Helping capitalists is not to be equated with helping capitalism.--Lavois
A cynical take on "fake news" by Higgs:
A little-noticed aspect of this ongoing activity relates to the
matter of “failed polices.” Government’s critics constantly harp on
allegations of such failures in an attempt to sway public opinion in
favor of throwing the (current) rascals out and replacing them with the
critics’ preferred rascals. Revelations of “scandals,” whether personal
or managerial, provide especially useful allegations in the world of
fake news. Thus, for example, critics of the government’s so-called drug
war(s) constantly allege that these efforts have failed to stem the use
and trafficking in such forbidden fruits and therefore ought to be
modified or abandoned. Such criticism, whether well founded or not,
however, falls victim to the assumption that the policy has failed
merely because it has not halted or even reduced drug use and
trafficking. But the policy, at least at the federal level of
government, has not been altered substantially or abandoned in response
to such criticism, and the reason it has proved so durable is that it
has decidedly not failed insofar as its principal warriors are
concerned. The drug war has brought tremendous infusions of money and
power into the hands of its conductors, who would be crestfallen indeed
if their effort had succeeded in reducing the use and trafficking they
purport to be targeting. Such success would remove the foundation that
supports their hold on money and power and hence would prove personally
devastating to them, however desirable it might seem to be in the
abstract.
Derek Walcott was born on St. Lucia. Walcott's two-dozen collections of poems and plays -- one recent work, Tiepolo's Hound, includes
his paintings -- earned the 1992 Nobel. The Nobel committee cited the
"multicultural commitment" in Walcott's work, and so many followed suit
(often adding "post-colonial") that interviewers now get a forewarning:
"If anybody uses the word 'multiculturalism' I'm walking out of the
room."
R. J. Rummel’s compilations show that approximately 262 million, MILLION, persons were deliberately killed by their own governments
during the twentieth century alone—many times the number of death’s in
that century’s international wars. Rummel calls this death toll
“democide.” Yet people always see the government as somehow a kind
intervener in life, I'll bet often intervening against the threat of
corporations which are, so far, unarmed. If people rightly fear the
power of a governmental leader, the obvious solution is not to replace
him with a powerful leader you agree with, it is to decrease the power
of the position the leader has assumed.
Currency manipulation transfers wealth from the citizens of
countries that practice it to the citizens of countries fortunate enough
to buy the manipulators’ subsidized exports.
And yet it is the governments whose citizens are on the receiving
end of these transfers who fussily try to prevent these transfers,
while the governments whose citizens are taxed to fund the transfers
stubbornly carry on with them. So with the Trump administration
threatening to stop Beijing’s alleged currency manipulation, and Beijing
resisting, it’s as if the Trump administration believes itself to be
charged with the responsibility of protecting the welfare of the Chinese
people at the expense of American citizens, while the government in
Beijing plays the role of benefactor of the American people at the
expense of Chinese citizens. (WSJ)
Gary Taubes reminds listeners that his new book and the subject of The Case Against Sugar
is like all his previous work; it's really about good science versus
bad science. Because the human body, like the economy, is so very
complex, it's extremely difficult to parse out the effect of a single
variable. Taubes maintains though, that every culture which adopts the
Western diet and lifestyle invariably falls victim to the cocktail of
ailments we face- including obesity, heart disease, Alzheimer's, etc.
"The agent is sugar," he warns. And it's dangerous because it's so
delicious.
So I hope he has better arguments than the common sugar element.
What about the internal combustion engine? Or toothpaste? Or voting?
Who is...Sally Brown?
Trump's Inauguration Speech was confident and nationalistic. These
politicians frequently declare they must pick up more power when faced
with a domestic problem as they see the state as an ever increasing
source of right and proper power. Remember Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country" speech. Or this from Roosevelt's "fear itself" speech: "But........
in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not
evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask
the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis--broad
Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the
power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign
foe." They just can not stop themselves.
It’s well-known that U.S. manufacturing output continues to rise
despite the reality that the number of Americans employed in jobs
classified as being in the manufacturing sector peaked in June 1977 and
has fallen, with very few interruptions, ever since.
Nevertheless, some people continue to insist that the loss of
manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is largely due to increased American
trade with non-Americans. Other studies find empirical evidence that
labor-saving innovation rather than trade is overwhelmingly responsible
for the loss of manufacturing jobs.
Hemingway's first book, the story collection In Our Time,
had been published by Boni Liveright the previous autumn, under a
contract that granted them an option on his next three books. Hemingway
was a rising star with the finished first draft of The Sun Also Rises
in his pocket, along with tempting offers from other publishers --
Scribners, Knopf and Harcourt, Brace. His only way around Horace
Liveright was to get him to reject his next manuscript. Hemingway's
solution was to submit The Torrents of Spring, a ninety-page
satire which he knocked off in eleven days. This aimed at a variety of
targets, but chief among them was Sherwood Anderson and the writing
style of the "Chicago School" -- in Hemingway's view, representative of
the worst in puffed-up, lyrical romanticism. Anderson was a leading
author for Boni & Liveright, and Hemingway knew that they wouldn't
dare publish his slap at him, though his letter accompanying the
manuscript played it straight: "The only reason I can conceive that you
might not want to publish it would be for fear of offending Sherwood. I
do not think that anybody with any stuff can be hurt by satire...."
Horace Liveright's return letter was as hoped, expressing his belief
that the book was unpublishable and "a bitter, and I might say almost
vicious caricature of Sherwood Anderson." ( from Steve King)
The Bestseller Code is an “anatomy of the blockbuster novel” based on computer analysis of New York Times
bestselling fiction. It is satisfying to read comparative analysis of
Virginia Woolf and Jackie Collins on the simple and reasonable grounds
that they are authors whose novels are widely read, and the program
makes some interesting discoveries. Across genres, bestsellers use do but not very; didn’t instead of did not.
Intimacy sells, explicit sex does not. Bestsellers use question marks
and avoid exclamation marks. Appealing, proactive characters and a
regularly pulsing plot are marketable. In bestsellers, there are many
instances of the words thing and things.
In billion-year-old bedrock, 100 stories below ground, the Finns have found what the whole world is looking for: a place to bury their most dangerous nuclear waste.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/04/mr-putins-world.html
steeleydock.blogspot.com
Obama continues with his strange public approach to Russia. Putin is not
a 21st Century man. Russia is a "regional power." Obama is more c...
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The Trident program is Britain's submarine-based nuclear deterrent which has been in operation since 1994.
Construction of a replacement generation is now underway after a
parliamentary vote in July 2016 approved an upgrade that is expected to
cost the U.K. taxpayer £31 billion ($39 bn).
Candidates aspiring to take over as chairman of the Democratic National Committee met at George Washington University
to discuss what went wrong in 2016 and how to get the party back on
track. Some of the stuff was astonishing; Sally Brown's comments are
worth finding and watching.
Recently, The Sunday
Times revealed that a serious malfunction in the system took place off
the Florida coast just weeks before the vote, but was not made public.
In what the newspaper describes as the only test of a British missile
in four years, the unarmed missile veered off in the direction of the
U.S. mainland, the exact opposite of the Royal Navy's intent.Over the next decade the United States government is expected to spend close to $50 trillion.
Good news. People will be able to buy an American-made Kalashnikov. Kalashnikov USA, which split from its Russian parent company three years ago, will start selling a semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun called the KS-12 in February, CEO Brian Skinner told CNNMoney. Jobs and industry. Making America great again.
Barack Obama likes to brag about how he brought federal deficits
down, and that's true: In FY 2010 (the first year covered by an Obama
administration budget) the deficit was just under $1.3 trillion, while
in FY 2017 (the final year covered by an Obama administration budget)
the deficit will be just over $500 billion. The federal debt, on the other hand, has almost doubled over his eight years.
AAAAaaaannnnnnddddddd......a graph:
Joanna Andreasson
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