"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!"--Woodrow Wilson
Government employees taking the Fifth, just as if government were a criminal enterprise.
Market prices are not arbitrary terms of exchange that determine how wealth is distributed--unless they are controlled by monopolists or government "experts." Instead, prices reflect underlying realities.
Jonah Lehrer has a new book, “A Book About Love.” He has fallen far. He has been a pop science writer, specializing in neuroscience. His books were successful and he was always in great demand as a speaker.
But in the summer of 2012, he was caught recycling old material for his new blog at "The New Yorker." Then it was discovered he’d plagiarized several blog posts while working at Wired magazine. And then the journalist Michael Moynihan found that Mr. Lehrer had invented quotes from Bob Dylan for his third book, “Imagine,” and misused the words Mr. Dylan actually did say. Later investigations showed that “Imagine” contained many other factual errors. The book was pulled from shelves. So, too, was his second book, “How We Decide.” This from a recent review in the NYT that just murdered his new book.
In 2014, the latest year available, more than 7,400 veterans took their own lives, accounting for 18 percent of all suicides in America. Veterans make up less than 9 percent of the U.S. population. Roughly 20 veterans a day commit suicide nationwide, according to new data from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
On June 30, 1908, a massive explosion ripped through the sky over the Tunguska region of Siberia, flattening trees nearly 31 miles around. The blast is thought to have been produced by a comet or asteroid hurtling through Earth's atmosphere, resulting in an explosion equal to 185 Hiroshima bombs as pressure and heat rapidly increased.
The object likely entered the atmosphere at 9-19 miles per second, and would have been extremely fragile, destroying itself roughly six miles above Earth. Any remaining traces would be cosmic dust, BBC explains, making them extremely difficult, as they could be just a millimetre in size. The blast sent shock waves as far away as England, and even people in Asia saw the sky glowing until midnight – bright enough to read a newspaper outdoors. But, with no impact crater and little evidence of such an object ever found, scientists remain perplexed as to what truly caused the event in which 'the sky was split in two' - and a new study has "failed to reach a conclusion." This was the topic of a terrific book, The Fire Came By.
Who is....Duterte?
Quantitative Easing and the buying of bank assets were supposed to cause inflation. All the models predicted it. But it did not happen. Why? The answer is that banks and financial institutions hoarded the money in order to shore up their own balance sheets and regain profitability. Banks still had bad loans and toxic assets on their balance sheets as a result of the housing bubble burst and its aftershocks. The extra cash on hand made their financial picture look a whole lot better. So the money solved old mistakes, it did not finance new efforts.
The Middle East deterioration continues. Now we are hoping the Evil Empire will help us. And there are always the recriminations: Who started this? Who can we blame? America is always a big target but the British and French have some great claims in the creation of Israel out of whole cloth. There are other elements, too. There is a new book by Stephen Kinzer called All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Kinzer tells the story, in great detail, of how Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of TR and an employee of the CIA, set in motion the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s. Iran was a fledgling democracy stopped in its tracks by the U.S. government at the behest of the British government. When the Iranians finally overthrew the Shah, they got, not another liberal democracy, but a vicious theocracy.The motivation for the coup was to get back the oil company that Mossadegh had nationalized. But, as British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, of the Labour government, said at the time: "What argument can I advance against anyone claiming the right to nationalize the resources of their country? We are doing the same thing here with our power in the shape of coal, electricity, railways, transport and steel."
The Middle East deterioration continues. Now we are hoping the Evil Empire will help us. And there are always the recriminations: Who started this? Who can we blame? America is always a big target but the British and French have some great claims in the creation of Israel out of whole cloth. There are other elements, too. There is a new book by Stephen Kinzer called All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Kinzer tells the story, in great detail, of how Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of TR and an employee of the CIA, set in motion the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s. Iran was a fledgling democracy stopped in its tracks by the U.S. government at the behest of the British government. When the Iranians finally overthrew the Shah, they got, not another liberal democracy, but a vicious theocracy.The motivation for the coup was to get back the oil company that Mossadegh had nationalized. But, as British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, of the Labour government, said at the time: "What argument can I advance against anyone claiming the right to nationalize the resources of their country? We are doing the same thing here with our power in the shape of coal, electricity, railways, transport and steel."
Well, some bad news on the religious front. Fareed Zakaris has a show on CNN called GPS where he discusses topics of the week. His program Sunday was "Why do they hate us?", an hour long program devoted to the discussion of Islam and its relationship with the West. First, there were bloody quotes from the Koran about non-believers and then gays. These were, inexplicably, set against violent phrases from Leviticus in the Old Testament. I was unaware of active Old Testament militants and Zacharia had the good taste and judgment not to link these phrases with modern Christianity--the New Testament being, in essence, the repudiation of the Old--but there was the subtle suggestion that the Old tainted the New. Then came an Islamic scholar who explained the worst possible news: The 72 virgins promised for men killed in battle against the infidel is apparently a bad translation; it is actually 72 raisins. (I am not making this up.) The meaning is, apparently, a poetic lushness. Well, anyway, in the minds of many men such a change might be considered a step down--but... perhaps there might be a health angle or something.
In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop-killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only about 13 percent of the nation's population. Little over a quarter of all homicides by police involve black victims.
AAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnndddddd...........a map of Russian defensive missile range around the Mediterranean:
In “On What We Can Not Do,” a short essay published a few years ago, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben outlined two ways in which power operates today. There’s the conventional type that seeks to limit our potential for self-development by restricting material resources and banning certain behaviors. But there’s also a subtler, more insidious type, which limits not what we can do but what we can not do. What’s at stake here is not so much our ability to do things but our capacity not to make use of that very ability.
While each of us can still choose not to be on Facebook, have a credit history or build a presence online, can we really afford not to do any of those things today? It was acceptable not to have a cellphone when most people didn’t have them; today, when almost everybody does and when our phone habits can even be used to assess whether we qualify for a loan, such acts of refusal border on the impossible.
For Agamben, it’s this double power “to be and to not be, to do and to not do” that makes us human. This active necessity to choose (and err) contributes to the development of individual faculties that shape our subjectivity. The tragedy of modern man, then, is that “he has become blind not to his capacities but to his incapacities, not to what he can do but to what he cannot, or can not, do.” (from the NYT, Evgeny Morozov)
In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop-killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only about 13 percent of the nation's population. Little over a quarter of all homicides by police involve black victims.
Vigilantism has another side. Look at the Philippines. Duterte has just been elected President. He said he would issue shoot-to-kill orders to the security services and offer them bounties for the bodies of drug dealers. He also urged ordinary Filipinos to kill suspected criminals. During the campaign, Duterte said 100,000 people would die in his crackdown. He has been accused of links to vigilante death squads in Davao, which rights groups say have killed more than 1,000 people. Such groups are concerned that extrajudicial killings could spread across the Philippines under him, with a police crackdown following his election already leaving dozens of people dead. Strangely, Duterte has specifically said that he did not view Abu Sayyaf, a homicidal ISIS affiliate, as criminal. Perhaps he did not want his people to be confused by too many targets.
I wonder if Trump would ban Korean golfers from the U.S. Women's' Open?
A new busybody frontier: Agriculture consumes 80 percent of water in the United States. Meat requires much more water than plants So......China, which consumes half of the world’s pork and more than a quarter of its overall meat, announced new dietary guidelines last week that advises the average citizen to reduce their meat consumption by one-half. That country’s meat consumption has increased by nearly five-fold since 1982, even though their population has only increased by 30 percent during that time. Denmark went a little further in May. The Danish government is considering a recommendation from its ethics council that all red meats should be taxed. Red meat accounts for 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, and the council argued that Danes were “ethically obliged” to reduce their consumption. Ah. "Ethics."
AAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnndddddd...........a map of Russian defensive missile range around the Mediterranean:
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