unless WW-III jumps off, that younger brother's SOL...,

NYTimes | We take as our text today the parable of the prodigal son. As I hope you know, the story is about a father with two sons. The younger son took his share of the inheritance early and blew it on prostitutes and riotous living. When the money was gone, he returned home.

His father ran out and embraced him. The delighted father offered the boy his finest robe and threw a feast in his honor. The older son, the responsible one, was appalled. He stood outside the feast, crying in effect, “Look! All these years I’ve been working hard and obeying you faithfully, and you never gave me special treatment such as this!”

The father responded, “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” But he had to celebrate the younger one’s return. The boy was lost and now is found. 

Did the father do the right thing? Is the father the right model for authority today?

The father’s critics say he was unjust. People who play by the rules should see the rewards. Those who abandon the community, live according to their own reckless desires should not get to come back and automatically reap the bounty of others’ hard work. If you reward the younger brother, you signal that self-indulgence pays, while hard work gets slighted. 

The father’s example is especially pernicious now, the critics continue. Jesus preached it at the time of the Pharisees, in an overly rigid and rule-bound society. In those circumstances, a story of radical forgiveness was a useful antidote to the prevailing legalism.

But we don’t live in that kind of society. We live in a society in which moral standards are already fuzzy, in which people are already encouraged to do their own thing. We live in a society with advanced social decay — with teens dropping out of high school, financiers plundering companies and kids being raised without fathers. The father’s example in the parable reinforces loose self-indulgence at a time when we need more rule-following, more social discipline and more accountability, not less.

It’s a valid critique, but I’d defend the father’s example, and, informed by a reading of Timothy Keller’s outstanding book “The Prodigal God,” I’d even apply the father’s wisdom to social policy-making today. 

We live in a divided society in which many of us in the middle- and upper-middle classes are like the older brother and many of the people who drop out of school, commit crimes and abandon their children are like the younger brother. In many cases, we have a governing class of elder brothers legislating programs on behalf of the younger brothers. The great danger in this situation is that we in the elder brother class will end up self-righteously lecturing the poor: “You need to be more like us: graduate from school, practice a little sexual discipline, work harder.”

But the father in this parable exposes the truth that people in the elder brother class are stained, too. The elder brother is self-righteous, smug, cold and shrewd. The elder brother wasn’t really working to honor his father; he was working for material reward and out of a fear-based moralism. The father reminds us of the old truth that the line between good and evil doesn’t run between people or classes; it runs straight through every human heart.

old men who run their mouths are scared to death of young men who run their mouths...,

My daughter attended an elite private independent school, the best of its kind in this part of the U.S.  When she was a junior in high school, there was a heavily attended Jr/Sr. party held downtown. Parents were in attendence as chaperones. A couple of fathers were working the door. In the course of the party, some of the kids were so intoxicated and so obnoxious that they needed to be escorted from the premises. As in, their parents were contacted to come and retrieve their drunk, belligerant and nasty brats. At checkpoint Charlie, where the bad seed were being handed off to their retrieving parents, the father of one particularly notorious young trollop being dismissed, and the father working the door at the party venue, were accosted by several athletic adolescents males who objected to young Miley Ray being ejected from the venue. Mayhem ensued, and the two fathers summarily got their asses whooped by these boys.

So let's break down what all had happened here. It was an established fact that these idle rich kids were going to behave badly. The goal of the parents was to contain and control any consequences and any liability attending to the known and predictable bad behavior of their children. Nobody wanted this mess in their home, nobody wanted this mess in a public place where bouncers, random public, and potentially the gendarmes might intervene and implement harsh reality-correcting measures. Some pampered, protected, roided up little monsters got out of pocket and assaulted and battered a couple of men volunteering and acting so as to protect and keep these children out of trouble with strangers and the law. I was not in attendance at this party as a chaperone, so I didn't witness any of this first hand. My daughter was in attendance - and I'm relating what she reported to me as an eyewitness and what I subsequently heard from some of the other parents.

Now, let the record show, I don't particularly like adolescents. They're loud, obnoxious, butt-sniffing, hormone-addled know-it-alls just itching for trouble. Some days, I don't even like my own adolescent, so you can be damn sure I don't like yours. In the aftermath of that incident, I swore up and down that there was no way, no how, under any conceivable circumstance - that I would ever go out like those two dads who got straight whooped by a gang of boys. That incident served as somewhat of a wake up call. I started back at the gym, started making sure I was "moving it" so as not to lose it, etc.., In the intervening three years, I've managed to lose a lot of weight and get into pretty good shape. Not get into pretty good shape for an old man, but get into pretty good shape.

While I pride myself on advanced barbarian skills, it takes a considerable amount of time, effort, and work to maintain those skills.  My motto is simple, loose meat and tight joints are a useless tragedy. You've got to maintain tight meat and loose joints if you want the creature to maintain the dignity of the man in the context of a slippery sidewalk where you might otherwise slip and fall on your ass, or, in the context of the slippery slope where you're summoned to safely and authoritatively regulate the antics of young killer-apes.

Yesterday was a federal holiday, so given the time off, I was at the YMCA in the morning in the weight room. The place was packed with the active elderly. Boisterous, busy, loud, territorial old men who socialize more than they exercise, and who give voice to all the nitwit nonsense they've picked up off of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage radio broadcasts. One old, long retired marine, was busy setting up the bench press and had a couple of 35lb weights on the bar. He didn't do any presses, just set it up and walked away to the other side of the room whereupon he proceeded to jaw-jack. Knowing how these old fart knockers think and operate, I dared not just take the bench and get to work, even though he had no intention of doing anything with it for several minutes. He had clearly marked his territory and would be deeply offended.

So I strolled straight up to him, "good morning sir, mind if I quickly jump in there at the bench?"

"Oh no, not at all, go right ahead"

So I take his little 35lb discs off, put three 45lb discs on each side, put the clamps on and grind out three sets of bench presses. (I'd warmed up on the machines in the other weight room) So I'm sweating and pretty swole up, and am in the process of taking the weights off and putting it back like he had it. "You sir are a true scholar and gentleman" and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...., "when you get old like me, you just don't have the testosterone to push that much weight - a youngster like you still full of sap, can still do all that" - whatever cheddar.

I shave my head and don't grow out too many whiskers - so all my telltale grey signs of AARP membership are concealed. Guy thinks I'm 15 years younger than I am. He's as happy as an old dog can be that I showed him his propers (proper respect) in the weight room. As far as he's concerned, I can do no wrong and he's perfectly at ease holding forth, pontificating, and repeating the crap he's heard on Rush and Savage Nation with me too. I smile, excuse myself, ignoring the rest of his prattle and getting on with my business with other weights and machines.

An hour or so later, I'm in the lobby waiting for my wife to finish up on the ellipticals so we can leave. All the old dogs are gathered in their masses yakking about this past weekend's antics on the Plaza and the Michael Dunn/Jordan Davis verdict. The old marine is the main talker and he's wound up in his speechifying. "Dunn should've walked. I would've shot up that car cause you never know these days. Take what happened at the Plaza on saturday, they just don't know how to act."

They.just.don't.know.how.to.act....,

I don't say a word, and thankfully my wife swings into the lobby and we're out just in the nick of time. 

why mine can't be anywhere near this area on friday and saturday evenings...,

KCTV5

kctv5 |  Problems with youth traditionally have been a problem at the Country Club Plaza in warmer months when school is out, but issues are again flaring up. 

Police Chief Darryl Forte said the issue is one for the community but said he is working to complete a plan to deal with the issues. He said he will then share the plan with stakeholders and hopes to get wrapped up by the middle of the week.

Councilman Jermaine Reed said the council may need to look at tightening up the city's curfew law. He praised the police department's handling of the situation Saturday night.

"Kids need to be behave appropriately when out in public," he said.

Kansas City police were first called to Cinemark Palace, located at 500 Nichols Rd., about 8:15 p.m. on a large disturbance involving about 150 juveniles.

Police said they dispersed the unruly group; however, they scattered through the Plaza.

There were three fights reported with four getting ticketed for the problems. 

Three of those ticketed were in their late teens and are considered adults. One was a juvenile.

The citations were issued based on behavior, not race, Forte said in a Twitter post.

"Expect more citations to be issued in the near future," Forte said.

Forte said that more citations are likely to follow. He said police will do everything in their power to tackle this issue.

"Plaza is a great place to visit. Most kids are well behaved. The few disorderly kids stand out. We'll give the non-compliant attention," Forte wrote. "We're going to continue to do everything we can to identify and impact the few deviants while allowing others peace."

smdh, in my backyard, WHERE MY CHILDREN PLAY!!! - read the comments

tonyskansascity |  So, earlier this year we reported a rise in Flash mob activity and now mainstream media is paying attention to the trend . . .

KCTV5: Kansas City Police Chief Darryl Forte said 150 juveniles had to be cleared from the Plaza Saturday night after things got unruly.

This event elicits promise of a crackdown . . .

KMBC . . . Forte: Public should expect more enforcement after Plaza brawls

And once again in Kansas City we learn that even slightly nicer weather has negative consequences.

Developing . . .

bias towards power IS corporate media objectivity

medialens | The key to what is precisely wrong with corporate journalism is explained in this nutshell by the US commentator Michael Parenti:

'Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for "objectivity". Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.'

Examples of bias towards the orthodoxy of Western power are legion every day of the week. On January 30 this year, David Loyn reported for BBC News at Ten from Bagram airbase in Afghanistan as US troops prepared to withdraw from a blood-strewn occupation. Standing beside a large US military plane, he intoned:

'For all of the lives lost and money spent, it could have been so much better.'

The pro-Nato perspective of that remark masquerading as impartial journalism is stark. By contrast, Patrick Cockburn summed up the reality:

'After 12 years, £390bn, and countless dead, we leave poverty, fraud – and the Taliban in Afghanistan...60 per cent of children are malnourished and only 27 per cent of Afghans have access to safe drinking water...Elections are now so fraudulent as to rob the winners of legitimacy.'

The damning conclusion?

'Faced with these multiple disasters western leaders simply ignore Afghan reality and take refuge in spin that is not far from deliberate lying.'

BBC News has been a major component of this gross deception of the public.

The BBC's 'objective' bias in support of power also imbues the 'impartial' stance of alpha-male interviewer Jeremy Paxman, who recently disparaged 'extreme' WWI conscientious objectors as 'cranks'.

BBC political editor Nick Robinson is another safe pair of hands. He once described his 'objective' role in the run-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq (when he was ITN's political editor):

'It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking . . . That is all someone in my sort of job can do.' (Nick Robinson, ' "Remember the last time you shouted like that?" I asked the spin-doctor', The Times, July 16, 2004)

We tweeted a reminder of this remarkable admission by Robinson of his stenographic role as a channeller of state propaganda:

'The skewed way in which @bbcnickrobinson sees his role as BBC political editor can only lead to bias towards power.'

US journalist Glenn Greenwald responded pithily:

'That'd make an excellent epitaph on the tombstone of modern establishment journalism'

After we had repeatedly challenged Robinson about his bias towards power (see this recent media alert), he finally responded via email (January 27, 2014):

'We could have this debate forever I suspect.'

But in reality 'this debate' never gets an airing on the BBC. It is simply taboo.

cognitive biases

wikipedia | Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways. Cognitive biases can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment, and are often studied in psychology and behavioral economics.

Although the reality of these biases is confirmed by replicable research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them.^[1] Some are effects of information-processing rules (i.e. mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Such effects are called cognitive biases.^[2][3] Biases in judgment or decision-making can also result from motivation, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. Some biases have a variety of cognitive ("cold") or motivational ("hot") explanations. Both effects can be present at the same time.^[4][5]

There are also controversies as to whether some of these biases count as truly irrational or whether they result in useful attitudes or behavior. For example, when getting to know others, people tend to ask leading questions which seem biased towards confirming their assumptions about the person. This kind of confirmation bias has been argued to be an example of social skill: a way to establish a connection with the other person.^[6]

The research on these biases overwhelmingly involves human subjects. However, some of the findings have appeared in non-human animals as well. For example, hyperbolic discounting has also been observed in rats, pigeons, and monkeys.^[7]

wikipedia | Bias arises from various processes that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. These include

• information-processing shortcuts (heuristics)^[12]

• mental noise

• the mind's limited information processing capacity^[13]

• emotional and moral motivations^[14]

• social influence^[15]

The notion of cognitive biases was introduced by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972^[16] and grew out of their experience of people's innumeracy, or inability to reason intuitively with the greater orders of magnitude. Tversky, Kahneman and colleagues demonstrated several replicable ways in which human judgments and decisions differ from rational choice theory. Tversky and Kahneman explained human differences in judgement and decision making in terms of heuristics.

Heuristics involve mental shortcuts which provide swift estimates about the possibility of uncertain occurrences (Baumeister & Bushman, 2010, p. 141). Heuristics are simple for the brain to compute but sometimes introduce “severe and systematic errors” (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, p. 1125).^[17]

For example, the representativeness heuristic is defined as the tendency to “judge the frequency or likelihood” of an occurrence by the extent of which the event “resembles the typical case” (Baumeister & Bushman, 2010, p. 141). The “Linda Problem” illustrates the representativeness heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983^[18] ). Participants were given a description of the target person Linda which implies Linda could be a feminist, as she is interested in discrimination and social justice issues (see Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). Participants are asked whether they think Linda is more likely to be a “a) bank teller” or a “b) bank teller and active in the feminist movement”. Participants often select option “b)”. Tversky and Kahneman (1983) termed participants choice as a “conjunction fallacy”; whereby participants chose option b) because the description relates to feminism. Moreover, the representativeness heuristic may lead to errors such as activating stereotypes and inaccurate judgements of others (Haselton et al., 2005, p. 726).

Alternatively, critics of Kahneman and Tversky such as Gerd Gigerenzer argue that heuristics should not lead us to conceive of human thinking as riddled with irrational cognitive biases, but rather to conceive rationality as an adaptive tool that is not identical to the rules of formal logic or the probability calculus.^[19] Nevertheless, experiments such as the “Linda problem” grew into the heuristics and biases research program which spread beyond academic psychology into other disciplines including medicine and political science.

whatever happened to hip-hop?

dissecting the odious new menage sitting atop the rhyming and posing garbage heap...,

cathedral-style defense of the indefensible....,

theroot |  Zaheer, I'm glad you made note that the image is being misread, that she's placing herself in the position of Malcolm. And I thought your points on stamps were compelling. But there's a point I think that's being missed. I'm going to mirror a post I had commented in another facebook group discussing this issue:

She's holding Malcolm's rifle, and pointing the master's weapon against her oppressor. She's trying to aim at the thing that has threatened the lives of Black women, paralleling threats to Malcolm's life. (Rape culture, misogyny, etc.) She's going in and starting a conversation, and she's appropriating the weapons used against us to do it. She's pissed off. She's using a similar platform that Malcolm did, riling people up with words. I think she's asking, what's it like to feel humiliated by listening to a song? To have you reduced to parts and cast you in a role where you are there for her own carnal pleasures and ego boosting? To make you feel less than if you don't have what it takes to please someone like her?

Like you stated, the stamp didn't get as much heat as Minaj gets, precisely because she's a Black woman employing the tools that have been used against her. I personally don't think it's the right approach, but it sure got brothas' attention, because talking, caring, writing, and saying no did not, for the most part. I think this is the conversation we should be having here - why is it that we resort to the master's tools to get our perpetrators to feel? I sure felt hurt for the lookin' ass nigga she was talking to in the video, and then remembered that the hurt is the same kind I feel when I listen to most hip-hop lyrics performed by men.

xkeyscore renders the security state more powerful than the 1% (deep state)

targetfreedom | Apparently the criminals in the United States government now have a vested interest in keeping Edward Snowden alive and safe. A classified briefing was given to members of Congress on Wednesday Feb. 6, 2014. Leading members of the House Armed Services Committee emerged from the classified briefing “shocked” at the amount of information Edward Snowden reportedly took with him when he left the country.

Congressional members were informed that Snowden possesses: A complete roster of absolutely every employee, and official, in the entire US Government. The names, home addresses, unlisted personal home telephone numbers, personal cellular phone numbers, dates of birth and social security numbers of every person involved in any way, with any department of the US Government.

This database even extends to government contractors, bankers, Corporate Boards Of Directors and the entire private support apparatus for the Federal government. As a contractor at the National Security Agency Edward Snowden, became angry at the massive US government spying on its own citizens. Snowden apparently decided to do unto the government exactly as they were doing unto us. Over time he accumulated multiple “doomsday” packages of information, which he took with him when he departed the country.

The bulk of this information seems to have come from Glenn Greenwald, of The Guardian. Glenn Greenwald has received information directly from Edward Snowden. The NSA has admitted that they do not know the extent of what Snowden has. Government is now using shills to distract attention from this story. Government is attempting to create a public prejudice against factual information, by flooding the internet with alternative versions, coming from discredited sources. This is the old intelligence trick called “Poisoning the well”: promotion of fiction or exaggeration to be blended with the actual truth. Purpose is to discredit truth by association with fiction or exaggeration. Embellishing the actual truth tarnishes the truth by association with fiction or exaggeration. When that outlandish fiction or exaggeration is discredited, then many people might dismiss the actual truth; which the Disinformers were able to associate with those outlandish exaggeration.

wikipedia | On January 26, 2014, the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk asked Edward Snowden in its TV interview: "What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?" and he answered:[1]

"You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information."

“…You can tag individuals… Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a form somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.”

According to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, low-level NSA analysts can via systems like XKeyscore "listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst."[6]

He added that the NSA's databank of collected communications allows its analysts to listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future"

1%: environment is destiny

johnkurman |  But Perkins as miraculously inerrant self-made man who's every word should be unquestioningly lapped up, like some child's turd dropped in a doggy dish? He just appeared fully formed out of the shining void with all powers and talents intact? Credit where credit is due, I never deny intelligence and hard work  for success, but LUCK, luck and circumstance, and social position, have to be accounted for as well.

I've been through this before, but, where did all the money come from? Hmm? The very taxpayers and progressive policies that created the basic science R&D, and all the engineers and technicians that made Perkins, and a lot of others in Silicon Valley, rich.

Because if you are going to talk about Perkins and Silicon Valley, then you have to talk about Hewlett-Packard, Stanford U, MIT, and massive government subsidies from the Defense Dep. And if you have to talk about Silicon Valley, then you got to talk about Fred Terman 

Fred Terman was the founder of Silicon Valley, if any single person can be given credit for it. He was one of the most successful American administrators of science, engineering, and higher education in the 20^th century. He made the Stanford engineering department one of the best in the country and laid the foundations that would make Stanford one of the world’s preeminent research universities. He single-handedly created the university, government, private industry partnership model that still characterizes Silicon Valley in the twenty-first century. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were two of Terman’s favorite engineering students, and certainly his most successful protégés. They left behind a Global Fortune 50 company that in 2010 sold products around the world (it is Silicon Valley’s largest corporation by revenues) and multiple multi-billion dollar charitable foundations.

The history of the three is best combined, as is the partnership of Stanford University with the federal government and private industry; the Hewlett Packard Corporation (HP) provides the best example. Their friendship and admiration for each other was genuine. David Packard showed it at Terman’s Memorial Service in January 1983, in Stanford California, when he mentioned knowing Terman for more than 50 years. Packard said he enjoyed Terman’s “friendship and benefited in many ways and on many occasions from his council, his advice, and his wisdom. . . Fred Terman was an engineer’s engineer.” Terman was unique in that he loved technical theory but also loved to build useful products and companies, to see practical things get done.[6]  

Bill Hewlett showed the depth of his affection after hearing of his best friend Packard’s death in a March morning in 1996. Another friend came by to pay his condolences. The friend went into the kitchen and saw Hewlett sitting on his wheelchair by a table in the breakfast nook. Hewlett was staring into the distance; his staff watched him sitting there from the early morning into the afternoon hours, with a deep and sad look on his face.[7]

The HP history is an admirable one of two close friends building a multinational company which during their lives was one of the world’s most admired companies for both its profit growth and its employee-oriented culture.

Fred Terman Settles in California

In 1905 the Terman family moved to Southern California from the Midwest, as Terman’s father needed the warm climate to get over tuberculosis. Terman’s father took a Stanford Education School professorship in 1910, and so the family moved to the place where Fred Terman would both grow up and die. Terman went to Palo Alto High School just as Federal Telegraph Corp. (funded by Stanford President David Starr Jordan) became a major radio company in Palo Alto.

Federal Telegraph is important for both the Valley and Terman. Cy Elwell‘s company convinced the inventor Lee DeForest to leave the East Coast and come to Palo Alto to be his Chief Scientist. DeForest created the electronic amplifier (found in so many electronics devices today), but was still being persecuted and had even been sent to jail for stock fraud charges for a previously failed New York startup.  Elwell had to post bail, and California was a much more amenable place to work for a risky electronics venture. Federal Telegraph went on to have the first intercontinental radio broadcast in 1919 (Annapolis Maryland to Bordeaux France) and was one of the major radio manufacturing companies in the US. Alas, the glamour of Federal Telegraph didn’t last, as it slowly faded around a handful of products till Marconi acquired it in 1931 (two entrepreneurial employees left to found Magnavox).

Federal Telegraph was doubly important because all the neighborhood techie kids became amateur radio enthusiasts, hanging around Federal Telegraph’s labs. In fact, ham radio may have been the first Silicon Valley boom, with its low cost of entry and simple technology, and hence accessibility to a large group of technical-minded people. The inspiration of radio never left Terman – environment was destiny in his case. 

Do I need to talk about Fred Terman? I just gave you the link, but, come on, without Terman building up Stanford's School of Engineering, and without HP taking a rather progressive attitude (due in no small part by Terman's influence) of "share the company’s prosperity with workers" (SOCIALISM!), Perkins could have just as easily been some nobody jerkoff. And no one would care if he violated Godwin's Law.

top drives the global political-economic suffering on the deck of the titanic...,

theatlantic |  Take one look at this graph, and you'll think you recognize the story: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the 1 percent blasts into the stratosphere while the 99 percent languishes in stagnation, moving on... 

Simple, right? Except this graph doesn't tell that story, at all. Because you see that languishing green line at the bottom? That's the 1 percent.

Now let's add labels (the income data lives here if you wanna play at home) and voila, you can see this isn't a picture of the rich and the rest. It's the 40-year history of the rich, the truly rich, and the truly filthy stinking rich—the 1 percent, the 0.1 percent, and the 0.01 percent.

the devastating effect of the blood funnel

zerohedge | At first we thought Reuters had been punk'd in its article titled "EU executive sees personal savings used to plug long-term financing gap" which disclosed the latest leaked proposal by the European Commission, but after several hours without a retraction, we realized that the story is sadly true. Sadly, because everything that we warned about in "There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis" back in September of 2011, and everything that the depositors and citizens of Cyprus had to live through, seems on the verge of going continental. In a nutshell, and in Reuters' own words, "the savings of the European Union's 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says." What is left unsaid is that the "usage" will be on a purely involuntary basis, at the discretion of the "union", and can thus best be described as confiscation.

The source of this stunner is a document seen be Reuters, which describes how the EU is looking for ways to "wean" the 28-country bloc from its heavy reliance on bank financing and find other means of funding small companies, infrastructure projects and other investment. So as Europe finally admits that the ECB has failed to unclog its broken monetary pipelines for the past five years - something we highlight every month (most recently in No Waking From Draghi's Monetary Nightmare: Eurozone Credit Creation Tumbles To New All Time Low), the commissions report finally admits that "the economic and financial crisis has impaired the ability of the financial sector to channel funds to the real economy, in particular long-term investment." 

The solution? "The Commission will ask the bloc's insurance watchdog in the second half of this year for advice on a possible draft law "to mobilize more personal pension savings for long-term financing", the document said."

Mobilize, once again, is a more palatable word than, say, confiscate.

And yet this is precisely what Europe is contemplating:

Banks have complained they are hindered from lending to the economy by post-crisis rules forcing them to hold much larger safety cushions of capital and liquidity.

The document said the "appropriateness" of the EU capital and liquidity rules for long-term financing will be reviewed over the next two years, a process likely to be scrutinized in the United States and elsewhere to head off any risk of EU banks gaining an unfair advantage.

But wait: there's more! 

Inspired by the recently introduced "no risk, guaranteed return" collectivized savings instrument in the US better known as MyRA, Europe will also complete a study by the end of this year on the feasibility of introducing an EU savings account, open to individuals whose funds could be pooled and invested in small companies.

Because when corporations refuse to invest money in Capex, who will invest? Why you, dear Europeans. Whether you like it or not. 

But wait, there is still more!

Additionally, Europe is seeking to restore the primary reason why Europe's banks are as insolvent as they are: securitizations, which the persuasive salesmen and sexy saleswomen of Goldman et al sold to idiot European bankers, who in turn invested the money or widows and orphans only to see all of it disappear.

Taibbi Redux: an attempt at war with the vampire squid

rollingstone |  Congress looked serious about finance reform – until America's biggest banks unleashed an army of 2,000 paid lobbyists. It's early May in Washington, and something very weird is in the air. As Chris Dodd, Harry Reid and the rest of the compulsive dealmakers in the Senate barrel toward the finish line of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act – the massive, year-in-the-making effort to clean up the Wall Street crime swamp – word starts to spread on Capitol Hill that somebody forgot to kill the important reforms in the bill. As of the first week in May, the legislation still contains aggressive measures that could cost once- indomitable behemoths like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase tens of billions of dollars. Somehow, the bill has escaped the usual Senate-whorehouse orgy of mutual back-scratching, fine-print compromises and freeway-wide loopholes that screw any chance of meaningful change.

The Great American Bubble Machine

The real shocker is a thing known among Senate insiders as "716." This section of an amendment would force America's banking giants to either forgo their access to the public teat they receive through the Federal Reserve's discount window, or give up the insanely risky, casino-style bets they've been making on derivatives. That means no more pawning off predatory interest-rate swaps on suckers in Greece, no more gathering balls of subprime shit into incomprehensible debt deals, no more getting idiot bookies like AIG to wrap the crappy mortgages in phony insurance. In short, 716 would take a chain saw to one of Wall Street's most lucrative profit centers: Five of America's biggest banks (Goldman, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup) raked in some $30 billion in over-the-counter derivatives last year. By some estimates, more than half of JP Morgan's trading revenue between 2006 and 2008 came from such derivatives. If 716 goes through, it would be a veritable Hiroshima to the era of greed.

"When I first heard about 716, I thought, 'This is never gonna fly,'" says Adam White, a derivatives expert who has been among the most vocal advocates for reform. When I speak to him early in May, he sounds slightly befuddled, like he can't believe his good fortune. "It's funny," he says. "We keep waiting for the watering-down to take place – but we keep getting to the next hurdle, and it's still staying strong."

In the weeks leading up to the vote on the reform bill, I hear one variation or another on this same theme from Senate insiders: that the usual process of chipping away at key legislation is not taking place with its customary dispatch, despite a full-court press by Wall Street. The financial-services industry has reportedly flooded the Capitol with more than 2,000 paid lobbyists; even veteran members are stunned by the intensity of the blitz. "They're trying everything," says Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio. Wall Street's army is especially imposing given that the main (really, the only) progressive coalition working the other side of the aisle, Americans for Financial Reform, has been in existence less than a year – and has just 60 unpaid "volunteer" lobbyists working the Senate halls.

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

The companies with the most at stake are particularly well-connected. The lobbying campaign for Goldman Sachs, for instance, is being headed up by a former top staffer for Rep. Barney Frank, Michael Paese, who is coordinating some 14 different lobbying firms to fight on Goldman's behalf. The bank is also represented by Capitol Hill heavyweights like former House majority leader Dick Gephardt and former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein. All told, there are at least 40 ex-staffers of the Senate Banking Committee – and even one former senator, Trent Lott – lobbying on behalf of Wall Street. Until the final weeks of the reform debate, however, it seemed that all these insiders were facing the prospect of a rare defeat – and they weren't pleased. One lobbyist even complained to The Washington Post that the bill was being debated out in the open, on the Senate floor, instead of in a smoky backroom. "They've got to get this thing off the floor and into a reasonable, behind-the-scenes" discussion, he groused. "Let's have a few wise fathers sit around the table in some quiet room" to work it out.

As it neared the finish line, the Restoring American Financial Stability Act was almost unprecedentedly broad in scope, in some ways surpassing even the health care bill in size and societal impact. It would rein in $600 trillion in derivatives, create a giant new federal agency to protect financial consumers, open up the books of the Federal Reserve for the first time in history and perhaps even break up the so-called "Too Big to Fail" giants on Wall Street. The recent history of the U.S. Congress suggests that it was almost a given that they would fuck up this one real shot at slaying the dragon of corruption that has been slowly devouring not just our economy but our whole way of life over the past 20 years. Yet with just weeks left in the nearly year-long process at hammering out this huge new law, the bad guys were still on the run. Even the senators themselves seemed surprised at what assholes they weren't being. This new baby of theirs, finance reform, was going to be that one rare kid who made it out of the filth and the crime of the hood for everybody to be proud of.

Then reality set in.

Picture the Restoring American Financial Stability Act as a vast conflict being fought on multiple fronts, with the tiny but enormously influential Wall Street lobby on one side and pretty much everyone else on the planet on the other. To be precise, think World War II – with some battles won by long marches and brutal campaigns of attrition, others by blitzkrieg attacks, still more decided by espionage and clandestine movements. Time after time, at the last moment, the Wall Street axis has turned seemingly lost positions into surprise victories or, at worst, bitterly fought stalemates. The only way to accurately convey the scale of Wall Street's ingenious comeback is to sketch out all the crazy, last-minute shifts on each of the war's four major fronts.

Taibbi Redux: the five bubble history of the vampire squid

rollingstone |  From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

The Feds vs. Goldman

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.

if only the cathedral could stop bellyaching, get off its ass, and find something useful to do...,

physorg | "This study tests the model that the mind cares about physical features only to the extent that they suggest social relationships," explained Pietraszewski. "It shows that the reason the mind attends to race at all is to keep track of people's affiliations. When race proves not to be a factor, the alliance detection system attends to it only minimally, if at all."

"The method we used is entirely unobtrusive," said Tooby. "People don't know what you're measuring, and they couldn't control it even if they did. It shows the principles by which you're categorizing people implicitly. In and of itself, implicitly assigning people to racial categories is not racism. But if you combine the tendency to categorize by race with a negative evaluation, that is racism."

According to Tooby, when race does not predict who's on what side of an issue or who's supporting whom, the mind discards it as an element for identifying alliances. "Traditionally, the general impression people had was that when you learn to be racist, it gets deeply inscribed and sneaks out in subtle ways and it's slow to change," he explained. "One of the striking implications of this research is that the tendency to categorize by race is easy to eliminate.

"The common-sense interpretation of why you see racial categories in the world is because different kinds of people exist, and they look different from each other. Therefore, just like you pick up differences between pears and peaches, you pick up different races in the world," continued Tooby. "But at the genetic level the differences are really hard to see. It's just not the case that people of one race have a large series of genes that people from another race lack; you just don't see that."

The question then becomes why racial differences are so visually salient to people. "We see race in the world because patterns of alliance and cooperation have trained us to sort people into categories that way," he said. "And this training requires that our visual systems pick up tiny differences and amplify them until what we see matches the alliance structure of our social world. Young children are often surprised when adults describe players on their favorite team as being of a different race. They don't see it."

"This research suggests that our minds retrieve race because it predicts alliances in our social world," said Cosmides. "When other cues predict cooperative alliances better, the mind reduces its reliance on racial categories. That's why we refer to the content of your cooperation, not the color of your skin."

For years, she added, social scientists have tried unsuccessfully to identify social situations that decrease the extent to which people categorize others by race. "One of the reasons people had assumed it was so difficult is because it's supported by these perceptual differences," she said. "But we also show that when you have purely perceptual categories—like wearing red shirts versus yellow shirts—and when shirt color doesn't mean anything about coalitions or social differences, people barely pick it up, or they don't pick it up at all. You can't just say people categorize others by skin color because their visual system can't help it."

If categorizing individuals by race is a reversible product of a cognitive system specialized for detecting alliance categories, changing behavior might have more powerful effects than changing minds, the researchers said. "Many people assume you need to change how people think about racial issues to eliminate racism," Cosmides explained. "This research suggests that if cooperation across racial lines continues to increase in our society, our tendency to think about people in racial terms will fall away. Cooperation should change how people think."

why people have to periodically poleaxe potatoheads...,

royalsocietypublishing |  Centralized sanctioning institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning, displace all other forms of punishment and lead to stable cooperation. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good provision tend to rely more on citizen-driven peer punishment? Here, we consider how corruption influences the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in promoting cooperation breaks down when some actors in the model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counterintuitively, a weaker centralized authority is actually more effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities that rely only on strong centralized institutions. Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized enforcement. These results help to explain why citizen participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.

poleaxe-ready potatohead pontificating...,

yahoo | Bud Konheim has a message for all of the 99 percenters: You're luckier than you think.

Konheim, CEO and co-founder of luxury-fashion company Nicole Miller, said on CNBC's " Squawk Box " on Wednesday that Americans not in the top 1 percent would be considered wealthy in most of the world. He said the 99ers should stop complaining and understand how lucky they are.

"We've got a country that the poverty level is wealth in 99 percent of the rest of the world," he said. "So we're talking about woe is me, woe is us, woe is this." He added that "the guy that's making, oh my God, he's making $35,000 a year, why don't we try that out in India or some countries we can't even name. China, anyplace, the guy is wealthy."

Konheim's comments are sure to provoke the inequality crusaders. After all, here is the wealthy CEO of a luxury company that sells $800 sequined dresses and $250 clutches saying that people who make $35,000 a year should be grateful.

But he happens to be correct--at least if you look at only the income numbers. In the U.S., you need around $500,000 in annual income to be in the top 1 percent. Globally, income of $34,000 a year gets you in the top 1 percent, according Branko Milanovic, a World Bank economist.

and at sites of longstanding ongoing gangsterism...,

ICH |  US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Nuland said: “Since the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the United States supported the Ukrainians in the development of democratic institutions and skills in promoting civil society and a good form of government - all that is necessary to achieve the objectives of Ukraine’s European. We have invested more than 5 billion dollars to help Ukraine to achieve these and other goals. ” Nuland said the United States will continue to “promote Ukraine to the future it deserves.”

We don't know who actually tapped and leaked Nuland's private call to the US ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. It could have been the Ukrainian or Russian secret services, but, regardless, it was an inspired move to reveal it. For the disclosure, which has been posted on the internet, lays bare the subversive meddling agenda of Washington in Ukrainian internal affairs. Up to now, the Americans have been piously pretending that their involvement is one of a bystander supporting democracy from afar. 

But, thanks to the Nuland's foul-mouthed indiscretion, the truth is out. Washington, from her own admission, is acting like an agent provocateur in Ukraine's political turmoil. That is an illegal breach of international rules of sovereignty. Nuland finishes her phone call like a gangster ordering a hit on a rival, referring to incompetent European interference in Ukraine with disdain - "F...k the EU."

What we are witnessing here is the real, ugly face of American government and its uncouth contempt for international law and norms.

Next up is Wendy Sherman, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, who is also Washington's top negotiator in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran. Sherman is another flinty-eyed female specimen of the American political class, who, like Nuland, seems to have a block of ice for a heart and a frozen Popsicle for a brain.

Again, like Nuland, Sherman aims to excel in her political career by sounding even more macho, morose and moronic than her male American peers.

Last week, Sherman was giving testimony before the US Senate foreign affairs committee on the upcoming negotiations with Iran over the interim nuclear agreement. The panel was chaired by the warmongering Democrat Senator Robert Menendez, who wants to immediately ramp up more sanctions on Iran, as well as back the Israeli regime in any preemptive military strike on the Islamic Republic.

Sherman's performance was a craven display of someone who has been brainwashed to mouth a mantra of falsehoods with no apparent ability to think for herself. It's scary that such people comprise the government of the most nuclear-armed-and-dangerous state in the world. 

Programmed Sherman accused Iran of harboring ambitions to build nuclear weapons. "We share the same goal [as the warmonger Menendez] to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon." And she went on to repeat threadbare, risible allegations that Iran is supporting international terrorism. That is a disturbing indication of the low level of political intelligence possessed by the US chief negotiator.

"Iran also continues to arm and train militants in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Bahrain. And Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah continue," asserted Sherman without citing an iota of proof and instead relying on a stale-old propaganda narrative.

The number three in the US State Department went on to say of the interim nuclear deal with Iran: "What is also important to understand is that we remain in control over whether to accept the terms of a final deal or not. We have made it clear to Iran that, if it fails to live up to its commitments, or if we are unable to reach agreement on a comprehensive solution, we would ask the Congress to ramp up new sanctions."

Remember that Sherman and her State Department boss John Kerry are considered "soft on Iran" by the likes of Menendez, John McCain, Lyndsey Graham, Mark Kirk, and the other political psychopaths in Washington. So, we can tell from Sherman's callous words and mean-minded logic that the scope for genuine rapprochement between the US and Iran is extremely limited.

 Sherman finished her performance before the Senate panel with the obligatory illegal threat of war that Washington continually issues against Iran: "We retain all options to ensure that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon."

time running out for egypt, iran...,

dailyimpact | Never forget that where you see rebellion, it arises from terrible privation and loss of hope. Nor forget that where you see privation and despair, you will soon see rebellion. It does not matter whether Egypt is governed by the army or the Muslim Brotherhood, by a dictator or a democrat; what matters is that the Egyptian people cannot get enough food, water or fuel. It does not matter whether Iran is governed by a cleric, a moderate or a Southern Baptist; if the people do not have enough food, water or electricity, the government will fall. And that won’t solve the problems.

It’s hard to even imagine how Egypt could find any relief from its intractable problems. Formerly oil rich, it must now import oil for its people; formerly blessed with abundant grain reserves, it must now buy 70 per cent of the wheat needed to keep its people alive. The loss of the oil income, and the new expenses, mean that the government cannot afford to keep subsidizing bread and fuel, in a country where cheap bread and fuel is the difference between subsistence and privation, between hope and despair.

The finance minister in the interim Egyptian government, Ahmed Galal, can add and subtract. One fifth of the country’s entire budget is being spent on the subsidies. Its balance-of-trade deficit, its operating deficit, and its debts to sellers of grain and oil are all growing exponentially. Its declining oil industry, its drought-plagued agriculture industry, its vanished tourist industry — none of these can offer help. The only help Egypt has received in recent years is a whopping $12 billion from the sheikdoms of Arabia, desperate that Egypt not start a trend of failing, formerly oil-rich states.

Minister Galal knows what has to happen. He is talking, ever so delicately, about reducing the subsidies on bread and petroleum. Mubarak tried it, and Mubarak is gone. Morsi found no alternative, and Morsi is gone. In a recent interview for the eternally gullible USA Today, Minister Galal murmured weasel words about moving toward “more sustainable development down the road,” and about “simultaneously [somehow] creating jobs and improving education and health care” — a very nice trick indeed, if anyone could do it.

meanwhile, back at one of many locations where we meddled extensively....,

aljazeera |  An anti-privatisation protest in the city of Tuzla has exploded into general social insurrection.

Whatever little semblance of legitimacy the constitutional order in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) may have enjoyed at the beginning of this week went up in flames on Friday night. BiH's three Presidents, two entities, one special district, ten cantons and internationally appointed High Representative - the entirety of its bloated bureaucracy - witnessed the storming of their government offices in the cities of Tuzla, Sarajevo, Zenica, Bihac and Mostar.

As a result, at least two regional governments have collapsed, in the Tuzla and Zenica-Doboj cantons. What began as a local, anti-privatisation protest on Wednesday in Tuzla had grown by Friday into a general social insurrection.

Two years ago, I wrote that a "Bosnian Spring" was this country's only hope for a brighter future. Now, the spring has come, and with it, the storms. 

For nearly twenty years, Bosnians and Herzegovinians have suffered under the administration of a vicious cabal of political oligarchs who have used ethno-nationalist rhetoric to obscure the plunder of BiH's public coffers. The official unemployment rate has remained frozen for years at around 40 percent, while the number is above  57 percent among youth. Shady privatisation schemes have dismantled what were once flourishing industries in Tuzla and Zenica, sold them off for parts, and left thousands of workers destitute, with many still owed thousands of dollars in back-pay. Pensions are miserly too; the sight of seniors digging through waste bins[Ba] is a regular one in every part of the country, while the wages of BiH's armies of bureaucrats and elected officials have only grown[Sr].

Pervasive corruption

After the general elections in 2010, it took sixteen months for a state government to be formed, one which collapsed almost immediately thereafter. Since then, on the rare occasion that Parliamentary sessions have actually been held, the members of this body have mostly concerned themselves with calling for the ouster of their political opponents. ZivkoBudimir, for instance, the president of the Federation entity, was arrested in April of last year on suspicions of corruption and bribery. He was released shortly thereafter for "lack of evidence" and has since returned to his post. As Sarajevo burnt on Friday, Budimir declared[Sr/Ba/Hr] that he would resign if the people insisted - apparently refusing to look out his window as he spoke. 

Several major elected official in BiH have been under investigation for corruption. In the Federation, the squabbling of Bosniak and Croat nationalists has immobilised government institutions. In the Republika Srpska(RS) entity, President Milorad Dodik has attempted to make himself synonymous with the Serb nation itself - hounding the few independent journalists and activists who dared challenge him. 

But the ethno-nationalist rhetoric of these elites betrays the realities of BiH's true political economy: accumulation through dispossession. The graffiti on the walls of the burnt out husk of the Tuzla canton government now offers a stark rebuke to these policies: "You must all resign! Death to nationalism!"

The international community has, meanwhile, allowed this sordid state of affairs to fester since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. An initial period of reform between 1996 and 2006 has all but completely ceased and since then the country has jerked from one constitutional crisis to the next. All the while, seething public anger has repeatedly threatened to boil over, as it did this past summer during the so-called "Baby Revolution".

The reasons for this rage are simple: At no point have the international architects of peace in BiH expended any serious energy to include ordinary citizens, students, workers or pensioners in the reforms which European and American diplomats insist the country requires. Instead, by engaging exclusively with members of BiH's obstructionist and recalcitrant political establishment, they have only cemented the oligarchs in their posts while the pleas and demands of ordinary citizens, students, workers and civil rights activists have been ignored.

rotflmbao..., “the ideas we’re talking about unite people”

WaPo | It is time, Jim DeMint told his fellow conservatives, to come up with a program beyond opposing everything President Obama does.

“It’s not sufficient for conservatives to run against agendas; they must advance ideas,” the head of the Heritage Foundation advised an audience at his think tank Monday morning. “A mandate to lead without a plan, without a proposal, without original legislation, is no mandate at all.”

And so Heritage Action, the group’s political wing, convened a Conservative Policy Summit to “show Americans what a bold, forward-looking, winning conservative reform agenda looks like.”

But conference organizers must have misread “bold” as “old,” because the proposals they assembled have been collecting dust for years:

They would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from means-tested programs, including Pell grants, school lunches, Medicaid and food stamps.

They would impose a work requirement on food-stamp recipients and perhaps a drug-test requirement on all who receive any form of welfare.

They would open up the outer continental shelf, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and more federal lands to oil drilling, and they would curtail medical-malpractice lawsuits.

They would expand private-school vouchers and introduce Medicaid vouchers, while giving bigger tax breaks for health-care spending — as long as insurance plans don’t cover abortion.

They would abolish Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and cut the federal gas tax by 80 percent, leaving it to the states to fund roads and infrastructure.

They would repeal an 83-year-old law that requires the federal government to pay prevailing wages and they would look into cutting the minimum wage to $5 an hour in some places.

Oh, and they’re backing two more bills that would repeal Obamacare.

DeMint acknowledged the obvious: “Some of the ideas have been introduced before.” But Heritage chose this slate of issues — and not, say, entitlement reform — because “the ideas we’re talking about unite people.”