Foreign Policy is the Art of Establishing Priorities

WaPo |  For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.

Putin should come to realize that, whatever his grievances, a policy of military impositions would produce another Cold War. For its part, the United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a serious strategist — on the premises of Russian history. Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers.

Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing. Here is my notion of an outcome compatible with the values and security interests of all sides:

1. Ukraine should have the right to choose freely its economic and political associations, including with Europe.

2. Ukraine should not join NATO, a position I took seven years ago, when it last came up. 

3. Ukraine should be free to create any government compatible with the expressed will of its people. Wise Ukrainian leaders would then opt for a policy of reconciliation between the various parts of their country. Internationally, they should pursue a posture comparable to that of Finland. That nation leaves no doubt about its fierce independence and cooperates with the West in most fields but carefully avoids institutional hostility toward Russia.

4. It is incompatible with the rules of the existing world order for Russia to annex Crimea. But it should be possible to put Crimea’s relationship to Ukraine on a less fraught basis. To that end, Russia would recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea. Ukraine should reinforce Crimea’s autonomy in elections held in the presence of international observers. The process would include removing any ambiguities about the status of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol.

These are principles, not prescriptions. People familiar with the region will know that not all of them will be palatable to all parties. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction. If some solution based on these or comparable elements is not achieved, the drift toward confrontation will accelerate. The time for that will come soon enough.

Duty, Honor, Country..., and NOT Jailing Any Banksters!!!

libertyblitzkrieg |  Which brings me to the final and most important part of this piece. The entire Comey firing saga could go in several directions, but an increasingly likely outcome is the one I don’t see being discussed anywhere. First we need to ask ourselves, what’s likely to happen next? Calls for a special prosecutor and independent investigation into Trump-Russia collusion are likely to get louder and louder. Given the timing of the firing, I support this and I think there’s a good chance it’ll happen. I hope it does happen, as we really do need to put an end to all the speculation and hysteria one way or the other, once and for all. But here’s where it gets really interesting…

If Trump really did coordinate with the Russian government to affect the U.S. election and indisputable evidence emerges, it will be an enormous scandal and he will likely be removed from office. Personally, I don’t think such evidence exists because I don’t think such collusion happened, but I support an independent investigation. On the other hand, what might happen if Trump didn’t collude with Russia?

Here’s where Trump legitimately has a chance to destroy the Democratic Party once and for all. The Democrats have already been putting all their eggs in the Russia conspiracy theory basket, and this focus on Russia as opposed to jobs, healthcare, student loans, debt slavery etc., has made the American public think the Democratic Party is more out of touch than both Trump and the GOP. Given that’s where things stand today, imagine what’ll happen to the party and its leaders if they start spending 100% of their time pursuing this lead and then nothing comes up? What then?

I’ll tell you what happens. The Democratic Party, as useless as it is today, will completely evaporate as a serious political opposition force in America. This is because it appears all of its handful of 2020 hopefuls seem to be completely hyperventilating and losing their minds about Comey’s dismissal and asserting that it represents proof Trump colluded with Russia.

Imagine if Trump is cleared by an independent investigation? These Dems will look like complete imbeciles with horrible judgement who wasted the nation’s time while tens of millions of Americans struggled to make ends meet. This will destroy the party and lead to an easy Trump win in 2020. This is a potentially lethal trap for Democrats and they seem to be falling for it in unison.

Those Controlling the Technology and Those Carrying Out the Tasks...,

opendemocracy |  Vulnerable employment, with workers experiencing high levels of precariousness, is a global phenomenon. The ILO projects global growth in vulnerable forms of employment to grow by 11 million a year. The impacts of this are being felt across developed, emerging and developing countries.

In the UK, much concern about the changing labour market has been framed in terms of the shift in risk that has occurred between employers and individuals. The gig economy is often used to epitomise the imbalance in power between those controlling the technology, and those carrying out the tasks: 

However, this shift of risk reaches far beyond Uber drivers and millennials on bicycles. It can be seen in the use of contracted, agency and temporary staff and in the unpredictability of zero and minimum hours contracts of those working for supermarkets, in warehouses, in social care and in universities. 

The impact of this on people’s lives is exacerbated by a parallel transfer of risk in the systems set up to support those who are unemployed or in low paid work. At the same time as work has become less predictable, the safety net has become less springy and with bigger holes. 

This shift can be seen in cuts to social security, in the changes and increasing conditionality that universal credit brings, in the way jobs are measured and impact on poverty is not. It is seen in adult learning and the introduction of adult learner loans. It is also seen in a childcare sector that does not have the capacity to offer care to those with unpredictable or non-standard hours, even though those are the jobs increasingly likely to be available for those on low pay. 

The Hardest Part is Not Knowing What Your Next Paycheck is From...,

newyorker |  “These are jobs that don’t lead to anything,” he said, without looking up from his work. “It doesn’t feel”—he weighed the word—“sustainable to me.”

The American workplace is both a seat of national identity and a site of chronic upheaval and shame. The industry that drove America’s rise in the nineteenth century was often inhumane. The twentieth-century corrective—a corporate workplace of rules, hierarchies, collective bargaining, triplicate forms—brought its own unfairnesses. Gigging reflects the endlessly personalizable values of our own era, but its social effects, untried by time, remain uncertain.

Support for the new work model has come together swiftly, though, in surprising quarters. On the second day of the most recent Democratic National Convention, in July, members of a four-person panel suggested that gigging life was not only sustainable but the embodiment of today’s progressive values. “It’s all about democratizing capitalism,” Chris Lehane, a strategist in the Clinton Administration and now Airbnb’s head of global policy and public affairs, said during the proceedings, in Philadelphia. David Plouffe, who had managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign before he joined Uber, explained, “Politically, you’re seeing a large contingent of the Obama coalition demanding the sharing economy.” Instead of being pawns in the games of industry, the panelists thought, working Americans could thrive by hiring out skills as they wanted, and putting money in the pockets of peers who had done the same. The power to control one’s working life would return, grassroots style, to the people.

The basis for such confidence was largely demographic. Though statistics about gigging work are few, and general at best, a Pew study last year found that seventy-two per cent of American adults had used one of eleven sharing or on-demand services, and that a third of people under forty-five had used four or more. “To ‘speak millennial,’ you ought to be talking about the sharing economy, because it is core and central to their economic future,” Lehane declared, and many of his political kin have agreed. No other commercial field has lately drawn as deeply from the Democratic brain trust. Yet what does democratized capitalism actually promise a politically unsettled generation? Who are its beneficiaries? At a moment when the nation’s electoral future seems tied to the fate of its jobs, much more than next month’s paycheck depends on the answers.

Snoop's Sign Language Interpreter IS THE SHOW!!!

How Grown Folks Handle Nonsense

Shameless Globalism - Double-00 Stacking Dead Presidents Like Hot Cakes!!!

express |  BARACK Obama will reportedly pocket a staggering £2.5million (€3million) today for delivering a speech to a sold-out audience in Milan as part of his lucrative post-presidential speaking tour.

The former President, who has already earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for private speeches since leaving the White House, will make his highest-paying appearance yet at the Global Food Innovation Summit today.

24 Forbidden Kwestins You're Too Scared to Ask

tomdispatch |  Since the late eighteenth century, the United States has been involved in an almost ceaseless string of wars, interventions, punitive expeditions, and other types of military ventures abroad -- from fighting the British and Mexicans to the Filipinos and Koreans to the Vietnamese and Laotians to the Afghans and Iraqis. The country has formally declared war 11 times and has often engaged in undeclared conflicts with some form of congressional authorization, as with the post-9/11 “wars” that rage on today.

Recent presidents have conducted such wars without seemingly asking the hard questions -- whether about the validity of intelligence claims, the efficacy of military power, or the likely blowback from invasions, drone strikes, and the deposing of dictators. The consequences have been catastrophic for Afghans and Iraqis, Libyans and Yemenis, among others.  At last, however, we finally have a president willing to raise some of the hard questions about war. Well, at least, about one war. Or, rather, questions about one war that are, at least, hard to decipher.

“People don't ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?” President Donald Trump wondered in a recent interview, referring to America’s nineteenth century war over slavery. “Why could that one not have been worked out?"

Trump then suggested that, had President Andrew Jackson -- to whom he’s compared himself -- been in office, he would have avoided the conflict that claimed more American lives than any other: “He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War.  He said, ‘There's no reason for this.’”  Of course, Andrew Jackson, who fought in his fair share of America’s ceaseless conflicts (including against the British during the War of 1812 and the Seminoles in Spanish Florida), died in 1845, more than a decade and a half before the Civil War began.

No matter. The important thing is that we finally have a president willing to ask some questions about some wars -- even if it’s the wrong questions about a war that ended more than 150 years ago.

Today, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich offers a cheat sheet of sorts: the real questions about war and national security that should be asked but never are in these United States.  Since it’s bound to take President Trump some time to work his way to the present -- what with all the questions about why we fought Japanese, Koreans, Spaniards, Filipinos, Chinese, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Japanese (again), Germans, Koreans (again), Chinese (again), Vietnamese, and so many others -- it’s incumbent upon the rest of us to start asking Bacevich’s questions and demanding some answers.

The Last Nuremberg Prosecutor

cbsnews |  It is not often you get the chance to meet a man who holds a place in history like Ben Ferencz.  He's 97 years old, barely 5 feet tall, and he served as prosecutor of what's been called the biggest murder trial ever. The courtroom was Nuremberg; the crime, genocide; the defendants, a group of German SS officers accused of committing the largest number of Nazi killings outside the concentration camps -- more than a million men, women, and children shot down in their own towns and villages in cold blood.

Ferencz is the last Nuremberg prosecutor alive today. But he isn't content just to be part of 20th century history -- he believes he has something important to offer the world right now.

"If it's naive to want peace instead of war, let 'em make sure they say I'm naive. Because I want peace instead of war."

• Twenty-two SS officers responsible for the deaths of 1M+ people would never have been brought to justice were it not for Ben Ferencz.
• The officers were part of units called Einsatzgruppen, or action groups. Their job was to follow the German army as it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and kill Communists, Gypsies and Jews.
• Ferencz believes "war makes murderers out of otherwise decent people" and has spent his life working to deter war and war crimes. 

Healthcare Service Costs Depend on How Much the Provider Can Extract From You

kunstler |  If you seek to know why this country is in so much trouble, check out the lead reports about the health care reform bill in today’s New York Times, WashPo, and CNN. You will find there is no intelligible discussion in any of them as to what’s actually ailing US health care. All you get is play-by-play commentary about which political tag-team is “winning,” as if this were a pro wrestling match — with an overlay of gloat that the Republicans fell oafishly out of the ring in the early rounds.

Of course, an issue even larger than the health care fiasco is this society’s tragic and astounding inability to discuss anything coherently in the public arena, and that might possibly be traced to the failures of education in our time and its effects on the current crop of editors and news producers — people who grew up hearing that reality was just a constructed “narrative” and that one narrative was as good as another.

So, you would surmise from reading the papers (or their web editions) that the health care problem was simply a matter of apportioning insurance coverage. That is what the stage magicians call misdirection. Any way you cut the dynamics of health insurance, as practiced in the USA these days, it is nothing but racketeering, literally a conspiracy between informed players to swindle uninformed “patients.” The debate in congress (and the news media) is just about who gets to be swindled.

This is almost entirely due to the hocus-pocus of pricing for services. For an excellent dissection of all this, I urge you to read Karl Denninger’s comprehensive manifesto, How To Permanently Fix Health Care For All, which he posted one month ago. You have to wonder whether anybody in congress happened to read this, because the debate has been devoid of any of the crucial points that it addresses.

The way it works now, the so-called “providers” (doctors, hospitals) refuse to post the cost of any service, and then charge whatever they feel they can extract, subject to an abstruse and dishonest ceremonial “negotiation” with the insurance company. The result: hospital and insurance executives get paid multi-million dollar salaries, doctors get to drive fine German cars, and the patient gets financially ass-raped, kicked to the curb, and eventually stuffed into the bankruptcy courts.

Student Loans and Healthcare Costs are Ticking Time Bombs

libertyblitzkrieg |  Healthcare costs are obscene, something I’ve become intimately aware of since getting on individual plans several years ago. Even worse, it seems the predatory behavior continues to get worse and worse with each passing year. Which brings me to a MarketWatch post I became aware of yesterday titled, This Hidden Fee is Becoming Increasingly Common — and It’s a Nasty Surprise on Medical Bills.

Here are a few excerpts:

When Jackie Thennes decided to switch doctors earlier this year, the hospital system in her Chicago, Il. suburb seemed like the natural choice. She’d been to the immediate care facility multiple times before for screenings, and the doctor was in-network.

But Thennes, who is 50 and looking for work, got a nasty surprise when the bill arrived in the mail: along with an anticipated charge for the doctor’s visit, she was also charged a “facility fee.” At $235, the fee was slightly more than the doctor’s visit itself.

Thennes tried to contest the charge with the hospital system, but to no avail. And while she said she won’t go to the facility again, she worries about getting hit with the same fee somewhere else.

This is “going to deter me from getting the medical attention I need,” she said. “I’m going to get sick just worrying about it.”

These kinds of facility fees are common at hospitals, where they help pay the hospital system’s overhead costs. But as doctors’ offices increasingly are being bought up by big hospital systems, patients are being charged facility fees of up to hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket without warning and without the ability to contest them.

The rate of hospital-employed doctors increased by almost 50% between July 2012 and July 2015, according to an analysis conducted by the nonprofit Avalere Health for the Physicians Advocacy Institute. By July 2015, nearly 40% of doctors were employed by hospitals, the analysis found. The trend occurred across the country but was especially prominent in the Midwest.

It’s hard for patients to research which doctors charge facility fees, since there’s no comprehensive resource to track it, said Chuck Bell, programs director for Consumers Union, the policy and mobilization arm of Consumer Reports.

There is one foolproof option, though, Bell said: ask pre-emptively.

Still, “why should patients have to do this?” Bell said. “Health care has become this outlier bad, terrible customer experience. Even a mechanic has to tell you up-front what the estimate is for working on your car.”

Moving along, let’s take a look at a very disturbing trends happening with regard to student loans, which as you know are almost impossible to get rid of, even in bankruptcy. They essentially follow you to the grave.

Also from MarketWatch:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) introduced a bill with several prominent co-sponsors last week that would prohibit the government from garnishing borrowers’ Social Security disability and retirement checks to pay for defaulted student loans. This marks the second time the Senators have tried to curb this practice; they introduced a similar bill in 2015 was never enacted into law. And given today’s highly partisan lawmaking environment, getting the bill through this time may not be much easier.

“It’s a challenge,” Brown told MarketWatch. Still, he said he’s hopeful lawmakers will respond to growing concern on this topic from constituents. “Senators and House members are hearing about this problem more and more. We’re hearing all kinds of people calling us surprised that [the government] can do this.”

And indeed, the government can. The federal student loan program provides many options borrowers can use to manage their debts, but once borrowers default, the government has extraordinary powers to get its money back, including garnishing tax refunds, Social Security checks and wages.

A growing number of borrowers are losing out on a portion of their Social Security checks to pay back student loans. The number of borrowers over 65 facing this predicament jumped 540% between 2002 and 2015, according to a report released by the Government Accountability Office in December.

Multiple factors explain that spike. For one, over the past several years we’ve witnessed rapid growth in the number of students going to college or returning to school during their career. But perhaps more important, rising college costs over the past few decades means that it’s more likely that an older adult would have taken on a student debt either to pay for their own schooling or that of a child.

The challenges these older or disabled borrowers face paying back their loans is increasingly pushing them toward the financial brink. The 1996 law that allows the feds to garnish Social Security benefits over student loans requires that they leave the borrower with a minimum of $750 in benefits. But that floor hasn’t been adjusted since the 1990s to account for the rising cost of living. In 2015, about 67,300 borrowers over 50 had their benefits garnished below the poverty line from just 8,300 borrowers in 2004.

Student loans and healthcare are both ticking time bombs and I see no real effort underway to tackle them at the macro level where they need to be addressed. Watch these two issues closely going forward, as I think fury at both will be the main driver behind the next populist wave.

Unified, Independent, and Sovereign

Counterpunch |  It somehow makes US Americans feel good that the “commies” finally came around and saw the light.  It’s a psychological and emotional salve that reassures the gullible, the uninformed, and the nationalists that the sacrifices on their side were not in vain.  The problem is it’s dead wrong.

3.8 million of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s fellow Vietnamese and over 58,000 US Americans did not die in a war of economic systems or ideologies.  The world is not binary and the cause for which they gave their all was not about a free market vs. a centrally planned economy.  It was about Vietnamese governing Viet Nam without continued foreign interference, occupation, and war.  Viet Nam won the war because it expelled yet another foreign invader.

Despite what embittered Vietnamese-Americans and diehard veterans who desperately want to believe, and want you to believe, that the loss of limbs, life and sanity were not in vain, it’s really that simple.

The “hardline communists” of whom you spoke, Mr. Viet, were also pragmatists – out of necessity.  They made the fateful decision to bend rather than break with the Đổi Mới (renovation) reforms of 1986, which began to bear fruit in the mid-1990s during my first visit to the country of your birth.  Viet Nam has one of the fastest growing economies in the world and is considered to be one of the great success stories of the developing world.  It also ranks 5^th among countries sending their young people to study in the US.

In spite of extremes of wealth and poverty that are characteristic of any rapidly developing economy, Viet Nam’s government has been praised for converting wealth into national well-being, i.e., helping to create a rising tide that raises all boats, certainly not a claim the US can make, where extreme wealth concentration and a resulting oligarchy are the order of the day.  (20 US Americans own as much as wealth as 50% of the population.)

The Communist Party is not a monolith, as you know.  In fact, there’s probably more diversity of opinion within this one party than in the US in which “there is only one party…  the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat”, as another US writer and public intellectual, Gore Vidal, once described the US political system.  I know this because Viet Nam is not a country I visit from time to time; I have lived here for over a decade.

Bún Thịt Nướng - Bún Bò Xào

theculinarychronicles |  Truth be told, most of my “mom-meal knock offs” aren’t 100% authentic. But that sure isn’t do to lack of trying! She was so quick maneuvering around the kitchen–throwing a little of bit of this and a little bit of that into pans that we could never keep up. Let’s not even begin to get into how she never measured!

So, on one recent weekend, I found myself recreating a meal that we often had growing up– Bún Thịt Nướng or Vietnamese Grilled Pork over Vermicelli Noodles. It’s not a dish that I eat (or more like “order“) often these days but when I do get the chance to enjoy it, I am reminded of how it really is a great depiction of Vietnamese cuisine. An extremely savory and mutli-layered flavor protein, combined with tons of fresh herbs, pickled veggies, cold noodles, various textures, and all enhanced by a spicy nước chấm (dipping sauce). And like many Vietnamese dishes, Bún Thịt Nướng is not difficult to make but it does take some time preparing as there are many steps and components to the dish.

I spend most of the time below describing steps to preparing the pork so if you have any questions, about the condiments in particular, feel free to shoot me an email. Since I was too lazy to pull out the grill, I ended up using my tried and true All-Clad grill pan to cook the pork. It worked fairly nicely but if you want the true authentic flavor, I’d recommend using an outdoor grill with with one of those wire mesh grilling baskets. You can pick one up for really cheap at most Asian grocery stores. You can’t beat the slightly charred flavor produced by cooking it that way. Plus, if you’re ever in Việt Nam, you’ll see that it’s the way my peeps do it.

I was quite pleased with the final dish. The warm grilled meat over the cold veggies and noodles are a perfect pairing–particular for warm summer days.

foodforfour |  This refreshing vermicelli noodles with wok-tossed beef is our family’s favourite during the summer months. Thin juicy slices of beef with beautiful flavours of lemongrass is served on a bed of cold vermicelli noodles, fresh herbs, topped with sprinkles of fried shallot and chopped peanuts, and drenched in fish sauce.

This dish is really easy to make and also very versatile. The vermicelli noodles salad and fish sauce forms the basis of many popular Vietnamese dishes as the beef can be substituted for another type of protein. Other Vietnamese vermicelli noodle dishes are served with pork skewers (bun nem nuong), grilled pork ( bun thit nuong), spring rolls (bun cha gio), sugarcane prawn (bun chao tom) and grilled fish.

The trick to preparing this dish is to prepare all your ingredients before you start to stir fry. Fish sauce dipping sauce can be made the day before to save time.

Nước Chấm

wikipedia |  Nước chấm (Vietnamese: [nɨ́ək tɕə̌m]) is a common name for a variety of Vietnamese "dipping sauces" that are served quite frequently as condiments. It is commonly a sweet, sour, salty, savoury and/or spicy sauce.

Nước mắm pha (mixed fish sauce) is the most well known dipping sauce made from fish sauce. Its simplest recipe is some lime juice, or occasionally vinegar, one part fish sauce (nước mắm), one part sugar and two parts water. Vegetarians create nước chấm chay (vegetarian dipping sauce) or nước tương (soy water) by substituting Maggi seasoning sauce for fish sauce (nước mắm).^{[citation needed]}

To this, people will usually add minced uncooked garlic, chopped or minced Bird's eye chilis, and in some instances, shredded pickled carrot/white radish and green papaya for bún. Otherwise, when having seafood, such as eels, people also serve some slices of lemongrass.

It is often prepared hot on a stove to dissolve the sugar more quickly, then cooled. The flavor can be varied depending on the individual's preference, but it is generally described as pungent and distinct, sweet yet sour, and sometimes spicy.

Nước Mắm

wikipedia |  Fish sauce is an amber-colored liquid extracted from the fermentation of fish with sea salt. It is used as a condiment in various cuisines. Fish sauce is a staple ingredient in numerous cultures in Southeast Asia and the coastal regions of East Asia, and features heavily in Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Thai, Lao and Vietnamese cuisines. It also was a major ingredient in ancient European cuisine, but is no longer commonly used in those regions.

In addition to being added to dishes during the cooking process, fish sauce is also used as a base for a dipping condiment and is prepared in many different ways in each country. It is eaten with fish, shrimp, pork, and chicken. In parts of southern China, it is used as an ingredient for soups and casseroles. Fish sauce, and its derivatives, impart an umami flavor to food due to their glutamate content.

Empires Decline and Fall Due to Military Overreach and Economic Bankruptcy

theburningplatform |  In Part One of this article I detailed how propaganda has been utilized by the Deep State for decades to control the minds of the masses and allow those in control to reap the benefits of never ending war. In Part Two I will discuss recent events, false flags, and propaganda campaigns utilized by the Deep State to push the world to the brink of war.

The people realize they have been screwed and continue to be screwed by the politicians, bankers and corporate fascists running the show. This is the major reason Trump was elected. People were desperate for someone who offered them a promise of economic revival and reduced government interference in their lives.

The problem is no one is capable of saving the US Titanic. The iceberg was struck sixteen years ago when the Deep State engineered a plundering campaign driving the national debt from $5.8 trillion to $20 trillion, and unfunded welfare liabilities to $200 trillion. Unpaid for tax cuts will not save us. Unpaid for shovel ready infrastructure projects will not save us. Threatening foreign countries with tariffs will not bring manufacturing jobs back. Excessively low interest rates will not spur investment, but it will create a pension crisis and impoverish senior citizens.

Devaluing your currency when every country in the world attempts the same “solution” will not work. Passing an Obamacare lite healthcare plan that keeps mega-corporation insurance companies and hospitals in charge solves nothing. The demographic time bomb of boomers turning 65 cannot be reversed. Providing the appearance of normalcy and improvement by artificially boosting the stock and real estate markets to all-time bubble highs only makes the coming crash that much more devastating.

It is clearly evident to me the drumbeat of war is louder than it has been in decades as this Fourth Turning enters its ninth year. Every previous U.S. Fourth Turning has climaxed with a more horrific war than the previous, as the technological “advances” allow the Deep State controllers to create cannon fodder more efficiently. The year 2011 seems to have been the nexus for the Deep State to create new enemies and sow the seeds of discontent and revolution around the globe. U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq in 2011, while troop levels in Afghanistan remained low.

Retail Apocalypse 2017

Visual Capitalist

Unpaywall

filmsforaction  |  Getting blocked by a paywall can be irritating, especially if you’re trying to access peer-reviewed scientific research. Open access advocates would certainly think so. To paraphrase Richard from HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” who doesn’t want free information? Well, there may now be a way to get scientific publications for free — and it’s completely legal.

Open-source nonprofit Impactstory, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has developed a web browser plug-in called Unpaywall, and as the name suggests, it’s a way to get through to paywalled research papers for free.

“Now more than ever, humanity needs to access our collective knowledge, not hoard it behind paywalls,” according to Unpaywall’s website. “Lots of researchers feel the same; that’s why they upload their papers to free, legal servers online. We want to help bring that open access content to the masses.”

SUPER LEGAL

Unlike similar services that rely on means like automated web scraping, Unpaywall’s method of getting full-text access to scientific journals is totally legal. It scans a database of more than 90 million digital object identifiers (DOIs) for copies of papers that the researchers themselves have uploaded, whether on some pre-press servers or university websites. Unpaywall is also completely secure, as it doesn’t ask you for any personal information.

Best of all, to use the service, you just need to install the plug-in on your Chrome or Firefox desktop browser. A little lock symbol will appear every time you visit a journal article’s landing page. If the lock is green, you have access to a full-text copy of the article. A gold lock means an article already has open license access from the publisher.

“We’re able to deliver an OA copy to users more than half the time,” Jason Priem, one of Unpaywall’s creators, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. He’s excited for the service to hit critical mass: “That’s when people start thinking, ‘Hey, why are we paying millions of dollars to subscribe to tens of thousands of journals when our researchers have about a better-than-even chance of reading an article with no subscription at all?'”

Replacing Delusional Economics With a Reality-Based System

Counterpunch |  Keen’s “Minsky” model traces this to what he has called “endogenous money creation,” that is, bank credit mainly to buyers of real estate, companies and other assets. He recently suggested a more catchy moniker: “Bank Originated Money and Debt” (BOMD). That seems easier to remember.

The concept is more accessible than the dry academic terminology usually coined. It is simple enough to show that the mathematics of compound interest lead the volume of debt to exceed the rate of GDP growth, thereby diverting more and more income to the financial sector as debt service. Keen traces this view back to Irving Fisher’s famous 1933 article on debt deflation – the residue from unpaid debt. Such payments to creditors leave less available to spend on goods and services.

In explaining the mathematical dynamics underlying his “Minsky” model, Keen links financial dynamics to employment. If private debt grows faster than GDP, the debt/GDP ratio will rise. This stifles markets, and hence employment. Wages fall as a share of GDP.

This is precisely what is happening. But mainstream models ignore the overgrowth of debt, as if the economy operates on a barter basis. Keen calls this “the barter illusion,” and reviews his wonderful exchange with Paul Krugman (who plays the role of an intellectual Bambi to Keen’s Godzilla), who insists that banks do not create credit but merely recycle savings – as if they are savings banks, not commercial banks. It is the old logic that debt doesn’t matter because “we” owe the debt to “ourselves.”

The “We” are the 99%, the “ourselves” are the 1%. Krugman calls them “patient” savers vs “impatient” borrowers, blaming the malstructured economy on personal psychology of indebted victims having to work for a living and spend their working lives paying off the debt needed to obtain debt-leveraged homes of their own, debt-leveraged education and other basic living costs.

By being so compact, this book is able to concentrate attention on the easy-to-understand mathematical principles that underlie the “junk economics” mainstream. Keen explains why, mathematically, the Great Moderation leading up to the 2008 crash was not an anomaly, but is inherent in a basic principle: Economies can prolong the debt-financed boom and delay a crash simply by providing more and more credit, Australia-style. The effect is to make the ensuing crash worse, more long-lasting and more difficult to extricate. For this, he blames mainly Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan as, in effect, bank lobbyists. But behind them is the whole edifice of neoliberal economic brainwashing.

Keen attacks this “neoclassical” methodology by pointing that the logical fallacy of trying to explain society by looking only at “the individual.” That approach and its related “series of plausible but false propositions” blinds economics graduates from seeing the obvious. Their discipline is the product of ideological desire not to blame banks or creditors, wrapped in a libertarian antagonism toward government’s role as economic regulator, money creator, and financer of basic infrastructure.

Keen’s exposition undercuts the most basic and fundamental assumptions of neoclassical (that is, anti-government, anti-socialist) economics by showing that instead of personifying economic classes as “individuals” (Krugman’s “prudent” individuals with their inherited fortunes and insider dealings vs. spendthrift individuals too economically squeezed to afford to buy houses free of mortgage debt) it is easier to start with basic economic categories – creditors, wage earners, employers, governments running deficits (to provide the economy with money) or surpluses (to suck out money and force reliance on commercial banks).

Genie Energy and Oil in the Golan Heights

lewrockwell |  QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong I live in Israel and today I listened to your podcast with Macrovoices. At some point you mentioned that there is more oil in Golan heights than in Saudi Arabia -and this oil belongs to genie energy. Is it true? How can it be that nobody knew nothing about this in Israel? Are you sure 100 % about this information? I will be happy to know more about this.

ANSWER: Yes. This is one of the best kept secrets. You can imagine that if this went into production, then the disputed Syrian land issue occupied by Israel would come to the forefront. This is why it gets no play but this is one reason Obama was working to overthrow the Syrian government. They would not have political people on the Strategic Advisory Board if they did not need political strings pulled.

Politically, you have the Pipe Line from Qatar being one major issue that was to compete with Russia in selling gas to Europe, which is why Putin is involved. He is not involved in Egypt, Israel, or even Afghanistan. This is the reason why Putin has an interest in Syria and the mainstream media of course championed Obama claiming he was defending children. Then we have Genie Oil and strategic oil reserves within occupied Syria. Just look at the people who are are heavy hitters on the Strategic Advisory Board of Genie Oil!  Not bad for a company nobody has heard of and the glaring issue is why do you need heavy hitters like this just to pump oil? Location! Location! Location! The mainstream media is not going to report on this issue. They even have Rupert Murdoch on their Strategic Advisory Board. This is hush hush in the mainstream media.