Readers, at some point in the last few hours, we went over the 15,000 mark for posts. A lot of labor in that, as an old comrade-in-arms at the plant used to say. –lambert.
Hawks Act as Unwitting Muscle for Hummingbirds Smithsonian
G20 eyes faster economic reforms as cheap credit not enough for growth Reuters
$100bn BRICS monetary fund now operational The BRICS Post
Sovereign borrowers fall behind on payment FT
Blowing the Whistle on Tax Cheats WSJ. $116 million payout.
US shale oil industry hit by $30bn outflows FT
Labor Day
Our Forgotten Labor Revolution Jacobin
The changing face of modern U.S. labor CNN
Labor Day: 3 reasons unions should be celebrating this year Fortune
Bernie Sanders’ Labor Day index, with apologies to Harper’s Magazine Los Angeles Times
Scott Walker’s Labor Day Weekend: Union Bike and Anti-Union Message Bloomberg
China?
Why I Don’t Believe Chinese GDP Data Baldings World (hindenberg).
How Hard Will the Great Fall of China Hit ASEAN? The Diplomat
Li Ka-shing’s Moves on China Reveal Good Timing WSJ
China is “blotting out the sun” Reformed Broker
Goldman tested the limits of banking morality with huge fees from 1MDB South China Morning Post
1MDB, RM2.6 billion scandals reach Pekan but have little impact Malaysian Insider. Pekan being Prime Minister Najib’s parliamentary seat.
Thai Draft Constitution Is Rejected by Junta-Backed Council NYT
Japanese yakuza mobsters form new group, spark fears of gang war ABC Australia
Grexit?
Shadowed By Bailout He Agreed To, Greece’s Tsipras Pledges Easier Terms WSJ
Greece still needs to build trust: Eurogroup head CNBC
Greece crisis: Cancer patients suffer as health system fails BBC
The outlook of British Labour favourite Jeremy Corbyn Agence France Presse
Anatomy of a crisis: the facts on Europe’s refugees New Statesman. Of course, if we hadn’t set the Middle East on fire (again)…
Europe debates migrant quota buyout plan FT
IMF chief urges Ukraine’s creditors to back debt restructuring plan Reuters
Massive Protest Held in Moldova Over $1 Billion That Mysteriously Vanished VICE
Black Injustice Tipping Point
The Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’ Editorial, NYT
The States With The Most Gun Laws See The Fewest Gun-Related Deaths National Journal
Joliet family struggles to find medical care Joliet Herald-News
2016
Hillary Clinton courts Iowa over ice tea at house parties Daily Telegraph. “Small private gatherings.” Except to Clinton haters, Clinton can be both charming and formidable in small groups, and this may be an effective retail strategy for her. It will also keep her in controlled, low-stress, press-free, and friendly environments.
Hillary Clinton’s proxies ramp up attacks against Sanders Politico
Harvard Professor Larry Lessig Says He’s Running for President ABC. “After exceeding his $1 million crowd-funding goal.”
Paging Dr. Carson The New Yorker
The Politics of Distraction NYT. Opens with extended kayfabe metaphor. Ha.
How Botchamania created a cult following outside the ring—and the law Daily Dot. And kayfabe bloopers!
Charter schools group calls for special session after ruling Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A lot of squilliionaire muscle behind funding scabs, destroying public institutions, and selling fancy tests and software, I would think, so watch out.
Meet the Flexians Pacific Standard. Dated, but worth a read!
Class Warfare
How on-call and irregular scheduling harm the American workforce The Conversation
America’s Poorest Are Getting Virtually No Assistance The Atlantic
Mexico’s account of how 43 students disappeared is wrong, new report says WaPo
Stonehenge: Temple near site shows evidence of a prehistoric religious revolution Independent
Five years, building a culture, and handing it off. Laughing Meme
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Comments are closed.
Income Inequality Institute Will Pay Paul Krugman $25,000 Per Month
CUNY, which is publicly funded, pays adjunct professors approximately $3,000 per course. The annual salaries of tenured (but undistinguished) professors, meanwhile, top out at $116,364, according to the most recent salary schedule negotiated by the university system’s faculty union. And those professors are expected to teach and publish. Even David Petraeus, whom CUNY initially offered $150,000, conducted a weekly 3-hour seminar.
Along with the offer letter, CUNY released dozens of emails between Krugman and university officials. “Perhaps I’m being premature or forward,” the Graduate Center’s President, Chase Robinson, tells Krugman in one of them, “but I wanted you to have no doubt that we can provide not just a platform for public interventions and a stimulating academic community—especially, as you will know, because of our investments in the study of inequality—but also a relatively comfortable perch.”
Which is undeniably true: $225,000 is more than quadruple New York City’s median household income.
Krugman did not respond to requests for comment. When contacted, a CUNY spokesperson told Gawker, “We’ll get back to you by early next week.”
http://gawker.com/income-inequality-institute-will-pay-paul-krugman-25-0-1563245534
Skippy… btw mr krugman was just down under and did the rounds, one ABC [Oz public[?] tele he had a hard time keeping eye contact whilst peddling a few bromide’s and constant seating readjustments.
PS. the antidote… yes the claws are out and eyes upon you….
Two laws to keep in mind regarding economists:
1. For every economist holding a certain opinion, there will be one with the opposite opinion.
2. They’ll both be wrong.
(Groan)
Btw, congrats to NC for passing the 15000 posts milestone!
Great work and much appreciated. I’ve learnt a lot from this site.
+10 — a great milestone!
yes the claws are out and eyes upon you….
No worries mate, just to fluff the terry a bit!
By NYC standards, $250,000 a year is not very much in a city where median rent for a one-bedroom is $3400 a month. It’s a safe assumption he and his wife have at minimum a two bedroom apartment and they probably purchased that runs about $1.5 million for a nice but not extravagant apartment on the upper west side. Median maintenance which is paid on top of a $6200 mortgage is $1600. Parking spaces will run another 5 to $600 per month per car. Depending on where he parks, he may have had to purchase the parking spaces, another $150,000 per space, and still has to pay a monthly on top,of it.
So the monthly nut just for the roof over his head is probably running in the vicinity of $12,000/month or almost half the reported income before taxes. $25,000 sounds like a lot until you factor in the extremely high cost of living today in NYC. Unless he bought back in the 1990s, which I doubt, he’s paying top dollar for comfortable but by no means luxurious housing.
(Former New Yorker…)
No income compared to local median income and other measures like those above give more information. It’s not valid to claim one “doesn’t make much” when nearly everyone around one is making less just because one doesn’t make what they would like to make aspirationally.
Yes, maybe everyone whose money comes from labor should be paid more (expropriate the expropriators and take it from the capitalists and the rentiers!), but that’s a different argument.
True he could compare himself to a Wall Street type and maybe claim he was “poor”. But it is probably far more accurate to claim that Wall Street types are way overpaid!!! But if most people are making it (and maybe poorly) in New York city on 50k a year, that’s the relevant part and their struggles are far more relevant and important as well. They would probably say: the rent is too damn high!
Like it or not, Manhattan has a large percentage of high income earners which in turn drives the costs of living. It’s just a fact. To pretend otherwise is just a waste of energy and pixels.
To pretend that a 250,000k income that allows you to purchase (purchase with a mortgage not rent right?) a million dollar apartment in new york isn’t a lot of money seems silly even if you don’t think your living that well. If you wanted to you could always sell that condo and move to the middle of nowhere and be rich beyond the vast majorities wildest fantasies. If you really have assets worth a million to pretend you aren’t pretty well off seems silly. That kind of income usually buys assets.
I don’t understand your point. Is it that you want Krugman to pretend he lives in a city that has a lower cost of living? Should he find a rental apartment in the South Bronx?
Manhattan is an extremely expensive city. High salaries in Manhattan both reflect this reality and are a cause of it.
Krugmans salary offer is perfectly in line with this reality.
I get the feeling everyone wants him to accept $50,000 a year on some bizarre principal that one can only address income inequality if one is on the suffering side of the equation.
The point is sd… he is being bought off as his powers of public perception are waning at the graylady, can’t have any loose cannons now can we.
The remuneration quip in the email w/ reference to a perch is instructive imo, especially when considering the work load e.g. navel gazing.
Doesn’t a lot depend on which borough he lives in? Average Manhattan costs and incomes might be quite different from averages in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens. I’ve never lived in New York, so please correct my misconceptions.
I don’t read his column regularly, but I believe he’s more or less hinted he and his wife are living on the upper west side which is in Manhattan and close to Central Park.
It’s a desirable neighborhood known for its pre-war apartments (generally spacious and built before WW2).
“Organized labor is organized to take control of an asset away from its rightful owners without paying for it. Organized labor is organization of property by those who don’t own it. Organized labor, by driving up the costs of production through coercive means, destroys industries. Organized labor is piracy without the boats and eye patches. Why would anybody want to celebrate organized labor?”
Douglas oligarchy mouthpiece Wilson
“The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,’ said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. ‘Like the profits made by banks,’ he went on. ‘This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work.”
Leo Tolstoy
Leo rolling over…” It’s no longer just about earning giant fees.
Goldman earned about US$500 million in fees for raising US$6.5 billion in a series of bond sales for 1MDB. At 7.69 per cent, this represents a huge commission for a fixed-income underwriting. It pulled in nearly US$300 million in fees for US$3 billion for 1MDB in 2013. Compare this to the average fees of 1.32 per cent earned by underwriters so far this year on US high-yield junk bonds rated below sovereign issues and to Goldman’s overall record US$694 million of global bond underwriting fees in the first quarter, all according to data from Bloomberg.
Someone in Goldman’s risk or compliance unit should have demanded answers as to why a sovereign client would be willing to pay so much for funding.
Part of Goldman’s US$500 million fee came from buying the bonds at a discount to face value before selling to investors for a profit. The bonds yielded about 5.6 per cent, or 364 basis points more than Treasuries and 261 basis points more than the rate on Malaysia’s sovereign Islamic dollar debt due July 2021. re: Goldman tested the limits of banking morality with huge fees from 1MDB
Malaysian Proverb: No matter how big the whale is, a tiny harpoon can kill him.
Really. Kinda a variation on the old Groucho Marx country club joke….”If I accept your terms, you shouldn’t want me as a borrower.”
But securitization, of course. Buyer beware – read the label, first.
“…..banking ‘morality’….”
What does that even mean? Let alone suggesting that there is some “limit” below which goldman sachs will not go. I mean we’re talking about goldman sachs here.
A more likely scenario is that gs was chosen to underwrite this deal BECAUSE of its reputational relationship with “banking morality:” Money talks and that bullsh*t morality walks.
“Someone in Goldman’s risk or compliance unit should have demanded answers as to why a sovereign client would be willing to pay so much for funding.” Seriously???
“Banking morality” = crimes are not only okay, but pay!
“Robo-signing” = some silly paperwork screw-up, judges please disregard
“Surrogate signing” = we had a surrogate sign the document, clearly that is legal.
“Person Entitled to Enforce” = a thief.
Any more questions?
We just might be at the dawn of a New Era when “labor” as we have known it since the industrial revolution might become increasingly non-human; the technological infrastructure necessary for this to occur is rapidly falling into place. http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/is-a-cambrian-explosion-coming-for-robotics
Whether this change is socially or privately directed will determine if we will live in material Utopia or in a second Feudal Age.
I think it will render most of us useless eaters and a drain on the planet’s resources. Looking ahead to a vast culling bringing the human population to a more sustainable number, which of course will include the 1% and their retsinerd.
Re: “Five years, building a culture…” Nice try, but it turns out, Etsy is a tax cheat and a fraud:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-clemente/vintage-ethics-etsy-tax-dodge_b_8042904.html
Thanks! gladly signed petition
companies are selling their wares on itsy…claiming hand/homemade.
This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, which makes every lie bigger and widens its destructive path.”
Reed Albergotti, Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour de France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever
Ouch. Is nothing sacred? (I had some hope for the IT workplace, there, for a moment.)
My condolences. Nobody said atheism would be easy.
It’s shocking that you linked to a salon.com post with ‘nightmare’ in the title. I think they have a 33% ‘nightmare’ headline quota.
For your Labor Day edification: 5 short interviews with worker-owners from this year’s Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy:
http://www.geo.coop/story/3-worker-owners-share-their-stories
http://www.geo.coop/story/little-rock-catering-co-ops-have-big-plans-future
More Coop activity,in Philly area. More than you can shake a stick at!
http://www.gridphilly.com/
Here’s another short video, which answers the question (partially) about what BlackLivesMatter activists are doing proactively to help their communities. In Worcester, it’s building an aquaponics greenhouse cooperative, in keeping with the long history of black economic advancement through working together. Cool peeps doing cool stuff. Check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L55YkKEvdoA
Re Corbyn
I continue to marvel at the batsh*t response of Labour establishment pols, other political actors and the media to Corbyn. Even the Guardian has moved permanently to crazy town. Even Daily Kos. You would think he is the second comings of Stalin and Hitler all rolled up into one. Are Neiliberals really this weak that they can’t handle even one social democrat in a position of power?
A victory by Corbyn would be a definitive debunking of TINA. They would visibly have no clothes on, and Corbyn would be the little child who points that out to the crowd.
When I speak of weakness, I’m thinking of the fact that they can’t even let us think for one second about other ideas, much less enacting them, since one pol can’t enact anything alone. It’s like their grip on power, at least based on their overreaction, is not as great as it seems to us and is psycholocal in nature.
Have to agree. Smells a lot like desperation to me.
Their grip on power is more than just psychological in nature, they control the basic things we need for survival: food, shelter, increasingly water too. Moreover, through the increasing use of the Public Private “Partnerships” they increasingly directly control functions of government that we all rely on. I think that it comes to numbers as well as psychology: there is more of us and no amount of control can stop a desperate populace once it knows that there is an alternative. It’s about keeping us comfortably numb (consumerism and entertainment) and dumb (destruction of public education). So they can’t afford anyone like Corbyn saying things that create cognitive dissonance among the hoi polloi.
The more I think about it the more I think “it’s a house of cards” (see below) makes a lot of sense.
You neglect the dragon in the room: the overwhelming force of repressive violence in their hands with no “legal” or other limits on their ability to use it against anyone and for any reason. Cameron could, but of course won’t, inscribe on his Tridents the motto that Frederick the Great put on his cannons: Ultima Ratio Regionis.
You are correct.
Corruption aside, self identity is at stake. The “New Left’s” identity is wrapped up in both being the liberal option in a two party structure and a rebellion against an old guard. The New Left is being rebelled against by a younger audience with old guy, outsiders, curiosities, asthe alternative. A Sanders or Corbyn win spells doom for an existing element of the “New Left.”
If they lose the lower economic classes, isn’t the New Left old Republicans/Tories with a less hostile attitude towards upper middle class minorities and women? Even Rahm considers himself very liberal. Without Hillary’s celebrity to carry them over the finish line, questions about the “New Left’s” policies won’t be drowned out, and they might be confronted with the premise they aren’t leading citizens, versed on policy but rather attached to buzz words and much more similar to the followers of Trump or Palin than they would like to recognize.
If a Corbyn or Sanders wins, it means the New Left elite at ever level down to precinct captains are inherently out of touch and not cool.
A definitive debunking? I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
“Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth.”
-Lucy Parsons
I guess if you build a house of cards and tell everyone it’s structurally sound, you get very nervous letting even one person inside who refuses to hold his or her breath.
Great comment!
In this case, I think people are reading too much into this. Labour was led by people like Corbyn in the early 1980s, and had its worst electoral defeat since World War 2. So the received wisdom is put the left of Labour in charge = bad electoral defeat. I don’t think the hyperventilating is anything more than this.
I also don’t think this necessarily applies to very different circumstances, over three decades later. Labour’s second worst electoral defeat after World War 2 was in 2010, after thirteen years of Blairism. Corbyn’s own appeal seems to be pretty much a really delayed reaction to the damage done to the party by Blair (for some reason due to the Labour Party rules or culture they never even try to get rid of sitting leaders, unlike the Tories).
One problem is the Labour mps who lost in the 1980s had been there for 30 years. Instead of retiring when they stopped being relevant, they held on and lost on an individual basis (Yes, Minister was built around this). The Congressional elections in ’94 were a similar event. Blair took over for John Smith who was poised to win before his sudden death. Blair and Brown hated Smith as a leftist, but Labour’s polling didn’t rise with their ascension to leadership.
I don’t think so. The Blairites are scared that their own complicity will become even more apparent and they will lose whatever support does remain for them. And that, in turn, will derail the post-government gravy train they are on. Same thing with the Clintonites and Obamaites in the US. Losing an election was never a tragedy for the New “Left”, it allowed them to talk the populist talk while doing business as usual. Or even better, justify the need for “triangulation”. Was the 2010 defeat a tragedy for Obama? Hell no, it allowed the Obots to elevate Obama to the status of a martyr who sacrificed himself and his party for the rest of us through his oh-so-great ACA, allowed them to guilt-trip white liberals eager not to be associated with the right wing loonies and racists, all the while Obama continued to try to dismantle SS and any semblance of a progressive taxation. Defeat was good for business, in short.
Where did Kos go crazy on Corbyn? I did a search, and this “high impact” post looked pretty good.
It was in early Aug, I believe, with an elevated hit piece diary. May be this one :
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/13/1408694/-Britain-s-Labour-Party-might-make-lefty-rebel-Jeremy-Corbyn-its-new-leader-and-tear-itself-apart
Re: Joliet Family Struggles to Find Health Care
Wow. I wish they would have gone into that aspect of the story a little more. Insurance companies just making up doctors?!? That’s got to be a new height of insurance fraud. Maybe I’ll start offering my own ACA plan: doctors in our network include Dr. Fixemup and Dr. Feelgood–both of whom are accepting new patients…I swear!
I happen to know a teen in California who is “covered” by Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid program). That is exactly how it works. This young person’s parent called all five physicians on a list provided by Medi-Cal. Only one accepted Medi-Cal and his office was many miles away. Adding the term “fraud” to the term “insurance” is simply redundant.
Insurance companies are somewhat notorious for not keeping their lists of doctors who accept their insurance updated. It actually never occurred to me that the lists are padded with doctors who are just made up. But its probably the more boring explanation that the lists are not updated properly. They probably don’t want to employ the additional staff to manage the database.
Yeah. Because they’re not being paid to do that, right? But somehow, their executives make multi-million dollar annual compensation packages.
Like I said, insurance=fraud.
RE: Hillary Clinton’s proxies ramp up attacks against Sanders Politico
Dannel Malloy, Andrew Cuomo and Joaquin Castro–a panoply of “heavy hitters.” Not.
Bernie doesn’t need to break stride long enough to swat these flies or say, “Ouch.”
McCaskill, on the other hand, with her “socialist” mantra and newly released “memoir,” is playing the long game. That game being trolling for the veep spot. In my humble opinion.
RE:Meet the Flexians Pacific Standard. Dated, but worth a read!
This map shows the business associations of retired generals and admirals. The red dots are people who retired in the ’90s; the larger blue and green dots are more recent retirees—and their many affiliations. Data is partially from a Boston Globe investigation.
Reminds me of a resolving Mandelbrot set
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
Images of the Mandelbrot set display an elaborate boundary that reveals progressively ever-finer recursive detail at increasing magnifications. The “style” of this repeating detail depends on the region of the set being examined. The set’s boundary also incorporates smaller versions of the main shape, so the fractal property of self-similarity applies to the entire set, and not just to its parts.
The Mandelbrot set has become popular outside mathematics both for its aesthetic appeal and as an example of a complex structure arising from the application of simple rules, and is one of the best-known examples of mathematical visualization.
I would bet it’s a scale free network.
I like the term Flexian. I refer to them as Waveskimmers, they skip from the crests of government-private sector-education positions and back, often in time frames that substantially insulate them from consequences. And if they stick around to long they are given awards tidy severance packages on the way out to the next gig. . See files: Larry Summers, D. Von Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Hadley, Michael Hayden etc etc and Chertoff of course, a classic case — guy with dual citizenship at the head of the security apparatchik
This August interview might be interesting and welcome food for thought for NC audiences; the topic is sustainable economics and although it is a bit long, TPP is named specifically early on as the opposite of healthy trade.
“Helena Norberg-Hodge Full Interview – A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity”
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=SkGd1UjMn7c&u=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dxl9DpwvRxOc%26feature%3Dshare
As regular reader, and coming from the FireDogLake audience, here is the best overview yet as to why Trump is surging among the TParty types:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3223828/PETER-HITCHENS-won-t-save-refugees-destroying-country.html
Screentime Is Making Kids Moody, Crazy and Lazy
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mental-wealth/201508/screentime-is-making-kids-moody-crazy-and-lazy
Interesting take on moderation. As a public school teacher, I’ve come to believe that you can have classroom engagement centered around intellectual growth and learning, or you can have smartphones. You cannot have both. My school has a soft enforcement policy concerning student use of smartphones. They really don’t have much choice – parents now demand that their children get to play with their toys all day. I don’t get that. Such is the power of marketing/groupthink.
From a political/economic perspective, I see smartphone usage in public schools as private power/interests colonizing a public space.
Excuse what may be a very foolish request for clarification from someone who started grade school when Harry Truman was President, but the kids are allowed to have their smart phones IN CLASS ?
I started high school in the early 90’s, and the then-ubiquitous beepers were not allowed in the classroom. And it’s not like the parents of my schoolmates weren’t rather well to do and entitled, either.
I can remember having to turn in our slide rules before maths tests in high school. I’m waiting for the first ‘Lobots’ to appear on the city streets.
See: http://www.starwars.com/databank/lobot
Oldeguy,
Technically at my school (large urban Title I HS) students are prohibited from cell phone usage in class unless granted permission from the teacher. But from a teacher’s perspective it’s like trying to hold back the tides. I didn’t go to school to be a cell phone policeman,
These damn things are so ubiquitous nobody even notices anymore. Next time you’re out and about, take a step back and notice how many people have their noses buried in a screen.
Youngest son 11 just had some physio after a sports related complaint. During the session the physio w/ a masters, said he was being inundated just after school holidays by kids with neck and back complaints. All due to excessive electronic device [phone / pad] use e.g. in bed, on floor, even sitting as your face gets sucked in to the screen and contorted body posture for abnormal time lengths.
Lmmao so by the time this cohort starts reaching the late 40s in to the early 60s, sadly probably sooner in too many cases, were going to have to come up with a syndrome for it. BTW some of the new findings in musculoskeletal research and clinical is just incredible e.g. don’t let anyone play with your C-section [chiropractors or massage] ever!
Skippy… On a lighter note son is going to states for shot put and discus, where on a dimmer note thats about 1.5 grand for comp fees and travel expenses. Which begs the question what do you do if you don’t have that kinda dosh, some poor kid can’t compete?…. grrrrrr…
Sort of sick funny but, sedentary pursuits are conducive to hemorrhoids too. Get them moving! 1.5 grand? Where does he have to go, Macau? I remember going to Tallahassee for Speech and Debate State, a distance of about 400 miles, in the early seventies. Drive up and back (carpooling), several days lodging, and food, for about $200 USD. Had to save it up myself too. Dad pulls me to the side; “Here. $50 just in case. If you don’t need it, give it back afterwards.” I did.
In the bad old days of communism, trips like that cost nothing. We had an average of two long class trips per year, of 3-4 days each, either visiting historic places or just resting in the mountains’ fresh air. Shorter trips for those of us who were on the academic Olympiad teams, or sports teams. All that was needed was a bit of pocket money for ice cream and soda, food, lodging, and transportation were paid for by the state. Summer vacations one could go to the Black Sea for two weeks courtesy of the school or the parents’ workplace, they all had some permanent accommodations steps from the beach. Not free if you went via school, but extremely subsidized. Terrible way to raise children…
And that’s with the Nomenklatura to support in the ‘style to which they were accustomed!’
I made no friends doing it, but whenever one of the younger lads wherever I was working at the time would wax effusive about how ‘rich’ the boss was, I’d ask them when was the last time the boss had invited them over to spend a day at the boss’s backyard pool. I generally received either a blank stare or a hearty, “You Commie m—–f—-r!” I’m sorry to say it, but Americans have no class consciousness, yet. (I discount the Great Middle Class because they are going extinct.)
Up to Townsville from Brisbane [15hr -1.364km drive], about $500 for uniforms and admin fees, $500 for accommodation [granted not staying at budget motel, might as well a mini 3 day vacation next to beach] and folding stuff for incidentals. Good thing is car gets about 4.5 – 5.0 ltr to a 100km in 66ltr tank or 1200km at $80ish per fill up, otherwise is another $500 for a return flight.
So if he makes the state team [he is competitive] its off to nationals in Canberra [at least its only 12 h 58 min 1,206 km] in a month or so afterwards.
Skippy…. Onward to victory! [or is it destitution]… go you good thing!
I should have said, “Best of luck!” Also, “Focus!”
Attention, refugees:
Good to see the French coming round to the American view, that indiscriminate bombing is a kind of miracle drug that will set everything right.
As Kurgman doubtlessly advised Hollande, refugees will rush home for new career opportunities, rebuilding their ruined cities.
Meanwhile, the war situation on the Syrian front has developed not necessarily to our advantage:
$9.26 million per moderate rebel, comrades: it’s a bargain compared to an F-35, plus it’s boots onna ground.
Wow, “moderate rebels.” That’s a hardy perennial, isn’t it?
Like I said yesterday, the Euro lemmings are reaping what they sowed. Looks like they want to reap an even bigger harvest though. Must be the geopolitical version of groaf.
Groaf and income (for French arms suppliers):
War socialism — what a concept!
The States With The Most Gun Laws See The Fewest Gun-Related Deaths
That is a very suggestive headline! Suggestive in that it appears to be saying something significant, but really isn’t.
I’m can only say the following because I was in the Marines and had some anti-terrorism training there. I have no interest in researching methods or doing terrorism otherwise.
That said, it’s relatively easy to devise methods of mass violence that don’t involve firearms. Actually going out and shooting people is a pretty inefficient method for accomplishing violence on a large scale, and we should hope that people crazy enough to commit such atrocities would continue to be so banal in their methods. Trying to ban firearms would just encourage them to be more creative, which would not be good.
Anyway, a good question to ask is why people are frustrated enough to go out and randomly shoot people anyway. As Nicole Foss pointed out in an interview I watched of her yesterday, it’s not poor people who are going out and committing mass shooting–the poor have already accepted and internalized the fact that they lack enough agency to actually affect society or change their situation at all. By and large it’s [white male], (former?) members of the middle doing this kind of thing. This is because these people have come to feel that they are entitled to the privilege and wealth that they’ve enjoyed all their lives, and now that the economy is in a slow-motion collapse they are affronted at having to join the ranks of the impoverished and powerless.
As the economy continues to collapse we’re simply going to have a lot more horrific violence across the board. The only reason its expression is typified by guns in America is because guns are already so widespread and part of the culture here. If not guns, this angst would simply find another outlet. Crusading against guns is mistaking symptom for cause.
Speaking of my own “white male privileges”: I have an income, a place to sleep, transportation, am able to go the doctor if I’m sick, and have not (so far) been subject to arbitrary police harassment. Do you really want to call those privileges? Or are they things that everybody should have?
Yes, those are privileges that most people do not have right now. And in fact, less and less people going forward will have them also. You have the sorts of unhealthy expectations and feelings of entitlement that could cause you problems in the future.
They are rights that most people are being denied. Damned straight I feel entitled to them, and a lot more — and so should everybody else.
They’re rights, in that humans who impair others’ access to them need their minds changed with a tire iron. All that doesn’t mean that nature is obligated to provide them to you under any or no terms.
You said it better than I could have!
well, let me tell you that every time i see road rage or other examples of run of the mill people gettin’ frustrated stuff, i’m super glad that basically nobody where i live carries, let alone owns, a gun.
“OK, MOTHERFLUNKER, OUTTA THAT CAR SO I CAN THROW MY EXTRA HOT COFFEE ON YOU!!!!!!”
I mostly think owning guns is meh owning something and maybe people are in dangerous areas where they think they need them or even actually just use them to hunt. Probably is true they hunt if it’s rural and they are hunting guns. Clearly those given to fits of rage shouldn’t own guns, and anyone should implement all safety precautions.
But lately I’ve noticed the gun owning going along not with hunting, and not with say being a single female living alone in a dangerous neighborhood or camping alone or who was a rape victim, and not even with the fantasy of it being a last case resort the chance of ever using of which approach zero “when an armed burglar busts into the house and attacks”, and not even people paranoid about the government “becoming” totalitarian and rounding everyone up for FEMA camps but …. with people who actually because they own guns must see the world as chronically dangerous and hostile. And this new wrinkle is more than alarming. So that things that are actually nothing of nothing, innocent normal functions of life in an urban area where we must coexist with other humans even the down and out and even if we don’t care about them, I just mean coexisting nothing more, become in these gun owners minds: the threat that justifies why I’m packing. They start to almost become unfit for urban life in my view.
well, looks like you (america) are kinda stuck with the bullet-laden mess you’ve created.
maybe when china finishes buying america they’ll do something about it.
The whole world is stuck with the mess we Americans created. And we’re just warming up…
“…and we’re just warming up.”
What??? Puns, at Dawn! (My Seconds will call on your Seconds, Sir.)
This is a normal and realistic view people should have. And the sooner they switch to it, the better off they’ll be.
As energy and resource supplies become more constricted, financial panics increase, ecologies continue to collapse and centralized governing regimes loose ever more power and legitimacy by the day, learning to take care of your own needs, including the need for self-defense, will be an beneficial trait that dramatically increases the likelihood of propagating and being able to protect progeny.
no it’s not realistic, it’s cloud cuckoo land, that’s why I said increasingly unfit to live in society more or less (or to deal with ordinary harmless urban occurrences, note I did not say real threats, because these things being perceived as threats by increasingly paranoid nuts in their own heads, are NOT real threats. Note I did not say no real threats ever exist but that the gun fetish some have, and note I did not say everyone who owns a gun, is making them unable to distinguish, for the ability to make a distinguishing judgement to even operate). That’s what seems to be going on to me.
And for all that it was just an observation of a social phenomena that does exist at least to some small degree, that maybe others have also seen and can relate to and understand, not some x% of gun owners think y statement.
Sorry but you aren’t prepared for what the future is going to look like. You have an opportunity to start changing and adapting now; or you can succumb to the kind of inflexible and entitled thinking that is going to doom most people in America.
None of us is really prepared for it. The more one feels he or she is prepared, the greater the ultimate shock will be.
Walter Palmer speaks, and sounds every bit the douchebag we imagined he is: http://news.yahoo.com/us-dentist-killed-cecil-lion-breaks-silence-115725145.html.
Regarding: “IMF chief urges Ukraine’s creditors to back debt restructuring plan”
Where’s the write down for Greek loans?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_legislative_election,_September_2015#Seat_projections
I noticed that new ex-Syriza splitoff, anti-EU, Popular Unity/LAE is projected to obtain 11 seats, where 151 is needed for a majority. Why is Popular Unity polling so poorly? Shouldn’t Popular Unity be winning a significant portion of the “No” voters in the July (iirc) Referendum?
Is the current corrupt austerity EU/Troika/Bank$ta dictatorship status quo likely to change, whether a Syriza or an New Democracy led coalition win the election?
Thanks in advance for any info or opinions. Casually following the Greece crisis this year, makes me realize I am fairly ignorant USian about how parliamentary democracies work, how a coalition majority is formed, etc
Polls indicate about 70% of Greeks favor staying in the Euro. Votes against are split with Golden Dawn, the fascists, and probably several other parties.
In this case, a governing coalition is formed with great difficulty.
Western news reports are so objective, fair, and balanced! Take Reuters’s and Deutsche Welle’s news items on the meeting of the Slovak, Czech, and Austrian prime ministers in Bratislava, where the topic discussed was the EU’s attempt to force refugee quotas on its members. Both items quote Slovak PM Fico’s statement that the quotes are irrational. So far so good. Except, the full quote is: “Quotas are irrational. They are presented as a magic political map, which should solve the problem of refugees. But it will not solve this issue, because no one wants to tell the truth about Syria! What are we talking about here, when certain countries in the EU do not want to acknowledge supporting the civil war in Syria?” (http://www.bgnes.com/sviat/evropa/4368213/, in Bulgarian, the above translation is mine). And that’s how dissent and truth-saying are censored, by taking one word and quoting it out of context lest the responsibility of the US and it’s Euro lemmings is broadcast to wider audience and that audience begins to question why it is that others should pick up the costs of others’ hubris.
Re. the Smithsonian piece, a more-accurate title would have been “Hawks Act as Unwitting Muscle for Equally-Unwitting Hummingbirds”.
“…hummingbirds that are clever enough to cluster their nests under the protective umbrella of a neighborhood hawk enjoy greater survival of fledging chicks compared to those that don’t.”
Actually, no particular cleverness is required … natural selection will ensure that over time such a protective-effect-exploiting behavior will evolve. The hummingbirds probably have no idea why they prefer such nesting sites, just that an overwhelming innate urge pushes them to do so. Any mutants who ‘forget the long-term-evolved lesson’ suffer reduced fecundity as a consequence, and pass their mutant ‘who cares about the hawk when it comes nest-siting time’ genes on to fewer offspring than birds whose genes ‘remember the nest-siting lessons of their parents’. [Some likely-crude simplifications of the actual process in there, but I believe the gist is accurate.]
Remember, the core thesis of classical Darwin/Wallace theory is so simple that when you appreciate the amplifying effects of even a small-but-systematic fecundity bias over many generations, the theory becomes well-nigh a truism:
Heritable traits enhancing reproductive success spread throughout populations over time.
The NYT finally managed to pin the tail on the donkey:
Now if only the NYT had found the guts to be this frank ALL the time, regarding gutter level that politics has reached in this country. Not just police brutality, but also regarding electoral financing, TAARP, endless wars abroad – so much. We’d all be better off if newspapers called this thing for what it is: a cesspool.