PragerU, Candace Owens, and Cody testifies before Congress in the body of a young Black woman from Connecticut by warging ala Bran Stark and the Night King.
C’mon people, I only have 5 more weeks to work off my Game of Thrones trivia.
Apr 17 2019
Cartnoon
Along with the Portuguese, Connecticut is infested with Poles (don’t get me started about the Italians and Irish).
I hope you realize that I’m merely being sardonic about Racism and Bigotry in general. It’s not that I have no opinion, I think it’s bad and you should publicly shame Racists and Bigots at the very least and, depending on how bad and entrenched the attitude is, sometimes more energetic action is required.
Anyway it doesn’t seem you can drive 5 minutes without finding a Pulaski Club or a Pulaski Monument or a Pulaski Bridge or Highway or Street.
Who was Casimir Pulaski?
Umm… yeah. Also this–
A Revolutionary War hero who served alongside Washington may have been intersex
By Kayla Epstein, Washington Post
April 8, 2019
Gen. Casimir Pulaski didn’t make it into”Hamilton,” but the world still knows his name. The Revolutionary War hero is considered the “father of the American cavalry,” and even if you aren’t aware of his story, you may have driven over a bridge, joined a society or gazed up at a monument named in his memory. In the mid-19th century, Polish and Catholic immigrants looked to him as a celebrated figure, a sign that they, too, had been part of the American origin story.
…
Intersex individuals have biological variations that do not fit typical categories of male or female. The variations can be chromosomal or differences in a person’s genitalia, hormones or sex organs. Intersex traits can manifest in a variety of ways, some less detectable than others, and members of the intersex community have several ways of identifying their gender.Virginia Estabrook, an anthropologist at Georgia Southern University who helped identify Pulaski’s remains, noted that “there’s a lot of erasure of intersex people over a long period of time.” While historical records show Pulaski was identified and raised as male from birth, and lived as a man, Estabrook said that this new discovery gave his legacy a new significance.
Pulaski is “somebody who was a historical figure, we know a lot about his life,” Estabrook said. “He’s got a story, he’s got a presence. He’s got highways and roads and national holidays named after him. This could be a figure that is a touchstone for a totally different group of people than Pulaski had been a touchstone for in the past.”
As much as 1.7 percent of the world’s population are born with intersex traits, the Intersex Campaign for Equality estimates, and the United Nations points out that these individuals are often stigmatized and abused.
Pulaski was born into nobility in Warsaw, in what was then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There, he began his military career before Benjamin Franklin ultimately recommended that he join the American Revolution on the other side of the sea. Pulaski reached Massachusetts in July 1777, and made a name for himself only a few months later at the Battle of Brandywine, where he was credited with leading a charge that helped save George Washington’s life and the Continental Army from a disastrous defeat.
He stood 5-foot-1 to 5-foot-4, and appears in portraits with dark hair, a strong brow and a slender mustache.
“He was small but also incredibly strong, and incredibly skilled,” Maj. Douglas Shores, author of “Kasimierz Pulaski: General of Two Nations,” says in the Smithsonian Channel documentary. “And was willing to lead people by example, lead out in front.”
Washington made Pulaski a general, and the young commander set to work remaking the Colonial cavalry. He died after being wounded at the Siege of Savannah, Ga., in 1779, where revolutionary forces suffered a resounding defeat. However, Pulaski’s death at 34 solidified his reputation as an American military hero.
…
When examining the remains, forensic anthropologist Karen Burns realized that the pelvic bone appeared to be that of a woman. It seemed to rule out the possibility that the bones belonged to the father of the American cavalry.But there were other indicators that pointed to Pulaski: similar height and age, scarring in the pelvis that indicated extensive horseback riding and an injury on the hand that matched one he had sustained in battle.
…
Burns died in 2012, with the identity of the bones still unanswered. But a new generation of researchers, including Estabrook, carried on the investigation. A new round of mitochondrial DNA tests in 2018 showed a match between the skeleton and Pulaski’s deceased Polish relative.The skeleton belonged to Pulaski. But what to make of the pelvis that appeared to be that of a woman? The scientists concluded that he may have been intersex, which would have accounted for the discrepancy.
“What we do know is that we have a disconnect between what we see in the skeleton and what we know about Pulaski’s life,” Estabrook said. She noted that there was little research on how intersex conditions impacted skeletal development, and that the Pulaski case was a sign of the work that needs to be done in this field.
The findings help bring new significance to the life of a soldier who already occupied a distinguished place in history. That he was able to rise up the ranks of the Continental Army is a remarkable achievement, said Hida Viloria, an intersex and non-binary activist and author, in the documentary.
“I think that Pulaski being intersex doesn’t impact or change his legacy at all,” Viloria said. “If anything, I think it enhances it.”
Apr 17 2019
Pondering the Pundits
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Paul Krugman: Republicans Are the Real Extremists
Conspiracy theorists and enemies of democracy, oh my.
All of Donald Trump’s major policies have failed substantively, politically, or both. His one big legislative achievement, the 2017 tax cut, remains unpopular. His attacks on Obamacare have only enhanced public approval of the program. His fearmongering has cemented majority opposition to his proposed border wall.
But while today’s G.O.P. can’t do policy, it commands a powerful propaganda machine. And this machine is now dedicated to a strategy of portraying Democrats as extremists. It might work — but it shouldn’t, because Democrats aren’t extremists, but Republicans are.
The attack on Democrats has largely involved demonizing two new members of Congress, Representative Ilhan Omar and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Omar is Muslim, and the usual suspects have gone all-out in using an out-of-context quotation to portray her, completely falsely, as sympathetic to terrorists. AOC, who calls herself a democratic socialist — although she’s really just a social democrat — has been the subject of obsessive coverage on the right. Over a six-week period, Fox News and Fox Business mentioned her more than 3,000 times, invariably portraying her as ignorant, radical, or both.
It’s surely not an accident that these two principal targets are both women of color; there’s a sense in which supposed concerns about extremism are just a cover for sexism and white nationalism. But it’s still worth pointing out that while both Omar and AOC are on the left of the Democratic Party, neither is staking out policy positions that are extreme compared with either expert views or public opinion.
Harry Litman: If Congress wants the unredacted Mueller report, here’s how to get it
The Justice Department has announced that it will deliver special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report to Congress and the public on Thursday morning, but with redactions of grand jury information (and other categories of information) that will leave innumerable gaps in our understanding of what Mueller uncovered. Many commentators have suggested that Congress’s only mechanism for securing an unredacted report is to launch a formal impeachment inquiry — a blind step forward with great political risks for congressional Democrats and the party overall. [..]
But that’s not correct. In fact, Congress has immediate recourse to seek the unredacted report pursuant to the ”judicial proceeding” exception, without having to initiate an impeachment inquiry.
How do we know? Well, for starters, we need look no further than the Starr investigation of President Bill Clinton and the succeeding impeachment proceedings in Congress. In September 1998, before the House had initiated an impeachment inquiry, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr sought and received from federal district court an order to provide to Congress his report, including voluminous grand jury materials. The court’s order granting the request provided expressly that it constituted an order for purposes of the “judicial proceeding” exception in the federal rules.
It was only after digesting Starr’s report, and based upon the report, that the House decided to initiate an impeachment proceeding.
Apr 17 2019
The Breakfast Club (Abstinence)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Cuban exiles invade Bay of Pigs; Three astronauts of Apollo 13 land safely in pacific ocean; Benjamin Franklin dies at age 84; JP Morgan born in Connecticut; Ford rolls out the Mustang convertible.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.
Apr 16 2019
Kangaroo Court Show Trials
Well, we won’t be getting them soon. Let’s take a moment to remember why we can’t have just a plain old regular trial instead of these cobbled together travesties.
THE UNITED STATES TORTURES PEOPLE!
And evidence obtained by torture is inadmissible.
Guantanamo military tribunal hit with another legal setback
By JOSH GERSTEIN, Politico
04/16/2019
A federal appeals court dealt another severe blow to the beleaguered Guantanamo Bay military tribunals Tuesday, tossing out three years worth of rulings in a key terror case after deciding the judge overseeing the proceedings did not appear to be impartial.
In a blistering opinion, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that Air Force Col. Vance Spath created “an intolerable cloud of partiality” over the military commission by pursuing a job at the Justice Department while simultaneously presiding over the case against Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the U.S.S. Cole bombing in Yemen in 2000.
The unanimous opinion from a three-judge panel also accused Spath of a “lack of candor” for obscuring his pending job change by not revealing it when he halted proceedings in the case in July 2018.
Judge David Tatel said that under the circumstances, Al-Nashiri had “a clear and indisputable right to relief.”
The case is being handled under Guantanamo Bay’s military commissions, created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to prosecute detainees at the military prison.
The process — intended to bypass civilian courts out of concerns they might offer too many rights to the accused and jeopardize classified information — has run into one hurdle after another, including repeated allegations of intrusions on the confidentiality of defense communications.
The problems have led to a tangle of litigation that has resulted in protracted delays, not only in the Cole case, but in another case against men accused of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Tuesday’s ruling is yet another setback for the tribunal system. The order included an extraordinary rebuke of military judges, prosecutors and other officials for failing to ensure that the commission process remained free of bias and the appearance of bias.
…
(I)n this case, save for Al-Nashiri’s defense counsel, all elements of the military commission system—from the prosecution team to the Justice Department to the [Court of Military Commission Review] to the judge himself—failed to live up to that responsibility,” Tatel wrote. “And we cannot dismiss Spath’s lapse as a one-time aberration, as Al-Nashiri’s is not the first meritorious request for recusal that our court has considered with respect to military commission proceedings.”Tatel added that the need for an independent judge in Al-Nashiri’s case was heightened by the fact that the government is seeking the death penalty in connection with the deaths of 17 soldiers in the Cole attack.
“In no proceeding is the need for an impartial judge more acute than one that may end in death,” Tatel wrote in an opinion joined by Judges Judith Rogers and Thomas Griffith.
The ruling will void about 460 written orders Spath issued as well as an untold number of oral rulings, including rulings he issued against defense attorneys who attempted to withdraw from the case over ethics concerns.
The decision means any trial for Nashiri, an alleged al-Qaida operative, will likely come more than two decades after his alleged crime.
Tatel said the court recognized that the ruling would lead to further delays in a process already faulted for its glacial pace, but added that upholding the legitimacy of the process had to take precedence over speed.
“Surely the public’s interest in efficient justice is no greater than its interest in impartial justice,” Tatel wrote. “Any institution that wields the government’s power to deny life and liberty must do so fairly, as the public’s ultimate objective is not in securing a conviction but in achieving a just outcome.”
The appeals court also noted that the military initially replaced Spath with another military judge, Air Force Col. Shelly Schools. However, earlier this year, government lawyers said her retirement was imminent — as she also had accepted a position in the Justice Department’s burgeoning ranks of immigration judges.
The Justice Department declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. The Defense Department had no immediate comment on the ruling.
An attorney for Nashiri, Michael Paradis, said the D.C. Circuit decision ruling is an indictment of the military commissions system.
“It is a disgrace that it had to come to this,” Paradis told POLITICO. “These are basic rules of judicial ethics. They were violated for years. They were violated in secret. And no one within the military commission system … did anything even after they came to light.”
“Things like this would never have happened in a federal court, let alone festered for years as they have,” Paradis added.
Apr 16 2019
Pondering the Pundits
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Michael Tomasky: Is America Becoming an Oligarchy?
Growing inequality threatens our most basic democratic principles.
Pete Buttigieg, who’s shown an impressive knack for putting matters well in these early days of the 2020 presidential race, nailed it recently when Chuck Todd of NBC asked him about capitalism. Of course I’m a capitalist, he said; America “is a capitalist society.”
But, he continued: “It’s got to be democratic capitalism.”
Mr. Buttigieg said that when capitalism becomes unrestrained by democratic checks and impulses, that’s no longer the kind of capitalism that once produced broad prosperity in this country. “If you want to see what happens when you have capitalism without democracy, you can see it very clearly in Russia,” he said. “It turns into crony capitalism, and that turns into oligarchy.”
Aside from enabling Mr. Buttigieg, the South Bend, Ind., mayor, to swat away a question that has bedeviled some others, his rhetoric reminds us of a crucial point: There is, or should be, a democratic element to capitalism — and an economic element to how we define democracy. [..]
But somehow, as the definition of democracy has been handed down to us over the years, the word has come to mean the existence and exercise of a few basic rights and principles. The people — the “demos” — are imbued with no particular economic characteristic. This is wrong. Our definition of democracy needs to change.
Democracy can’t flourish in a context of grotesque concentration of wealth. This idea is neither new nor radical nor alien. It is old, mainstream and as American as Thomas Jefferson.
Charles M. Blow: Demonizing Minority Women
Representative Ilhan Omar is the latest target in a trend of conservatives attacking women of color.
Last month at an event hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, delivered a speech in which she correctly derided Islamophobia, a real and persistent problem in this country and others.
In that speech, Representative Omar invoked the attacks of Sept. 11, saying the council was created “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
(As The New York Times pointed out, “The Council on American-Islamic Relations was actually founded in 1994.)
The congresswoman could have used different, more severe language to describe the attacks, but she didn’t. Maybe we could judge her use of language as inartful, but we all succumb to that occasionally, me included. Error is inevitable among the loquacious. But, the Omar of the speech stands. I saw nowhere in it a thread of terror apologia. [..]
While the unrelenting attacks on Omar are newsworthy unto themselves as a conservative peculiarity, I believe that the attacks should be viewed through a wider and longer lens. Omar is only the most recent minority woman onto whom conservatives have trained their fire.
While white supremacy has historically tried to paint minority men as physically dangerous, it has routinely painted minority women, particularly those strong and vocal, as pathological and reprobate.
Apr 16 2019
The Modern Monetary Theory Wave
Frankly when I started highlighting it and writing about some of the core concepts it was because I thought it was hip and edgy. I certainly never expected it to find such wide acceptance so soon.
Understanding Fiat Money is easy if you have a background in Keynesian Economics. Some still dismiss it (looking at you Krugman), even if they have adopted most of the primary principles, as mere accounting. Nothing mere about accounting.
Now my home Local (Capo di Tutti remember) we had strict rules set by our National Organization for budgeting local projects and expenses. Every report started with “Allocation from Local”, ended with “Return to Local” and the net economic activity was Zero. Project reports were submitted to the State, Regional, and National Organization for competitive judging based on completeness and beauty and as a veteran Judge (they operated under the illusion I was fair and impartial) the easiest way to cull the herd was to take a look at the budget and see if it conformed to guidelines.
People balk at the notion that the expenditure of funds can take place before any income is received, but you do have income- right up front. In my case you went to the Local Treasurer and they cut you a check, in a Government with a sovereign currency you print what you need to get the ball rolling.
Later you give it all back of course, to the Local if the intent was profit, or to your chosen charity if that was the purpose. In the mean time you spend it and all your vendors are a little wealthier and they spend money too, it’s called the multiplier effect.
So, mere accounting. In the case of a Government with a sovereign currency “later” effectively means never unless hyper-inflation gets you. Debt service? It’s a “sovereign” currency. You pay it back in the same notes you printed to get it.
Anyway it’s getting disgustingly mainstream and I’ll have to cook up a new way to be peculiar.
Modern Monetary Theory Finds an Embrace in an Unexpected Place: Wall Street
By Patricia Cohen, The New York Times
April 5, 2019
The package of eccentric ideas known as modern monetary theory — for example, that annual deficits are too small, and that the United States can essentially print money to pay off its debt — has been on the receiving end of a remarkable level of vitriol.
In policy circles, heavyweight economists have churned out scathing attacks. In the business arena, titans like Laurence D. Fink and Bill Gates have labeled it “garbage” and “crazy talk.” And in academia, when the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business asked top scholars about a couple of its claims, they split between the 28 percent who disagreed and the 72 percent who strongly disagreed.
But M.M.T., as it’s known, is attracting a conspicuous number of fans in an unexpected place: Wall Street. Money managers, chief executives and business analysts maintain that the approach offers several important and overlooked insights, and far from finding it fanciful or deranged, they are using M.M.T. to build economic forecasts and even trading strategies.
…
That framework helped produce billion-dollar gains for the company after the 2008 financial crisis. Dismissing alarms about outsize government debt and white-knuckle interest rates, Pimco instead bet successfully that rates would remain low. When it came to decision-making during this period, Mr. McCulley said, M.M.T. and other unorthodox approaches helped him “get it right.”Richard C. Koo, chief economist at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo, said he had been telling his clients for years that “even with huge budget deficits in the U.S., interest rates would actually come down, not go up.”
Wall Street is not immune to the herd mentality, but Mr. Koo and several other analysts argued that academic economists had a vested interest in certain theories and were, therefore, more likely to suffer from groupthink.
In an article posted on Wednesday on the website of Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Company, known as GMO, the strategist James Montier wrote: “For me an economic approach must help me understand the world, and provide me with some useful insights (preferably about my day job — investing). On those measures, let me assure you that M.M.T. thrashes neoclassical economics, hands down.”
And Daniel Alpert, a managing partner of the investment bank Westwood Capital, credited the theory with preventing him from panicking that rates would soar when the Federal Reserve set off a brief “taper tantrum” in 2013 and announced it was easing its stimulus program.
Over the past couple of years, he said, the Fed tried everything — “it did a belly dance to get long-term interest rates up” — and it didn’t work.
M.M.T., Mr. Alpert said, “successfully debunks 40 years of misassumptions of how markets and public credit work.”
Progressive politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York are among the most vocal supporters of M.M.T., but the theory’s appeal crosses political lines in part because it offers a narrative for a series of events that the established wisdom failed to anticipate or explain.
Big government deficits, for instance, were supposed to mop up available pools of capital and drive up interest rates, which would, in turn, elbow out private investors, damage growth and feed inflation.
But the last decade was different. When deficits soared after the recession, interest rates fell and savings rates climbed. Investors are awash in capital. The economy has been expanding, slowly, for 10 years, with unemployment and inflation rates ensconced at record-low levels.
One reason for the misjudgments may be that the economic models that confidently strode down the mainstream were hammered out in the decades after World War II, when American companies had an enormous appetite for capital investment. “We don’t live in that world anymore,” said Mr. Koo of Nomura. Today, vast fortunes shift across oceans in an instant, currencies are untethered from gold, and your local coffee shop may no longer accept cash.
Technological advances, demographic shifts and persistently lower interest rates have further altered the global economy. Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief economic adviser at the financial firm Allianz, wrote in an email that “modern monetary theory has merit in stimulating debate” on whether those changes provide “for governments to run larger economically sustainable deficits than was previously thought possible.”
Besides the risk of government deficits, M.M.T. throws out a drawerful of other venerable assumptions with Marie Kondo-esque ruthlessness. To start, it instructs you to erase that textbook drawing of a white-haired Uncle Sam collecting tax dollars from the public and then using them to pay for military weapons, highway repairs, federal workers’ wages and more.
Tax revenues are not what finance the government’s expenditures, argues Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University and one of the most influential modern monetary theorists. What actually happens in a country that controls its own currency, she says, is that the government first decides what it’s going to spend. In the United States, Congress agrees on a budget. Then government agencies start handing out dollars to the public to pay for those tanks, earth movers and salaries. Afterward, it takes a portion back in the form of taxes. If the government takes back less than it gave out, there will be a deficit.
“The national debt is nothing more than a historical record of all of the dollars that were spent into the economy and not taxed back, and are currently being saved in the form of Treasury securities,” Ms. Kelton said.
Ms. Kelton, a frequent speaker at business and financial conferences and the chief economic adviser to Mr. Sanders during his 2016 presidential campaign, points out that every dollar the government spends translates into a dollar of income for someone else. So a deficit in the public sector simultaneously produces a surplus outside the government.
The reverse is also true, Ms. Kelton maintains, and that can lead to trouble. The seven biggest American depressions or downturns going back 200 years, she said, were all preceded by government surpluses.
Ms. Kelton complains that modern monetary theorists are often incorrectly described as contending that “deficits don’t matter.” Of course they matter, she said.
What she disagrees with is the reason given. In her view, deficits are not a sign of excessive spending or necessarily a forerunner of inflation. They can be too big, especially if they are not used to increase the nation’s productive capacity, or if there is a shortage of labor, raw materials and factories.
“If Congress authorizes too much spending and businesses are not nimble enough” to absorb it, there can be bottlenecks and price pressure, she acknowledged.
But she argues that it is much more likely that deficits are too small, depriving the economy of critical investments. The best way to stabilize the economy and ensure full employment and a humming economy, she said, is to have the federal government guarantee every American a job.
The notion that surpluses could cause economic downturns flips conventional thinking. Yet the idea of sectoral balances — that government or nongovernment deficits are offset by surpluses on the other side — is what some financial economists find so illuminating, even if they stop short of endorsing all of the theory’s tenets.
“It is a great way of summarizing whether households and firms are living beyond their means,” said Mr. Hatzius of Goldman Sachs. “It is a great indicator of potential financial crises.”
In his view, giant private-sector deficits are much more alarming than public-sector ones because households and companies are at much greater risk of losing access to credit in a downturn. Unlike the Treasury, they can’t print money — or issue bonds — when they run out.
…
Mr. Koo of Nomura has further developed the idea of sectoral balances to explain the most recent wave of recessions and argue for larger government deficits. The problem that major economies in Japan, Europe and the United States have today, he said, is that despite low interest rates, investment opportunities in domestic markets don’t offer sufficient returns to lure borrowers to go into debt, using the vast pools of available savings.That means “the government has to spend money to keep the economy going,” he said. And as long as the government invests in projects that produce an economic return greater than the yield on 10-year Treasury notes — currently about 2.5 percent — “this will never be a burden on taxpayers.”
…
To many mainstream economists, though, M.M.T. is a confused mishmash that proponents use to support their political objectives, whether big government programs like “Medicare for all” and the Green New Deal or smaller taxes. Think of the Mirror of Erised in the Harry Potter saga, which shows the heart’s desire — a tantalizing prospect that ultimately brings ruin.From this perspective, M.M.T. is a version of free-lunchonomics, leaving the next generation to pay for this generation’s profligacy.
Although several prominent mainstream economists have recently revised their thinking about the risks of large government debt, they continue to reject other tenets of M.M.T.
At some point, they insist, if the government just creates money to pay the bills, hyperinflation will kick in.
…
Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 2009 to 2015, is aware of the conflicts between M.M.T. and the traditional framework developed by John Maynard Keynes, in which it is rooted.But he is more struck by their similarities rather than their differences. Both recommend that government should spend when the private sector isn’t doing enough to employ the nation’s work force, raw materials and factories to prompt growth. Both deem inflation to be insidious.
The inflationary threat looms particularly large for economists of his generation, Mr. Kocherlakota, 55, said. For them, the seminal experience was the scarring inflation of the 1970s. “The big lesson was that resources are always scarce,” he said.
But over the past decade, he said, his thinking has evolved. Now Mr. Kocherlakota is more inclined to believe that scarcity is not the overriding problem and that the federal government could spend more without risk of excessive inflation.
If you put aside the theoretical disputations, Mr. Kocherlakota said, the important question is: How far is the United States from reaching the limits of its capacity?
Even with a jobless rate under 4 percent, he believes there is room to maneuver.
Mr. Kocherlakota said that compared to those within the Fed, chief executives, financiers and analysts who operate internationally tend to be more open to modern monetary theory in their analyses of government deficits and inflation.
“Folks who take a global perspective are much more likely to see a lot of unused capacity,” he said. They realize “inflation is not built at home anymore, it’s built through global pressures.”
Mr. McCulley, the Pimco alumnus, would put his money on that. Increasing the deficit so that the government could invest in infrastructure and the labor force “would not make me bearish on the stock market at all,” he said.
“At all,” he repeated. “If anything, it would make me bullish.”
The Chicago School is nothing more than a bunch of rattleshaking Shamen chanting “Inflation. Inflation.” Also Social Darwinism and Economic Calvinism.
Show me some or shut up. Bless your heart (in Dixie) idiots.
Apr 16 2019
The Breakfast Club (Unawakened)
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Virginia Tech shooting kills 32 students and faculty; Country’s deadliest industrial accident in Texas; Vladimir Lenin returns to Russia after years of exile; Charlie Chaplin born; Prince Andrew and Duchess of York announce divorce; Rolling Stone release debut album; Michael Jordan plays last NBA game.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Until one has loved an animal a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
Apr 15 2019
Notre Dame is burning.
The roof is fully engaged, the central spire has collapsed, the medieval stained glass windows (I’ve worked with stained glass a bit) are threatened with destruction not to mention the many Gargoyles and sculptures and other priceless art inside the Cathedral.
They started building it in 1160 which means it’s 859 years old.
It’s incredibly depressing and so I’ll distract you and myself with this-
Maryann Thorpe
It’s not easy being green
Did you know Kermit was hooked on Oxy? Well you would if you’d watched the John Oliver I posted earlier.
Muppets!
Apr 15 2019
Pondering the Pundits
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Paul Krugman: Purity vs. Pragmatism, Environment vs. Health
A surprising, important difference between the Green New Deal and Medicare for all.
Right now there are two big progressive ideas out there: the Green New Deal on climate change and “Medicare for all” on health reform. Both would move U.S. policy significantly to the left. Each is sponsored by a self-proclaimed socialist: the Green New Deal by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Medicare for all by Bernie Sanders. (Of course, neither of them is a socialist in the traditional sense.) Both ideas horrify not just conservatives but also many self-proclaimed centrists.
Yet while they may seem similar if you think of everything as left versus right, they’re very different on another dimension, which you might call purity versus pragmatism. And that difference is why I believe progressives should enthusiastically embrace the G.N.D. while being much more cautious about M4A.
You see, for all its sweeping ambition, the Green New Deal is arguably an exercise in pragmatism — in the proposition that the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Owen Jones: Whatever you think of Julian Assange, his extradition to the US must be opposed
Extraditing the founder of WikiLeaks is an attempt by the US to intimidate anyone who exposes its crimes
States that commit crimes in foreign lands depend on at least passive acquiescence. This is achieved in a number of ways. One is the “othering” of the victims: the stripping away of their humanity, because if you imagined them to be people like your own children or your neighbours, their suffering and deaths would be intolerable. Another approach is to portray opponents of foreign aggression as traitors, or in league with hostile powers. And another strategy is to cover up the consequences of foreign wars, to ensure that the populace is kept intentionally unaware of the acts committed in their name. [..]
But Assange’s extradition to the US must be passionately opposed. It is notable that Obama’s administration itself concluded that to prosecute Assange for publishing documents would gravely imperil press freedom. Yes, this is a defence of journalism and media freedom. But it is also about the attempt to intimidate those who expose crimes committed by the world’s last remaining superpower. The US wishes to hide its crimes so it can continue to commit them with impunity: that’s why, last month, Trump signed an executive order to cover up civilian deaths from drones, the use of which has hugely escalated in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan.
Silence kills, because a public that is uninformed about the slaughter of innocent people by their own government will not exert pressure to stop the killing. For the sake of stopping crimes yet to be committed, this extradition – and the intentionally chilling precedent it sets – must be defeated.
Apr 15 2019
Opium Wars
In 1820 China had the largest economy in the world. By 1787 the British East India Company was selling them 680,000 pounds of Opium a year. They weren’t the only providers, just one of the bigger ones. Among the English they had a Crown Monopoly on the Trade.
By 1833 they were providing 5.1 Million pounds and after years of attempting to buy them off, in 1839 the Chinese seized a bunch of it. Britain, not satisfied with the value of the settlement for the property, engaged in an aggressive military campaign against China called The First Opium War.
China was resoundingly defeated and in the diktat of Nanking surrendered control of Hong Kong in perpetuity, and opened the ports of Shanghai, Canton, Ningpo, Foochow, and Amoy, gave most favored nation status to the English and added provisions for British extraterritoriality (meaning British citizens were not subject to Chinese law). There was a Second Opium War in 1856 but it was more about Territorial expansion and trading in Chinese Slaves than Opium.
All of which are very bad things to do.
Three Songs about Heroin, an Opioid
I’ve had Opioids, Codeine for a variety of ills (toothache), Morphine for Hospital level pain (I call that a 6, 10 is passed out and 9 is I want to die), Fentanyl as an anesthetic (I don’t remember missing a full day per se but there were events other people attest to that I can’t recall), and Oxycontin, a lot of it over a fair amount of time (3 – 4 weeks maybe) after I broke my leg in half a dozen places.
Never finished it. At the end it was just making me paranoid and itch all over so I stopped. Didn’t affect my overall pain level which normally runs at about a 2. Yeah, pretty much every day, you get used to it.
Withdrawal? Didn’t notice it (I already felt pretty crappy) so my experience is mine and probably not typical.
I pity the fool who doesn’t like Curling
Winter is here.
Self Regulation does not work.
Did John Oliver talk about other things? Yes, and I hope to post his remarks but sourcing other than the main topic is difficult.