a previously unguessed mathematical secret of how the world works?

WaPo |  In nature, the relationship between predators and their prey seems like it should be simple: The more prey that’s available to be eaten, the more predators there should be to eat them. 

If a prey population doubles, for instance, we would logically expect its predators to double too. But a new study, published Thursday in the journal Science, turns this idea on its head with a strange discovery: There aren’t as many predators in the world as we expect there to be. And scientists aren’t sure why.

By conducting an analysis of more than a thousand studies worldwide, researchers found a common theme in just about every ecosystem across the globe: Predators don’t increase in numbers at the same rate as their prey. In fact, the faster you add prey to an ecosystem, the slower predators’ numbers grow. 

“When you double your prey, you also increase your predators, but not to the same extent,” says Ian Hatton, a biologist and the study’s lead author. “Instead they grow at a much diminished rate in comparison to prey.” This was true for large carnivores on the African savanna all the way down to the tiniest microbe-munching fish in the ocean.

Even more intriguing, the researchers noticed that the ratio of predators to prey in all of these ecosystems could be predicted by the same mathematical function — in other words, the way predator and prey numbers relate to each other is the same for different species all over the world.

why when you hit a bibtard with a rock a racetard is liable to squeal....,

politico |  In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero. 

In  Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.

Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening. 

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes. 

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.” 

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990. 

The  Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.” 

One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans. 

Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation. For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus. 

Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit  unmarried African-Americans. The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated interracial dating, would be expelled.

The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax exemption. 

For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since  Green v. Connally, Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”

louisiana lays bare the tangled-web of tard bidnis...,

NYTimes |  The political dispute embroiling Planned Parenthood here and nationwide is over abortion, though public funds are not permitted by federal law to be used for abortion, except in cases involving rape, incest or a pregnancy that threatens the mother’s life. Neither clinic in this state — like nearly half of all Planned Parenthood centers — performs abortions. What the Louisiana Planned Parenthood clinics did do last year was administer nearly 20,000 tests for sexually transmitted infections, as well as provide gynecological exams, contraceptive care, cancer screenings and other wellness services for nearly 10,000 mostly low-income patients.

“You can’t just cut Planned Parenthood off one day and expect everyone across the city to absorb the patients,” Dr. Taylor said. “There needs to be time to build the capacity.”

With the calls to stop funding for Planned Parenthood, a visit to New Orleans and Baton Rouge suggests that it would not be as easy to do without the nonprofit centers as some Republicans and their anti-abortion allies say. Other states would face similar problems.

Louisiana is among a number of states counted as medically underserved: It has a large poor and unhealthy population, with high rates of unintended pregnancies, a shortage of health professionals and too few who will accept Medicaid, as Planned Parenthood does.

“I think of it as sort of a triple whammy, particularly in the South,” said Cindy Mann, who until recently was the federal director of Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended to help low-income Americans get medical care.

Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, reported in 2012 that four out of five Planned Parenthood patients nationally had incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level, and two-thirds of states reported difficulties ensuring enough health providers for Medicaid patients, especially in obstetrics and gynecology.

Also, since most funds that Planned Parenthood receives from taxpayers are reimbursements for tending to Medicaid beneficiaries, experts in health policy say lawmakers cannot simply take money from the organization and redirect it to other facilities.

the cathedral is fundamentally antithetical to virtue...,

slate | However much we’d like to think of gender as a social construct, science suggests that real differences do exist between female and male brains. The latest evidence: a first-of-its-kind European study that finds that the female brain can be drastically reshaped by treating it with testosterone over time. 

Research has shown that women have the advantage when it comes to memory and language, while men tend to have stronger spatial skills (though this too has been disputed). But due to ethical restrictions, no study had been able to track the direct effect that testosterone exposure has on the brain—until now. Using neuroimaging, Dutch and Austrian researchers found that an increase in this potent hormone led to shrinkage in key areas of the female (transitioning to male) brain associated with language. They presented their findings at last week’s annual meeting of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology in Amsterdam.

For the study, researchers scanned the brains of 18 individuals receiving high doses of testosterone as part of female-to-male gender reassignment surgery before and after hormone treatment. After just four weeks of receiving testosterone, participants had lost gray matter (which mainly processes information) in the regions of the brain that are used for language processing. That change amounted to a “real, quantitative difference in brain structure,” said researcher Rupert Lanzenberger of the Medical University of Vienna.

The study, while small, provides tantalizing new evidence of how hormones can influence brain chemistry. As Lanzenberger says, “these findings may suggest that the genuine difference between the brains of women and men is substantially attributable to the effects of circulating sex hormones.” 

it's the poverty stupid!!!

medicalexpress |  A six-year study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has added to the mounting evidence that growing up in severe poverty affects how children's brains develop, potentially putting them at a lifelong disadvantage.

"A lot of brain science data isn't really saying anything all that different than the behavioral and social science data that we've had for 20 to 30 years," Luby said. "But when you can show tangible brain change, it has a different impact on people and a different meaning. It just provides a level of tangible evidence."

That, too, is Pollak's take on the study.

"What this is doing is reframing the problem," he said. "Since President Johnson declared the War on Poverty, Americans have tended to look at poverty as a policy issue. ... But it also looks like it is a biomedical issue."

He likens the potential effect of poverty on children to lead paint - an environmental hazard that damaged children's brains.

"Now we certainly can begin looking at poverty that way, too," he said.

Research shows that early interventions, such as home visitation programs for families and preschool for children, are effective and have the potential to change lives.

That's because the brain has more "plasticity" early in life - it responds more quickly to changes in environment.

The studies on how poverty affects the development of children's brains are relatively new. Few existed a decade ago. But now more studies exist, and they are getting more attention in policy circles.

They suggest the need to invest in children, Wolfe said.

If society doesn't, she said, "they are worse off, and we are all worse off."

Pollak, too, stressed the potential long-term costs.

"Americans tend to really like to believe in this narrative that everyone here has a chance," he said. This kind of research suggests that we have some kids entering kindergarten at totally not a level playing field - with environments that are so impoverished and under-stimulated and nonconducive to healthy growth, we've got little 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds starting kindergarten already at an extreme disadvantage.

"So the data really runs counter to the fact that everyone in this country has a fair shot."

if intelligent, high-prestige humans are utterly clueless, where does that leave folks who see what's really going on?

declineoftheempire |  In particular, when we talk about the long-term future of humans the discussion tends to branch into two directions (neither of which are necessarily actually separate).

One is the 'stewardship' route. Here the emphasis is on how we should learn to become good stewards of the planet, not just for our own survival, but also for a rather nebulous greater cause; not upsetting the natural cart, allowing the Earth to maintain a more stable balance in terms of climate and biodiversity. A balance perhaps more representative of the long-term state of the environment without a short-term perturbation like ourselves.

The second route doesn't necessarily obviate the need for home stewardship, but it looks beyond the Earth.

One of our biggest talents, and one of our biggest problems as a species, is that we thrive on expansion. We're resource and space hungry. But instead of trying to curtail ourselves, we have the option of spreading beyond, to the vast and untapped wealth of the solar system. Call it the ultimate manifest destiny if you will, except that it also offers the possibility of preserving our homeworld by altering the fundamental equation of our existence, by outsourcing many of our material needs.

Those are the options, Caleb? Good stewardship or leaving the Earth?

What about Door #3? What about the unfortunately fact that Homo sapiens is hell-bent on destroying the biosphere, and in so doing, taking themselves down in the process?

Caleb does say something about this possibility ... sort of.

Of course, this cosmic pathway could go wrong. We could start altering the environmental state of Mars and mess that up. Or, without care, we could risk destabilizing our global economy and balance of power. After all, we seem to be barely capable of managing 196 recognized countries, adding more offworld states is unlikely to help.

But on a grand scale, for the ultimate preservation of the species, the solar system may be our savior. There's only one surefire way to avoid extinction by asteroid impacts or supervolcanoes, or sheer overcrowding. Put some of us somewhere else.

We might carelessly "risk" destabilizing the global economy and the balance of power. And that's it?

Caleb, you started off with the Holocene (Sixth) Extinction. How did you get from a human-caused mass extinction to "destabilizing the global economy" in only five paragraphs?

just around that signpost up ahead....,

ourfiniteworld |  I gave a list of likely changes to expect in my January post. These haven’t changed. I won’t repeat them all here. Instead, I will give an overview of what is going wrong and offer some thoughts regarding why others are not pointing out this same problem.

Overview of What is Going Wrong

1. The big thing that is happening is that the world financial system is likely to collapse. Back in 2008, the world financial system almost collapsed. This time, our chances of avoiding collapse are very slim.
2. Without the financial system, pretty much nothing else works: the oil extraction system, the electricity delivery system, the pension system, the ability of the stock market to hold its value. The change we are encountering is similar to losing the operating system on a computer, or unplugging a refrigerator from the wall.
3. We don’t know how fast things will unravel, but things are likely to be quite different in as short a time as a year. World financial leaders are likely to “pull out the stops,” trying to keep things together. A big part of our problem is too much debt. This is hard to fix, because reducing debt reduces demand and makes commodity prices fall further. With low prices, production of commodities is likely to fall. For example, food production using fossil fuel inputs is likely to greatly decline over time, as is oil, gas, and coal production.
4. The electricity system, as delivered by the grid, is likely to fail in approximately the same timeframe as our oil-based system. Nothing will fail overnight, but it seems highly unlikely that electricity will outlast oil by more than a year or two. All systems are dependent on the financial system. If the oil system cannot pay its workers and get replacement parts because of a collapse in the financial system, the same is likely to be true of the electrical grid system.
5. Our economy is a self-organized networked system that continuously dissipates energy, known in physics as a dissipative structure. Other examples of dissipative structures include all plants and animals (including humans) and hurricanes. All of these grow from small beginnings, gradually plateau in size, and eventually collapse and die. We know of a huge number of prior civilizations that have collapsed. This appears to have happened when the return on human labor has fallen too low. This is much like the after-tax wages of non-elite workers falling too low. Wages reflect not only the workers’ own energy (gained from eating food), but any supplemental energy used, such as from draft animals, wind-powered boats, or electricity. Falling median wages, especially of young people, are one of the indications that our economy is headed toward collapse, just like the other economies.
6. The reason that collapse happens quickly has to do with debt and derivatives. Our networked economy requires debt in order to extract fossil fuels from the ground and to create renewable energy sources, for several reasons: (a) Producers don’t have to save up as much money in advance, (b) Middle-men making products that use energy products (such cars and refrigerators) can “finance” their factories, so they don’t have to save up as much, (c) Consumers can afford to buy “big-ticket” items like homes and cars, with the use of plans that allow monthly payments, so they don’t have to save up as much, and (d) Most importantly, debt helps raise the price of commodities of all sorts (including oil and electricity), because it allows more customers to afford products that use them. The problem as the economy slows, and as we add more and more debt, is that eventually debt collapses. This happens because the economy fails to grow enough to allow the economy to generate sufficient goods and services to keep the system going–that is, pay adequate wages, even to non-elite workers; pay growing government and corporate overhead; and repay debt with interest, all at the same time. Figure 2 is an illustration of the problem with the debt component.

what wikileaks teaches us about the secret structure of u.s. empire...,

newsweek |  The US diplomatic service dates back to the Revolution, but it was in the post–World War II environment that the modern State Department came to be.

Its origins coincided with the appointment of Henry Kissinger as secretary of state, in 1973. Kissinger’s appointment was unusual in several respects. Kissinger did not just head up the State Department; he was also concurrently appointed national security advisor, facilitating a tighter integration between the foreign relations and military and intelligence arms of the US government.

While the State Department had long had a cable system, the appointment of Kissinger led to logistical changes in how cables were written, indexed and stored. For the first time, the bulk of cables were transmitted electronically. This period of major innovation is still present in the way the department operates today.

The US Department of State is unique among the formal bureaucracies of the United States. Other agencies aspire to administrate one function or another, but the State Department represents, and even houses, all major elements of US national power. It provides cover for the CIA, buildings for the NSA mass-interception equipment, office space and communications facilities for the FBI, the military and other government agencies and staff to act as sales agents and political advisors for the largest US corporations.

One cannot properly understand an institution like the State Department from the outside, any more than Renaissance artists could discover how animals worked without opening them up and poking about inside. As the diplomatic apparatus of the United States, the State Department is directly involved in putting a friendly face on empire, concealing its underlying mechanics.

Every year, more than $1 billion is budgeted for “public diplomacy,” a circumlocutory term for outward-facing propaganda. Public diplomacy explicitly aims to influence journalists and civil society, so that they serve as conduits for State Department messaging.

While national archives have produced impressive collections of internal state communications, their material is intentionally withheld or made difficult to access for decades, until it is stripped of potency. This is inevitable, as national archives are not structured to resist the blowback (in the form of withdrawn funding or termination of officials) that timely, accessible archives of international significance would produce.

What makes the revelation of secret communications potent is that we were not supposed to read them. The internal communications of the US Department of State are the logistical by-product of its activities: their publication is the vivisection of a living empire, showing what substance flowed from which state organ and when.

Diplomatic cables are not produced in order to manipulate the public, but are aimed at elements of the rest of the US state apparatus and are therefore relatively free from the distorting influence of public relations. Reading them is a much more effective way of understanding an institution like the State Department than reading reports by journalists on the public pronouncements of Hillary Clinton, or [White House Communications Director] Jen Psaki.

While in their internal communications State Department officials must match their pens to the latest DC orthodoxies should they wish to stand out in Washington for the “right” reasons and not the “wrong” ones, these elements of political correctness are themselves noteworthy and visible to outsiders who are not sufficiently indoctrinated.

                         

Many cables are deliberative or logistical, and their causal relationships across time and space with other cables and with externally documented events create a web of interpretive constraints that reliably show how the US Department of State and the agencies that inter-operate with its cable system understand their place in the world.

Only by approaching this corpus holistically—over and above the documentation of each individual abuse, each localized atrocity—does the true human cost of empire heave into view.

we will be lucky to go medieval...,

kunstler |  The tremors rattling markets are not exactly what they seem to be. A meme prevails that these movements represent a kind of financial peristalsis — regular wavelike workings of eternal progress toward an epic more of everything, especially profits! You can forget the supposedly “normal” cycles of the techno-industrial arrangement, which means, in particular, the business cycle of the standard economics textbooks. Those cycle are dying.

They’re dying because there really are Limits to Growth and we are now solidly in grips of those limits. Only we can’t recognize the way it is expressing itself, especially in political terms. What’s afoot is a not “recession” but a permanent contraction of what has been normal for a little over two hundred years. There is not going to be more of everything, especially profits, and the stock buyback orgy that has animated the corporate executive suites will be recognized shortly for what it is: an assest-stripping operation.

What’s happening now is a permanent contraction. Well, of course, nothing lasts forever, and the contraction is one phase of a greater transition. The cornucopians and techno-narcissists would like to think that we are transitioning into an even more lavish era of techno-wonderama — life in a padded recliner tapping on a tablet for everything! I don’t think so. Rather, we’re going medieval, and we’re doing it the hard way because there’s just not enough to go around and the swollen populations of the world are going to be fighting over what’s left.

Actually, we’ll be lucky if we can go medieval, because there’s no guarantee that the contraction has to stop there, especially if we behave really badly about it — and based on the way we’re acting now, it’s hard to be optimistic about our behavior improving. Going medieval would imply living within the solar energy income of the planet, and by that I don’t mean photo-voltaic panels, but rather what the planet might provide in the way of plant and animal “income” for a substantially smaller population of humans. That plus a long-term resource salvage operation.

not to be left out, the WaPo takes its tuesday editorial whacks at mr. miracle too...,

WaPo |  Trump, on the evidence of past behavior, would take whatever political shape the moment required. But the direction upon which his spinning compass has settled is instructive. His approach has little to do with the Republican Party’s history of religious conservatism. Nor is it rooted primarily in tea party constitutionalism. Trump is pressing a case against corrupt and cosmopolitan elites; against mass and illegal immigration and the dilution of American identity; and against the economic dislocations of free trade and business capitalism. 

Insofar as Trump leads a movement, it is headed in the direction of a more European form of secular, nationalist, right-wing populism. Were Trump to succeed, the GOP would be an anti-immigration party of the white working class. Before he fails — as he certainly will — Americans may long for the good old days of the religious right. 

A number of thoughtful conservatives are attempting to take the good parts of Trump’s message — his unapologetic nationalism, his identification with working-class discontents — while minimizing the parts that appeal to the lowest human instincts. They prefer their Trumpism with a little less Trump. But by leading off with the issue of immigration, by proposing to narrow the protections of the 14th Amendment, by representing undocumented Mexicans as rapists, criminals and sources of infectious disease, by pledging to construct a wall across a continent, by promising the roundup and forced deportation of 11 million people, Trump has made looking on the bright side pretty difficult. In fact, Trump’s political approach is defined by the fomenting of conflict with foreigners: with scheming Mexicans and predatory Chinese. Remove the appeal to base instincts and you are left with little but opposition to entitlement reform.

NYT's attempted psychoanalytic hit-piece on mr. miracle fails to villify and succeeds in making him more sympathetic

NYTimes |  When Hollywood wants us to understand a character, it gives us a Rosebud — an event or an object, like the wooden sled in “Citizen Kane,” that reflects the character’s essence. Mr. Trump’s Rosebud moment, I learned recently from a story on WNYC, happened one day in 1964, when he accompanied his father to the opening ceremony of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

As Mr. Trump recounted the story for Howard Blum in The New York Times in 1980: “The rain was coming down for hours … But all I’m thinking about is that all these politicians who opposed the bridge are being applauded.” Even as a wet-behind-the-ears kid, he wanted the reporter to understand, he couldn’t abide the hypocrisy of big shots. “In a corner,” he continued, “just standing there in the rain, is this man, this 85-year-old engineer who came from Sweden and designed this bridge, who poured his heart into it, and nobody even mentioned his name.

“I realized then and there,” the budding real estate mogul and future Republican front-runner concluded, “that if you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool. I realized then and there something I would never forget: I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.”

Who was that sad sack in the corner? It’s worth asking, because the Trump Rosebud moment reveals more than he perhaps realizes — and not just about himself, but about the people who are swelling his poll numbers.

Othmar H. Ammann was born in Switzerland, not Sweden, in 1879, and came to the United States in 1904. He proposed, designed and oversaw the construction of the George Washington Bridge and was closely involved with others around the country, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco among them. As the chief engineer of the Port Authority of New York and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, he oversaw the building of the Lincoln Tunnel, the Outerbridge Crossing and the Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Triborough, Bayonne and Goethals Bridges.

krugman goes in hard on the GOP clown car...,

NYTimes | There are many things we should remember about the events of late August and early September 2005, and the political fallout shouldn’t be near the top of the list. Still, the disaster in New Orleans did the Bush administration a great deal of damage — and conservatives have never stopped trying to take their revenge. Every time something has gone wrong on President Obama’s watch, critics have been quick to declare the event “Obama’s Katrina.” How many Katrinas has Mr. Obama had so far? By one count, 23.

Somehow, however, these putative Katrinas never end up having the political impact of the lethal debacle that unfolded a decade ago. Partly that’s because many of the alleged disasters weren’t disasters after all. For example, the teething problems of Healthcare.gov were embarrassing, but they were eventually resolved — without anyone dying in the process — and at this point Obamacare looks like a huge success.

Beyond that, Katrina was special in political terms because it revealed such a huge gap between image and reality. Ever since 9/11, former President George W. Bush had been posing as a strong, effective leader keeping America safe. He wasn’t. But as long as he was talking tough about terrorists, it was hard for the public to see what a lousy job he was doing. It took a domestic disaster, which made his administration’s cronyism and incompetence obvious to anyone with a TV set, to burst his bubble.

What we should have learned from Katrina, in other words, was that political poseurs with nothing much to offer besides bluster can nonetheless fool many people into believing that they’re strong leaders. And that’s a lesson we’re learning all over again as the 2016 presidential race unfolds.

the kochtopus would FUBAR the SCOTUS if it captured the #45 POTUS

WaPo |  Brian Beutler has an important piece in which he raises an unsettling question: Could the next Republican president nominate one or more Supreme Court justices who would seek to restore a pre-New Deal judicial conception of liberty of contract, with the goal of undermining much of the regulatory state that many Americans take for granted today?

Beutler reports on a movement among legal-minded libertarians to rehabilitate the Lochner decision, the notorious 1905 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a state law limiting the working hours of bakers, giving its name to the “Lochner era” of Supreme Court rulings in which economic regulations established by popularly elected officials were struck down as unconstitutional. The Lochner era is widely seen to have ended during the New Deal, when the Court upheld (among many other things) a state minimum wage law, concluding that liberty of contract is not an “absolute” right.

Sam Bagenstos, a liberal constitutional scholar at the University of Michigan, tells Beutler that “a full fledged return to Lochner” could ultimately undermine a whole host of economic regulations, including minimum wage, overtime, and worker safety laws and even possibly laws protecting customers from discrimination based on race.

One leading libertarian lawyer tells Beutler frankly that the goal is to invalidate much social welfare legislation “at the federal level,” though I would add that a Lochner restoration might invalidate a fair amount of it at the state level as well. Libertarians are frustrated with the Roberts court for its rulings preserving Obamacare — decisions that have been widely interpreted as a sign of Roberts’ judicial restraint and deference to the elected branches — and the hope is that a Republican president will appoint more unabashedly activist judges when it comes to placing limits on federal power to regulate the economy:

watching him demolish three decades worth of failed and fraudulent conservatard "simple math" is pure political gold...,

WaPo |  Critics, including many leading conservative economists in Washington, call Trump’s plans “nativist,” “protectionist” and incompatible with the party’s core pro-market beliefs. They also worry Trump’s ideas could spread to other GOP contenders.

“This is a very dangerous moment, I think, for the Republican Party,” said Stephen Moore, a conservative economist and co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which has been meeting with candidates to urge them to adopt low-tax, low-regulation policies to grow the economy.

“What Trump is saying about trade and immigration is a political and economic disaster,” Moore said. “He’s almost now making it cool and acceptable to be nativist on immigration and protectionist on trade. That’s destroying a lot of the progress we’ve made as a party in the last 30 years.”

Many Republican candidates beyond Trump have voiced opposition to new free-trade deals, including the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership being negotiated by the Obama administration with several Asian countries. While every GOP candidate promises to secure the nation’s southern border and crack down on illegal immigration, some are now expressing an openness to reducing levels of legal immigration.

Free-market economists have long argued that trade and immigration are critical to growing the U.S. economy. Top Republicans have frequently adopted those beliefs.

But a growing portion of the conservative base -- and, to a lesser extent, the country as a whole -- now blames American workers’ economic woes on competition from illegal immigrants and from low-skilled foreign factory workers abroad.

In a 2014 Public Religion Research Institute survey, 57 percent of Republicans said immigrants mostly hurt the economy by driving down wages, compared with 33 percent who said they help by providing low-cost labor. The nation as a whole split evenly on the question.

figuring out who mr. miracle works for and their agenda - is like a splinter in my mind....,

NYTimes |  For years, Republicans have run for office on promises of cutting taxes and bolstering business to stimulate economic growth, pledging allegiance to a Reaganesque model of conservatism that has largely become the party’s orthodoxy.

But this election cycle, the Republican presidential candidate who currently leads in most polls is taking a different approach, and it is jangling the nerves of some of the party’s most traditional supporters.

The tendency of that candidate, the billionaire developer Donald J. Trump, to make provocative, headline-grabbing speeches has helped obscure an emerging set of beliefs: that he would raise taxes in certain areas, particularly on corporations that he believes do not act in the best interests of the United States.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on American companies that put their factories in other countries. He has threatened to increase taxes on the compensation of hedge fund managers. And he has vowed to change laws that allow American companies to benefit from cheaper tax rates by using mergers to base their operations outside the United States.

Alarmed that those ideas might catch on with some of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals — as his immigration policies have — the Club for Growth, an anti-tax think tank, is pulling together a team of economists to scrutinize his proposals and calculate the economic impact if he is elected.

 “All of those are anti-growth policies,” said David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, a group that Republican candidates routinely court. “Yes he’s a businessman, but if those are the policies he implements, they’ll drive the economy into the ground and we’ll see huge drops in G.D.P., and frankly I think it would lead to massive loss of jobs.”

you can't reboot a nullity with a tentacle already reaching from its sphincter to its frontal lobes...,

WaPo |  Walker loyalists say the first priority should be to help the governor rebalance himself as a candidate. That, they say, will require some tough love from his campaign advisers and more discipline in developing answers to questions about issues that are not central to Walker’s core message.

While a few of Walker’s campaign staffers have worked with him before, many are newcomers. Two of Walker’s former top political advisers, Keith Gilkes and Stephan Thompson, are now in charge of the pro-Walker super PAC that is legally separated from the campaign.

The campaign is led by Rick Wiley, a former Republican National Committee political director who grew up in the Midwest and has worked in Wisconsin before. Wiley is frequently on the trail with Walker, and several top supporters say he acts too much like a buddy and not enough like a chief operating officer.

“Every candidate needs somebody that can checkmate them in private, like a Karl Rove and ‘W,’ ” one top donor said, referring to George W. Bush’s longtime political adviser. “Is there some concern about senior experience around the governor, actual presidential experience? Yes, no question.”

Wiley, through a campaign spokeswoman, declined to respond to the comments. A spokeswoman said that while the campaign manager did spend the first full week of Walker’s campaign on the road and has made a few trips since then, he is usually at work in Madison.

Despite the falling poll numbers, Walker supporters are optimistic his campaign can still rebound — particularly if he performs well at the Sept. 16 debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

“All campaigns go through cycles, and nobody has ridden all the way to victory,” said Gregory W. Slayton, a major Walker fundraiser who lives in New Hampshire. “There isn’t a candidate out there who hasn’t had really serious issues or challenges.”

mr. miracle plucking suckers off the kochtopus...,

firstlook |  After investing a sizable fortune into building a political machine that now rivals the size and budgets of both major political parties, the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are seeing some of their top operatives take jobs with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

The fact that many of Trump’s political positions are at odds with those of the Koch brothers does not seem to be a factor.

Take Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, who spent many years of his career working for the Koch political network, first as an assistant at the Koch-led group Citizens for a Sound Economy in 1997 and from 2008 through earlier this year as a senior staff member to the Koch’s primary grassroots group, Americans for Prosperity. Over the last seven years, Lewandowski helped the Koch network organize Tea Party events and get-out-the-vote efforts for Republican candidates for office.

Alan Cobb, a strategic consultant for Trump, is the former director of Kansas public affairs for Koch Industries and also worked for years as a vice president at Americans for Prosperity.

Trump is being counseled by lawyer Donald F. McGahn, the former Federal Election Commission chair who just months ago represented the Koch political network during hearings with the FEC. McGahn is listed as affiliated with Freedom Partners Action Fund, the Super PAC set up by the Koch brothers and their lobbyists.

In New Hampshire, Trump’s state director is Matt Ciepielowski, the former New Hampshire state field director for Americans for Prosperity. As National Journal reported, as Trump works to develop a team to win the New Hampshire primary, he has hired multiple AFP staff, and even leased a campaign headquarters in the same office building as AFP’s office in Manchester.

bro. nathanial speaks on the source of mr. miracle's power...,

costumes a dead giveaway that superheroes are insane - elective politics is cosplay....,

newrepublic |  Donald Trump is the Republican frontrunner for president, a fact that has befuddled just about everybody—except perhaps Trump himself—and spawned countless theories: He's leading because Americans are frustrated with politicians and want a straight-talking outsider. Because he shamelessly caters to paranoid conservatives. Because he's famous. He's not politically correct. He never says sorry. He's unfailingly entertaining. And the press can't resist him. But there's another reason that no one has considered yet, a secret weapon that has propelled past charismatic politicians like Bill Clinton and Theodore Roosevelt to the White House: hypomanic temperament. 

To be clear, I’m not using my authority as a professor of psychiatry to call Trump mentally ill. Hypomanic temperament is not an illness. It is genetically linked to bipolar disorder and manifests the same traits as mania—but crucially, does so to a less severe and more functional degree. Historically, hypomanic temperament has received little attention compared to bipolar disorder, but the founders of modern psychiatry—Eugen Bleuler, Emil Kraepelin, Ernst Kretschmer—first described these personalities around a century ago. "Hypomanics," as I describe them in In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography: 

are whirlwinds of activity who are filled with energy and need little sleep, less than 6 hours. They are restless, impatient and easily bored, needing constant stimulation… and tend to dominate conversations. They are driven, ambitious and veritable forces of nature in pursuit of their goals. While these goals may appear grandiose to others, they are supremely confident of success—and no one can tell them otherwise…. They can be exuberant, charming, witty, gregarious but also arrogant…. They are impulsive in ways that show poor judgment, saying things off the top of their head, and acting on ideas and desires quickly, seemingly oblivious to potentially damaging consequences. They are risk takers who seem oblivious to how risky their behavior truly is. They have large libidos and often act out sexually. Indeed all of their appetites are heightened.

This description doesn't just match Clinton; it also sounds an awful lot like Trump. He reports, for example, “I usually sleep only four hours a night,” which by itself is usually a pretty reliable indicator of hypomania, and something he boasts about: “How can you compete against people like me if I sleep only four hours?” He claims to work seven days a week, and in a typical 18-hour day makes “over a hundred" phone calls and have “at least a dozen meetings.” “Without passion you don't have energy, without energy you have nothing!” Trump has tweeted. Hence his taunt of Jeb Bush as “a low energy person,” by contrast. Like most hypomanics, he is distractible. “Most successful people have very short attention spans. It has a lot to do with imagination,” he once wrote. He is correct. The same rapidity of thought that helps engender creativity makes it difficult to stay on one linear track of ideas without skipping to the next. Like most hypomanics, he follows his “vision, no matter how crazy or idiotic other people think it is.” Trump sees himself as a person of destiny and no one is going to talk him out of it. Trump's inflated self-esteem is illustrated by the fact that his net worth is reported by Forbes to be $4 billion, a fraction of the $10 billion he claims. It’s not just hyperbole: Hypomanics' wild optimism systematically distorts their perceptions.

Dripping with arrogance, Trump is an uber-aggressive alpha male who gleefully dominates, bullies, and colorfully disparages his competitors and critics. His hypomanic energy gives him that elusive charisma: Whether you love him or hate him (and charismatic figures produce such polarized responses) he makes himself the center of attention, the most exciting figure on the stage, who consumes all the oxygen in the room.

mr. miracle BEEN saying true things about other denizens of the psychopathocracy

cbsnews |  On Saturday, he took aim at top aide Huma Abedin, who has been embroiled in the recent controversy over Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure at the State Department, and accused her of sharing classified information with her husband. Abedin's husband, the former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, also suffered a few Trump insults. 

"[Abedin's] receiving very, very important information and giving it to Hillary. Who else is she giving it to? Her husband has serious problems and on top of that, he now works for a public relations firm," Trump said Saturday in a press conference following an appearance at the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) convention in Nashville.

Trump added that Abedin was "married to a guy who is obviously psychologically disturbed," referencing the lewd photo scandal that forced Weiner to resign from Congress in 2011. Trump had previously donated $2,000 to Weiner's 2010 congressional campaign, according to the Washington Post.

"So how can she be married to this guy who's got these major problems? She's getting her most important information, it could be, in the world. Who knows what he's going to do with it? Forget about her," the Republican contender continued. "What she did is a very dangerous thing for this country, and probably it's a criminal act." 

A recent investigation found that while Abedin, a current Clinton campaign staffer, worked for the former secretary at the State Department, she had forwarded at least one email that contained potentially classified information.

Trump went after Clinton herself, for comments likening some Republican views on abortion to be expected "from some of the terrorist groups."

"I thought what Hillary Clinton said about terrorists and Republicans being terrorists was a disgraceful statement and she should take it back," Trump said. "She insulted many, many great people."