sgtreport |Please understand this, China fully understands consumers in the West are tapped out.
They can see through the bogus numbers Washington produces and the
wonks on Wall St. continually tout. They understand the Western system
is built entirely on debt as in I OWE YOU! And they understand the
system was set up originally as an “IOU nothing” system! They
understand “it’s over”.
I do believe China wants to assume “a” if not THE reserve
currency status in the future. They know they possess more gold than
the U.S.. Would it not make sense to devalue your currency and
even make it undervalued for the start of a new system for competitive
reasons? Yes I know, they do not have enough gold to back the yuan
currently …at current price. Will they pull a page out of FDR’s
playbook and revalue gold higher since they are the largest hoarder in
the world? Could they confiscate from their loyal citizens to leapfrog
their holdings even further? Remember, the tried and true way(s) out of
deflation are to print, devalue (versus neighbors AND gold) and of
course go to war. Whether you want to believe it or not, we are now at
war both financially and technologically. Unfortunately, financial and
trade wars often times turn into hot wars. China just fired a shot
heard ’round the world for those listening and it was not a celebratory
shot by any means!
To finish, could it be China knows this will end in a
complete collapse of the financial markets AND real economies of the
world, in particular of the West? They already have the
largest productive capacity in the world. Are they going to devalue
their currency so it is “competitive” when the reset occurs? Have they
stripped the West of their gold reserves leaving China with the greatest
“monetary” hoard on the planet? Could there be a better position to be
in than having the most “money” and greatest productive capacity …with a
middle/lower class of your society numbering in the hundreds of
millions needing “stuff” to truly enter the 21st century?
Kahneman |
Yet the illusion of valid prediction remains intact, a fact that is
exploited by people whose business is prediction—not only financial
experts but pundits in business and politics, too. Television and radio
stations and newspapers have their panels of experts whose job it is to
comment on the recent past and foretell the future. Viewers and readers
have the impression that they are receiving information that is somehow
privileged, or at least extremely insightful. And there is no doubt
that the pundits and their promoters genuinely believe they are
offering such information. Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the
University of Pennsylvania, explained these so-called expert
predictions in a landmark twenty-year study, which he published in his
2005 book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
Tetlock has set the terms for any future discussion of this topic.
Tetlock interviewed 284 people who made their living “commenting or
offering advice on political and economic trends.” He asked them to
assess the probabilities that certain events would occur in the not too
distant future, both in areas of the world in which they specialized
and in regions about which they had less knowledge. Would Gorbachev be
ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian
Gulf? Which country would become the next big emerging market? In all,
Tetlock gathered more than 80,000 predictions. He also asked the
experts how they reached their conclusions, how they reacted when
proved wrong, and how they evaluated evidence that did not support
their positions. Respondents were asked to rate the probabilities of
three alternative outcomes in every case: the persistence of the status
quo, more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or
less of that thing.
The results were devastating. The experts performed worse than they
would have if they had simply assigned equal probabilities to each of
the three potential outcomes. In other words, people who spend their
time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer
predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their
choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best,
experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists.
Those who know more forecast very slightly better than those who know
less. But those with the most knowledge are often less reliable. The
reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an
enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically
overconfident. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive
returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” Tetlock writes. “In
this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for
supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political
scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any
better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in
‘reading emerging situations.” The more famous the
forecaster, Tetlock discovered, the more flamboyant the forecasts.
“Experts in demand,” he writes, “were more overconfident than their
colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”
Tetlock also found that experts resisted admitting that they had been
wrong, and when they were compelled to admit error, they had a large
collection of excuses: they had been wrong only in their timing, an
unforeseeable event had intervened, or they had been wrong but for the
right reasons. Experts are just human in the end. They are dazzled by
their own brilliance and hate to be wrong. Experts are led astray not
by what they believe, but by how they think, says Tetlock. He uses the
terminology from Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and
the Fox.” Hedgehogs “know one big thing” and have a theory about the
world; they account for particular events within a coherent framework,
bristle with impatience toward those who don’t see things their way,
and are confident in their forecasts. They are also especially
reluctant to admit error. For hedgehogs, a failed prediction is almost
always “off only on timing” or “very nearly right.” They are
opinionated and clear, which is exactly what television producers love
to see on programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each
attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, make for a good show.
Foxes, by contrast, are complex thinkers. They don’t believe that one
big thing drives the march of history (for example, they are unlikely
to accept the view that Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the cold
war by standing tall against the Soviet Union). Instead the foxes
recognize that reality emerges from the interactions of many different
agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and
unpredictable outcomes. It was the foxes who scored best in Tetlock’s
study, although their performance was still very poor. They are less
likely than hedgehogs to be invited to participate in television
debates.
nationalreview |Hillary
Clinton is in trouble. Or more accurately put, she should be in trouble
— very big trouble, in fact. The latest from the Department of Justice
is that, yes, they have seized Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server
and an accompanying thumb drive.
The FBI has reportedly confiscated
copies of the same e-mails from Hillary’s lawyer because it deemed the
information contained in them too sensitive for him to keep. While
attempting to defend the indefensible, a Clinton spokesman said that
this merely shows that the former secretary of state is cooperating
with a “security inquiry.”
That pathetic spin was meant to prevent the
American people from recognizing there is not just smoke but fire to
the Hillary e-mail scandal. Too late. Already, the flames are visible.
The most damning revelation about Hillary’s e-mails from the last 24
hours is not the details of the investigation into her homebrew server.
What’s making headlines across the political spectrum is that some of
the material she sent via her personal server was so sensitive that it
was designated “Top Secret.”
This is a jaw-slaps-the-table moment. Even
for those of us who hold a very low opinion of Mrs. Clinton’s
character, integrity, and judgment, this is a graver offense than many
had contemplated. Merely the storage of “Top Secret” e-mails – never
mind their dissemination over open channels to some individuals likely
not cleared to read them — is a federal felony. On top of that, it is
unthinkable that Hillary could have sent such sensitive information and
not known at the time that it was sensitive.
thinkprogress | Current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said that while he opposes
abortion, he understands that Planned Parenthood helps a lot of women
and we “have to look at the positives.” The women’s health organization
currently had a 15 percent favorability rating — higher than any of the
GOP presidential candidates.
Fox News host Sean Hannity asked the business mogul during an extended
interview Tuesday night if half a billion dollars of taxpayer money
should continue to go toward funding the abortion provider.
“They do good things,” Trump said, interrupting the question.
“Let’s say there’s two Planned Parenthoods in a way,” Trump continued.
“You have it as an abortion clinic. Now that’s actually a fairly small
part of what they do but it’s a brutal part and I’m totally against it
and I wouldn’t do that. They also, however, service women.”
He went on to criticize former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who said last
week while criticizing Planned Parenthood that he’s “not sure we need
half a billion dollars for women’s health issues.”
“He was so bad,” Trump said. “It’s like, what is he doing? We have to
help women. A lot of women are helped. So we have to look at the
positives also for Planned Parenthood.”
thehill | Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he is certain Hillary Clinton "committed a crime" with her email server.
But
Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Tuesday that the Democratic
presidential front-runner might receive a free pass for her use of a
private email server because of Democrats in high places.
"She committed a crime," Trump said. "[But] Democrats are all the prosecutors."
Clinton has reportedly agreed
to turn over to Justice Department officials the private email server
that she used while heading the State Department. She has maintained
that she has followed all laws and protocols.
Trump
said Clinton and GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush are both
controlled by campaign donors — something he wouldn't have to worry
about because of his own wealth.
"My income is $400 million per year," Trump said. "Sure, I would spend it — if I'm doing well."
Trump
expressed gratitude to voters after recent polls show that two rival
candidates who attacked him — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and former
Texas Gov. Rick Perry — have dipped in the polls after attacking him
aggressively.
MEDIA ite | Donald Trump finally laid out his plan for dealing with Iran (or ISIS?) on Fox & Friends Tuesday, recommending that the United States “knock the hell out of them” and then “take the oil.”
Host Steve Doocy asked Trump about his plans to deal with ISIS. But whether he was confused or misspoke, Trump started talking about Iran. “Iran is taking over Iraq 100%, just like I predicted years ago,” he said. “I say this, I didn’t want to go there in the first place. Now we take the oil.”
“We should have kept the oil,” Trump continued. “Now we go in, we knock the hell out of them, take the oil, we thereby take their wealth. They have so much money.”
“They have better internet connections than we do in the United States,” he complained. “They’re training our kids through the internet. We have to knock out
wikidpedia | Scott Free is the son of Izaya (Highfather), the ruler of New Genesis, and his wife named Avia. As part of a diplomatic move to stop a destructive war against the planet Apokolips, Highfather agreed to an exchange of heirs with the galactic tyrant Darkseid;
the exchange of heirs guaranteed that neither side would attack the
other. Scott traded places with Darkseid's second-born son Orion.[23]
Scott grew up in one of Granny Goodness' "Terror Orphanages" with no knowledge of his own heritage. As he matured, Scott rebelled against the totalitarian ideology of Apokolips. Hating himself for being unable to fit in, he was influenced by Metron to see a future beyond Darkseid. Scott became part of a small band of pupils who were tutored in secret by the rebel Himon,[24] a New Genesian living as a "Hunger Dog" on Apokolips. It was at these meetings that he met fellow pupil Big Barda, who would later become his wife.[25]
Eventually, Scott Free escaped and fled to Earth. His escape, long
anticipated and planned for by Darkseid, nullified the pact between
Darkseid and Highfather and gave Darkseid the excuse he needed to revive
the war with New Genesis. Once on Earth, he became the protégé of a circusescape artist,
Thaddeus Brown, whose stage name was Mister Miracle. Brown was
impressed with Scott's skills (especially as supplemented with various
advanced devices he had taken from his previous home). Scott befriended
Brown's assistant, a dwarf named Oberon. When Thaddeus Brown was
murdered, Scott Free assumed the identity of Mister Miracle.[26]
Barda later followed Scott to Earth, and the two used their powers,
equipment, and skills in the war against Darkseid, who was still
interested in recapturing both of them. Eventually, tired of being
chased on Earth by Darkseid's servants, Scott returned to Apokolips and
won his freedom by legal means, through trial by combat.
Scott Free later became a member of the Justice League International
as did Barda and Oberon, which recast him and Big Barda as semi-retired
super-heroes that sought to live quiet lives in the suburbs when they
were not involved in Justice League-related adventures. In particular,
Scott Free was recast as a hen-pecked husband, who often found himself
on the receiving end of his wife's temper, over her desire to live a
quiet life on Earth.
During his time in the League, Scott developed an intense rivalry with Justice League villain Manga Khan.
The villainous intergalactic trader and black marketer repeatedly
kidnapped Scott, ultimately convincing Scott's conniving former manager
Funky Flashman into forging documents forcing Scott to work for Manga as
his personal entertainer. To force him to go along willingly, Khan
replaced Scott with a lifelike robot who was ultimately murdered by
Despero during his first mission with the Justice League. Scott
ultimately escaped from Manga Khan's clutches and reunited with his wife
and friends, though the shock was enough to cause Scott to ultimately
quit the League and to take on a protégé in the form of Shiloh Norman.
George Tarleton is a technician for the organization Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM). He was born in Bangor, Maine. Having recently created the artifact the Cosmic Cube, the AIM scientists use advanced mutagenics to alter Tarleton and create the super intelligent MODOC (acronym for Mental Organism Designed Only for Computing)
to study and improve the object. MODOC, however, becomes ambitious and
kills its former masters and takes control of AIM. Calling itself MODOK (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing), it comes into conflict with the hero Captain America, who is intent on rescuing SHIELD agent Sharon Carter from AIM.[3]
MODOK becomes a recurring foe for Captain America, battling the hero
on three more occasions, with the last encounter revealing the villain's
origin.[4] MODOK also battles Namor the Sub-Mariner and Doctor Doom, who is intent on claiming the Cosmic Cube.[5]
MODOK reappears and kidnaps Betty Ross, changing her into the mutant Harpy in a bid to destroy the Hulk. The character follows the Hulk and the Harpy to a floating aerie, where the Hulk's alter ego Bruce Banner cures Ross of her condition. MODOK and an AIM team arrive in time to kill the creature the Bi-Beast, the guardian of the aerie, but not before activating a self-destruct mechanism, forcing the characters to flee.[6] MODOK also accepts the offer of the other-dimensional being the Black Lama and participates in the "War of the Supervillains", but fails to capture the prize when defeated by Iron Man.[7]
AIM becomes dissatisfied with the lack of scientific advancement and MODOK's obsession with seeking revenge against metahumans, ousting him from power. MODOK attempts to regain control of the organization and prove his worth by unleashing a nerve agent on New York City, which is prevented by Ms. Marvel and the Vision.[8] MODOK seeks revenge against Ms. Marvel, attempting to mind control the heroine[9] and then hire assassin Deathbird to kill her;[10] Ms. Marvel overcomes these obstacles and finally defeats MODOK.[11]
MODOK's ambitions grow and he seeks world domination, but is thwarted by Iron Man and superhero team the Champions.[12] After an attempt to plunder the resources of the Savage Land and a battle with the savage Ka-Zar and the Hulk,[13] the character develops a new biological agent called Virus X. MODOK's attempts to test the agent on the homeless is prevented by the Thing, Sub-Mariner, and Captain America, although the villain escapes and the Thing almost dies when exposed to the virus.[14]
WaPo | The media loves Donald Trump. And who can blame them? In an era when
political candidates present the blandest, safest, focus-grouped
versions of themselves to the public, Trump's brash antics -- "pure political id," as my colleague Chris Cillizza says -- guarantee, if nothing else, an interesting read.
But
because Trump is such a larger-than-life character, we tend to overlook
the most interesting part of his candidacy -- the millions of
Republican primary voters with whom his message resonates so strongly.
The rise of Trump isn't really about Trump, but rather the political
moment we find ourselves in, where a foul-mouthed businessman and
reality TV star with no political experience is a front-runner for the
highest office in the land.
This weekend a fascinating reddit thread opened a window into the minds of a certain type of Trump supporter. In the popular AskReddit
section of the site, a Redditor asked Trump supporters to explain what
they saw in the guy. And they did -- the thread has generated nearly
13,000 comments so far. Here's what some of them said.
forbes | After Donald Trump announced his latest bid for the presidency, I
reached out to get details on Trump’s plan to replace Obamacare, and
posted that interview on FORBES last week. But for many FORBES readers,
the most eye-catching part of the interview wasn’t Trump’s plan for
health care.
It was what the Trump campaign said about unemployment.
“Mr. Trump believes that the real unemployment rate is over 18%, not the reported 5.5%,” a spokesperson told me.
Trump’s distrust of the government’s job statistics isn’t new. In July,
he even suggested that the U.S. unemployment rate could be as high as
40% — well above what the Bureau of Labor Statistics has found.
slate | To understand the rise of Donald Trump, you’d do well not to fixate
on the fact that he’s running under the Republican banner. During
Thursday night’s Fox News debate, Trump made it clear that failing to
secure the GOP nomination wouldn’t stop him from exploring an
independent candidacy. And honestly, he’d be crazy not to. Trump is very
far from a Republican regular. He represents an entirely different
phenomenon, one that bears little resemblance to garden-variety American
conservatism. That’s why Republicans shouldn’t fool themselves into
believing that one lackluster debate performance will send him packing.
Go to almost any European democracy and you will find that the
parties of the center-right and center-left that have dominated the
political scene since the Second World War are losing ground to new
political movements. What these movements have in common is that they
manage to blend populism and nationalism into a potent
anti-establishment brew. One of the first political figures to perfect
this brand of politics was the very Trumpian Silvio Berlusconi, the
Italian media tycoon who rose to power as part of a coalition of
right-of-center parties in the mid-1990s, and who has been in and out of
power ever since, dodging corruption charges and worse all the while.
More recently, the miserable state of Europe’s economies has fueled the
rise of dozens of other parties. Britain’s Labour Party has been
devastated by the rise not only of the leftist Scottish National Party,
but also by UKIP, a movement of the right that has been growing at
Labour’s expense by campaigning against mass immigration, and by largely
abandoning what had been its more libertarian line on the welfare
state. UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, has a penchant for bombast that
endears him his working-class base, which might sound familiar to you.
medialens | In May, voters grasped Spanish political orthodoxy and shook it like a rag doll:
'The anti-austerity party Podemos claimed its biggest victory in
Barcelona, where activist Ada Colau seized control of the city hall.
Podemos and Ciudadanos... made advances across the country that will
give them a chance to shape policy for the first time.'
Podemos also backed the campaign of Manuela Carmena, a 71-year-old
labour-rights lawyer, who ended 24 years of rule by Spain's hard-right
Popular party in the capital, Madrid. These were major triumphs in the
face of fierce and united corporate media opposition. Jose Juan Toharia,
president of polling firm Metroscopia, said:
'Tomorrow's Spain doesn't feel identified with the establishment parties.'
'Together, the two traditional parties have seen their support shrink
from two-thirds of the poll in 2011, to just over half. Podemos and
Ciudadanos have filled the void. The two-party system that had dominated
Spain since the end of dictatorship in 1978 is crumbling.'
MP Jeremy Corbyn, reportedly
'far ahead of his rivals in the Labour leadership election', has
explicitly called for Labour to learn from Greece's Syriza, Spain's
Podemos and the Scottish National Party by campaigning against
'austerity'. Corbyn said:
'I have been in Greece, I have been in Spain. It's very interesting
that social democratic parties that accept the austerity agenda and end
up implementing it end up losing a lot of members and a lot of support. I
think we have a chance to do something different here.'
This echoes a comment
made by Podemos' leader Pablo Iglesias in an interview with Tariq Ali.
Iglesias suggested that Podemos and Syriza offered potent examples that
had already been followed in Scotland:
'We saw this in the UK. The Scottish National Party [SNP] really beat
the Labour Party by criticising austerity and criticising cuts, which
are related to the failure of the "third way" policies of Tony Blair and
Anthony Giddens.'
One might think that, in discussing the popularity of Corbyn's
leadership bid, a rational media would give serious attention to the
visions, strategies and success of Podemos, Syriza and the SNP. For
example, we can imagine in-depth interviews with Iglesias and Colau on
Corbyn's prospects. We can imagine discussions of how a weakening of the
two-party grip on Spanish politics might be repeated outside Scotland
in the UK, where similarly moribund political conditions apply. As
former ambassador, Craig Murray, has observed:
'[I]f the range of possible political programmes were placed on a
linear scale from 1 to 100, the Labour and Conservative parties offer
you the choice between 81 and 84.'
And yet, we have not seen a single substantive discussion of
these issues in any UK national newspaper. The Lexis media database
records 1,974 articles mentioning Corbyn over the last month.
Of these,
just 29 mentioned Podemos. Our search of articles mentioning both
'Corbyn' and 'Pablo Iglesias' yielded zero results, as did our searches
for 'Corbyn' and 'Ada Colau', and 'Corbyn' and 'Manuela Carmena'. Lexis
found 133 Guardian articles mentioning Corbyn over the last month, with
three of these containing mentions in passing of SNP leader Nicola
Sturgeon. The Independent had 47 hits for Corbyn, with one article
mentioning Sturgeon.
These would appear to be natural sources and comparisons,
particularly given Corbyn's explicit references to them. Instead, we
found complete indifference combined with a ruthless and relentless
campaign to trash Corbyn across the so-called media 'spectrum'.
nautil.us | The book sets its sights high from the very first words. “O, what a
world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country
of the mind!” Jaynes begins. “A secret theater of speechless monologue
and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and
mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.”
To
explore the origins of this inner country, Jaynes first presents a
masterful precis of what consciousness is not. It is not an innate
property of matter. It is not merely the process of learning. It is not,
strangely enough, required for a number of rather complex processes.
Conscious focus is required to learn to put together puzzles or execute a
tennis serve or even play the piano. But after a skill is mastered, it
recedes below the horizon into the fuzzy world of the unconscious.
Thinking about it makes it harder to do. As Jaynes saw it, a great deal
of what is happening to you right now does not seem to be part of your
consciousness until your attention is drawn to it. Could you feel the
chair pressing against your back a moment ago? Or do you only feel it
now, now that you have asked yourself that question?
Consciousness,
Jaynes tells readers, in a passage that can be seen as a challenge to
future students of philosophy and cognitive science, “is a much smaller
part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be
conscious of what we are not conscious of.” His illustration of his
point is quite wonderful. “It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room
to search around for something that does not have any light shining
upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it
turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so
consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does
not.”
Perhaps most striking to Jaynes, though, is that knowledge
and even creative epiphanies appear to us without our control. You can
tell which water glass is the heavier of a pair without any conscious
thought—you just know, once you pick them up. And in the case of
problem-solving, creative or otherwise, we give our minds the
information we need to work through, but we are helpless to force an
answer. Instead it comes to us later, in the shower or on a walk. Jaynes
told a neighbor that his theory finally gelled while he was watching
ice moving on the St. John River. Something that we are not aware of
does the work.
The picture Jaynes paints is that consciousness is
only a very thin rime of ice atop a sea of habit, instinct, or some
other process that is capable of taking care of much more than we tend
to give it credit for. “If our reasonings have been correct,” he writes,
“it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men
who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the
things that we do, but were not conscious at all.”
Jaynes
believes that language needed to exist before what he has defined as
consciousness was possible. So he decides to read early texts, including
The Iliad and The Odyssey, to look for signs of people
who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And
he believes he sees that in The Iliad. He writes that the characters in The Iliad
do not look inward, and they take no independent initiative. They only
do what is suggested by the gods. When something needs to happen, a god
appears and speaks. Without these voices, the heroes would stand frozen
on the beaches of Troy, like puppets.
Speech was already known to
be localized in the left hemisphere, instead of spread out over both
hemispheres. Jaynes suggests that the right hemisphere’s lack of
language capacity is because it used to be used for something
else—specifically, it was the source of admonitory messages funneled to
the speech centers on the left side of the brain. These manifested
themselves as hallucinations that helped guide humans through situations
that required complex responses—decisions of statecraft, for instance,
or whether to go on a risky journey.
The combination of instinct
and voices—that is, the bicameral mind—would have allowed humans to
manage for quite some time, as long as their societies were rigidly
hierarchical, Jaynes writes. But about 3,000 years ago, stress from
overpopulation, natural disasters, and wars overwhelmed the voices’
rather limited capabilities. At that point, in the breakdown of the
bicameral mind, bits and pieces of the conscious mind would have come to
awareness, as the voices mostly died away. That led to a more flexible,
though more existentially daunting, way of coping with the decisions of
everyday life—one better suited to the chaos that ensued when the gods
went silent. By The Odyssey, the characters are capable of
something like interior thought, he says. The modern mind, with its
internal narrative and longing for direction from a higher power,
appear.
There is a deep commonality between the vilification of police and teachers. Interestingly, police and teachers have two things in common. First, they are largely from the same social class, the lower-middle or working class. Second,
in overwhelming majority, they are drawn from the population of working class whites.
Ever since the sixties, these heavily unionized and politically active working class whites have been tasked with keeping
the largely Black and Hispanic underclass under control. This is an
impossible task for them. They lack the personal, professional, cultural, and psychic resources to accomplish this task.
At the very least, they're drawing a paycheck for trying and failing, and to that extent, they have been spared the indignities of membership in the underclass themselves.
All kinds of "solutions" for the "problems" of the police
and teachers have been and are being proposed. None of these solutions will work.
I am
calling attention to the socio-economic and racial demographic fact that the composition of the public school teacher and urban overseer cadres are the same, and that these represent a continuation of an American Original divide and conquer strategy of intentional race-baiting.
zerohedge | Who says America has a jobs problem? As the chart below shows, the
"New Economy" may pay abysmally, but at least it promises a little to
everyone (or to paraphrase a famous phrase "From each according to his
ability, to each according to his need"). Nowhere is that more obvious
than in the chart showing the monthly change in waiter and bartender
jobs.
Here is the bottom line: in the past 65 months, or nearly
five and a half years starting with March 2010, or when the jobs
"recovery" really kicked in, jobs for waiters and bartenders (aka food
service and drinking places) have declined just once.
This is a statistically abnormal hit rate of nearly 99%, and one
which we assume has everything to do with the BLS' charge of not so much
reporting reality as finding loopholes in the goalseeked model to
report that the US keeps adding over 200,000 jobs every month or bust.
Putting this number in context, the US has allegedly added 376K bartenders in the past year, and 3 million since March 2010.
zerohedge |Officially, the unemployment rate in the U.S. is 5.6%,
meaning 5.6% of the work force is temporarily out of a job and actively
seeking another one. This low number reflects nearly full
employment, as 3% to 4% of the work force is typically in the process of
quitting/being laid off and finding another job.
Typically, periods of nearly full employment are economically good times, as household income is bolstered and employers have to pay a bit more to hire workers when the labor market is tight.
But these do not feel like good times for most households, despite the low unemployment rate.
Earnings are stagnant for 90% of the work force, and employers are only
paying a competitive premium for workers in very select fields
(programmers adept at Python and mobile user interfaces, etc.)
This creates a cognitive dissonance between the low official
unemployment rate and the real economy, which is behaving like an
economy with much higher rates of unemployment, i.e. sluggish
hiring, stagnant wages, difficulty in finding jobs, and very little
pressure on employers to pay more for typical jobs.
Let's start by trying to calculate the work force--the number of people who could get a job if they wanted to.
This isn't quite as straightforward as we might imagine, because the
two primary agencies that compile these statistics use slightly
different categories.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates the civilian noninstitutional population
as everyone 16 and older who is not in active-duty military service or
in prison. The BLS reckons this to be about 250 million people, out of a
total population of about 317 million residents: Household Data (BLS)
The BLS subtracts 93 million people who are not in the labor force, leaving about 157 million people in the civilian work force--roughly half the nation's population.
Of these, 148.8 million have a job of some sort and 8.6 million are unemployed.
The Census Bureau calculates the civilian noninstitutional population as everyone who is not in active-duty military service or in prison. (You can download various data on the U.S. population on this Census Bureau website: Age and Sex Composition in the United States: 2012. I am using Table 1 data.)
The Census Bureau places the civilian noninstitutional population at 308.8 million in 2012.
Since roughly 4 million people are born and 2.6 million die in the U.S.
each year, we can adjust this upward by roughly 3.5 million to bring it
up to date (mid-2015) to 312 million.
zerohedge |Statistics have become very misleading: in
particular we are being badly misled into believing that the US is
teetering on the edge of price deflation, because the US official rate
of inflation is barely positive, a level that US bonds and therefore all
other financial markets have priced in without accepting it is actually
significantly higher.
There are two possible approaches to assessing the true rate of price inflation.
You can either reverse all the tweaks government statisticians have
implemented over the decades to reduce the apparent rate, or you can
collect a statistically significant sample of price data independently
and turn that into an index. John Williams of Shadowstats.com is well
known for his work on the former approach, but until recently I was
unaware that anyone was attempting the latter. That is until Simon Hunt
of Simon Hunt Strategic Services drew my attention to the Chapwood Index, which deserves wider publicity.
This is from the website: "The Chapwood Index reflects the true
cost-of-living increase in America. Updated and released twice a year,
it reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top
500 items on which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50
largest cities in the nation."It is, therefore,
statistically significant, and it consistently shows price inflation to
be much higher than that indicated by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
theatlantic | The 2012 documentary The House I Live In critically
examines the War on Drugs, deeming it a failure that has bloated
American prisons and led to an adoption of flawed policing policies.
Now, Congress seems poised to seriously amend these tough federal
sentencing laws that caused a huge increase in the number of Americans
who are incarcerated—especially addressing the high incarceration rate
of minority drug offenders. In this clip from the documentary, The Wire's
creator, David Simon, describes how the strategies behind the War on
Drugs have actually destroyed law enforcement's power of deterrence and
increased cynicism among enforcement agents.
theatlantic | On-duty police officers appear to be eating edible pot products—OC Weeklytranscribes words they spoke while egging one another on. (“Those candy bars are pretty good,” one said. “I kinda feel light-headed though.”) Other
dialogue offers a number of insights into the subculture of this
narcotics unit. Take the woman with an amputated leg that police
encountered on entering the dispensary. “Did you punch that one-legged
old benita?” one police officer asks another. The other cop laughingly
replied, “I was about to kick her in her fucking nub.” These are people
Santa Ana taxpayers empower to use lethal force at their discretion.
Later, OC Weekly got access to a fuller version of the footage. They marvel at what it contains:
Hon. Jonathan Fish has been an Orange County Superior Court Judge
since 2008, but before that he was a prosecutor with the district
attorney’s office who specialized in narcotics cases.
In the footage, an unidentified Santa Ana Police officer is
talking to another cop as they wrap up their raid on the marijuana
dispensary.
“You ever work with John Fish, the DA?” the officer asks. “He was just in when I got there,” his partner responds.
“He's the judge that signed our warrant,” the first officer
continues, adding that he had just spoken with Judge Fish and had
enjoyed a good laugh with him about their old times together. “He's the
fucker that pulled into a gas station on our way to the Staples Center
and goes, ‘Let's buy some beers and drink 'em out of a red cup.’ I go,
‘That’s not going to be obvious.’ There we are at an am/pm getting
styrofoam cups and pouring our beers into them. That fucking blew me
away.”
That is all part of the backstory.
What’s
new is the way that the cops caught misbehaving on camera and the
police union that represents them have responded to an internal police
investigation—not with embarrassment, contrition, and public apologies,
as would befit trustworthy people of good character, but with shameless,
discrediting chutzpah: They’ve sued to keep now public video of their
indefensible behavior from their overseers!
thisamericanlife | Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite a lot of evidence that it works- desegregation. This week, Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district in Missouri that, just a few years ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program. It's the first of a two-part series.
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