I mean seriously, why isn’t representation knocking down my door? This is Hollywood gold!

Those pesky Pottsylvanians Russians keep coming back to haunt Trump
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
January 8, 2019

This case doesn’t have anything directly to do with the president or his family, but it does serve as more evidence of Veselnitskaya’s close Kremlin ties. She’s being charged with presenting to the court a supposedly independent Russian government report exonerating her clients, when in fact she “had participated in drafting those supposed independent investigative findings in secret cooperation with a senior Russian prosecutor.”

Which reinforces the likelihood that when Veselnitskaya sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort in June 2016, she was there as a representative of the Russian government.

That, of course, was how she was privately presented to the Trump campaign. You’ll recall that when the meeting was proposed in an email to Trump Jr. by his acquaintance Rob Goldstone, the latter wrote that dirt on Hillary Clinton would be forthcoming from Russia, and “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Don Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say, I love it,” and quickly arranged the meeting with the campaign’s top officials.

What has never been clear is why Veselnitskaya was unable to deliver the goods. We may never know; she’s back in Russia and will probably not be coming back to face questioning by U.S. prosecutors. That meeting, from both the Russian and Trump campaign sides, shows that conspiracies are seldom as neat and efficient as Hollywood would have us believe. They’re more likely to be full of incompetence and miscommunication, with everyone pursuing their own agendas and often unable to coordinate in the way they’d like.

That has been the basis of the Trump defense in all this, which basically comes down to the assertion that while they may have been trying to collude with Russia, the collusion never quite came together, and so they’re innocent. That isn’t completely false (except the innocent part), but the most important fact about the Trump Tower meeting may be that just about everyone involved has either been proven to have lied about it, or has said things about it that are impossible to believe.

To review: When the story of the meeting broke, Don Jr. first said it was for the purpose of discussing Russian adoptions and had nothing to do with the campaign, a lie that lasted all of one day. President Trump personally dictated a false statement for Don Jr. to release to the media, then had his representatives deny that he had done so. Kushner omitted mention of the meeting on his security clearance forms, and claimed he had no idea what the meeting was about despite the fact that he had been sent the email explaining that it was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Rudy Giuliani then said that Don Jr., Kushner and Manafort didn’t even know Veselnitskaya was Russian. (“She didn’t represent the Russian government, she’s a private citizen. I don’t even know if they knew she was Russian at the time,” Giuliani said.) It may also turn out that President Trump knew in advance about the Trump Tower meeting, which would mean that both he and Don Jr. have lied about that, too.

This is simply not how innocent people act.

At some point in the near future, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s final assessments will be made public in some form. There will no doubt be a good deal of discussion of the Trump Tower meeting and how it relates to the rest of the well-documented campaign waged by the Russian government to help Donald Trump get elected. At that point, Trump and his surrogates will insist that none of it means anything.

Here’s a suggestion, though, for an argument they can make. Sure, Trump and his family have associations with shady Russians, including some under indictment. But they have associations with shady Americans, too! So there’s nothing to see here.

If you’re like me (and nobody is, I am unique!) when you think of AOC you think of Computer Monitors of which I’ve owned several, some of which are still in service. My last acquisition was a 15.6″ 1920 x 1080 Portable USB unit (AOC I1659FWUX 15.6″). It’s not the best one I have but it’s a ton easier to cart around than my 32″ Vizio which I bought back when I had cataracts and macular degeneration (both under control now, thank you for your concern). To me it’s primary utility is the 1920 x 1080 Desktop (my HP 6475b’s 1366 x 768 is extremely cramped for the way I work), the image quality is adequate but nothing special.

But I’m not here to hardware brag (ok, maybe a little), I’m here to talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D NY-14) and Political Economics.

The Economics of Soaking the Rich
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Jan. 5, 2019

The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance. (Although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has ever implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.

To be more specific, Diamond, in work with Emmanuel Saez — one of our leading experts on inequality — estimated the optimal top tax rate to be 73 percent. Some put it higher: Christina Romer, top macroeconomist and former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimates it at more than 80 percent.

Where do these numbers come from? Underlying the Diamond-Saez analysis are two propositions: Diminishing marginal utility and competitive markets.

Diminishing marginal utility is the common-sense notion that an extra dollar is worth a lot less in satisfaction to people with very high incomes than to those with low incomes. Give a family with an annual income of $20,000 an extra $1,000 and it will make a big difference to their lives. Give a guy who makes $1 million an extra thousand and he’ll barely notice it.

What this implies for economic policy is that we shouldn’t care what a policy does to the incomes of the very rich. A policy that makes the rich a bit poorer will affect only a handful of people, and will barely affect their life satisfaction, since they will still be able to buy whatever they want.

So why not tax them at 100 percent? The answer is that this would eliminate any incentive to do whatever it is they do to earn that much money, which would hurt the economy. In other words, tax policy toward the rich should have nothing to do with the interests of the rich, per se, but should only be concerned with how incentive effects change the behavior of the rich, and how this affects the rest of the population.

But here’s where competitive markets come in. In a perfectly competitive economy, with no monopoly power or other distortions — which is the kind of economy conservatives want us to believe we have — everyone gets paid his or her marginal product. That is, if you get paid $1000 an hour, it’s because each extra hour you work adds $1000 worth to the economy’s output.

In that case, however, why do we care how hard the rich work? If a rich man works an extra hour, adding $1000 to the economy, but gets paid $1000 for his efforts, the combined income of everyone else doesn’t change, does it? Ah, but it does — because he pays taxes on that extra $1000. So the social benefit from getting high-income individuals to work a bit harder is the tax revenue generated by that extra effort — and conversely the cost of their working less is the reduction in the taxes they pay.

Or to put it a bit more succinctly, when taxing the rich, all we should care about is how much revenue we raise. The optimal tax rate on people with very high incomes is the rate that raises the maximum possible revenue.

And that’s something we can estimate, given evidence on how responsive the pre-tax income of the wealthy actually is to tax rates. As I said, Diamond and Saez put the optimal rate at 73 percent, Romer at over 80 percent — which is consistent with what AOC said.

An aside: What if we take into account the reality that markets aren’t perfectly competitive, that there’s a lot of monopoly power out there? The answer is that this almost surely makes the case for even higher tax rates, since high-income people presumably get a lot of those monopoly rents.

So AOC, far from showing her craziness, is fully in line with serious economic research. (I hear that she’s been talking to some very good economists.) Her critics, on the other hand, do indeed have crazy policy ideas — and tax policy is at the heart of the crazy.

You see, Republicans almost universally advocate low taxes on the wealthy, based on the claim that tax cuts at the top will have huge beneficial effects on the economy. This claim rests on research by … well, nobody. There isn’t any body of serious work supporting G.O.P. tax ideas, because the evidence is overwhelmingly against those ideas.
…
America used to have very high tax rates on the rich — higher even than those AOC is proposing — and did just fine. Since then tax rates have come way down, and if anything the economy has done less well.

Why do Republicans adhere to a tax theory that has no support from nonpartisan economists and is refuted by all available data? Well, ask who benefits from low taxes on the rich, and it’s obvious.

And because the party’s coffers demand adherence to nonsense economics, the party prefers “economists” who are obvious frauds and can’t even fake their numbers effectively.

Which brings me back to AOC, and the constant effort to portray her as flaky and ignorant. Well, on the tax issue she’s just saying what good economists say; and she definitely knows more economics than almost everyone in the G.O.P. caucus, not least because she doesn’t “know” things that aren’t true.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a self identified Socialist which actually is a good thing for the .01%. She’d let you keep the money you’ve already stolen. I’m an Anarcho-Syndicalist and I’d call for confiscatory Wealth Taxes.

Yeah, that $500+ Million Golden Parachute? Forget about it. Pick any 5 Houses (residences, not investments). Millage on financial transactions. Corporate Accountability (yup, jail time) and meaningful fines and vigorous anti-Monopoly enforcement. Corporate Officer pay tied to the salary of the lowest wage worker. Active redistribution baby!

Now that’s radical.

As a believer in Modern Monetary Theory (to a certain extent) I also realize that these debates are essentially meaningless. The only measure of whether there is too much money in the Economy is Inflation and what we have right now is entirely the result of the Federal Reserve’s desire to regain the illusion of fiscal control by raising interest rates. If we needed to win WW II today we’d print the money to do it and nothing bad would happen. Deficits are a joke and Democrats who buy the Debt/Deficit Hawk propoganda are idiots or thieves themselves.

Conflict – Off The Air

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.

Elvis Presley born; President Lyndon Johnson declares war on poverty; Ramzi Yousef sentenced to life in prison for first World Trade Center bombing. Physicist Stephen Hawking born.

All the pain and the poverty. Hypocrisy fuels my truth. Ain’t no stopping me.

Rep. Antonio Delgado (D-NY)

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect.

What’s behind the confidence of the incompetent? This suddenly popular psychological phenomenon.
By Angela Fritz, Washington Post
January 7, 2019

In their 1999 paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, David Dunning and Justin Kruger put data to what has been known by philosophers since Socrates, who supposedly said something along the lines of “the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” Charles Darwin followed that up in 1871 with “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Put simply, incompetent people think they know more than they really do, and they tend to be more boastful about it.

To test Darwin’s theory, the researchers quizzed people on several topics, such as grammar, logical reasoning and humor. After each test, they asked the participants how they thought they did. Specifically, participants were asked how many of the other quiz-takers they beat.

Dunning was shocked by the results, even though it confirmed his hypothesis. Time after time, no matter the subject, the people who did poorly on the tests ranked their competence much higher. On average, test takers who scored as low as the 10th percentile ranked themselves near the 70th percentile. Those least likely to know what they were talking about believed they knew as much as the experts.
…
There’s also “much more research activity” about the effect right now than immediately after it was published, Dunning said. Typically, interest in a research topic spikes in the five years following a groundbreaking study, then fades.

“Obviously it has to do with Trump and the various treatments that people have given him,” Dunning said, “So yeah, a lot of it is political. People trying to understand the other side. We have a massive rise in partisanship and it’s become more vicious and extreme, so people are reaching for explanations.”

Even though President Trump’s statements are rife with errors, falsehoods or inaccuracies, he expresses great confidence in his aptitude. He says he does not read extensively because he solves problems “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had.” He has said in interviews he doesn’t read lengthy reports because “I already know exactly what it is.”

He has “the best words” and cites his “high levels of intelligence” in rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. Decades ago, he said he could end the Cold War: “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Trump told The Washington Post’s Lois Romano over dinner in 1984. “I think I know most of it anyway.”

“Donald Trump has been overestimating his knowledge for decades,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “It’s not surprising that he would continue that pattern into the White House.”

Dunning-Kruger “offers an explanation for a kind of hubris,” said Steven Sloman, a cognitive psychologist at Brown University. “The fact is, that’s Trump in a nutshell. He’s a man with zero political skill who has no idea he has zero political skill. And it’s given him extreme confidence.”
…
Dunning says the effect is particularly dangerous when someone with influence or the means to do harm doesn’t have anyone who can speak honestly about their mistakes. He noted several plane crashes that could have been avoided if crew had spoken up to an overconfident pilot.

“You get into a situation where people can be too deferential to the people in charge,” Dunning explained. “You have to have people around you that are willing to tell you you’re making an error.”

What happens when the incompetent are unwilling to admit they have shortcomings? Are they so confident in their own perceived knowledge that they will reject the very idea of improvement? Not surprisingly (though no less concerning), Dunning’s follow-up research shows the poorest performers are also the least likely to accept criticism or show interest in self improvement.

So, Evil or Stupid? I vote for Evil. Not all Republicans are Stupid, many act transparently in their own personal self-interest in ways that are canny, effective, and persistent. The fact that they are wrong for the general population, morally abhorrent, and hypocritical is simply the tribute vice pays to virtue. If one considered their lack of empathy, disregard for the general welfare, and limited perception of time, indications of intellectual deficit then one might charitably assign them a category of lower than normal intelligence, say “Moron” or “Idiot”. Certainly when I label them that way it is with more compassion than I truly think they deserve.

So Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio wants to interrupt your Tuesday night Prime Time with an address that a growing number of people say should not be carried at all on the Broadcast Networks unless vetted and fact checked (the very foundation of it is a racist lie). I guess it’s a bridge too far even for him to get in the way of the Tide and the Tigers who would roll over him like a ratings juggernaught.

It won’t bother me at all because I’ll be watching Oak Island where last week we discovered what might be the 90 Foot Stone in the basement of a Halifax Book Bindery. Priorities folks.

As his policy deteriorates and crumbles by the minute I found these remarks by Bill Curry (I admit some ‘homeboy’ sentiment, I voted for him twice) instructive-

Part 1

(T)he Clinton shutdown – which really should be remembered as the Gingrich shutdown and was perceived that way overwhelmingly at the time. Polls showed that by 20 and 30 point even margins, peopled blamed the Republicans squarely, as they should have. And it was, Gingrich thought at the outset, a really good idea for him to shut down the government. Notice the first parallel to our present moment, that Trump, like Gingrich, seems to feel that this is an idea that’s very much in his interest and for some of the same reason that it excites his base.

And the public … Clinton had been so far down when Clinton hired me after the 1994 election, I had lost a close race for governor in Connecticut, Clinton called and asked if he thought there was any chance that he could come back and win, and I said sure, not really having an opinion on the subject at the time. But Clinton was way down. Two things happened. He did very well with the Oklahoma City bombing and that bumped him up. People thought that he demonstrated empathy, some character in that. And then came the event that made his re-election, and that was the shutdown. And people decided that Clinton had acted as an adult, that he demonstrated maturity and reason.

Part 2

(T)here’s a tendency sometimes to underestimate our base in terms of what we’re willing to talk about. And again, these trade, immigration issues, every Democratic president nominated in my adult lifetime has supported untrammeled free trade agreements. Most of our base is against it. The debate within our party has only begun in the last couple of years, and we’re still not at a point where we’re capable of engaging. So this international trade debate and the international immigration debate, there’s been too much silence.

The good news, I suppose, about this shutdown is it’s taking the two biggest leaders in our party, Schumer and Pelosi, and forcing them to engage and to begin to make arguments, like the one we talked about earlier, that begin to tell people the real story of border security and what it means. And so, I think Democrats – this is my constant message Democrats, is that policy precedes message. First you figure out what you believe and then how to tell people about it. We need to be better at making a brief. We need to be better at arguing the facts. The good news is the public opinion on almost all these great divides, on almost all these issues, is on our side already. We don’t have to create a market for it, we have to address it and we have to put a blueprint on the table that shows people we can fix those problems.

Ok, this is not funny in a conventional sense, more like the 2:30 First Act of The Abduction of Figaro, only less. Basically it’s 5 hours of D’Arcy Carden in character as Janet from The Good Place standing around in an empty white space reminiscent of the Nowhere Land found in the Vacuum Monster’s stomach (or nose, ick) in Yellow Submarine.

Now I could expound at length and in detail about the ‘bold artistic vision’ expressed by this particular piece of performance art and indeed whether ‘performance art’ is really art at all (Banksy, where are you when I need you? You should take Marshall McLuhan lessons).

Oh believe me, there’s a lot more where that came from like the symbolism of Janet’s Blue and whether that relates to the Blue Meanie invasion of the non-fictional world foreshadowed at the end of Yellow Submarine (the parallels are blindingly obvious folks).

Love, love, love.

Did you know I used to ghost write college papers? The best one was an exploration of whether a study of Shark cells, which unlike most reproduce indefinitely in a laboratory culture, would be valuable in understanding Cancer and Longevity. Some call that cheating but I didn’t cheat at all. My work was original, what other people did with it, like turning it in as their own, is not my responsibility.

Or is it?

More in keeping with the theme of the show (which is Moral Philosophy) I could talk at equal length about the futility of existence and whether consequences and accountability are a necessary predicate for ethical action (many Atheists would hold that ethical action has sufficient practical benefits in the long run and that appeals to external standards are arbitrary, detrimental, and unnecessary) in the face of ultimate impermanence.

You think it’ll last forever: people and cars and concrete. But it won’t. One day it’s all gone. Even the sky.

My planet’s gone. It’s dead. It burned, like the Earth. It’s just rocks and dust. Before its time.

What happened?

There was a war, and we lost.

A war with who? What about your people?

I’m a Time Lord. I’m the last of the Time Lords. They’re all gone. I’m the only survivor. I’m left traveling on my own, ‘cos there’s no one else.

There’s me.

You’ve seen how dangerous it is — do you want to go home?

I don’t know… I want… Oh, can you smell chips?

Yeah. Yeah!

I want chips.

Me too.

Right then, before you get me back in that box, chips it is. And you can pay.

No money.

What sort of date are you? Come on, then, tight wad, chips are on me… we’ve only got five billion years ’til the shops close!

I’ve also written monographs on the Varieties of Pipe, Cigar, and Cigarette Ash and Apiculture.

I hope I haven’t made you want to gouge out your eyes like Oedipus and cut off your ears like Van Gough. If the sheer experience is not enough the comments (found here) are quite amusing.

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.

First U.S. Presidential Election; Clinton goes on trial in Senate; Khmer Rouge overthrown; Emperor Hirohito dies.

Running away will never make you free.

Kenny Loggins

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