Reverie

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. --Karl Marx 
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed. -- Gandhi

Watched the wrestling nationals last night. Really terrific. Penn State is a monster but Ohio State is very strong. Bo Nickel pinned into the finals at 197.

The Mueller report is in--so that will end all the bickering, right?

For those of you who are wondering why Trump keeps hammering the dead: “A longtime associate of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain provided a copy of the … Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to an explosive court filing released Wednesday. David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, met on December 29, 2016 with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro. BuzzFeed published the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, on January 10, 2017.” (The dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, alleges that when Trump found out he was in the same hotel room that  Barack Obama had used,  Trump called and hired some prostitutes to come over and urinate on the bed. It was called “the golden showers” story.)
Our leaders.

Nearly 1,600 people were secretly recorded in South Korean motel rooms and live-streamed online for paying customers to watch in an unsettling, widespread scandal.

[H]istorians should approach capitalism not as a system of exploitation, which it clearly is not, but as a system of access. In the bad old days, only a tiny few had any access at all to large accumulations of capital or to the benefits that such accumulations could produce. Under capitalism, a revolutionary thing has occurred: anyone at all can get access to a share of the returns on capital. From the perspective of world and comparative history, this is an utterly momentous development, one whose implications have not yet been adequately explored owing to the discipline’s wasteful intellectual diversions, first to Marxism, and second to critical theory.---Kuznicki 

Mississippi’s Republican governor signed a bill Thursday that, with few exceptions, criminalizes abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Something called The 2019 World Happiness Report  says that Finland remains the happiest country on Earth for the second year in the row, while the U.S. drops to No. 19, its worst ranking ever (it was No. 18 in 2018 and No. 14 in 2017). In the U.S., where prosperity is on the rise, researchers pin the blame on declines in social capital and social support and increases in obesity and substance abuse. Author Jean M. Twenge believes fundamental changes in how Americans spend their leisure time are also to blame, pointing a finger at the rise of digital media and the decline of face-to-face interactions.

From a Mallon essay in The New Yorker: “As we got deep into 2016, the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina came to feel almost like refuges. So did the political discourse of the early two-thousands: I invite you, in our current ghost-tweeted political era, to go back just eight years, to the Facebook postings of Sarah Palin, and tell me that they do not now read like a lost volume of ‘The Federalist Papers.’ ”

During a speech before the second Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry declared, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Following the signing of the American Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Patrick Henry was appointed governor of Virginia by the Continental Congress.


                                           Reverie

Jake Tapper asserted to Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post that "the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists ... more than all previous administrations combined.".

Only 37% support Medicare-for-All if it means raising taxes. And 57% of Americans oppose banning semi-automatics. And apparently the idea of the "Green Deal" requires the abolition of private car ownership (new to me.) So the Dems are creating powerfully unpopular notions as baseline political beliefs. Maybe the Russians are influencing their policy committees.

The West is confused about individuals. One white whacko is seen to represent all white people, a movement within Islam is seen not to represent Islam, and we are discouraged from even generalizing about the XX or XY genotype.

The enthusiasm for the Second Amendment repeal is characteristic of thin but symbolic thinking. There are 40 odd State Constitutions that have similar language you’d have to repeal as well.

More than 65 million Miles are driven by trucks in the U.S. every year.

When Sweden eliminated its wealth tax, The Financial Times reported, the elimination of the tax had "virtually no effect of government finances."

The U.S. government has spent well over $150 billion over the last decade on green renewables, according to the Institute for Energy Research, but today we get less than 10% of our energy from "green" renewable sources.

The Va. governor's PR problems are comic. The double standards in the Press have become huge, irrational blind spots.

Raise your hand if you believe that the likes of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Marco Rubio can possibly know enough to plan and to run an economy that effectively serves the needs of 328 million people. But the deeper point is not that this task is beyond the abilities of venal politicians; it’s that this task is beyond – far beyond – the abilities of anyone. --Bordeaux

Medical direct to consumer ads make up 32% of pharma  advertising budget.

5G has a significant security problem that has not yet been fixed. When it is it will allow remote robotic surgery.

Lions can jump 15 feet high, 40 feet long and run up to 50 mph.

The odds that police will solve a shooting are low and dropping. Homicides and assaults carried out with guns lead to arrests about half as often as when the same crimes are committed using other weapons or physical for. The odds of an arrest are particularly low when victims survive, in part because those crimes tend to be assigned to detectives whose caseloads are exponentially higher compared to their colleagues in the homicide department, who are often overburdened themselves. The chances are even lower if the victims are people of color. When a black or Hispanic person is fatally shot, the likelihood that local detectives will catch the culprit is 35% — 18 percentage points fewer than when the victim is white. For gun assaults, the arrest rate is 21% if the victim is black or Hispanic, versus 37% for white victims.

These are just numbers; the factors are myriad.

 

The public phone calls after the SOTU were a strong argument against the idea of democracy. One girl from Pittsburgh called and thought that opposition to nine month abortion implied a violation of the separation of church and state.

Priest, of Epoch Investment Partners, summed up the social issue raised in Barron's Roundtable: “Democracy flowers when living standards are rising alongside it. But when you simultaneously challenge social norms and many of the values that anchor people—a sense of home, job security, and the prospects for growth—and amp it up with social-media networks, you get serious blowback.”

The Virginia governor for Kavanaugh! ‘‘Iphigenia for Helen!’’ "Agamemnon for Iphigenia!" "Clytemnestra for Agamemnon!"

College funding in the U.S.I is privately funded. In the US 69.7 percent of 2018 high school graduates enrolled in college. However, slightly over half will graduate.

• In Germany, where college is tuition wavered, 29.3 percent of high school graduates enrolled in college. Germany has a quota system, Numerus Clausus, which results in system where competition is high; students must be at the top of their class. So, the government does pay for college, but only pay for the best.