By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Trade
“Trump says he’s talking about leaving tariffs on China for ‘substantial period of time'” [MarketWatch]. “President Donald Trump on Wednesday, ahead of a trip to Ohio, told reporters on the South Lawn that he would leave tariffs on China for a ‘substantial period of time.’ ‘We are not talking about removing them, we are talking about leaving them,’ he said. ‘We have to make sure that if we do the deal with China, that China lives by the deal,’ he said. Trump said the deal ‘is coming along nicely.'”
Politics
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51
“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune
2020
Biden (1): “Joe Biden is about to ruin his reputation” [Ryan Cooper, The Week]. “The most immediate problem for Biden personally is that he has #MeToo written all over him. As my colleague Matthew Walther writes, there are already vast compilations of footage of him being far too handsy with women in public settings. Setting personal history aside, Biden’s actual policy record is probably almost as big of a potential problem. The Democratic Party has shifted markedly to the left over the last decade, as the consequences of the party’s policy record from the mid-1970s to 2008 have become clear…. This turn is to a great extent a response to Biden’s very career, because he was personally involved in almost every bad policy decision of the last 40 years.” • Ouch!
Biden (2): “Everybody’s Chum” [Nathan Robinson, Current Affairs]. “Joe Biden is widely considered a likable man. Genial Uncle Joe, he of Onion stardom and buddy cop fan-fiction. But in Washington, being too friendly can result in indefensible actions. You might be a perfectly nice person, but if those you spend time around are a group of segregationists, then your niceness is hurting people. Sometimes, being friends with one group means throwing another group under the bus. If you are determined never to say anything mean about anyone, and then you are asked to give Strom Thurmond’s eulogy, then you will end up fabricating history…. You can be everybody in Washington’s best buddy, or you can move the country toward justice, but you cannot do both. This is because there are powerful political figures standing in the way of justice, and the steps you need to take are going to alienate them.”
Gravel: “Mike Gravel’s Viral 2020 Campaign Is the Brainchild of a New York Teen” [Splinter News]. “That in and of itself is… weird, and kind of cool, but the story gets stranger. Gravel’s account is being run by a ‘group of students’ in Westchester, New York who, as one of them told Splinter in an interview, convinced the former senator to think about running again.” • An example of their work:
Mike Gravel 2020 starter pack pic.twitter.com/E8OIJD2AD4
— Mike Gravel (@MikeGravel) March 20, 2019
More: “[High school David Oks] said the exploratory committee sure is real, and Gravel is on board with it. (Gravel said the same thing to a Politico reporter on Tuesday night.) Oks, a high school senior who has previously run for mayor of his small New York town, told Splinter that he and several friends are avid listeners of the Chapo Trap House podcast, which mentioned Gravel in a recent episode. About a week ago, he and a couple friends reached out to Gravel and asked if he would consider making another run for president. Their pitch was clear. “My friends and I were encouraging him to consider running for president with the idea being that he would not try to contest any primaries, he would just try to get into the Democratic debates,” he said.” • I think this is brilliant and I am here for the Gravel campaign. Gravelmentum!
Klobuchar: “Klobuchar’s ‘senator next door’ strategy collides with Betomania” [Politico]. “At every stop in Iowa last weekend, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar reminded voters that she’s from ‘just up the river’ and likes ‘to go south, to Iowa, for the winter,’ even riffing on the title of her book, ‘The Senator Next Door.’… Klobuchar and O’Rourke both headlined canvass launches here for a state Senate special election candidate, but only O’Rourke’s crowd was so large that it spilled out of the Black Hawk County headquarters into a parking lot, where the Texan spoke from a truck bed. Klobuchar attracted a standing room-only group of her own, but they stayed comfortably inside. It’s part of a long shift in Iowa’s long famous living room-to-living room politics; voters are still vetting candidates in person — but the introductions are online.” • I rather like the picture of O’Rourke swerving into the centrist lane and creating mayhem, before crashing out himself.
O’Rourke (1): “The Privilege of Being Beto” [Lisa Lerner, New York Times]. “Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager in 2016, said that Mr. O’Rourke stands apart as a politician who can ‘drive his own news,’ independent of Mr. Trump, alluding to his history of social media-ready flourishes on the campaign trail. ‘It’s not just a matter of being authentic,’ Mr. Mook said. ‘It’s authentically taking on Trump and challenging political norms.'”• In the photo, Beto is, of course, sweating.
O’Rourke (2): “Medicare for America, Beto O’Rourke’s favorite health care plan, explained” [Sarah Kliff, Vox]. “In his early days as a presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke has walked away from supporting single-payer Medicare-for-all* and into the arms of another health care plan: Medicare for America. That plan, introduced last year by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), was founded on the previous work of the Center for American Progress and Yale professor Jacob Hacker**. It is the Democratic establishment’s alternative to the single-payer approach favored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the democratic socialist left.” • As I’ve been saying, O’Rourke is a darker figure than we think. NOTES * Mushy though that “support” was. ** Hacker was absolutely instrumental in the liberal Democrat “public option” bait-and-switch operation in 2009, that (designedly) sucked all the oxygen away from single payer. Unsurprisingly, liberals are running the same play again.
Sanders (1): “Sanders names women to majority of top campaign posts” [The Hill]. “Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) campaign announced a senior 2020 campaign team that includes 10 women among the 15 most prominent roles.” • And centrist Twitter loses its mind…
Sanders (2): “Unlike Some People, Bernie Hasn’t ‘Evolved'” [Jacobin]. “In 1993, twenty years after his involvement with the Liberty Union Party, Bernie brought his first single-payer bill to Congress. ‘Our system is not in need of band-aids or patchwork or such concepts as managed competition. We are in need of a new system,” he said as he introduced it. Some called him crazy, but he was on a mission. ‘The American people believe that healthcare must be a right of all citizens and not just the privilege of the wealthy.’ His message stayed consistent for the next two decades.”
Trump: “What Do We Know About Trump’s Re-election Chances So Far?” [FiveThirtyEight]. Discussion. Nate Silver: “If you incepted Trump’s brain and made him stop doing dumbass shit, he’d be a favorite for re-election, but I’m not sure the actual Trump is.” • “Incept” seems to be a synonym for “ingest,” so I’m not sure exactly what Silver is saying here.
Health Care
“Democrats on the take: New DCCC Chair is a best friend of health insurers” [Tarbell]. “Here’s a headline you can bet my former colleagues in the health insurance business were thrilled to see last week: “DCCC chief: Medicare for All price tag ‘a little scary.’… [Of those] House Democrats who received campaign contributions from the political action committees of all five of the biggest for-profit health insurers—Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealth Group. [DCCC head Cheri Bustos was those] PACs’ favorite Democrat in Congress.” • Ka-ching.
Realignment and Legitimacy
“Unlikely Journeys” [The Baffler] Democrat campaign memoirs. “A candidate’s book may be PR, but so is everything else they touch—their debate one-liners, their Twitter clapbacks, their policy platforms, even their voting histories and signature accomplishments. Anyone who runs for president has almost of necessity lived their entire life as a kind of public-relations campaign, sandblasting their biographies and forsaking their freedom of choice, so that one day, if only for a few sweet years, they might have the kind of Jovian power of which any normal person lacks the temerity to so much as dream. Of such a person it makes no sense to ask the question, “Who are they, really, on the inside?” By the time they hit the campaign trail, there is no longer an ‘inside.'”
“Opinion: We Confronted Chelsea Clinton At The Christchurch Vigil. Here’s Why.” [Buzzfeed]. “We were shocked when Clinton arrived at the vigil, given that she had not yet apologized to Rep. Omar for the public vilification against her. We thought it was inappropriate for her to show up to a vigil for a community she had so recently stoked hatred against. We were not alone in feeling uncomfortable — many students were dismayed to see her there.”
Stats Watch
MBA Mortgage Applications, week of March 15, 2019: Rose on top of last week’s “surge. till, year-on-year the index is up only 1 percent” [Econoday]. “[I]n a continuing sign that rising housing demand is lopsided toward high-end buyers, the average loan size is up for a third straight week.” And: “Rates would have to fall further for a significant increase in refinance activity” [Calculated Risk].
Manufacturing: “Exclusive: Lion Air pilots scoured handbook in minutes before crash – sources” [Reuters]. This is interesting: “The U.S. Transportation Department’s inspector-general now plans to audit the FAA’s certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, while European and Canadian regulators say they want to make up their own minds whether a promised software upgrade is adequate.” • Good.
Manufacturing: “Capt. Sullenberger on the FAA and Boeing: ‘Our credibility as leaders in aviation is being damaged'” [Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, MarketWatch]. “For too many years, the FAA has not been provided budgets sufficient to ensure appropriate oversight of a rapidly growing global aviation industry. Staffing has not been adequate for FAA employees to oversee much of the critically important work of validating and approving aircraft certification. Instead, much of the work has been outsourced by designating aircraft manufacturer employees to do the work on behalf of the FAA. This, of course, has created inherent conflicts of interest [gasp], when employees working for the company whose products must be certified to meet safety standards are the ones doing much of the work of certifying them. There simply are not nearly enough FAA employees to do this important work in-house.” • Thank you, neoliberalism!
The Bezzle: “Inside Airbnb’s ‘Guerrilla War’ Against Local Governments” [WIRED]. “Similar dramas are playing out around the country. From Nashville to New Orleans to Honolulu, Airbnb is battling local officials over requests to collect occupancy taxes and ensure that the properties listed on its site comply with zoning and safety rules. In the past five months alone, the company has spent nearly $1 million to overturn regulations in San Diego and has sued Boston, Miami, and Palm Beach County over local ordinances that require Airbnb to collect taxes or remove illegal listings. Elsewhere, Airbnb has fought city officials over regulations aimed at preventing homes from being transformed into de facto hotels and requests from tax authorities for more specific data about hosts and visits. Airbnb is engaged in ‘a city-by-city, block-by-block guerrilla war’ against local governments, says Ulrik Binzer, CEO of Host Compliance, which helps cities draft and enforce rules for short-term rentals, sometimes putting it at odds with hosting platforms. ‘They need to essentially fight every one of these battles like it is the most important battle they have.'” • I don’t understand why Airbnb’s reputation isn’t the same as Uber’s; they have the same business model and they’re run by crooks.
The Bezzle: “The lawyers who took on Big Tobacco are aiming at Realtors and their 6% fee” [MarketWatch]. “The suit was filed in Chicago on behalf of anyone who sold a home through one of 20 of the largest listing services in the country over the past five years. It charges that the mighty Washington-based lobby National Association of Realtors, as well as the four largest national real estate brokerages, and the Multiple Listing Services they use, have conspired to require anyone selling a home to pay the commission of the broker representing their buyer ‘at an inflated amount,’ in violation of federal antitrust law.” • The economic rent is too damn high!
Tech: “Optimize What?” [Commune]. One paragraph: “Back on campus, the AI and machine learning takeover of industry is fully reflected in course enrollment numbers. At Huang Engineering Center, just a few hundred feet from where Boyd lectures on optimization, Andrew Ng teaches CS 230: Deep Learning, a course that enrolled eight hundred students in the 2017-18 year, and yet is the smaller of Ng’s two courses. Ng is something of a celebrity in machine learning, a Twitter hype man for AI. In a scene that has become all too typical, he walks onstage to deliver the first lecture of the course, then disappears for several weeks to tend to his self-driving car startup. For most of the quarter, the lectures are doled out by a graduate student, who does a commendable job given the circumstances.” • Ng probably breeds llamas or crafts didgeridoos in his spare time.
Tech: “DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence” [1843]. “But human intelligence is limited by the size of the skull that houses the brain. Its power is restricted by the puny amount of energy that the body is able to provide. Because [Artificial General Intelligence] will run on computers, it will suffer none of these constraints. Its intelligence will be limited only by the number of processors available. AGI may start by monitoring nuclear reactions. But soon enough it will discover new sources of energy by digesting more physics papers in a second than a human could in a thousand lifetimes. Human-level intelligence, coupled with the speed and scalability of computers, will make problems that currently appear insoluble disappear.” • With singularity loons doing the programming. What could go wrong?
Concentration: “Google hit with €1.5bn fine from EU over advertising” [BBC]. “Google has been hit with a €1.49bn (£1.28bn) fine from the EU for blocking rival online search advertisers. It is the third EU fine for the search and advertising giant in two years. The case accuses Google of abusing its market dominance by restricting third-party rivals from displaying search ads between 2006 and 2016. In response, Google changed its AdSense contracts with large third parties, giving them more leeway to display competing search ads…. ‘Google has cemented its dominance in online search adverts and shielded itself from competitive pressure by imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites. This is illegal under EU anti-trust rules,’ said EC commissioner Margrethe Vestager.”
The Biosphere
“Forget Tesla, It’s China’s E-Buses That Are Denting Oil Demand” [Bloomberg]. “By the end of this year, a cumulative 270,000 barrels a day of diesel demand will have been displaced by electric buses, most of it in China, according to a report published Tuesday by BloombergNEF. That’s more than three times the displacement by all the world’s passenger electric vehicles (a market where Tesla has a share of about 12 percent.).”
“Antibiotics set to flood Florida’s troubled orange orchards” [Nature]. “Public-health researchers worry that the spraying plan might spur resistance in some human pathogens. It’s a reasonable concern; a fungicide used to control a tulip blight in the Netherlands, for example, has triggered a rise in treatment-resistant aspergillosis in people with compromised immune systems…. Growers are willing to try anything, however. Citrus greening (also known as huanglongbing, caused by the bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus), has crippled the Florida citrus industry: almost half the acreage that was in production before the disease arrived has been abandoned and, by some estimates, 90% of the state’s citrus trees are infected. “The level of desperation is high,” says Rick Dantzler, chief operating officer of Florida’s Citrus Research and Development Foundation (CRDF) in Lake Alfred.” • Monoculture fighting to hold on…
“This is how climate change takes a toll on the heart” [Anthropocene]. n = 27,310. “A team of German researchers has found evidence that heat-induced heart attacks are increasing, suggesting that climate change poses a risk to cardiovascular health…. Schneider’s team found that the heat-related heart attack risk during 2001-2014 was especially prominent among people with pre-existing cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or high cholesterol. The prevalence of these biological risk factors has increased in the population over time, illustrating that the health effects of climate change don’t occur in isolation. Climate change can be a health risk in itself, but can also exacerbate other public health problems…. Health risks from extreme heat are often portrayed as mainly affecting people living in stifling cities. But the researchers found that people in rural areas around Augsburg were at greater risk of heat-induced heart attack than those in the city itself. Lower socioeconomic status and a higher prevalence of pre-existing chronic diseases in the rural population could contribute to the greater vulnerability to heat-induced heart attack among rural residents, the researchers say. The findings add heft to an emerging body of research suggesting ‘that people living in non-urban areas could have similar or even higher heat-related mortality risks’ compared to city dwellers, they write.”
Health Care
“Care of acute conditions and chronic diseases in Canada and the United States: Rapid systematic review and meta-analysis” [Journal of Public Health Research]. A meta-analysis. From the abstract: “This study tested the hypothesis that socioeconomically vulnerable Canadians with diverse acute conditions or chronic diseases have health care access and survival advantages over their counterparts in the USA. … In aggregate and controlling for specific conditions or diseases and typically 4 to 9 comorbid factors or biomarkers, Canadians’ chances of receiving better health care were estimated to be 36% greater than their American counterparts… Contrary to prevalent political rhetoric, three studies observed that Americans experience more than twice the risk of long waits for breast or colon cancer care or of dying while they wait for an organ transplant.” • Who knew…
Testimony:
Everyone complains about government healthcare being so terrible. After serving 10 years in the US Navy I can say…….you’d love it of you had it. No copays, no premiums, no out of pocket max etc…..just get taken care of for any and all medical issues
— therealshakdiesel (@shakdaddy3) March 19, 2019
#MedicareForAll is too centrist… Go for the full NHS?
Because everybody loves their private health insurance plan:
New survey finds that among adults who were insured all year, 29% were underinsured in 2018, up from 23% in 2014. People in employer plans saw the biggest erosion in coverage. https://t.co/RC6CBxZuIx pic.twitter.com/dE3sDywMyS
— Commonwealth Fund (@commonwealthfnd) February 7, 2019
Black Injustice Tipping Point
“Fearing for His Life” [The Verge]. “>Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment—Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.” Concluding: “I am 10 minutes from [a prison visit with Orta] when [Orta’s girlfriend] Deja calls me. As soon as I’d left, Orta was given a ticket for his braided hair, which was apparently not in regulation. This meant a possible 30 more days in solitary. ‘They’re mad when he talks to journalists,’ she says. But of course I hadn’t told anyone at the prison that I was a journalist. ‘Look in a mirror. They know why you’re there.'” • Disgusting, and also could have been filed under “Police State Watch.”
“Petrochemical Giants Are Slowly Killing Black Louisiana Communities” [Portside]. “While researching the proposal [for a new plastics plant], environmentalists discovered that a 2014 ‘comprehensive plan’ produced by the St. James Parish government had designated the Welcome and St. James portion of 5th District as an ‘industrial’ and ‘residential/future industrial’ on map detailing future land-use. About 1,500 people live in the area, and over 90 percent are Black, according to census data. The fact that a longtime residential community tracing its roots back to freed slaves would be labeled “industrial” set off alarm bells among residents and environmentalists. ‘I could have sworn we were here first,’ Stephanie Cooper, a local schoolteacher, told the council.” • So much is right out in the open, if you know where to look.
Class Warfare
“Cedric Johnson and the Other Sixties’ Nostalgia” [New Politics]. “The table below shows the prison population for 2016. What we see is a wildly disproportionate representation of blacks, Latinos, and other people of color composing together almost 70% of the prison population. … That black middle-class professionals and politicians played a contradictory and even reactionary role in demanding or developing these policies, as Johnson argues, is undeniable—although it is most certainly a subordinate role in terms of federal and state policy and practice. Indeed, whether in the old ghetto or today’s leafy black neighborhoods, the black middle class and petty bourgeoisie have always played a contradictory role in the long struggle for black freedom. None of this refutes the existence of both underlying structures of racial inequality or the practice of racism in the criminal “justice” system as countless studies have shown…. The escalation of incarceration is not simply a matter of controlling the “surplus population,” as Johnson argues. It is, as I stated above, a class project, but one with racist assumptions and practices. Those who are sentenced to prison are not primarily from the “surplus population.” In fact, nearly two-thirds of the prison population were employed prior to incarceration. 49% of all prisoners were employed full-time and another 16% in part-time work before entering prison, while another 8% were students, retired, or permanently disabled according to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics.”
“Judge: Baystate Franklin hospital engaged in union busting” [Daily Hampshire Gazette]. “While former Baystate Franklin Medical Center President Cindy Russo was named in the complaint, and her involvement in the matter was central to the overall case, she was not found directly guilty of any of the charges. Russo left the hospital in January 2018 after a year and a half at the post; she said at the time it was the ‘right personal decision for me to explore other health care leadership opportunities.'” • “Other leadership opportunities” is almost as good as “spend more time with my family.”
News of the Wired
News you can use:
“Teen Unvaccinated For Chickenpox Sues Kentucky Health Department After Being Banned From School Extracurriculars” [Newsweek]. The Right To Infect™
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The Robbie Mook quote. That’s all.
loserDems2020, by design.
Does Mook have any self awareness?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjUOBVAbGhQ
O’Rourke and Mook are both Fredo.
Authenticity™ yeah that’ll do it
goof
Oddly, Mook seems not to notice that one of the Democrats who’s been most consistent in calling out Trump is…. Sanders.
[scratches head]
Mook qualified Beto with “authentically.” When Sanders attacks Trump, its not “authentic.” Words have no meaning.
Will that fly in 2020?
It can be a Darwintelligence test. It won’t fly with the darwintelligent. It will fly with the darwindumm.
The darwintelligent will get to see who is who.
like the boeing 737
Mook has no meaning …
Twice the betrayal and twice the good times! Fredo knew everybody.
But it does mean it will now take two of us to row them out to the center of the lake.
About 2 years ago I started noticing more people around the condo development where I live in a San Diego suburb that I’d never seen before. Usually they had luggage and rental cars. Of course it turned out to be the early infestation of AirBnB. Then some units started selling for 50% more than comps in the area. The only way they were getting the loans approved was to tell the bank they were gonna run it as an AirBnb. It’s a racket with a lot of people getting their beak wet. A friend of mine in LA has an AirBnB place that is literally the only thing keeping his family afloat.
This area is pretty wealthy and the hotel industry very powerful. They managed to shut it down fast. Maybe they think fighting this particular locality just isn’t worth it. The actual city of San Diego is now infested with AirBnB gangsters and scooters piling up on street corners. You love to see it!
Throw the scooters into the AirBnB windows. Problem solved!
>I don’t understand why Airbnb’s reputation isn’t the same as Uber’s;
Because Uber preys on the individuals that work, sorry “contract”, for it. But Airbnb puts money into upper-class pockets whilst afflicting people who are actually in the neighborhood. That is, you can tie individual names to Uber defoliation but not Airbnb. Shorter me: Airbnb makes a wide swath of people with money richer, whereas Uber only make Uber richer.
However, this does create a landmine for Airbnb. At some point, the neighbors are going to get mad enough and, unlike your Uber drivers, will have enough money to do something about it, as per Troy’s example.
Uber and Lyft are losing $6 and $12 respectively on average per ride. The money-making phase, should it ever come to pass, will be after they have low-balled the competition out of existence. An IPO index fund manager interviewed recently on Nightly Business Report indicated that her fund had serious misgivings about both companies. Rather amusingly, she had a school marm’s expression of disapproval on her face as she spoke of them.
Haha yeah I seem to have gotten “massive stock valuations” mixed up with actually making real money. Thanks for the correction, and thanks to our idiot overclass for making that easy to do.
Can you put “a really low P/E ratio” in your brochure if it’s negative? Technically that can be considered a low number.
Profit rules, dude.
I think every last one of the 70 in attendance at our monthly town hall meeting laughed out loud, when I mentioned that ‘there were a few vacation rentals in town’, for in reality they’ve taken over realty, now over 300 homes hosting one or two night stands, whoring themselves out, to the detriment of the community.
A pox on their houses!
> there were a few vacation rentals in town
To be fair, I can’t blame live-in homeowners (as opposed to speculators) from doing what it takes to save their houses.* But if that’s what it takes to stave off the downward spiral…
NOTE * Given some respect for the neighborhood, like not renting out as party house.
Looking at the various vacation rental possibilities in town here, about 15% will rent you a bed, while you get the whole enchilada of a house or cabin on the other 85%.
A friend lives on a street near the National Park, and 5 out of 7 homes are vacation rentals, and he took me on a walk-by, and things are not being kept up, all they do is ‘clean’ them up enough for the next rental. So when this craze goes away, those homes will need a lot of work to get them up to snuff. There were lots of ‘easy’ repairs needed on the outside of the homes that were visible, which hadn’t been touched, and who knows what’s lurking inside?
Synergy™!
Yeah, but to do it for greatest effect, they’ve gotta fly like a Bird, right ?
Airbnb has a wide base of support from people (like me) who rent out their spare bedroom, and get enough income from it to pay the taxes on their house. After several hundred guests, I’ve yet to have a neighbor complain. Meanwhile, our city has decided to go after absent landlords who rent out whole units or houses, without being present to control the guests. People like me are in the majority, and we work to maintain our income streams by protecting Airbnb. The landlords provide most of the income to Airbnb, while I provide cover.
Meanwhile, Airbnb is undergoing the Crapification of Everything™, and the website gets cluttered up with ways that the computer thinks will get me to draw more guests, instead of giving me the information I want.
Do you know and talk to your neighbors? Seems unlikely. “Several hundred guests” in your home? Gross.
Sock puppet? And you complain about their website while acknowledging that you carry water for their crimes. Wow!
> Airbnb has a wide base of support from people (like me) who rent out their spare bedroom, and get enough income from it to pay the taxes on their house. After several hundred guests, I’ve yet to have a neighbor complain. Meanwhile, our city has decided to go after absent landlords who rent out whole units or houses, without being present to control the guests. People like me are in the majority
We have the same situation in my town (and I couldn’t pay our extraordinarily high property taxes — i.e., send other people’s children to school as a public duty — if I did not rent).
But I wonder what the proportion, nationwide, is between the “spare room” types and the “absentee landlord” types. I bet it varies. And in my college town, the absentee landlords are a problem, because you end up with party houses.
“It’s a racket with a lot of people getting their beak wet.“
The squid blood funnel?
Seems like regulation is in order; a fixed and low number of rooms per property, ideally an on-site landlord, zoning restraints, and code restraints (especially including fire exits). What I really object to is that AirBnB is in the regulatory arbitrage business, turning properties into hotels while avoiding being regulated like hotels).
This line works for any establishment democrat/liberal.
I feel like if we just start calling him Robert instead of his holy-shit-how-does-he-not-get-called-out-for-cultural-appropriation Hispanic nickname “Beto”, the idPol warriors will realize he’s a silver spoon white guy who votes with Republicans a lot and his buzz will melt like an ice cream cone on an El Paso sidewalk.
Also, it’s super offensive to have a Jewish person running for president to be referred to as an “Old White Guy”, in the event consistency matters to some in the idPol crowd (for most it doesn’t)
I remember an anecdote about one of the primaries in 2016 where a future Hillary voter said they liked Bernie but thought the country didn’t need another WASP President. Not that Hillary is a Cabot or a Lodge, but her last name is Rodham and she married a guy named Clinton.
The false ID crowd is largely just devoted to their royal family.
You didn’t hear? The Clintons are a famous Afican-American family..
Affluent-American at any rate. It’s definitely a special Identity.
And call him Robert in the same tone of voice Gayle King used when interviewing R. Kelley. Every time he evades a question:
Robert…Robert…
> I feel like if we just start calling him Robert
My practice is to call them all by their last names, because I’ve done the “invent a name” style of snark (“Bernard,” for example) and I don’t need to do it any more.
I’ve got skin in the game, too, because “O’Rourke” is harder to type than “Beto,” what with that [family blogging] apostrophe followed by another capital letter.
I added some more political material because I got a late state. Mike Gravel might throw his hat into the ring!
“Gravelmentum”—how did we live without that word??
https://twitter.com/MikeGravel/status/1108441728275628032
I know its not Mike Gravel, but right now, my decision to not steal a Mike Gravel sign on the eve of the 2008 NH primary is my greatest regret. They were 3×3 signs and heavy duty, but right now….I’m…arrrgh…I want that sign.
#Gravelanche
I’m not voting for Mike Gravel (I was tempted in 2008), but I’ve heard nothing but nice things.
Also:
Be Excellent to Each Other!
I don’t remember Mike Gravel, not at all, and it sounds like I should.
Guess this is what getting old is like, heh! I’ll look him up.
Carey
Maybe you were stoned when you should have been graveled.
That could be. ;)
> #Gravelanche
Holy moly!
I’m not voting for Gravel either, but I think if he gets in the debates that’s a good thing and I am here for it (as long as the kids running his Twitter account don’t get too excited and blow it).
Ten years ago I saw Mike speak at public event, and happened to be sitting next to an elderly lady from Alaska. I asked her what got him elected as Alaska’s first Senator, since he didn’t fit my picture of a politician from a resource state. She said it was that he had a college degree.
Silver is referring to the movie “inception” I think, where you plant a subconscious idea into someone else in order to change their behavior while making them think they came up with it on their own.
Yes…Christopher Nolan. Very arty premise.
Now, if we were really going to do the Inception thing, the guy to incept would be Obama. Go back to a day before the 2011 Journalist dinner/roasting where Obama pasted Trump and plant the idea in Obama’s brain to say something nice about the Donald. Avoids the whole 7 year payback by Trump that resulted in his presidency.
Or, I guess we can do Nate’s thing, copy the movie plot almost exactly in terms of the father conveying a deathbed message of love. Have Fred Trump intimate to his son these final words: “you make me so very proud on your beautiful golf courses. Go my son, and defeat Chi Chi and Freddy Boom Boom on the PGA Senior Tour. It’s your destiny.”
Funny. But would that mean that Hillary becomes president after defeating Little Marco (now trying to destroy Venezuela)? Or even worse: he defeats her…..
I don’t know, I suspect we’d be two years into a Kasich presidency.
From the IMDB site:
I see why Silver would like this. We saw it happen with WMDs, and we saw it happen all over again with Russia Russia Russia. The horror! The horror!
Wish Bernie would push back on the “Medicare For All Will Cost $33T we can’t afford it!” BS talking point with “it costs more to do it this way. Cut out the millionaire middle men and it would cost much less. We can’t afford *NOT* to have single payer.”
Beto will get the establishment shine once those inside the political class realize the proles actually hate uncle Joe. Harris looks DOA.
He has pushed back on it. Just doesn’t get much attention for it.
That was quite awhile back, though. Wonder why he’s not hammering on “it’s cheaper, while providing care (not “coverage”!) for all.”
Sanders is a good politician, so there is *some*
reason.
The Pragmatic Choice: Improved Medicare for All
It is, but the Few’s rice bowls are at stake! And their ability to humbly shape
our glorious, peace-loving democracy, of course.
#composttheFew
Medicare For All Will Cost $33T – (Over 10 years, adjusted for inflation), or about $3T per year.
Wikipedia: US GDP is $21.5 trillion, of which 18% is medical — about $4 Trillion/year.
So we save $1T/year with medicare for all? Nice!!
Figures must be put in context.
So we save $1T/year with medicare for all? Nice!!
nb: great talking point!
Stephanie Kelton, Bernie’s 2016 economics advisor, was on MSNBC on March 16 pushing back on a couple of how-ya-gonna-pay-for-it myths (including Medicare for All, starting at 1:30) https://www.msnbc.com/weekends-with-alex-witt/watch/economist-it-s-refreshing-to-see-2020-dems-going-bold-on-economic-proposals-1459522115960
Kelton also quashed the myth about diminished quality. Questioner: “I’ve got family in Michigan and they talk about Canadians who come over the border all the time because they want to have their medical services done here in the US.” Kelton saw her opening with such a data-free question and hand-waved her likewise data-free response, basically saying, “yeah, the rich people of both countries cross borders to get procedures done”:
> yeah, the rich people of both countries cross borders to get procedures done
Which is what Kelton should have said. I hope she reads this :-)
I’m one of the last people to defend a Clinton but “feeling uncomfortable” is a dumb reason for the confrontation. There are better ways to address Chelsea’s hypocrisy in attending that vigil. Or, at the very least, come up with better phrasing than “feeling uncomfortable”. Just state clearly that the vigil does not welcome people who have thrown outspoken Muslim women under the bus just so they can virtue signal a fake image of solidarity.
Words are important. Use them well.
Should Clinton have been there after her anti-Omar tweets “As An American…”? No, she’s a gross opportunist. The apple doesn’t fall far.
Are those two grandstanding types who made it about themselves (and created some anti-Bernie backlash online as they are supposedly supporters, though this is unconfirmed)?
Why not both?
The point of the story is the elite outrage and circle defense of Chelsea Clinton, a public figure who has put herself out there. She’s not a White House kid.
At the same time, the Venn diagram of the people attacking the muslim student of color and those who are mad at Trump dissing John McCain is a circle.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/sep/02/women.johnmccain
He’s such a swell guy. Atrios brought this up today. Here is the #resistance.
https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1107004388080418816
This is the sick shit being directed at a 19 year old muslim girl by the wokest among us. If this girl wasn’t polite enough, I’m sure she has a family member who will ream her out because that is what families do.
This was a minor event in the life of a political celebrity, a role noted arbiter of “American” values Chelsea Clinton chose to embrace. This is a story about cultists attacking the powerless to protect the ego of the new aristocracy.
Agree fully but effective movements use strong messages. The Suffragates weren’t “uncomfortable”. Rosa Parks didn’t refuse to sit in the backseat because it was “uncomfortable”. Saying that they feel uncomfortable just makes their case sound weak.
They should have let Clinton attend and used the speeches to speak about the need to support strong voices within the Muslim community, to listen to them, and not throw them under the bus for disagreements. Instead of one activist scolding her for a viral video let the event shame her for what she said about Omar.
Again, I’m not disagreeing with their reasons, but they made Clinton look like the victim and themselves look weak. That video was hard to watch and even I, who usually loves seeing a Clinton get pushback, couldn’t get through it.
Just my take on it. I want their message to take root but this one instance, and it’s follow up messaging, seems to be working against it.
Why get upset about one day in a stressed out person’s life? The worst case scenario is she was rude to a scion of a political joke of a dynasty a week after the scion broadcasted clearly racist stuff. Get over it. Its not in need of being fixed. People are emotional.
What does Rosa Parks have to do with this? She was a professional activist by that point.
As far as the Clintons, they’ve heard the stories. Greater understanding aren’t going to change them. They should know what their name is going to bring. They aren’t completely braindead; although Chelsea demonstrated she didn’t comprehend the meaning of the word “banality” in a twitter debate with Corey Robin a year or so ago.
What did this 19 year old do to a white mother to have people including prominent people come down on her? She was rude to a politician? This country is sick. Whatever this girl might have said to Saint Chelsea of the McCain Holy Order doesn’t merit the reaction of “Centrist thugs.”
“uncomfortable” is a young people’s, possibly focus-grouped, word.
I don’t like it, either: it’s flimsy. (See humpty-dumpty)
Snowflaky.
Hmm, kind of like how that turned out.
Posing as weak is not a good political tactic.
> Again, I’m not disagreeing with their reasons, but they made Clinton look like the victim and themselves look weak. That video was hard to watch and even I, who usually loves seeing a Clinton get pushback, couldn’t get through it.
Often, 19-year-olds aren’t very good at what they do (yet). Even Erica Garner was 26. What’s odd is that people are treating the whole situation as if they and Chelsea (millionaire, hedgie spouse, dynastic heir) were both 19 years old, and as if Chelsea were somehow punching up.
Clinton was the victim, and everybody damn well knows it. She spoke truth to Islamist power, and everybody damn well knows that too. Those who profess otherwise are lying in their rotten teeth.
Four more Birmingham schools drop pro-LGBT classes
https://5pillarsuk.com/2019/03/20/four-more-birmingham-schools-drop-pro-lgbt-classes/
“Many parents at Parkfield, and the other four schools, say the classes are inappropriate for young children and the schools’ pro-LGBT message contradicts Islam”.
“What happens when an Unstoppable Force meets an Immovable Object?”
LGBT vs. Muslims: Who’s Going to Win? Why cultural Marxism is imploding!
Dr. Steve Turley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7AUD5rKzM4
The Few love culture wars, and stoking them is so easy!
‘LGBT vs. Muslims: Who’s Going to Win?’ Open to debate. When you get very young impressionable children into the equation? Then you have your answer. The original school at the center of this controversy had mostly muslim kids going there. You do have to wonder if this was a deliberate choice to target them as an effort to mold the future muslim community’s attitudes. Remember that children had to attend this program and were not allowed to opt out and parents had no say in the matter.
It has been said many times here, but no real “Marxist” would privilege identity politics this way. The term ‘cultural Marxism’ is a right-wing rhetorical tool for denigrating both by conflating them.
I’ve been trying to sort the term “Cultural Marxism” for awhile.
Not much luck so far, in terms of clear examples.
Cultural Marxism = Marxism – Economics = Not Marxism
Short “you get what you pay for, which is zilch” thoughts on the posts above:
>But human intelligence is limited by the size of the skull that houses the brain.
WTF? Everybody knows this is *not* true, in fact it seems almost unrelated. That’s why MIT is not dominated by elephants. Or at least everybody knows this but the techno geeks, which is unsurprising. I read pretty far into the article as I couldn’t believe it wasn’t sarcasm, and apparently it wasn’t. Jesus. These guys are scary stupid, regardless of their cranial size.
>That black middle-class professionals and politicians played a contradictory and even reactionary role in demanding or developing these policies
Racism is not what we think it is. It is truly a cultural concept. I know somebody who works in a school dominated by Jamaican and black teachers. They hate each other. The few white people there, both sides like.
>“Other leadership opportunities” is almost as good as “spend more time with my family.”
Funny Lambert, but I wish this was true. She is actually saying “my career is now above the glass floor, so see ya suckers!”.
I think for the same design, it’s liikely (though not sure if it’s 100% all the time), the bigger the brain, the more powerfully it can compute.
For diefferent designs, we have to look to other factors…for example, how wrinkly are the folds, say, and in fact, smaller brains can do think bigger ones.
Reading that quote, I think it’s referring to the same design, and the human skull limits how much more we can add the same brain design in the limited space.
>I think for the same design, it’s liikely (though not sure if it’s 100% all the time), the bigger the brain, the more powerfully it can compute
No. It just isn’t “likely”. Nobody has the slightest, well, idea. When you go to get your taxes done, do you look for the biggest head in the room? I suspect not. But “training”, you say is the difference, the big head guy/gal would be better given the exact same life experiences. Yeah, um, no.
Size can, but is not always nor even frequently, the deciding factor.
But it presents a limitation.
So, a person with a smaller head, but better training, is in fact a better bet.
And if everyone is equally trained (this relates to looking at the brain’s limitations), and someone comes along with a brain twice as big, with the same amount of folding denisty and the same other factors, chances are likely the person can do more (or faster) thinking, or mental processing.
That’s the way of looking at this based on what I know. If I can learn more, I’d be grateful.
This is why birds like crows and parrots often have very high, in some species almost human, levels of intelligence at least in some areas while having much smaller brains. Or women are just as intelligent as men but on average smaller brains.
In some areas it is the human brain that can be considered inferior to say a chimpanzee. It is all about how a animal’s brain is wired or organized. It is also why deciding who is more “intelligent” can be problematic as it is better to speak of one’s intelligences plural not their intelligence singular.
None of this makes brain size irrelevant especially in the ratio between brain and body size as our brains has been increasing in size for millions of years as we take on more complex tasks.
Within a shorter time span, recent evidence suggests that anatomically modern human hunter-gather brains were larger in proportion to body mass than our more recent settled agricultural ancestors. I cannot imagine a more complex task than surviving and successfully raising the next generation in the natural world with only sharp sticks and flaked stones at one’s disposal, particularly given the extremely lengthy period of dependency of our young.
Farming to blame for our shrinking size and brains
https://phys.org/news/2011-06-farming-blame-size-brains.html
What is banking going to do?
https://jezebel.com/donald-trump-jr-meets-a-flannel-shirt-for-the-first-ti-1793406835
I fear this may be the way the species is headed.
There are some well-done things on that Jezebel site,
and this is one of them, but to me, it has maybe a polishedly-unpolished, seventeen intelligence feel?
One POV.
Actually, if you have a look into the literature, you soon find out human brain size is SHRINKING.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-have-our-brains-started-to-shrink/
>especially in the ratio between brain and body size as our brains
Now I am, despite my differences with MLTPB above, going to just flip the switch on that. My leg has a femur, a fibula, and a tibia, and a handful (see what I did there?) of muscles attached. A gorilla is not much different. Nor is an elephant, and I am not sure if coordinating four legs is that easier from balancing on two. It might be harder.
My point is – size doesn’t matter. It’s what you have to control, and they have to control the same stuff. An F150 doesn’t have any more wiring than a Fiat 500.
I’m not so sure about that. I think you might be confusing larger brains with thicker skulls. ; )
Well, my mom does sometimes worry about my boneheadedness. Come to think of it, so did dad as well as my better half. :-)
which for whom, or may I ask?
Also, just because one brain is larger than another doesn’t mean it has more neurons, better neurological “equipment”, or runs faster. Especially within the same species. Pretty weird assumption TBH.
Encephalization quotient, the relative size of the brain to the body mass, is more important than brain size as an indication of complex thought processes. So, the encephalization quotient of a computer would be….oh wait, they don’t have bodies. Dolphins have the highest EQ so instead of setting AI to solving human problems, we should see if a computer can catch more fish than a dolphin. Now that would be impressive.
For the same E. quotient, is it a case of the bigger the brain (to go with the bigger body, in order to the E. quotient the same) the more capable of complex though processing it is?
Assuming that there are many limiting factors, to look at size as a factor, don’t we isolate that (that is, by making everything else the same – E. quotient, training, etc)?
It’s complicated and, by me at least, not that well understood. Evidently, the amount of brain matter that it takes to drive some basic bodily functions is more or less the same no matter what size the animal, while other vital functions and what we call higher functions requires more brain matter for larger animals. And then there is the relative size of the parts of the brain and the number of folds to be taken into account. So, EQ, while a good rough indicator, is not the most definitive measure.
Wikepedia has an article on it and Dawkins discusses this at some length in his book The Ancestors’ Tale.
Interesting that the amount of brain matter to move 2 legs would be more or less the same as that to move, say, 8 legs.
We have 4 legs like other mammals. Two of them don’t reach the ground. Controlling them is especially complicated.
Please ! Don’t give these ‘researchers, or possibly the likes of Boston Dynamics, any ideas*, ok ..??
hint : it certainly won’t be a cuddly artificial dolphin they come up with. The oceans have enough problems as it is …
a different chris, mit and elephants ?, now that is that is the funniest thing I’ve read/heard all week. Thanks
> But human intelligence is limited by the size of the skull that houses the brain
Only if you assume
a) that intelligence is not embodied in the artifacts that surround us; a dubious assumption
b) that intelligence is denied to collective entities*, including collective intelligences; again a dubious assumption
NOTE * I remember I linked to a study on IIRC super-organic beings, and there was a term of this, not “hive mind,” but I’m too lazy to find it.
Politico looked at Amy Klobuchar’s claims to have lowered prosecution of African Americans by 65%: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/mar/19/amy-klobuchar/did-african-american-incarceration-drop-65-under-a/
Politico misses the demographics of what happened. At some point in the early 1990s, Chicago changed welfare rules and there was a significant migration of former welfare families from Chicago to the Twin Cities. They brought gang violence with them and wars over the new turf led to south Minneapolis being referred to as Murderapolis. While local news tried to terrify locals with the crime spree, everyone quickly noticed that all the people dying were from Chicago and that all other crime was down. It was a unique series of events that was disgracefully undercovered at the time.
All of this peaked about the time Amy Klobuchar took office.
I’d also love to know if arrests of Somalis and other East African refugees counted as arrests of African-Americans.
Got anything to substantiate this? Sounds like the “conservative” group-think to me.
“Welfare” migrations?
Welfare rules are set by the state, not Chicago.
Like in all folktales, there is a grain of truth; the early 90’s featured the demolition of Chicago public housing projects, that could have displaced people toward Minneapolis. I would say the more likely scenario is that native Minneapolis black marketeers were killing the transplanted perceived Chicagoan competition. There’s nothing like a new unfamiliar neighborhood in which to be ambushed.
Further, Chicago Housing Authority vouchers are not “welfare”: they are an eviction on-demand lever for landlords, an excuse for over-policing, and a failed brake on runaway real estate speculation that makes housing un-affordable in the first place. More housing units, taller high-rises, do the opposite of moderating housing costs: the additional construction brings speculators to the neighborhood, raising the price of area units [res and commersh], so that once the final unit is built, the voucher discount is eaten, making more apartments, more un-affordable than the three-flats that were just demo-ed. Just like “911 is a joke”, Flavor Flav says, economic academia and urban planning are jokes.
If we are talking about Cabrini Green, it started out very well, but for some reason the maintenance funding was always short like road and freeway maintenance is often lacking. High rises full of poor people with no political pull will often get the shaft while the money goes into more “important” projects.
This separate from what kind of public housing there should be if any. That is an honest question, but any building needs maintenance, and maintenance requires money, which requires the ability to get the funds. Obviously the poor are poor because they lack the ability to get the funds. It was a kind of neoliberal urban renewal. Defund, crapify, replace and profit.
If you want to look at what public housing looks like done well, I strongly suggest looking at Vienna’s various projects, as they are not only a mix of all income levels, well run, but also architecturally beautiful. That Americans can’t have fantastic affordable public housing is the same as saying that we cannot have fantastic public healthcare for all. A lie that has enriched the few by consuming the lives of many.
OK, let’s switch our populations and stuff our housing projects full of Austrians. I’ll bet they would be fine. Wonder how Vienna’s would do with our folk in them?
> stuff our housing projects full of Austrians
That’s what we did with our Economics Departments. The result was disaster.
Too funny…
Austrians are utilized best for starting financial depressions, ala 1873 with the Vienna stock exchange crashing & 1931 with the Credinanstalt crisis.
Responding to ALL the doubters at once: my source were Minneapolis police officers I worked with in real time, and reading both newspapers daily. And yes, it’s VERY hard to find stories about this now.
But it happened, and it freaked out the Twin Cities. The murder charts are explicit, but not asterisked. If you read the obits in real time, it was always Chicago-born victims, and when perps were actually caught, they were from Chicago.
It may sound racist, but the real racism in this story was Wisconsin busting its ass to make sure no one got off those buses leaving Chicago until they got to Minnesota.
Oh, and every single MN-born African American client I had in the ’90s talked about this and the impact/nonimpact on their neighborhood.
If a fact disagrees with you, it’s still a fact. But the comments bothered me so I kept digging. Apparently Indiana has a long history of blaming crime on former Chicagoans, and studies have been done to disprove this.
As for Mpls, a rounding error on the Chicago census would have a huge impact on a smaller city (metro area a couple million but spread over seven large counties).
NY Times from the 1990s:
“In Minneapolis, the murders have often been linked to drugs, especially crack.
“The lads from Chicago are coming up here to sell their pharmaceutical products,” said Sgt. Charlie Miles, of the homicide division, referring to illicit drug dealers, “because they have seen Minneapolis as a new market for them.”
People here tend to blame bad-apple newcomers from out of state for the trouble.
Sharon Belton Sayles, the city’s Mayor, has complained about people who are “liabilities” coming to Minneapolis.
In the neighborhoods, people often blame the state’s comparatively generous welfare payments for attracting troublemakers.
“They call Minnesota ‘Money State,’ ” said Ms. Atlas. “They come here for the welfare. And they bring all their problems with them.””
An ugly quote. The truth is most people were very reluctant to talk about the origins of the crime because they were so obviously connected to low income folks from Chicago. And most didn’t want to be racist about it but it was obvious what was happening. And then the influx ended, the newcomers settled in and the crime way ended just in time for Klobuchar to take all the credit.
Good grief. Let us dig into what I said, shall we?
Austrian, especially Viennese public housing, is often preferred even by those with money because of the low costs, excellent design, and services. Their housing is not allowed defunded, crapified, and replaced for profit as it is not allowed to happen.
American public housing has been (deliberately) designed to be ugly, badly designed, terribly well run especially in maintenance, and occupied exclusively by the lowest classes, preferable by the poorest black although sometimes white families are added Racialized, concentrated poverty in deliberately poorly maintained housing.
With the Hell do people expect to happen? Treat people poorly and they often respond poorly especially when they do not have the resources needed to replace the state. And when all that housing is demolished because “those people” supposedly cannot take care of nice things, the occupants have to live somewhere.
American public housing is usually defunded, crapified, and replaced for profit as our ruling neoliberal elites not only allow it, they encourage and profit from it.
More housing units particularly in high rises are causing prices to fall all over the US including Chicago. “Supply and demand does not apply to housing” is a NIMBY myth.
I think Silver’s “incepted his brain” comment is a reference to Inception, the film. IMDB link
FWIW
Interesting.
That makes graduation a mere starting point, an inception point, and not the end point.
“Your degree entitles you to nothing, but a place at the start of a life long rat race. Without that credential, you can’t even start.”
It’s a crowded neighborhood for “the corporatist next door” candidates.
Biden’s campaign song when he announces…?
Well I don’t know why I came here tonight,
I got the feeling that something ain’t right,
I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair,
And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs,
Klobuchar to the left of me,
Beto to the right right, here I am,
Stuck in the primary with you.
Speaking of Klobuchar, did anyone else see her claim that she needed to be abusive to
her staff because Pootin?
What a country
Link, please.
I know what he’s talking about. Here is a link to a 3-minute Jimmy Dore video-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzHkGwdmBC4
A followup to an earlier discussion:
From the sidebar to the article on aluminum can non-recycling, the answer to a discussion earlier (I can’t remember whether on Links or on Water Cooler, so I’ll repost this to WC): https://www.treehugger.com/lawn-garden/how-plant-clover-lawn.html; “How to plant a clover lawn”. Complete with seed source, in Portland OR.
And a caveat of sorts: my experience is that clover lawns do not remain pure for very long. I think you’ll have a mixture after a year or two, so you might want to plant a mixture in the first place. I was just looking out at the area where I planted (full-size) white clover years ago; it’s about half clover now, a beautiful texture. And luxuriant.
“Optimize What?” [Commune]
This is just the present-day continuation of the barbarous instrumentalism of Vietnam-era Cold Warriors (“the best and brightest”) like Robert McNamera and Herman Kahn. Silicon Valley grew out of that subculture, it’s not really surprising that it would retain its attitudes.
The same mindset is evident in the Beltway “swamp”, both party establishments, and basically every major circle of American officialdom save maybe for parts of the military.
Is this an extension of credentialism? I got my fancy sheepskin Harvard MBA so I got smarts and you don’t?
I am trying to get another college degree so I have no objections to being educated, but too many people confused intelligence and wisdom, education and knowledge, ability and skill as all the same same which they are not.
The Vaccine-Friendly Plan: Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health-from Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Years
By Dr Paul Thomas and Jennifer Murgolis PhD
Following his plan will make you technically unvaccinated. He has the largest peditric practice in Oregon. A study of his patients on his plan has an autism rate of 1 in 440(ish) and no vaccines is 1 in 715. The New Jersey rate is 1 in 32 and national rate is 1 in 44 There are no studies on the CDC schedule.
Dr Sears has a similar book. He was removed from his TV show for his stance on vaccines.
Chicken pox is not dangerous. Shingles is painful and the result of not having natural immunity. Let kids get chicken pox. One problem is that parents or a family member can not afford to stay home with there sick kids. It is another neoliberal tragedy.
Also, a health official using the precautionary principle is ironic. You can not predict who will have an adverse reaction. You take a risk with every vaccine.
I think that vaccine safety has not been adequately studied, but we have been using them for a long time with excellent results. They have saved hundreds of millions of lives.
We also have the “vaccines are perfectly safe so stfu and take them all” against the “vaccines are all dangerous and give you autism, cooties, and bad breath.” Too bad we cannot have the “vaccines are great but should be studied for the best methods and for any dangers of certain combinations.”
Also, I had chickenpox as a child and anyone who says it’s no big deal just don’t know what they are talking about. Decades later and I still itch just remembering the fun.
My little sister and I got chicken pox at the same time, ages 8 and 11 respectively. Our parents more or less quarantined us in the same bedroom. In this instance misery did not love the company provided. And thanks for the memories. :>/
It doesn’t affect everyone the same way, apparently. I had chickenpox in 6th grade. Spots, but almost no itching. Sadly, I had to stay home from school for a week, just as the first warm weather of spring arrived.
It’s no joke for those who have severe reactions. Thankfully, I wasn’t one of them.
Too bad we cannot have the “vaccines are great but should be studied for the best methods and for any dangers of certain combinations.”
—
Totally agree with that statement. Vaccines have become like religion – every day on this site it seems there’s a sermon about vaccinations. IMO, it’s irrational to promote the idea that vaccines are 100% effective and safe and always will be forever and ever. That is an inappropriate threshold for a human endeavor IMO. I, myself, got the measles after a vaccination. If it happened today my poor mum would probably be burned at the stake on the town green. And I would be receiving CBT to instruct my subconscious that vaccines are always effective and to think otherwise makes me an anti-vaxxer. This is especially amusing to someone who works in pharma manufacturing. It boggles the mind to think that once you enter a vaccine facility all human activities become error free. LOL.
Vaccines have known effectiveness rates, often not 100%. And different expiration rates; tetanus, for instance, should be renewed regularly – more often if you’re, say, landscaping.
Now I can’t remember which fairly new one – whooping cough? – had a much shorter effectiveness span than expected.
I agree that we should know more about potential hazards of vaccines; for instance, I worry about giving multiple ones at the same time, just on general principle. Doesn’t imitate natural immunity. It’s clear they don’t cause autism, at least not via the mercury. I would worry more about auto-immune diseases, but have never seen data.
In general: vaccines are extremely powerful and valuable technology. That usually comes at a price; it would be good to know what the price is.
The rate of autism and “autism spectrum” (I hate that second term, but won’t go into it here) is still going up. Maybe we should find out why. I assume it’s chemicals; who’s going to pay for finding that out?
thanks for a dose of moderation! not often i hear this.
I lead some largish vaccine initiatives in my early career. But the amount of industry tie ins got me concerned. I now try to do shared decision making using the best data i can which as you point out needs to be a lot better
You forgot to mention that when pregnant women come into contact with the chickenpox virus their babies can be born with serious birth defects, including deafness, is that not right?
Also chickenpox is not serious in some children but others can suffer terribly. I had it at age five, and it was trivial. My daughter had it at four or five. and it wasn’t too bad. But my son had it at 11 mos. and had a high fever & screamed for hours. The rash gets into all the orifices of the body and can be agonizing.
A girl in my sister’s class (1962-ish) got them in her brain (at least this is what we heard) and she was in the hospital for weeks. Intensive care even. …. We were just uncomfortable. My mom must have been miserable she had 6 kids who had them all at once!!
Thank you, Phenix. Won’t go near a vaccine myself and I survived (easily my Mum tells me) Measles , Mumps and Chicken Pox. But that is me.
My children were all vaccinated as they would not have been allowed into the school system otherwise. But I held my breath every time.
Your views and those of Dr Sears are controversial.
Pharma, Doctors and Phamacists make good money from the practise. They are a very powerful and persuasive lobby and that is where we are today.
This group has deceived the public before in pursuit of money and has shown itself not always to be truthful. I simply do not trust them
No, chickenpox is very dangerous, in fact, it can be fatal. My dear childhood friend lost his teenage son to it…To this day, this father is not the same person i grew up with….Took his son to the hospital and Docs then didn’t recognize chickenpox in teens as most had been vaccinated. He went back the next day and died.
Don’t say chickenpox is not dangerous, please.
It is true that childhood diseases can be much more dangerous when they strike adults or teenagers, in this case. This was commonpalce knowledge when such diseases were more prevalent.
Totally agree.
And by getting the VZV (Varivax) jab at age 55 or so, one can be nearly certain avoid shingles, which is a horrifically painful rash of HSV-3 that leaves a lot of people with permanent nerve damage and shooting pain on the site where the vesicles appeared.
We are on a site that uses statistics and data to support their positions. Chicken pox is not a dangerous childhoid illness. Your friend’s son had chicken pox as a teenager. He would likely be alive today if he had chicken pox as a child.
In the past chicken pox killed about 50 people per year. It is not a dangerous virus.
Now people are scared of shingles and use this fear to justify a childhood vaccine that needs boosters to remain effective. $$$$
You clearly don’t know anyone who has had shingles. It is debilitatingly painful. And not just for older people. I know someone who was just over 30 who got shingles and she was in horrible pain, effectively incapacitated for weeks. For some people, the pain never goes away. I know someone to whom that happened. She’s been on opioids for more than a year and expects to have to take them for the rest of her life.
It can also cause permanent nerve damage.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/postherpetic-neuralgia/symptoms-causes/syc-20376588
You have just completely discredited yourself. Congrats.
You are ready to pounce on anyone that questions vaccine orthodoxy.
People are afraid of shingles because chicken pox is not a common childhood illness.
Shingles is terrible. However that is not a reason to vaccinate children against a common viral infection. At risk adults can ask for and receive a shingles vaccine especially if they are not around children.
From Wikipedia
In historical shingles studies, shingles incidence generally increased with age. However, in his 1965 paper, Hope-Simpson suggested that the “peculiar age distribution of zoster may in part reflect the frequency with which the different age groups encounter cases of varicella and because of the ensuing boost to their antibody protection have their attacks of zoster postponed”.[19] Lending support to this hypothesis that contact with children with chickenpox boosts adult cell-mediated immunity to help postpone or suppress shingles, a study by Thomas et al. reported that adults in households with children had lower rates of shingles than households without children.[99]
And again the CDC schedule has NEVER been tested.
Perhaps you should read up about the Japanese medical researcher who invented the Oka varicella vaccine – and how and why it came to fruition. It treats more than you might guess. I don’t think you’ll find the full history with Google but good luck trying.
Also have a good look at the Quackwatch site. You won’t even believe the stuff there.
Anti vaccination positions are as unscientific as climate denial. Attacking the ‘weakest’ herpes varicella vaccination is classic propagandist procedure. Cancer and surgery are the money makers, not primary prevention.
Please go.
Adults who had chicken pox as children absolutely get shingles.
“Shingles is caused by the varicella-zoster virus — the same virus that causes chickenpox. After you’ve had chickenpox, the virus lies inactive in nerve tissue near your spinal cord and brain. Years later, the virus may reactivate as shingles.
While it isn’t a life-threatening condition, shingles can be very painful. Vaccines can help reduce the risk of shingles, while early treatment can help shorten a shingles infection and lessen the chance of complications.” — The Mayo Clinic
The Marketwatch article on realtors and the 6% commission is interesting. What realtors are not talking about – and what you never see discussed – is that multiple listing services (which are primarily local) aren’t really the first line sites buyers visit when searching for a new home. Plug in real estate for sale in xxx on google and I bet the first site that comes up (or is near to the top) is Zillow, which was started by a guy whose mother was a real estate agent. What he is attempting to do is for Zillow to be the multiple listing service for the entire nation…..a listing service monopoly so to speak. He additionally charges real estate brokers advertising fees to be listed as premier agents….
Freedomny, as a Realtor in Sonoma County I’m pretty familiar with what the gross commissions are, here it’s usually 5%.
Keep in mind that the 5% is split between two offices and the there’s a split between the offices and the agents.
At 6% the actual take for an agent is right at 1%…
Someone has to pay “Suzanne” to research it.
There are a lot of fingers in the pie, the actual cost of sale is between 7 and 8% in most cases.
found out at&t apparently unilaterally downgraded my internet service without bothering to inform me, oddly there was no decrease in price. so much crapification, so little time.
I hear you. I have Sprint, or more accurately, Sprint has me, to similar effect:
frequent loss of service for no apparent reason, and throttling to absurdly slow speeds.
No, not crapification, but incentivication for you to upgrade to a higher paying plan. Just because you have a contract and statement saying one thing doesn’t mean it is true! The truth is whatever makes the mendacious parasitic company the most money.
according the them there isn’t one available. meanwhile i keep getting flyers claiming fiber optic now available in my neighborhood.
Allow me to speak up in highly particular defense of two public figures I abhor.
Re Chelsea Clinton at the Christchurch vigil: Granted her piling on the condemnation of Ilhan Omar was bad (plus Clinton’s pretty awful in any number of other ways), but the gushing self-righteous finger pointing at this particular deficiency is more than a bit much.
On a somewhat similar note, I keep reading about Joe Biden’s “handsy” behavior around women. As with the Clintons, there are abundant valid and sadly consequential reasons for Biden to just step away from the mic. But what exactly has “handsy” got to do with much of anything? I take it to mean putting a hand on a shoulder on someone’s back. Not good, and he ought to cut it out. And today’s sturdy, capable women are surely capable of working up the pluck to nudge or swat the Biden hand away. This alone just can’t be a disqualifier, can it?
If I’m wrong in either case, I’m prepared to be enlightened.
Re: The Clinton situation. You clearly missed the piling on of a 19 year old muslim student by prominent Clinton supporters along with threats to her future career opportunities. It was the thuggish behavior we have come to expect out of the Clintons. Chelsea is neither a girl in the White House or even a private citizen. After putting out racist statement in support of racist policy, she shows up at this vigil. Chelsea’s defenders are also pointing out Chelsea is pregnant and she was attacked by a petite 19 year old. The horror. Can you imagine how damaged the white baby is? They can hear in the womb.
I would also add this is about power dynamics. Most likely this would have disappeared if not for the Clinton brigades who brought it to the forefront.
As for Joe Biden and his hands, who the eff is he to touch people? Who is he? Do you do this? If he wasn’t a Senator and he did that, people would have hit him, and they would have been right to. Biden is a thug who uses his position to prey on people.
Joe Biden at the same time was a participant in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas who had a bit of a problem with workplace relations and women. To a certain extent, there aren’t opportunities to hold these people accountable, and these are the only avenues available.
“Re Chelsea Clinton at the Christchurch vigil: Granted her piling on the condemnation of Ilhan Omar was bad (plus Clinton’s pretty awful in any number of other ways), but the gushing self-righteous finger pointing at this particular deficiency is more than a bit much.”
And I thought righteous finger-pointing was a Clintonite monopoly!
It was a bit boorish on Clinton the younger, but emblematic of how outdated the family name is in politics to younger Americans.
And today’s sturdy, capable women are surely capable of working up the pluck to nudge or swat the Biden hand away
well youtube that’s a believable source. not
There are tons of clips from C-SPAN and comparable source. And these have been up for years.
Are you suggesting this is somehow faked?
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/joe-biden-women-gifs/
There are multiple videos of Biden putting his hands on young girls on camera, whispering to them, hugging them, etc. while they grimace with disgust and distaste. I guess these underage women ought to have the “pluck” to tell off the VP of the US? Their parents’ political careers probably require them to behave demurely, especially while on camera, not to mention a young person might not have nailed down a good method of fending off gropers yet or might just be surprised by how familyblogging inappropriate his behavior was. Oh God the victim blaming, how it burns.
As for Chelsea, she can go home and cry in her pile of millions of dollars until she feels better. It’s not likely she’ll ever face any actual accountability for anything, so hopefully she’ll get over 30 uncomfortable seconds.
D’oh Biden = Impunity, IMO, first noticeable in the sh!t-eating grin.
Why so happy?
Joe Biden has regularly put his hands on underage girls. It’s gross and makes him look like a pedophile.
When I went to search on YouTube and put in “Joe Biden,” “children” was the first choice on the list of autofilled searches. I just picket this one, not sure it’s the worst, but it has 2 million view and there are lots of others:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwXweiRjckI
And he puts his hands on women in official settings where the women would lose points by swatting him off.
This is the worst one I’ve seen.
You toxically masculine person, you are clearly not on board with the post #MeToo rules. As Garrison Keilor found out a hand momentarily on the back of a woman in a backless dress is career-destroying.
You need to get to your local #MeToo struggle session for re-education, comrade. And there’s a quick procedure for extraction of that hateful Y chromosome.
Sometimes I wonder if this is one of Bezos’s goals, to have AWS host a dynamically scalable AI in much the same way as J.G. Ballard’s mutant spider’s brain… [don’t know if anyone recalls that short story but thought I’d toss it out there]
Can “AI” be clearly defined, for general purposes, and can it be said, by that definition,
to presently exist, or not?
Surely, but my definition and your definition and, oh, Kurzweil’s will differ.
Absolutely! You’ll just have to pick a definition. Perhaps you mean, are they conscious, are they self-aware? Currently, it is up to the inquisitor to distinguish between a philosophical zombie (Chalmers) and something … self-aware.
Personally, I ask myself if I’m encountering philosophical zombies ALL.THE.TIME. But, I’m in Alabamistan, so, whatever they are, they seem to reproduce at will.
Thanks, WT. Seems there is not a commonly-applicable definition, AFAIK.
‘AI’ appears to be a marketing term, though I’d be interested to hear evidence
to the contrary, preferably from disinterested parties.
“this sucker’s going down..”
Just asking, but … does that count as fieldwork?
I… don’t know. I’m not too bright, so take that into account.
A new and I think substantial piece on 737 MAX history from Leeham News:
https://leehamnews.com/2019/03/20/boeing-didnt-want-to-re-engine-the-737-but-had-design-standing-by/
I guess Bezos and the ’17 intel’ have cooked up something which will make that Utah center obsolete. Can’t have all that stuff vulnerable in one place, now, can we?
Maybe it’s ‘Colossus: The Forbin Project’
Distributed across every Amazon processor farm around the world.
10Y yield down 9 basis points today. Getting closer and closer to the Fed Funds rate.
Re: “Incept” seems to be a synonym for “ingest,” so I’m not sure exactly what Silver is saying here.”
I think it’s a reference from a movie:
Inception is a 2010 science fiction action film[3] written, co-produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan, and co-produced by Emma Thomas. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious, and is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased as payment for the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious.[4]
A shameless rip-off of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika.
I favor an NHS over single payer, and I always have, because it is harder to loot and the US is a looter’s paradise.
“…and the US is a looter’s paradise.”
Yeah, I remember saying something like that, along with “and a great place to buy stuff cheaply”, 35 years ago, and immigration by those who think that’s wonderful has been
encouraged, before and since. Clumsy sentence, sorry.
Here we are.
A la Baudrillard, the politicians have become their simulation. Though to be fair, the bulk of everybody else has too. Though maybe a difference is that we have doubt that we truly are our simulations – the old saying is fake it til you make it and even when we make it we still secretly believe we’re faking it. I suspect the politicians don’t have that type of doubt – they’re true believers.
PC > internet > (esp!) smartphone > new, profound, alienation and self-simulation (myself certainly included).
IMO.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
So I was reading earlier of the troubles that the US Navy were having with the F-35 so more or less just another day in the week-
https://sputniknews.com/military/201903201073410541-watchdog-report-us-navy-f-35-troubles/
Then the penny dropped. If the FAA had subcontracted quality control and inspections of the 737 Max to Boeing, could this mean that the Pentagon had also subcontracted out the same to Lockheed-Martin? That this company was verifying the same planes that they built? And this is why the US Navy alone is having so many problems when they get sent out to the fleet?
Just my opinion, but I don’t think the Navy take orders from the FAA. Sure, they cooperate when flying in civilian airspace, there may be some coordination wrt the air traffic controller school, but that would be about it.
I think it is more along the lines of flag rank officers in the acquisition process nearing an “up or out” inflection point in their careers, believing the outcome will be “out” for once, and then deciding that the Lockheed-Martin/Boeing/General Dynamics/whatever representative that keeps stopping by to say “Hi” just might be onto something.
No, what I meant to imply was that whatever inspectors the Pentagon had, the work itself was outsourced to Boeing and not done in-house by the Pentagon’s people. That the substandard work was being passed by Boeing inspectors and only really Boeing inspectors.
Florida Republicans Are Sabotaging a Constitutional Amendment That Gave Felons the Right to Vote
There have been some noise similar to the one on asset forfeiture being imposed often without even charges of a crime. Housings, cars, businesses, cash (from wallets) and so on. So reforms are finally being done after thirty plus years.
The addition of endless fees, extra charges, interest, and penalties in many, perhaps most places, have gotten reformers and lawyers to start lobbying for changes. Unfortunately, it will probably take decades for any effective changes as it is often “those people”, those felons who are complaining and the fines and fees are often used as replacement for taxes. The fact that it might, and in some cases ruled by the Federal courts (and sometimes ignored) as unconstitutional and that trying to collect the money often cost money than can be collected.
https://twitter.com/MikeGravel/status/1108397025224286209
Good clips of him at the twitter.com site of his.
This is very good news. It could be that the left now has flanks!
It’s funny anyway
Progressive group disputes right-wing report that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was quietly booted from its board
[NYDN]
Hard as it is to believe, Tucker’s Daily Cholera played fast and loose with the facts:
For some definition of “dabbling”.
https://twitter.com/JordanChariton/status/1108458119456346113
I’m surprised Gabbard’s numbers are not higher, but it’s early and the MSM are doing their best to unperson her. Jose Padilla, meet Tulsi Gabbard, or vice versa, I guess.
I sent her a little money, and hope others do also, to get her over the top and into the
debates. She is at least talking about stopping USA USA’s perma-wars. Very brave.
While reading the reddit, I stumbleuponed an interesting little video with its attendant reddit discussion thread. It is titled: Academics expose corruption in Grievance Studies. ( A few minutes into the video they explain why they have decided to call this group of disciplines by the catch-all name of Grievance Studies).
If this video is not itself a hoax, and it gives the feel of being not-a-hoax to me, then we will be hearing more about this project in the months and years to come; including massive hate-campaigns against the people behind this project. For myself, I would say that this project and the further work to flow from it helps to explain why so many decent people have come to view the Social Justice Warriors and their University Tools and Butlers with genuine deeply-felt hatred. (More selfishly speaking, it also validates to me my own view expressed here in the recent past that the phrase “White Privilege” is a secular recasting of the theological phrase “Original Sin”. The seculigious phrase ” White Privilege” is indeed the Burning Cross of the Seculigious Theopolitical Crusaders of the Social Justice Warrior Identity Left.
Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/b3cbi9/academics_expose_corruption_in_grievance_studies/
‘Lockheed F-35 Dinged as Boeing’s F-15X Wins in Air Force’s Plan’:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-18/lockheed-f-35-dinged-as-boeing-s-f-15x-wins-in-air-force-s-plan
And don’t miss this part:
“Northrop Grumman Corp.’s new B-21 stealth bomber would get $20 billion over the next five years, with funding jumping from $3 billion in 2020 to $5 billion in 2023. Of the $5 billion, $2.3 billion would be for the first year of major procurement..”
rollin’, rollin’, rawHide!
freedom n democracy
Somebody named Tim Wise™, telling us what we’re all doing wrong:
https://www.salon.com/2019/03/20/six-things-we-learned-from-the-new-zealand-massacre-tim-wise-on-the-crisis-of-whiteness/
tired
I’m sure someone else will have commented on this before, but the success of Uber, AirBnB and so on relies on the fact that they are attacking widely detested consumer experiences. Yellow cabs in NYC are considered filthy, unsafe, and expensive. Car services in the suburbs are just as bad. Hotels? forget about it. Many families couldn’t go on vacation where they want to go if AirBnB were not available–try taking three kids to a hotel.
My point is that if the market didn’t crave these services as soon as they’re launched, they wouldn’t succeed in attacking regulation. But it does. So the big picture is that a much deeper reformation of existing services would be needed to up-end this trend.