"We human beings always seek happiness. Now there are two ways.
You can
make yourself happy by making other people unhappy--I call that the
logic of robbery. The other way, you make yourself happy by making other
people happy--that's the logic of the market. Which way do you
prefer?"-- Zhang Weiying
The
most recent numbers from the California Franchise Tax Board show nearly
90 percent of the tax money comes from one-fifth of the taxpayers –
those making $91,000 and up. They belong to the only income range whose
average income increased in the last two decades. From an average of
almost $173,000 per return in 1994, the average adjusted gross income
for the top fifth of taxpayers reached nearly $238,000 by 2013, a 38
percent increase. Forty-five percent of the state’s income tax money
comes from the top 1 percent of filers – those with adjusted gross
income of at least $501,000. Those taxpayers recorded an average
adjusted gross income of $1.6 million in 2013, almost double what it was
in 1994.
Imagine how dangerous a recession would be for tax revenues.
Imagine how dangerous a recession would be for tax revenues.
A new take on the elites in the U.S.: For lawyers, doctors, and dentists-- three of the most over-represented occupations in the top 1 percent--state-level lobbying from professional associations has blocked efforts to expand the supply of qualified workers who could do many of the "professional" job tasks for less pay.
Eskimo: n: A name referring generically to all Inuit and Yupik people of the world. This name is considered derogatory in many other places because it was given by non-Inuit people and was said to mean "eater of raw meat." Strangely, the Eskimo people themselves seem not to care.
Linguists now believe that "Eskimo" is derived from an Ojibwa word meaning "to net snowshoes." However, the people of Canada and Greenland prefer other names. "Inuit," meaning "people," is used in most of Canada, and the language is called "Inuktitut" in eastern Canada although other local designations are used also. The Inuit people of Greenland refer to themselves as "Greenlanders" or "Kalaallit" in their language, which they call "Greenlandic" or "Kalaallisut."
Most Alaskans continue to accept the name "Eskimo," particularly because "Inuit" refers only to the Inupiat of northern Alaska, the Inuit of Canada, and the Kalaallit of Greenland, and it is not a word in the Yupik languages of Alaska and Siberia.
As a result of the ongoing collapse of the Alberta energy economy, CBRE Canada estimates that Calgary's downtown office vacancy rate was 20.2% as of March 31, nearly twice as high as the 11.8% a year ago. 20%.
It has
become fashionable for government to define things it wants to control
as "a public good." For example, water. The economic definition of a
"public good" is: A public good has two specific characteristics: it is
(1) non-excludable and (2) non-rivalrous in consumption. In
lay-persons’ terms, this means that (1) if the good is supplied to
Smith, no one – including the supplier – can, at reasonable cost,
prevent Jones and Williams from also consuming the good even if Jones
and Williams refuse to pay for their use of it; and (2) Smith’s
consumption of the good does not diminish (that is, does not “rival”)
Jones’s or Williams’s ability to consume the good. Safe drinking water
is emphatically not a public good thus defined, for safe
drinking water is both excludable (your water supply, and yours alone,
can be cut off if you don’t pay your water bill) and rivalrous in
consumption (every gallon of water that you use today is a gallon that
your neighbors cannot use today).
During
Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign visit to Liberty University, he told
students that our nation was created on racist principles.
The
intellectual in the West seems to be in growing despair. Here are a few
lines from John Gray in "Lapham": Civilization is not the endpoint of
modern history, but a succession of interludes in recurring spasms of
barbarism. The liberal civilization that has prevailed in some Western
countries over the past few centuries emerged slowly and with difficulty
against the background of a particular mix of traditions and
institutions. Precarious wherever it has existed, it is a way of life
that has no strong hold on humankind. For an older generation of liberal
thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Isaiah Berlin, these were
commonplaces. Today these truisms are forbidden truths, which can no
longer be spoken or in many cases comprehended.
For
many in the West, the threat ISIS poses to their view of the world
seems a greater disaster than the atrocities ISIS has committed and
threatens to repeat. The bafflement with which the West approaches the
group is a symptom of the senility of the liberal mind, a condition for
which there is no obvious remedy. Perhaps what our culture lacks, in the
end, is the ability to understand itself.
Long
term vegetarianism can lead to genetic mutations which raise the risk
of heart disease and cancer, scientists have found. The new research
was published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. Science.
Just
when the political and economic agitation of the campaign was
beginning to clarify, this Mathews guy manages to force another social
issue (abortion) into the discussion. Probably couldn't figure out a
racial element. I have been agnostic about this election, interested
more in the cause of these candidates' success than the candidates
themselves, but Trump's performance with the idiotic Mathews
ideologue-disguised-as-objective-journalist was just unforgivable.
Everyone in the universe knows that election discussions with the Left
will not involve finance, war, terrorism, deficit, debt, welfare,
social security or the Federal Reserve--it will involve the Holy Trinity
of abortion, contraception and gay marriage. As important as these
questions might be to individuals, they should not be the centerpiece of
national policy. That said, they will always be so and any candidate
must anticipate that these questions will come up-- intense,
sanctimonious and heartfelt. Not having an answer for these inevitable
questions seems to be a hallmark of Rube-publican candidates and they
seem to pick answers from a Saturday Night Live script. (Remember the
"women's bodies shut down during rape" answer?) I do not care about
these people at all but this Trump guy should really be punished for
this stupidity.
OPEC production problem: "I am not sure you can call it a freeze," one OPEC source said. A senior oil industry source said: "The problem now is to come up with something that excludes Iran, makes the Saudis happy and doesn't upset Russia."
Attorney General Loretta Lynch has issued a warning to municipal and state judges across the country that their courts could lose federal funding if they don’t ease up on fines and arrest warrants for minor crimes involving poor offenders, indigent minorities in particular. The Supreme Court has ruled that disparate impact doesn’t violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only “intentional” discrimination does. “The administration is quite wrong to say that Title VI incorporates a ‘disparate impact’ standard,” Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity points out. “The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that it does not.”
Hamilton could be in trouble over a casting call that seeks “non-white” actors and appears to violate human rights law. The official casting notice asks for “non-white men and women, ages 20s to 30s” to audition, because a major selling point of Hamilton is its cast full of black and Latino performers.
Who is.....Deidre McCloskey?
Leonard Woolf married Virginia Stephen (Woolf) in 1912. Both were writers, public intellectuals and influential among both groups. Together Leonard and Virginia Woolf entered into the Bloomsbury group, which also included various other former Apostles and were co-founders of 1917 Club. Virginia became a brilliant writer, under the influence on WW1 which both thought destroyed the West. Much of his life was caring for her and her depression which ended in suicide. His autobiography, Downhill All the Way, has a picture in it of him and his dog. No picture of Virginia.
Leonard Woolf married Virginia Stephen (Woolf) in 1912. Both were writers, public intellectuals and influential among both groups. Together Leonard and Virginia Woolf entered into the Bloomsbury group, which also included various other former Apostles and were co-founders of 1917 Club. Virginia became a brilliant writer, under the influence on WW1 which both thought destroyed the West. Much of his life was caring for her and her depression which ended in suicide. His autobiography, Downhill All the Way, has a picture in it of him and his dog. No picture of Virginia.
The Saudis are officially on board with
killing gays. Now any state or group in the U.S. with any ambiguity
toward gays will get serious reaction, including boycott. So.....?
Maybe they are just following Obama's dictum. Maybe it works for them.
Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Washington to meet Vice President
Joe Biden and attend the administration’s 2016 Nuclear Security Summit.
But he is not expected to enjoy a formal meeting with President Barack
Obama — a slight the White House explained away as scheduling issue
but which has been widely perceived as sign of Obama’s frustration with
Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian actions. He held an
off-the-record dinner at Washington’s high-end St. Regis Hotel
where Erdogan ripped the American media’s coverage of his
administration’s policies and bashed the White House’s support for
Kurdish fighters in Syria. No admin officials were invited. (But Obama
did go to Cuba, right?)
This
is from a recent review of Deidre McCloskey's new book: Most
economists—from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty—say the
Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated capital. McCloskey
disagrees, fiercely. “Our riches,” she argues, “were made not by piling
brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling idea on
idea.” Capital was necessary, but so was the presence of oxygen. It was
ideas, not matter, that drove “trade-tested betterment.” Nor were
institutions the drivers. The World Bank orthodoxy of “add institutions
and stir” doesn’t work, and didn’t. McCloskey builds a powerful case for
the initiating role of ideas—ideas for electric motors and free
elections, of course, but more deeply the bizarre and liberal ideas of
equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk. Liberalism arose from
theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, yielding a
unique respect for betterment and its practitioners, and upending
ancient hierarchies. Commoners were encouraged to have a go, and the
bourgeoisie took up the Bourgeois Deal, and we were all enriched.
OPEC production problem: "I am not sure you can call it a freeze," one OPEC source said. A senior oil industry source said: "The problem now is to come up with something that excludes Iran, makes the Saudis happy and doesn't upset Russia."
That should be a piece of cake.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch has issued a warning to municipal and state judges across the country that their courts could lose federal funding if they don’t ease up on fines and arrest warrants for minor crimes involving poor offenders, indigent minorities in particular. The Supreme Court has ruled that disparate impact doesn’t violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only “intentional” discrimination does. “The administration is quite wrong to say that Title VI incorporates a ‘disparate impact’ standard,” Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity points out. “The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that it does not.”
But, as in much of the world, ideology trumps everything.
AAAannnndddd................ a picture of an IRA member on "patrol," West Belfast 1987:
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