Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say Washington Post
‘More bee deaths’ in northern Europe BBC
Corporations Used to Brag About Genetic Modifications to Food Matt Stoller
Sorry, Kyoto Signatories, Emissions Traders, Carbon Taxers, Homo Oeconomicus Won’t Save the Climate – Part 2 New Economic Perspectives
Beyond the Mysteries of the “Middle-Income Trap” Triple Crisis
A sudden conversion of property bubble doubts Steve Keen
How big is China’s building bubble, again? MacroBusiness
Mario Draghi’s ‘whatever it takes’ may not be enough for the euro Gideon Rachman, Financial Times
EU deal on bank failures at risk Financial Times
Most people now not really middle class Daily Mash
Senate votes to ban Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. from entering the U.S. Washington Post
Ukraine
US warns Russia over Ukraine tension BBC
In East Ukraine, Protesters Seek Russian Troops New York Times
Does proxy war loom in Ukraine? MacroBusiness
Ukraine: The East Strikes Back Moon of Alabama
American sanctions on Russia are causing Russian buyers to desert the U.S. real estate market ValueWalk
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Supreme Court passes on NSA bulk phone surveillance case ars technica
NSA logs reveal flood of post-Snowden FOIA requests Al Jazeera
Obamacare Launch
Obamacare’s next obstacle: Confusion as people use it Politico
The Army v. The Press Time (Lysa)
Slate’s Civil War about Bigotry and Markets Bill Black, New Economic Perspectives
More HFT:
If the New York Stock Exchange is a “High-Frequency Brothel” then the SEC is its Pimp Pam Martens
Brokerages Make Millions Selling Orders To High Frequency Trading Firms Business Insider
Superfluous Financial Intermediation Rajiv Sethi. Some clear examples of why HFT provides junk liquidity.
Michael Lewis’s high-speed journalism Felix Salmon
Fed gives banks two more years to shed CLOs under Volcker Reuters
Ares Management Gains Control of Guitar Center Wall Street Journal (KG)
Paid-For Legislature Takes Teacher Tenure From Thousands In Kansas kspopuliat, Firedoglake
I Looked Up The Fastest-Growing Jobs In America, And Boy Was It Depressing Business Insider
Unemployment Shows Why We’re Getting Worse at Economic Recoveries Fiscal Times
The Unfootnoted Assault on the Minimum Wage Increase – Wisconsin Edition Econbrowser
Mortgage Loan Originations Lowest on Record Michael Shedlock (furzy mouse)
Hot Air Hisses Out Of Housing Bubble 2.0: Even Two Middle-Class Incomes Aren’t Enough Anymore To Buy A Median Home Wolf Richter
Aggregate production functions and other neoclassical fairy tales Lars P. Syll
A must-read three part series from WhoWhatWhy from last month (Deontos): Part 1: Atomic Devastation Hidden For Decades, Part 2: How They Hid the Worst Horrors of Hiroshima, and Part 3: Death and Suffering, in Living Color
Antidote du jour:
And a bonus (e-mail subscribers will need to visit the site to view this video):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
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Comments are closed.
re: Unemployment Shows Why We’re Getting Worse at Economic Recoveries
“The complexity of the U.S. economy (IS THE DEPTH OF AUSTERITY), Fed researchers said, creates a tricky public policy problem for lawmakers and others looking to spur hiring and expansion.”
John Robertson, vice president and senior economist at the Atlanta Fed. “No single policy is necessarily going to be effective in solving the jobs problem in the United States.” BS!
***
“It appears – because it has been the case for twenty years – that every problem is solvable…that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will be severe, the question is posed that has not really been posed for twenty years: who should feel it?”
Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed
The depth of the problem is the depth of disingenuousness of our dear leaders.
The only way to avoid the capricious fate of not depending on our dear leaders’ disingenuousness is to have a checks and balances system in place, where the 4th branch (the people) can restrain the abuses of the other three (lesser) branches.
That is to say, we have to empower ourselves.
We look for the solution within, not without.
absolutely
To really achieve that we need three things;
– Leaders who are willing to die, to be gunned down in public, assassinated, or disappeared.
– An unending procession of replacement leaders also prepared to die for the cause.
– Mass millions of followers (25 million + at a minimum) who are willing to follow those leaders and engage in massive non-violent civil disobedience.
Odds on this happening? My guess, one onr-hundreth of one percent.
Agreed.
The majority of us are too sanely devoted to a non-violent approach in life. Or perhaps we’re simply smoking dope.
And yet, passive resistance for those who run things in our world, is obviously foolish and unquestionably irresponsible. Violence gets leaders what they want – no cosy fireside chats with allegedly nasty people, nasty leaders, nasty countries, nasty regimes etc. they disagree with, rather, they remove them by force with self-sacrificing generosity.
It’s the right thing to do isn’t it? It works. Just look at where we all are today. We’re all competing fundamentalists. Our moronic mainstream media gnats feed on the heart of the matter too and swat the fact attacks away. So we’re all feel soft & fuzzy. And if not, go get a hug from Mary Jane in Colorado.
“No single policy is necessarily going to be effective in solving the jobs problem in the United States.”
Let’s restate this. No single policy, WHEN WE RESTRICT OUR POLICY CHOICES TO ORTHODOX NEOLIBERAL ECONOMICS, is necessarily going to be effective in solving the jobs problem in the United States.
The fact of the matter is that the federal government can end unemployment completely whenever it wants. The only reason it hasn’t is because it doesn’t work for its people anymore, It’s become a fascist plutocracy, and works only for the .01%. What benefits anyone else are merely the crumbs falling from the masters’ table.
If the federal government doesn’t work for its people anymore, one can
1 try to take it back (and risk losing it again, unless there is some reform to make sure it won’t be lost to the 0.01% again, and letting it spend as much as it wants is not the reform needed).
2. empower the Little Pople so the Little People can help themselves
One idea, for example, of the Little People empowerment is money creation via the Little People spending it into existing.
This requires a new monetary system.
This is also a moral monetary system.
The Little People might have to work hard, as spending money into existence is not an easy task, but we the Little People must make some sacrifices.
When banksters recruit trolls!
http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2014/04/when-banksters-recruit-trolls.html
Important link, thanks!
Everyone recruits the twenty-something, student-debt recent college/university graudates to troll on the internet. I saw it with my own eyes working a tech contract in one of the top-tier PR firms on K Street quite a few years ago–I was put in the midst of these young people when blogging first began to be a big deal–I also saw endless lobbying of reporters and Hill staffers, party girls and the whole nine-yards.
Whenever there is an article on climate-change in any major forum the trolls come out with a vengeance more than any other issue including Obamacare. Why is this? Because the open secret in Washington is that the energy companies have given these PR firms a virtual blank-check for their work. It should be no surprise that there is such opposition in lightening the load of student loans–it forces young people into a life of prostitution.
It is critical that we understand the mechanism for manufacturing consent and the fact major industries and the oligarchs that run them are involved in a conspiracy to deceive us and that this extends into the media and involves anything from favors to threats. The left often does not understand that the oligarchs do not play by any sort of rules other than the general rules of establishing power that Machiavelli gave us. Academia, btw, is not exempt.
Banger, the irony is that trolls should be obvious, but they are not. Our discourse is often so infantile and corrupted by sloganeering that the trolls are tougher to spot than one would imagine they should be. I see this at salon.com regularly. What once was a discussion in pursuit of some truth or understanding is now a shouting match of louts and angry ideologues. Very disheartening.
Wow James! This flash of light Is particularly important. This puts the onus on us to create a higher level of thought and discourse which I am convinced can be done by at least those of us commenting on this blog. Less shooting from the hip and rapid reaction and more contemplation? Yet as topics here and almost anywhere change rapidly the format encourages sloganeering rather than creative dialectic. How can we work this issue?
This is a particular fascination of mine; the subtle propaganda of cliches or “credos” that stop a conversation. John Michael Greer talks about this in his latest essay. I may have already linked to this a couple days ago but will repeat. He calls them “thought stoppers”
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
The Democrats have all kinds of them like “they are voting against their self interests” when referring to poor and middle class working Republicans. No mention that anybody voting Democratic is also voting against their economic self interest. Instead everybody just nods and mumbles, “Koch Brothers, Koch Brothers, Koch Brothers.”
Also Moon of Alabama has a piece on NPR using “mobs” for Eastern Ukraine uprisings as opposed to “protesters” in Kiev. http://www.moonofalabama.org/
I suppose you’d rather have Romney!
Oh, Lambert, you kidder.
Lambert Sir,
A vote for Romney in November 2012 is not as mad as it sounds, the fact being it would have taken him at least six months to get all his “placement” in places of authority and repay electoral debts with other seats at the high table – further, ObamaCare, which we all know is RomneyCare may have been cast aside in favour of the prevailing sick system that still exists and gobbles up a rather large percentage of your GDP – I’m also of the opinion that Romney would not have masterbatory inclinations towards the drone killing of men, women and children – call it a “delay” vote. Instead you have Obama, which is worse than Romney in my humble opinion.
Of course, in a rational, informed body politic, the obvious choice was Jill Stein, and yet many a fool voted for the duopoly legacy party – much like in the Uk in fact in 2010 – a great shame and one we are all paying for – still, at least Putin knows how to treat these types – with contempt!
The best thing about Mittens is that you can’t feel a thing as your freezing hands slip from the guardrail—. That is the problem with the Audacity of Hope— the sense of betrayal in spite of the fact that you should have known better.
Since I think the power of Presidents is way overrated I’m not sure the difference would be so great. The virtue of a Romney victory would be a revitalized left which almost became vital before the traitor Obama was foisted on us by the oligarchs in a cynical and calculated way. At any rate Rogers made good points.
I read that post at Moon of Alabama, followed the links to the respective – highly disparate – stories/blog posts at NPR on the two seemingly similar events, and was likewise horrified. I sent this comment to the NPR blog responsible for the “mob” rubric:
“So, in December NPR characterized a mass of people forcefully taking over and occupying government buildings in Kiev as “protesters”.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=249784855
But now, a mass of people forcefully taking over and occupying government buildings in Donetsk is a “mob”.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/04/07/300260435/mob-in-ukraine-seizes-provincial-building-declares-independence
The “mob” in Donetsk may just have been energized by having one of the first actions of the Kiev putsch be to vote to strike the Russian language as an officially-recognized state language. This despite this being the mother tongue of most of Eastern Ukraine, and unsurprisingly so as that region is largely comprised of provinces originally part of Russia. And then the putsch has resisted the idea that a strong federalism might serve to reassure these areas enough that they would feel safe continuing as part of Ukraine. So when the people of current Eastern Ukraine are confronted with an intransigent coup regime, dominated by violent ethnic extremists and neo-nazis, abominating their language and culture, and then further refusing to make any effort to accommodate their apprehensions, it comes as no surprise that they will “protest”, even vigorously so.
Your craven submission to the propaganda line of the Washington Consensus is clearly telegraphed in your choice of words to characterize the actions of the fearful citizens of current Eastern Ukraine versus those which you chose to apply to the partisans of the putsch in Kiev. You have thereby abandoned any pretense to journalistic objectivity.
NPR, because of this transparent “vaulting of the propaganda”, a phrase from the lips of George W. Bush, you are now officially and finally dead to me.”
NeoCon/NeoLib Public Radio is about the size of it.
I’d like to see the original of the John Michael Greer piece, looking through the first few pages of his blog didn’t get me there so can you provide a direct link?
I wish there were an NC discussion forum where threads could develop over days, weeks, and months, and where links to vital resources could be collected. The OWS Alternative Banking Group has collaboratively written a book (Occupy Finance) and I think is working on another. I bet the commentariat here could do amazing things using Stone Soup methods.
http://alternativebanking.nycga.net/2013/09/19/occupy-finance-the-book-2/
donate jar is in the top right corner…see cute lion cubs’)
“If you have one wish, wish for everything
to be exactly as it is.
Then wait patiently for your wish to come true.”
Stephen Russell, Barefoot Doctor’s Guide to the Tao: A Spiritual Handbook for the Urban Warrior
Aby. Your mind and your knowledge are simply incomparable. You are a gem.
We need to do something with you. I just don’t know what.
No, that is not how books get written. I know the people at the OWS Alt. Banking Group. They meet weekly and certain people volunteered to write particular chapters. This is not having people just show up and chat. People with expertise committed to doing specific tasks on a deadline.
And a forum would compete with the comments section, to its detriment.
Considering that this blog is not “pre”moderated, most of us do very well most of the time. Colonel (Ret.) Patrick Lang at his Sic Semper Tyrannis blog permits no comment to print without his pre-approval. But he only runs one post a day or sometimes several days at a time before putting up a new post. Considering how many posts per day our bloghosts offer us, the lowish number of trolls here is very heartening. Perhaps it is because they are discouraged by the “troll discipline” on display here.
Well we do have our moderation tripwires, which do catch some fine comments, which means Lambert and I have to liberate them. But we try to keep the comments section as open as we can while combatting trolls. There’s no perfect solution, but we think we’ve found a pretty good compromise.
Thanks! Very interesting info from both of you! There are indications that especially in times of hard economic war like now in Greece, government is flooding discussions in top websites with troll teams of few people in order to ruin the discussion against the destructive policies. Of course this is something new due to the relatively new internet technology, but the logic is more or less the same as in previous decades. Check also this, it might be interesting to read: http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2014/02/examples-of-friently-government-trolls.html
We all suspect that well-known banks and private companies may also use such methods today, but stories like this one leave no doubt.
I loved this comment on the NPR story over at Moon of Alabama by Robert Snefjella:
Re Mozilla and Bill Black: while I’m no fan of Slate or “Lord Saletan” (Atrios), I find it hard not to agree with Saletan’s point here. Indeed, it’s hard not to see how what happened with Mozilla isn’t McCarthyism of the left.
After all, the Hollywood blacklisters of the Fifties might well have told the banned writers that they were being excluded, not because past views affected their jobs, but because Communism was offensive to the majority of the moguls’ movie patrons.
What happened during that time was once a major cause for the left, and considered a violation of civil liberties. Famously the ACLU later defended the right of the KKK to conduct a parade in Chicago on the grounds that free speech in the U.S. applies even to racists.
So truly, if there’s going to be a new blacklist for Prop 8 supporters have at it. But call it what it is. Don’t pretend this punishment for privately held views is somehow a “liberal” idea.
Some fundamental logical and narrative flaws in your account.
First, the Mozilla board and Mozilla employees privately and then publicly requested that Eich not be elevated from CTO to CEO. Then members of the board resigned rather than approve Eich in that role after interviewing 24 other candidates. That’s prima facie evidence that there were problems other than one political donation in 2008, problems in corporate governance and problems in the culture and problems with Eich as a candidate. This was a business decision made for internal reasons with the public outrage the result of a management failure to keep these conflicts inside the circus tent.
Second, Eich resigned rather than attempt to ride it out, bs his way out with a PR campaign, capitalize on the controversy as Chick fil A (sp) did, or apologize and recant however sincere that may have been. He quit.
Third it is offensive that this is characterized as McCarthyist, lynching, and so on when it clearly was no such thing. The external threat was that activists would uninstall free software from their computers. This is tantamount to not eating the free samples at the Hickory Farms in the mall because you don’t like the company CEO. Compare this to the cases of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, Shirley Sherrod, and Mumia Jamal’s former lawyer recently denied a federal position for having served his client? These cases show substantial and significant differences in consequences; annoy the right, you get death threats, firings, record burnings and the full throated assault of the right wing ignorati. Eich was not dragged off to the reeducation camps; he was not tortured for hours by a crowd of townspeople before a public hanging; no tar and feathers, not even a beating like conservatives used to hand out. He resigned. Now he has cleared a path to the big bucks as a GOP martyr in service to the giant conservative welfare complex. Why settle for 600k at the for-profit arm of a non-profit Google vassal when you can make millions a year publicly lecturing on the evils of the super powerful Gaystapo?
There are some excellent discussions of this issue at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Circumstantial, at best. His donation has been the subject of previous rabble-rousing; if this were a business matter they would more likely have voted no or abstained out of concern for their own bacon. A flounce is a political statement.
You need to take account of network effects and public vs. private goods to understand this fully. In the gratis software world, users = power. In any software product space, users = influence over the direction of the market. Since Mozilla is a FOSS vendor, many of their developers work outside the organization. (I wish I had numbers for how many LoC are internal v. external.) In the libre software world, developers make product, and software developers tend to lean hard left on social issues.
What I think you are failing to understand is that Mozilla is not a commercial organization looking to compete for income. It is more a community looking to maintain a commons, one slightly unusual in that reaping from it does not deplete it, but indeed strengthens it. The company and its product itself are political. Therefore, Eich’s departure means a weaker FOSS presence in the browser community, which leads to the browser product space serving corporate ends rather than community ends.
So real, tangible benefits to the public were cast aside in favor of moral purity. Every generation has to have its delusional obsession with moral purity, I guess.
Please take a look at the Sy Hersh article in the London Review of Books. It will help in understanding why Hersh is now persona non grata in the U.S. media and provides a great understanding of how Washington and other actors approach international intrigue. It begs the question “why is Washington doing this sort of thing?”
I’ve been thinking since reading that one that the real fight is over the Caspian oil field(s).
Always interesting when Hersh publishes. Moon over Alabama commenters had a lively discussion on this that I found fascinating. Nothing is as it seems, it seems. http://www.moonofalabama.org/
Now, there’s a story that has disappeared into the black hole of “old news”. Right, the UN issued a report that stated Sarin was “…unequivocally used in the Ghouta district on 21 August, 2013…”, but shied away from naming the perps, as that investigation was beyond its mandate. And, of course, well before the UN report was issued, for months the US and UK had gone berserk, posturing about how “Assad gassed his own people…!” Sound familiar? After the UN report, however, little has been said, as the surrender and destruction of Syrian govt. chemical weaponry and stocks was well under way, and any chance that the US, or Nato would still play a military role in the Syrian “insurgency” was moot. Hersh’s article points out with acute clarity how the “military option” was immediately taken up by the WH after the gas attack was reported, with no credible evidence as to the origins of the attack. Here, Obama didn’t even make use of the Cheney-Bush “stovepiping” tactic of promoting bogus or incomplete intelligence in service of a predetermined endpoint; it was the infamous “red line” that would have catalyzed a military response under the rubric of “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine.
With all the books and documentaries already in existence detailing how the Iraq War was a massive farrago of government incompetence, fabrication, and self-deception, how is it still that somebody such as Obama can recklessly advocate and prepare for a potentially catastrophic military gesture based upon his own personal preference for a casus belli , contrary evidence be damned?
Fortunately, it does appear as though countervailing pressures negated the impetus of the “red line”, and sanity prevailed in this case, perhaps only too briefly in just one of several “hot spots” around the globe that yet may feel the wrath of the US military because a president felt that another “red line” was or was about to be crossed.
How do they expect to get away with that stuff? Gore Vidal would have simply answered that we live in the United States of Amnesia. History is an almost forbidden subject in the U.S. particularly in the mainstream media.
The Hersh article and other sources of information indicate deep internal splits within ruling circles on the issue of imperialism. Strangely, while after 2006 it appeared the neoconservative movement was in disarray, they resurrected after 2008 on the sly while everyone was congratulating themselves at having elected the “first black President” and McCain effectively throwing the election (like his friend Kerry did in 2004) and falling for the misdirection as Obama installed neocons into his foreign policy team. How was anyone going to believe in 2008 that the guy would put forward an insurance-company-friendly health care “reform” (it was nothing of the sort) bill, would out-Bush Bush on national security policy and officially begin the era of no-jail for rich people justice and pwogwessives still believe the dude is left of center.
Fortunately, the last refuge for sanity is in located in the military not the civilian leadership (the opposite was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis). The worst of the neocons aren’t even in the Administration but are in the media–particularly CNN, NPR, MSNBC who went to a level of hysteria and fanaticism over the gassing incidents in Syria I have not ever seen, even in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.
Well . . . people who read and believed Black Agenda Report and/or
The Confluence by blogger Riverdaughter would have understood Obama’s true self well before nomination 2008. Unfortunately, I had not
heard of either of those at that time. The Oblogs and Demblogs never made any mention of Black Agenda Report or The Confluence.
And many so-called Obama “critics” used such stale-smelling recycled-type Nixonian tropes ( Obama knew the Terrorist Bomber Ayers! Obama attended Radical Black Church Sermons!) as to poison the well of counter-Obama criticism. I suspect a lot of those “critics” were really false-flag Obama campaign operatives.
Excellent article! Sy Hersh is one of the very few true investigative journalists left with real writing chops– the fact that he’s no longer welcome at the New Yorker reveals the craven cowardice of our “creative elites.”
re: Ukraine
Video: In Ukraine Parliament Svoboda enforcers assault leader of Communists.
The Guardian calls this a “brawl”, but it is pretty obvious that one group (Svoboda) is attacking and the other defending.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/08/ukraine-russia-plan-divide-country-operation
Hiding the Truth About the Bomb
Excellent piece about how we hid the truth of the Bomb’s devastation. I do recall that the BBC’s excellent documentary, The World at War, shown on PBS in the mid-’70s, did show some of the graphic color footage of the wounded, the devastation, and had excellent interviews with survivors and Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay and dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
Just as the Korean War had all its dirty secrets regarding US bombing practices in North Korea – massive civilian deaths, devastation of NK infrastructure, etc., there were only a handful of academics who tried to write the truth about it all, including most prominently Bruce Cumings.
And in his “Hiroshima”, John Hersey wrote eloquently about the unimaginable horror of being at or near Ground Zero, complete with witness descriptions. The website Japan Focus also has an excellent collection of archived articles on the destruction and post-war consequences of “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” in Japan, and even today those who survived – “Hibakusha” – remain traumatised by those events.
http://japanfocus.org/site/
Since I believe I have seen much of this gruesome footage I think this “footage” is not hidden so much as forgotten. It is timely then that we revisit it. And do so regularly. And we should not revisit our atrocities in a vacuum – we should revisit them with full disclosure about the history and politics of the time. Like the revelation that Truman was convinced he needed to bomb Japan because they would never surrender and, more importantly, that we wanted to intimidate Russia with our military superiority. We didn’t fear japan – we feared Russia. And also analysis, with the caveat that nobody can falsify modern analysis of a sensitive event, i.e. Was Reagan really ready to go to nuclear war with Russia? Lots of people say he was just doing improv. That he wanted to get rid of nukes altogether. Etc. I was shocked that it didn’t appear at the NY Film Festival until 2004. That really astonished me. I can remember movie newsreels showing pretty awful footage in the 50s. My generation had a mild form of PTSD just from the news.
I agree that we need to see more. Sadly, like so much of what’s pushed on the public by our corporate media, the few programs about WWII are poorly produced and jingoistic; many films produced over the past 20 years appear to be little more than compilations of the War Department films shown in the movie theaters during the war, a mix of information and propaganda from Hollywood’s best directors. I can’t think of any documentary on WWII that comes close to The World at War.
I don’t recall the name of the film, but there was one I saw made entirely of footage filmed by Daniel McGovern.
Before my year in LZ English, I also went through duck and cover drills in Grade School.
I seem to be the only one who sees Ukraine escalating into a nuclear exchange. From Victoria Nuland on up, crazies are in charge. Cassandra has to have been touched by PTSD.
Another hidden truth is the scale of deaths from cancer caused by fallout. The model used by the European Committee on Radiation Risk “predicts 61,600,000 deaths from cancer, 1,600,000 infant deaths and 1,900,000 foetal deaths. In addition, the ECRR predict a 10% loss of life quality integrated over all diseases and conditions in those who were exposed over the period of global weapons fallout.”
No, that’s not a typo: if their model is sound, we’re talking about more than 60 million deaths.
http://www.euradcom.org/2003/execsumm.htm
Fewer deaths, but not less horrendous was the firebombing of Tokyo under Operation Meetinghouse.
Yes. Although I think the number of casualties in the Tokyo raids wasn’t many fewer than those killed directly in the Hiroshima bombing. Curtis LeMay, who commanded the bombing campaign over Japan and ordered those raids, once said that had the Japanese won, he would have been executed as a war criminal. People also forget the firebombing of Dresden.
We should never have dropped the bomb. We could have obtained the same outcome by just sacrificing the lives of a million or so young American boys. Remember, when we kill, disable, maim, and traumatize young soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan it’s wrong, but when we had a chance to do it by sending them against the Japanese mainland, it was our duty to humanity. And we shirked it.
Of course, two of my cousins whose father was slated to be in the invasion force, are probably glad we just settled for dropping the bomb, seeing as otherwise they probably wouldn’t be here.
Now, I know that people will say that the Japanese would have surrendered, that the entrance of Russia into the war was the real turning point. Only problem with this argument is that the only people predicting Japanese surrender are not and were not, you know, Japanese. And Russia only jumped in the war AFTER we dropped the first bomb. Old Uncle Joe saw a chance to grab some real estate quick, before the war was ended by another bomb (Nagasaki) or two or three. (Truman had already ordered production of more bombs, and because of his spies inside the Manhattan project, Stalin knew it.)
But go ahead, have at it, tell us how we are always the ones who perpetrate the ravages of war on civilians. I’m sure the survivors and heirs of survivors of the Rape of Nanking will agree with you. Or those who survived the death squad slaughter of civilians in Manila as the U.S. Marines advanced to take the city.
Say what? Russia, which was left hanging by the US (which kept delaying DDay presumably because they were hoping to have the USSR implode) for years gets blame for not also opening an eastern front against Japan? Go figure.
Is there any evidence that the Allied High Command timed D-Day for other than reasons of time needed to assemble the men/materiele/plans/logistical systems/etc to make it work?
Jess,
Sadly, I have to agree with you. After the casualties suffered at Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, I think that the US military, including the Navy which suffered significant losses from kamikaze attacks at Okinawa, was not eager to assault the numerous Japanese home islands. Nonetheless, I distinctly recall reading John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and being sickened by what I learned. But other than by undertaking an invasion of Japan itself with all of the deaths that would have resulted, both military and civilian, I see no other way that the Pacific war would have ended with that utter defeat of Japan which was required to fatally undermine their autocratic and militaristic state. The spell had to be broken once and for all.
Foppe,
Russia and Japan duked it out in 1939, and General Zhukov handed the Japanese their ass, stopping their aggressive moves toward Russian territories and the resources that they contained from the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. The Japanese and Russians signed a ceasefire, and this had huge consequences down the road when the Russians were, after garrisoning significant forces in the Far East for some time, able to bring those forces to bear against the Germans. By the time that this happened, the Japanese had their hands full with the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol
So in actuality, it was the US (along the British in Burma, and the Australians in New Guinea, etc.) who spared the Russians from the spectre of a two-front war by completely engaging the Japanese. A bit of a different perspective.
Total Russian losses, both military and civilian, from the beginning of the war 1939 through to 1945 are estimated to have been between 20 to 40 milion person. There are varying studies over the years, hence the wide range of numbers. ( by comparion the total population of the UK in 1939 was approx. 46,467,000.) :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union
I do not understand the comment of the previous poster Jess ; “And Russia only jumped in the war AFTER we dropped the first bomb.” The Russians were involved from the beginning, before the USA dropped a bomb.
The Russians do not give up easily, it might be noted.
Should have been clearer. As noted, the Russkies and the Japanese had signed a 1939 ceasefire and the Soviets only resumed action (broke the ceasefire agreement) against the Japanese forces garrisoned in Manchuria and the Korean peninsula after the first bombs was dropped.
A few points: The World at War was made for Thames Television, not the BBC. Ironically, looking back on it now it was strongly hostile to the Japanese, much less so to the Germans, who were always depicted as human, if deluded. One of the top historians who worked on The World at War was a real academic historian who had worked on the official history of the RAF in WWII. The litany at the end of the series of the deaths in every major country that participated in WWII is still chilling, although some of those numbers would now be rated higher than those reported back in 1974. It is also a testament to the British admission that it was a world war. And Olivier’s narration is haunting.
And compared to the crap they put on the so-called History Channel, or the deeply hagiographic Burns film “The War” (fought entirely by the USA which won everything single-handed) The World at War is still a monument to solid historical documentary filmmaking.
James sir,
The UK broadcasting scene in the 1970’s was a golden era, however, the BBC’s output on digital platforms has been no disaster, BBC4 and BBC 2 for that matter, still produce some great historical shows, as well as more modern scientific fayre its such a shame that the UK population on the whole seems to like bread and circus’s, to expanding its horizons.
Dialogue in the UK, which is diverse, has not been closed down, however, dialogue and debate within political organisations is effectively closed down.
I was actually going to join the Welsh Independence Party in my own homeland, this being Plaid Cymru, until its supposed left-of-centre leader decided to expel one of its old grandees for opening his mouth and saying he opposed the nationalistic tone of her language.
As a real and committed Socialist, I now have a limited choice where to park my vote, however, believing in the Marx’s historical determinism, it would seem that ones only hope, and that of mankind, is an actual Red/Green Alliance – with libertarians thrown into the mix.
Anyway, Thames Television’s World at War was a great documentary, but its only one of many that has emanated out of the UK over the years.
I agree with your comments on the History Channel and Ken Burns. As for the treatment of the Japanese in the The World at War, I didn’t get the same impression. Frankly, I thought that theater got rather short shrift, since the British weren’t so prominent.
When it comes to war documentaries, one that ranks very highly is the CBS series “World War One” which aired in ’64 (50th anniversary and all that). First-rate research, first-rate production (Robt. Ryan narrated, BTW).
Another excellent source on the barbarity of contemporary warfare is the historian, John Dower. HIs books, “Culture of War”, and “War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War” discuss in depth what impels nations to go “all-in” on destroying an enemy, and how they justify their actions to themselves and the rest of humanity. It’s a depressing commentary on man’s seemingly bottomless capacity of self-delusion and self-righteousness whilst committing acts surely indictable as war crimes.
Double reply to Mr. Rogers and Sufferin’:
I got my Ph.D. in naval history under Michael Simpson at Swansea, so I know and love Wales. Only place I’ve every been completely at home and happy. I also grew up on The Ascent of Man, Civilization, Life on Earth, and Connections, so I owe more to BBC productions than I could ever repay. Interesting that 45 years ago Kenneth Clark was absolutely clear about the debt paid to the Celts in retaining knowledge from Greece and Rome, long before it became a “big deal.” Something to be said for honesty and good research.
Sufferin’, I agree completely about World War I–underrated, unfairly forgotten, and also, like The World at War, alive to the tragedy of it all. Robert Ryan, like Olivier, conveyed not nostalgia, but loss, in his narration. Great call.
James,
I’m glad you had a positive experience at what was once known as the University of Wales, College Swansea – I’m afraid I’m a Leicester and Cardiff chap, but enjoyed my six years in the East Midlands greatly, so know how you feel.
Still yearn for a free Wales though, and as you point out, people need to acquaint themselves more with honest history, rather than sanitised propaganda – at least the UK Universities used to be good at that.
Won’t mention “blue water theory” as detailed by an American Naval Officer I believe – still, the “two-power standard” does remind me of US Naval practice/strategy today.
The First World War series and The World at War are both top drawer, and extremely eye-opening. We could stand to remember the dangers of “entangling alliances” that are clearly to be seen in the run-up to WWI. I’m lookin’ at you, NATO, with your Drang nach Osten.
The only broadcast source for these superb documentary histories here in the US seems to be the Military Channel (recently re-named as the “American Heroes Channel”), while History Channel 2 contents itself with some very weak, substantially inaccurate (by way of omissions), and jingoistic pablum. As a citizen of the Republic, it is my job to learn about these matters, especially since I myself was never in the armed services.
Yes, that was an excellent program. I still recall the opening score after nearly 40 years! (I first saw it in the ’70s.)
Just in time for Tax Day—are you being served? The Senate Finance Committee holds a hearing today on how best to protect taxpayers from incompetent and unethical return preparers. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson will appear. The Joint Committee on Taxation’s backgrounder on the issue is here.
http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/2014/04/08/ethics-and-fairness-growth-and-the-environment-retirement-and-tax-shelters/
“The one difference between death and taxes is that death does not get worse every time Congress meets.”
Jeffrey Fry
Don’t say it’s Tax Day.
It’s proper name is Inflation/Deflation Adjustment Day.
Many bureaucrats will thank you for it.
Sovereign Man: Notes from the field
April 8, 2014 Santiago, Chile
Pop quiz: how much do you weigh in kilograms?
If you live in just about every country on the planet, you know the answer immediately.
But if you live in the United States, you’re probably pulling out a calculator right now. That’s because the US is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t use the metric system.
And now that Myanmar is going metric, the only other country in the world besides the US to NOT use the metric system is the tiny African republic of Liberia.
Besides being metric-free, there’s another area that the US is almost alone in the world: taxation.
The Land of the Free is one of the only countries on the planet that taxes its non-resident citizens on their worldwide income.
For most nationalities, if you don’t live in the country of your citizenship, your home government doesn’t tax you.
So if you’re a French national living in, say, Abu Dhabi, you’re subject to income taxes in Abu Dhabi (which happen to be zero). Not France.
But in the Land of the Free, the US government wants its fair share of your labor no matter where in the world you live.
One of the only other countries on the planet where this is true is Eritrea. (In case you have to look that up, it’s by Ethiopia on the Red Sea.)
Eritrea’s government charges its non-resident citizens a discounted tax rate of just 2%. That’s it.
But here’s what’s amazing: in 2011, the United Nations caught wind of this 2% tax on Eritrean nationals living overseas and found it woefully immoral.
So immoral, in fact, that the UN Security Council passed resolution 2023 that year, condemning the Eritrean government for imposing a tax on non-resident citizens.
The resolution states that: “Eritrea shall cease using extortion, threats of violence, fraud and other illicit means to collect taxes outside of Eritrea from its nationals or other individuals of Eritrean descent.”
Incredible. The UN Security Council considered a 2% tax on Eritrean citizens living abroad to be ‘extortion’.
Even more incredible? The United States of America VOTED FOR the resolution.
Let that last part sink in.
The US government is establishing IRS field offices around the globe to demand taxation from its non-resident citizens… yet simultaneously condemns Eritrea’s government for taxing expats at just 2%.
The Eritrean tax authority’s tactics of “extortion, threats of violence,” etc. are worth denouncing in the UN. But it’s perfectly acceptable for the US government to throw people in jail simply for failing to file an offshore disclosure form.
It’s an unbelievable level of arrogance and hypocrisy… all to keep financing a bankrupt government’s wish list of more bombs, more drones, and more thugs just a little while longer.
Metric is already used here in scientific/engineering/medical/etc. pursuits where relevant. The “meter” is a totally artificial unit related to nothing at all and was invented by the French Revolution Regime to destroy traditional measure and culture within France.
If someone wants to metricate English measure, just take an equally arbitrary unit and make it the base. The foot. The decafoot . The centafoot.
The kilofoot. The quart, deciquart, miliquart, kiloquart, etc. Ounce, kiloounce, etc.
The Meter is not based on an arbitrarily defined distance:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/meter.html
Re: Serious Reading Takes a Hit…. That hit me all right! I love to listen to interviews with authors and often re-read their works or their recommendations. Recently, George Elliot’s “Middlemarch” was being discussed and I got out my university copy and started to re-read it. I could hardly get through a sentence without reading it again for content and subtext; however, I am not going to give up before finishing the book. So I was gobsmacked to read that others are having the same problem. Now I am beginning to realize just exactly what I am losing in the way of information retention because of the effects of technology which were not available when I was learning as a young person.
It is a scary idea that we are losing our deeper reading abilities when we rely too much on technology.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/serious-reading-takes-a-hit-from-online-scanning-and-skimming-researchers-say/2014/04/06/088028d2-b5d2-11e3-b899-20667de76985_story.html
Stay with it Middlemarch is among a handful of great English 19th century novels. I’ve read it several times in my life and each reading highlights something new often to my chagrin.
Endnotes should be outlawed. At least put them at the bottom of the page so that you don’t have to flip back and forth.
Yes!! Footnotes are far superior to endnotes!
It does have some long sentences, though. Especially when the passage involves Ladislaw.
I find myself doing too much of “must look up the repeal of the corn laws” sort of thing and because I can do so so easily, I do. And then I just skim the information.
I think I’d have trouble with William James under any circumstances. Most of his brother, too.
On the other hand, I think a lot of the humor in Middlemarch would have sailed over my head in my younger days.
I recommend an annotated edition, like Oxford’s.
Brief endnotes explain references to stuff like the corn law repeal so you don’t
lose the thread.
Supposing that you do well by reading *a lot* is the opposite trap. Your life can be changed by a single short sentence, if you really take it into yourself and think about it.
That such sentences don’t really appear on twitter is a different issue…
+ googolplex.
Humans cannot consume information fast, like downloading a text file on a computer. But we are trying to turn ourselves into machines. We will fail.
I would add that there is a vast, wonderful country beyond words and numbers.
yes. last year we had over a dozen monarch chrysalis in various places on our patio and in the garden. most extraordinary process – just breathtaking. i was lucky enough to have watched several butterflies emerge. i hope we are fortunate again this year to have as many visitors. videos just don’t capture the magic or coloring and texture – seeing the gold colored dots up close is really something.
JEHR,
A personal observation: with the rise of the internet and with the Web as my primary source of information, I have found a substantially reduced ability to sit quietly and read (concentrate) on any text of reasonable complexity. Can still “rip through” most modern novels, but reading more complex material is a real challenge.
Wasn’t an issue 20 years ago. Anyone else notice this?
Yes.
Ditto. I am finding videos are what work for me now. Listening vs. reading.
Only recently and I have no idea why.
Wisconsin teachers didn’t strike, therefore Kansas teachers won’t strike, therefore the next state’s won’t either. I wonder if the Kansas teachers’ union will also send out pamphlets saying “We can win with the rights we have” instead of putting up a fight?
They don’t want to be accused of being “union thugs”. Maybe if they just meekly accepted the situation the TeaTards will be nice to them for a change.
They like nothing better than to divide and conquer.
The only option to unite…tenure for all and one pension for all. Single payer for health care.
Parts of the K-12 education system in Kansas (the poorer parts likely) will become like little University of Phoenix’s or some odious private concoction. One disturbing part of the bill was the ability to hire teachers without any teacher training–part of the usual “anyone off the street” can do this. You know calculus? Come on in and teach it. You’ll get crap wages, but we only need to pay you for an hour a day.
I suspect the law may be invalidated with a court challenge. Then the KS legislature can claim, “we tried to raise the funding levels” [a lingering issue in KS] but the courts wouldn’t let us.
That bird in the antidote must be an alpha dog who just thinks it’s a crow.
Hoexter on how dire our situation is. Climate Change will have no mercy. So anyone planning to buy a retirement home along the coastline anywhere should probably just stay put. I don’t know how to assess Jim Hansen’s preference for nuclear energy, unless it is thorium. Read today that the military can make its own energy (fuel) from seawater. What’s that about?
Come on. Mother Nature is plenty merciful, and Mr. Sun is shining down free energy on any organism capable of utilizing it.
Lots of people will have to move, and we’ll have to learn to like eating jellyfish. But “life” will go on, if not society as we know it.
I hope so too because it looks like nobody is going to stand up with a good plan.
“The thing that a lot of people cannot comprehend is that Mother Nature doesn’t have a bullet with your name on it, she has millions of bullets inscribed with ‘to whom it may concern’.”
Brilliant!
Although if you keep provoking Mother Nature, she will pay special attention to you.
Building in the flood zone, for example, is a ham-wannabee.
What’s that about?
that’s about price is no object.
Of course our cesspool of an apex court stayed well away from NSA’s droit de seigneur. Now that Heartbleed is here, the third nail bomb found in critical security infrastructure in robust confirmation of Snowden’s warnings, we’ll be getting a lot of chaff like, you shoulda used ADA/ALGOL/PL1/C+++, or QA fad No. 7,197,409 etc., etc.
Bullshit. The way to fix this is to identify and liquidate the NSA saboteurs involved.
At the recent RSA Conference, NSA’s booth was handing out materials with a drawing representing the “puzzle of insecurity“. Observe that “Open source[1] software” was the center piece. I half wonder if that weren’t preparing the field for TAO to slowly liquidate FOSS 0days and discredit FOSS as a methodology and as a movement.
[1] “Open source” does have a specialized meaning in intelligence, yes, but given the target audience, that probably wasn’t what they meant.
I hate to say this, but this is yet another case of “You get what you pay for”: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/526386/the-under-funded-project-keeping-the-web-secure/
Former SEC lawyer slams SEC. Says “regulators” ignore crimes to seek high paying jobs at the firms they “regulate.” (Quelle surprise, to quote Yves) Also only pay attention to “broken windows at ” rarely going to penthouse, and then only in a overly polite way, negotiating all the way (“Please massa,”). Says the SEC is the turnpike on the bankster highway, collecting tiny tolls while the banksters “rape and pillage.” (My words.) http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-08/sec-goldman-lawyer-says-agency-too-timid-on-wall-street-misdeeds.html
This strikes me as more important than it is being given credit for.
1) While easy for pundits to dismiss as “nothing new” or “unsurprising”, the fact is that most people don’t give such dark, conspiratorial stories much weight until it has been confirmed by someone with direct knowledge (an insider or whistle-blower).
2) More importantly, it gives the lie to the ‘cognitive capture’ theory of regulatory lapses. Regulators are ‘captured’ by their own selfish desire for future personal gain NOT by an amorphous/agent-less analytical framework that exults ‘free markets’ and ‘financial innovation’.
S/B Pay attention to “broken windows only at street level”
Fyi,
All the Presidents’ Bankers: Nomi Prins on the Secret History of Washington-Wall Street Collusion (new book release)
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/8/all_the_presidents_bankers_nomi_prins?autostart=true
“We Can’t Just Give a Blank Check”: Lawmakers Call for Ending Secrecy of U.S. Intel’s Black Budget
(can anyone agency accountability to Congress?)
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/4/8/we_cant_just_give_a_blank?autostart=true
Also, FDL book salon will have Prins on April 26th. Plus, this seems like quite a coup: Thomas Piketty on the 11th of May.
How big is China’s building bubble?
We can only try our best to find out.
But we know a little more about China’s antique bubble today.
This time, it is not about Song Dynasty Ru ware.
Not Yuan Dynasty blue and white either.
Rather, some 0.01%er is happy to spend $36 million for what looks like a small and yet refined Chenghua ( of Ming Dynasty) over-glaze ‘Doucai’ tea cup.
Perhaps not too bubbly, as Chenghua Doucai has always been regarded as the best over-glaze work in Chinese history..
More bee deaths :<
And as the World GDP beast marches on, more and more elephants, rhinos, lions, gorillas, among other animals and plants, like these bees, continue to exit our party…involuntarily, I am pretty sure.
By continuing to give up their lives, they are contributing greatly to our Global GDP success story.
posted this recently.. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2263058/
a good documentary.
Kinda reads like the European bee are dying out. At best they are now dependent on human intervention and we will probably wipe them out with various pesticides and focus on monoculture agriculture.
It is implied honeybee survival may involve hybridization with the Africa Bees.
Yes, corporations used to boast about it. Now they don’t.
Just to clarify about “genetic modification” of bananas for the uninformed.
Those old ads talk about natural crossbreeding. There was no genetic modification as we suffer it today. That is, back then, a freak natural trait expressed through spontaneous mutations could be considered advantageous on one branch or part of a banana plant and it would be crossbred into commercial bananas.
Now we have cross species genetic mixing as for example the genes of an arctic fish inserted at the nuclear cell level into tomato plants, something that could never happen in nature. Or, the genes of a soil bacterium are inserted into the corn. The corn then expresses the proteins that cause bugs to die when they come in contact with the soil. You are feeding that to your kids who may have a violent allergic reaction to it.
Recommend the video, “The Future of Food” if you are confused about this.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-future-of-food/
Re Atomic Desolation, part 2,
For the longer version of the B&W footage than the three minutes shown in the link Google
“Hiroshima & Nagasaki After the Atomic Bombings: Documentary Film – People, Radiation ”
Every school child should be forced to watch this footage–all of it. They are going to be voting for and funding this lunacy with their taxes and may die because of it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093817/
Radio Bikini (TV Episode 1988)
Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened to be a variation on the theme of mans inhumanity to man, notable because they happened to involve a novel weapon at the time.
By the numbers, during WWII they were not the worst civilian casualty events.
I think “forcing” anyone to watch anything needs should more appropriately be in the context of a higher level morality issue than just objectifying people killed due to the type of weapon.
“Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.
An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there’s more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.”
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/20/age-of-ignorance/
Fully agree with Mr. Simic. I always thought that the ongoing destruction of education in the US was not only about rent extraction but also about easier to control populace. One good link deserves another: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/07/the-less-americans-know-about-ukraines-location-the-more-they-want-u-s-to-intervene/. “The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.” Idiocracy as is the new normal.
And a particularly brutal dissection of Obama’s recent speech:
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/08/obamas-lies-and-hypocrisy-indoctrinating-a-new-generation/#.U0SKYsm3M0N
Brutal takedown of US and NATO by Finian Cunningham: http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/04/09/washington-and-nato-new-surrealpolitik.html. Surrealpolitik, that truly stings.
That Washington Post blog must be one of the saddest indictments I’ve ever read against American’s. What the hell were the respondents thinking, or what the hell are you chaps taught in school, never mind University.
As a Brit, well Welshman, even at Secondary Modern School we were taught British and World History, together with British and Global Geography – indeed, one of our local villages is actually named after a Crimea battle that took place in the Anglo-French Russo conflict of the 1850’s, better known as the Crimean War, made famous by not only the Charge of the Light Brigade, the head of whom was a highly corrupt Parliamentarian, but by one Florence Nightingale – surely the Yanks have heard about her: the lady and the lamp?
It’s even worse than you think, 20% of Americans can’t find America on the map. Here is Miss Teen South Carolina explaining why that is: http://youtu.be/lj3iNxZ8Dww. I would say she certainly shed some light on why US Americans are rapidly becoming the laughingstock of the world.
OIFVet,
Yep, certainly is shameful and an indictment against your education system – glad my daughter’s only been schooled locally in Hong Kong and Wales – although the Wales attainment levels leave a great deal to not be satisfied about.
No problem with the term Brit, as Welshmen are most definitely Britons. DNA studies now confirm that most Englishmen are, too, as there were never more than 70 or 80 thousand Danes, Jutes, Angles, and Saxons and many fewer Normans who came to the British Isles. Most modern UK DNA is Celtic.
James,
Can’t argue with scientific fact, and there have been many programmes on UK TV documenting this, never mind actual printed research itself.
What is fascinating is the preponderance of Neanderthal DNA many carry in Western Europe – fascinating stuff.
Its rather strange though, that both parental lines for myself are actual Saxon derived names, and that many of us with these surnames live on the boarder of Wales and England, so whilst I may be a bit of a Welsh Nationalist, the nationalism I desire has zero to do with race, gender or religion – just wish to overturn a centuries old English slight – and certainly don’t like being on the receiving end of a colonising jack boot to put it bluntly.
life before cellphones..
http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
Is whistleblower advocate for nation’s spies under attack? http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/04/02/223269/is-whistleblower-advocate-for.html
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s inspector general is trying to suspend and possibly revoke the top secret access of the Defense Department’s former director of whistleblowing, triggering concerns in Congress that he’s being retaliated against for doing his job.
USDA estimates that 31% of the food supply is lost and uneaten
A new report from USDA’s Economic Research Service finds:
In the United States, 31 percent—or 133 billion pounds—of the 430 billion pounds of the available food supply at the retail and consumer levels in 2010 went uneaten. The estimated value of this food loss was $161.6 billion using retail prices. For the first time, ERS estimated the calories associated with food loss: 141 trillion in 2010, or 1,249 calories per capita per day.
crow pie chart: http://usfoodpolicy.blogspot.com/2014/02/usda-estimates-that-31-of-food-supply.html
Matt Taibbi on The Daily Show (video)
http://timiacono.com/index.php/2014/04/08/matt-taibbi-on-the-daily-show/
in response to the oft-asked question of why no bankers are in jail as a result of the financial crisis, Taibbi remarks, “There’s this really, kind of scary psychological moment that we’ve crossed in America where we no longer think of a certain kind of offender as appropriate for jail”.
““There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.”
Henry Miller
Regarding Stoller’s article on Chiquita’s banana ad . . . what Chiquita was doing then was probably hybridization and selection from among hybrids, or growing vast numbers from already existing ‘strange varieties’ and seeing if any could be developed in a desired direction, or other classical plant-breeding methods. I don’t think genetic modification engineering had been invented then. (Well, various plants were being exposed to various levels and kinds of radioctive nuclear radiation or particle bombardment to see what random mutants emerged. But that was not engineered gene transfer between uncrossably unrelated organisms).
If that is correct, then Chiquita had every right to be proud.
Correct.
A product of cross breeding not GMO!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Nain
These taste best tho:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latundan_banana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_banana
…but more skin/volume = more expensive to ship. Tasty little buggers.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1854513/?mode=desktop&ref_=m_ft_dsk
Blancanieves
Optimader – some more viewing for you.
The Spanish (and the rest of the Europeans) make really interesting and creative films – my favorite Spanish film is:
‘Intacto’: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0220580/
One which most NCers would enjoy for dark comedic relief about the impact of money on man is: ‘La Communidad’: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0255067/
Other than that, I’d highly recommend an Italian film recently released here in independent cinemas which beautifully captures the issue of euthanasia from every angle: ‘Honey’: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2357461/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
@hnkrdwn 10:18, good catch, NSA trying to undermine open source. Microsoft and Apple played ball – when NSA broke their stuff it stayed broke. But whenever NSA tried to wreck open source software, communities repaired the damage right away. So NSA wants to destroy open source like it destroyed Qwest, for resisting. There’s no open-source Nacchio, no one leader to be ruined or imprisoned, so NSA has to discredit the whole idea. But NSA sabotage is not working. Like skinny twerps with boxcutters on planes, NSA’s sabotage is unrepeatable. Communities know what to look for now. And now BIOS is going open source: Coreboot, OpenBIOS, even Intel is dipping a toe in the water, with open-source BIOS for Atom. How are they going to sabotage Novena?
The US is trying to use free-trade treaties against states that protect themselves. That will bite them in the ass. Countries that don’t want to be spied on can suspend their trade-treaty obligations as legal countermeasures against the US government’s internationally wrongful acts of arbitrary privacy-rights violations, theft of trade secrets, and interference with diplomatic correspondence. Trade treaties will get shredded. Joint ventures will get expropriated. NSA is piling up massive legal exposure to reparations and compensation.