A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

It can only be assumed at this point, with Daisy Ridley's recent interview with the The Guardian saying that everyone has a problem with "BoJo", and every "sane" person has a problem with Trump, that the Hollywoodesque elites in the UK behave as poorly in general and talk down to everybody over there the same way they constantly do here.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/07/daisy-ridley-jj-abrams-st
ar-wars-a-religion

People have had enough of that shit.

Anthony Hopkins gets it.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/anthony-ho
pkins-brad-pitt-actors-stupid-two-popes-once-upon-a-time-a9233926.html

Quote:
The actor, 81, sat down with his Meet Joe Black and Legends of the Fall co-star for a lengthy chat for Interview magazine ahead of the release of his new Netflix film The Two Popes, when he called those in the acting profession “stupid”.

He said: “People ask me questions about present situations in life, and I say, ‘I don’t know, I’m just an actor. I don’t have any opinions. Actors are pretty stupid. My opinion is not worth anything. There’s no controversy for me, so don’t engage me in it, because I’m not going to participate’.”

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, December 13, 2019 10:46 AM

Oh...

Sorry Daisy.

This just in (12 minutes ago)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/world/europe/uk-election-brexit.htm
l

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, December 13, 2019 11:03 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The defeat wasn't mind-boggling. It was easy to predict.

Quote:
I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.

As well you should.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You don't remember the 1972 election: Nixon versus George McGovern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern#1972_presidential_campai
gn

McGovern ran on a platform that advocated withdrawal from the Vietnam War, the only correct move according to people who weren't liars or ignorant about military strategy. The Vietnam War was the biggest, most obvious fiasco in history, and yet voters let it run. They were thinking that Peace with Honor was just around the corner in Vietnam. That was NOT true.

More than half of all voters in 1972 and more than half today can't understand a fiasco like Vietnam, nor can they understand a fiasco like Afghanistan, nor global warming, nor the Crash of 2008, nor the American healthcare system. The vast majority of voters will reject Presidential candidates such as McGovern, who actually knew in detail how things need to be changed for the better. Instead, they vote for hardcore liars like Nixon who knew nothing.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, December 13, 2019 11:25 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The defeat wasn't mind-boggling. It was easy to predict.

Quote:
I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.

As well you should.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You don't remember the 1972 election: Nixon versus George McGovern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern#1972_presidential_campai
gn

McGovern ran on a platform that advocated withdrawal from the Vietnam War, the only correct move according to people who weren't liars or ignorant about military strategy. The Vietnam War was the biggest, most obvious fiasco in history, and yet voters let it run. They were thinking that Peace with Honor was just around the corner in Vietnam. That was NOT true.

More than half of all voters in 1972 and more than half today can't understand a fiasco like Vietnam, nor can they understand a fiasco like Afghanistan, nor global warming, nor the Crash of 2008, nor the American healthcare system. The vast majority of voters will reject Presidential candidates such as McGovern, who actually knew in detail how things need to be changed for the better. Instead, they vote for hardcore liars like Nixon who knew nothing.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

People voted for Obama. Twice.

All of those things got worse under his watch.

I think at this point, people don't know what to do and figure that if everybody is going to lie to them everyday at least vote for the guy or gal who tells them the lies they want to hear.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, December 13, 2019 11:28 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What does it mean for US Democratic Presidential candidates that UK Labor candidate Jeremy Corbyn led Labor to its biggest defeat in decades? For those of you who haven’t been following closely, Corbyn is no neoliberal shill. He is an unabashed lefty socialist who campaigned on an unabashed lefty socialist platform. No triangulating or “Tory lite” for him. He was out to prove that Labor could win by promising the voters a soaring lefty agenda filled with taxing the rich, taking back control of privatized industries, free college, huge infrastructure spending, more money for health care, and so forth.

The result was a mind-boggling defeat. So what does this tell us about American presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders? Corbyn lost because he was a hard left candidate, and the same thing will happen if Democrats nominate one of their own.

The American and British electorates have voted quite similarly for the past several decades, putting in office Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump as against Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Boris Johnson. Given the similarities between Boris Johnson and Trump, as well as the obvious salience of immigration politics in both countries, I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.

It means that Labor chose the wrong hill to die on.

The Labor Party has a big split in it: It consists of young Londoners who like to vacation in the EU and who think of themselves as "world citizens" (as if there was such a thing! Tell me, oh "world citizen", where do you go to VOTE for your "world government"? The notion is idiotic and undemocratic, just like the EU.), and working class people in the north who deeply resent having to compete with poor Poles and other immigrants in a hollowed-out economy. (As a point of comparison, the DNC stopped representing working people a long time ago. )

And just as an FYI, this "world government" agenda is supported by the most anti-labor faction of all: The City of London, (not London, which is a city, but the City of London Corporation, where all the banks are. One square mile of government entirely onto itself, where banks are citizens and even the Queen doesn't rule. https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/pages/default.aspx )

Labor gave voters the wrong choice: FREE SHIT OR SELF RULE. If they had offered both, they would have won in a blowout.

Why did Labor choose this hill to die on? It was entirely unnecessary because it didn't represent their core mission, which is to represent LABOR. (Their name should have reminded them!)

It's like the Democratic Party shoehorning in the socalled "Patriot Act" into a budget resolution: It was entirely unnnecessary and totally voluntary, but for some reason they thought it extremely urgent to shred your Constitutional protections continuously, without even a 15-day gap. Who the fuck were they representing when they did THAT?

Anyway, the irony is that Jeremy Corbyn is apparently personally pro-Brexit, but he was forced to represent the Labor MPs who are a bunch of jackasss and twits.

And there's no guarantee that BoJo will bring in a real Brexit.

*****

There isn't a clear parallel to what's happening in the USA, because the parties don't represent the same things. But there IS an overall dissolution of these large non-democratic multinational governing structures and an overall resurgence of nationalism. And a good thing, too, since we have all only gotten poorer and less free under them, seeing as they really represent transnational banks, transnational financiers, transnational manufacturers and transnational tech companies.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, December 14, 2019 9:11 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

. . . in just the past 24 hours the response to the British election results has changed a lot. At first there were a fair number of folks who thought the results might hold a lesson or two for American progressives, but over the course of a few hours most of them seem to have been bullied into adopting the view that, hey, Britain is a different country with its own distinct issues. It’s stupid to think it’s similar in any way to what’s happening in America.

And sure, there’s no question that you should be cautious about blithely drawing parallels. At the same time, come on, folks. Britain and the US are both part of the Anglosphere and have related political cultures. What’s more, if you dive even slightly below the surface there enough specific similarities in our current situations that you really have to put your head in the sand not to notice them. The recent victories of Brexit and Donald Trump were both largely driven by white working-class panic over immigration. Trump and Boris Johnson are both buffoonish, ideologically flexible populists who are allegedly unpopular but who somehow get lots of votes anyway. In both countries, the progressive opposition won nice victories recently and were feeling good. Also in both cases, the progressive opposition has been moving to the left for several years: Jeremy Corbyn may have been a uniquely unlikeable party leader, but it’s hard to deny that at least part of the reason for his big loss is that he ran on a manifesto far to the left of the typical Labour leader. This is exactly the same thing that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are trying to do in the US, and both of them share Corbyn’s rigid distaste for any kind of politically useful weaseling.

So . . . yes, centrist types should be careful not to overstate the lessons we might take from Labour’s loss. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, although America in 2020 might not end up as a repeat of Britain in 2019, it will probably rhyme. It doesn’t do much good to close our eyes and pretend there’s just nothing there.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/america-in-2020-will-probably-r
hyme-with-britain-in-2019/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 6:27 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Selling Keynesianism

In the 1940s and ’50s, the general public understood and agreed upon Keynesian economic principles. Today, we can learn a lot from the popularizing efforts that led to that consensus and long-lasting economic success.

As Marriner S. Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, put it, “as mass production economy has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth . . . to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation’s economic machinery.” In Bowles’s formulation, “the redistribution of income is a subject which many people find distasteful to talk about — much less to do something about. But talk about it and do something about it we must, because this is not a matter of taste; it is a matter of national economic necessity.”

The key point is that businesses will only produce when there is demand for their products, otherwise they will shutter their facilities and lay off their workers. Because high-income people spend a smaller share of their earnings than low-income people do, high levels of income inequality result in lower levels of aggregate demand, the forerunner to recession and unemployment. Bowles demonstrated this logic by taking it to its extreme:

Let us suppose that one percent of the population were to receive 95 percent of our entire national income, with the remaining 5 percent spread among the rest of us. Could our system—could any system—work on that basis? One percent of the people couldn’t possibly consume 95 percent of all the goods and services which the rest of us could produce.

The long-lasting prosperity of the 1940s and ’50s thus owed, in large part, to the fact that the general public broadly understood and agreed upon the economic principle that fast-paced growth and high employment could be achieved on the back of consumer demand, but only if purchasing power was distributed widely enough.

Once armed with this information, the general public went about enforcing it. As Lizabeth Cohen documents in A Consumer’s Republic (2003), labor unions cited the importance of maintaining high demand through widely distributed purchasing power to justify their calls for higher wages. As George Meany, secretary-treasurer of the AFL, put it in 1944, “we have the machinery to build all of the automobiles, all of the radios, washing machines and such things; we have the workers to build all of the houses that we could possibly use. But we will not make those things unless there is purchasing power available to buy them.”

More at http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/robert-manduca-selling-keynes
ianism

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 7:20 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

This is something of a misunderstanding of Keynesianism. He wasn't an advocate of wealth redistribution or even government spending as much as increasing the money supply thru lowered interest rates. It was FDR's economic advisor who believed in "pump priming" thru government spending on public works.

In any case, Keynesianism only works in closed systems, where money supply can be efectively corraled into "an" economy. You can see why this is so by imagining that every USA family gets a $10,000 of "helicopter money" ... money dropped on them by government (deficit spending). What happens to that $10,000? Well, some will be spent on goods and services provided by the USA economy leading to an increase in jobs at home, but much will be spent on goods imported from abroad: consumer electronics and housewares manufactured in China; clothes from Haiti, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines; leather goods from Bangladesh etc. So money distributed in the USA would only partially increase jobs in the USA.

Keynes eventually took up the issue of TRADE IMBALANCES. He was NOT a believer of "free trade" but tried to achieve a system where international trade was regulated to eliminate these trade imbalances. This is not the system that we have today, nor i it the one espoused by the proponents of MMT (which is not Keynsianism).

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 10:55 AM

Sounds to me like every dollar you own is like stock in a company that is constantly being split, but you're not getting that split and they're giving it to somebody else.

Makes it even worse when you realize that we're just giving it away to places like the Ukraine.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 10:57 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Alex Jones' Sandy Hook deposition

Alex Jones performs live on radio and online three hours a day, five days a week, and two hours on Sundays. Sometimes more. A relentlessly ranting, blustering figure, by turns entertaining, frightening, even mesmerizing, the outrageousness of his claims is only exceeded by the certitude of his delivery and the promise to his more credulous viewers and listeners that what he is delivering is the real deal, the hidden truth behind the lies of the globalists, the deep state and the mainstream media.

It has made what was once a late-night Austin cable access novelty act into the most famous conspiracy theorist on earth.

But to watch the video of his recent three-hour deposition in one of the Sandy Hook lawsuits arrayed against him is to see that persona and its pretensions come undone and to understand how his tangling with the parents of those children whose tragic deaths in the school shooting that occurred seven years ago Saturday — and that he tauntingly denied — could be his InfoWars empire's undoing.

"I cannot emphasize enough how much this man is not taking these lawsuits seriously and has refused to do any preparation to testify," Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, who is an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Sandy Hook cases, tweeted after Jones' Nov. 26 deposition, which she attended. "It's an absolute train wreck and honestly gratifying to watch, but the disrespect to the Sandy Hook parents is palpable."

On Dec. 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 first graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. He also killed his mother and himself.

As Houston attorney Mark Bankston, representing Sandy Hook parents in four suits in Austin against Jones and his InfoWars operation, on Nov. 26 methodically asked Jones to explain how he came to report that tragedy as a hoax supposedly orchestrated as a pretext to crack down on gun rights, a subdued Jones seemed mostly befuddled.

Forty-four times he answered, "I don't remember;" 51 times, "I don't know."

Absent his gravelly and ferocious on-air growls, the various "anomalies" that Jones said made him suspicious of events at Sandy Hook, as recounted one by one by Bankston in the quietude of the deposition room, sounded ridiculous.

Jones' deposition, and those of three InfoWars associates, became public Thursday when they were filed in a Travis County court by Bankston in the case of Neil Heslin, the father of slain 6-year-old Jesse Lewis.

Bankston also filed a 49-page motion asking state District Judge Scott Jenkins, who is presiding over four Sandy Hook suits, to order a default judgment holding Jones and InfoWars liable without even requiring a jury trial, except to determine the size of the damages, as a consequence of what he contends is their flagrant refusal or inability to seriously answer questions.

More at www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-alex-jones-sandy-hook-deposition-a-person
a-undone/ar-AAK82Ea

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 11:16 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
This is something of a misunderstanding of Keynesianism. He wasn't an advocate of wealth redistribution or even government spending as much as increasing the money supply thru lowered interest rates. It was FDR's economic advisor who believed in "pump priming" thru government spending on public works.

What did Keynes really intend to be the key message of the General Theory? My answer is, that’s a question for the biographers and the intellectual historians; I won’t quite say I don’t care, but it’s surely not the most important thing. There’s an old story about a museum visitor who examined a portrait of George Washington and asked a guard whether he really looked like that. The guard answered, “That’s the way he looks now.” That’s more or less how I feel about Keynes. What matters is what we make of Keynes, not what he “really” meant.
www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/keynes_and_the_moderns.pdf

Krugman didn't stop there: I’d divide Keynes readers into two types: Chapter 12ers and Book One-ers. Chapter 12 is, of course, the wonderful, brilliant chapter on long-term expectations, with its acute observations on investor psychology, its analogies to beauty contests, and more. Its essential message is that investment decisions must be made in the face of radical uncertainty to which there is no rational answer, and that the conventions men use to pretend that they know what they are doing are subject to occasional drastic revisions, giving rise to economic instability. What Chapter 12ers insist is that this is the real message of Keynes, that all those who have invoked the great man’s name on behalf of quasi-equilibrium models that push this insight into the background, from John Hicks to Paul Samuelson to Mike Woodford, have violated his true legacy.

Book One-ers, by contrast, see Keynesian economics as being essentially about the refutation of Say’s Law, about the possibility of a general shortfall in demand.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 1:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Bankston also filed a 49-page motion asking state District Judge Scott Jenkins, who is presiding over four Sandy Hook suits, to order a default judgment holding Jones and InfoWars liable without even requiring a jury trial, except to determine the size of the damages, as a consequence of what he contends is their flagrant refusal or inability to seriously answer questions.

Tough shit. We do trial by jury here in America. Democrats haven't turned us into China yet.

What damages? The only damages I see are that he pretty much destroyed his own internet presence. He didn't drag anybody's name through the mud except for his own and anybody associated with Info Wars.

I'd ask you to name one single person living or dead involved in Sandy Hook, but I know you'll just Google it.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 4:11 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Party That Ruined the Planet: Republican climate denial is even scarier than Trumpism.

. . . A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.

Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later. . . .

[There are lots of reasons for this,] but one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America’s Republicans, who are the world’s only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn’t just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.

And Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we’re seeing with regard to Trump.

As I’ve written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of “fake news,” Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.

And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those responsible for these abuses are now ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The Times reports, “little concern for legal restraints.”

But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn’t even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.

However, I don’t believe that it’s just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there’s a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you’re more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda.

Still, whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.

Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn’t just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.

The truth is that even now I don’t fully understand how things got this bad. But the reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.

The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it’s the only hope we have.

https://andrewtobias.com/a-question-for-your-republican-friends/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 4:16 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.

HA HA!

And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.

And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 4:17 PM

In 2019 can we stop pretending that all Republicans deny climate change and that Democrats have ever done a fucking thing to fix it or even slow it down.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 15, 2019 9:29 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.

HA HA!

And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.

And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.

What I think is really funny is that SECOND - who pretends to be all about "the numbers" - is suddenly number-averse when it comes to the dimocrat's record, in numbers.

Wealth inequality by the numbers? Something that SECOND strenuously avoids!

Carbon dioxide emissions, by the numbers? MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!

Budget deficit? Homelessness? Manufacturing output? EVEN MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!

It seems to me that the person who avoids looking at numbers (because they tell him a story that doesn't fit his narrative) is SECOND.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 16, 2019 7:17 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.

HA HA!

And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.

And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.

1kiki, the US decreased its carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons because it switched from coal to natural gas. Trump promised to switch it back, but that didn't work because natural gas is cheaper. As usual, you don't know a damn thing.
www.eesi.org/articles/view/u.s.-leads-in-greenhouse-gas-reductions-but
-some-states-are-falling-behind

By the way, the President does not have the power to lower carbon emissions because the Congress never gave that power to a President, unlike Congress giving the President the power to lower or raise tariffs. President Sanders can't do what Congress won't give him the power or the money to do. Which brings us back around to the GOP denying that too much waste carbon in the atmosphere is a problem needing solving.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, December 19, 2019 7:27 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
You mistake dimocrits' words for actions. Words don't matter. They're just so much - hot air.

HA HA!

And let me point out for at least the 30th time, the only president who measurably reduced greenhouse gas emissions wasn't Obama. It was dubya, and he did by crashing the economy.

And btw, if you think anybody on the dimocrtitc campaign trail is going to measurably change our emissions, yer looney.*

And if democrats don't do anything different, how are they any better?

* Well, OK - Sanders and Gabbard might. But the dimocratic apparatus is going to be passive aggressive about it the whole way, where they wouldn't be actively torpedoing them, like it is on the campaign trail.
What I think is really funny is that SECOND - who pretends to be all about "the numbers" - is suddenly number-averse when it comes to the dimocrat's record, in numbers.

Wealth inequality by the numbers? Something that SECOND strenuously avoids!

Carbon dioxide emissions, by the numbers? MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!

Budget deficit? Homelessness? Manufacturing output? EVEN MORE numbers that SECOND avoids!

It seems to me that the person who avoids looking at numbers (because they tell him a story that doesn't fit his narrative) is SECOND.

Hello Signym. All those numbers you are talking about? The President doesn't control those numbers. It's guys like me, the top 0.1%, that control America's economy, manufacturing output, jobs, the stock market, even how much is spent on defense. Eisenhower famously warned about the Military-Industrial Complex getting rich by selling hugely overpriced weapons. H-bombs, subs, and aircraft carriers will make you richer faster than making anything else. And that is why America has too many H-bombs and not enough of other things.
www.history.com/topics/21st-century/military-industrial-complex

The American medical profession copied the weapon-builders' overpricing: A CT scan costs $1,100 in the US — and $140 in Holland. America’s health care prices problem, in four charts.
www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/17/21024614/us-health-care-cos
ts-medical-prices

Congress can bribe people like me into doing what Congress wants, but the important word is bribe. Being asked politely to patriotically do what is best won't work with people driven to accumulate large sums of money. You know where talking works more powerfully than money? In American science fiction, particularly "The Expanse". Sci-fi is probably where Americans get the idea that the President controls, not the rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series)

What “The Expanse” Can Teach About Macroeconomics!
www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/opinion/the-macroeconomics-of-the-expanse.h
tml

Earth appears to be suffering from mass technological unemployment. Half the population is unemployed and living on Basic, which apparently consists of in-kind provision of housing, food, and other necessities. (Kind of like a global version of Trump’s idea of replacing food stamps with food boxes.)

But are robots really the problem? For the first three seasons, Mars stands in stark contrast. It’s a mobilized, full-employment society where everyone is working either on supporting a military strong enough to stand up to Earth or on the long-term goal of terraforming the planet, making it suitable for humans.

Over the course of Season Three, however, the cold war was (mostly) resolved, while the protomolecule (don’t ask) seemed to have opened access to hundreds of habitable planets, making terraforming Mars seem pointless. And in Season Four, Martian society is in deep trouble. Unemployment is rife thanks to the winding down of both military spending and terraforming, with some ex-military Martians who can’t find jobs turning to crime.

So, my question: If Earth has mass unemployment because robots can do stuff, making human workers unnecessary, what were all those fully employed Martians doing?

In fact, the emergence of high unemployment on Mars after demobilization and the end of terraforming makes it seem as if the real problem wasn’t technology, it was secular stagnation — a situation in which private spending is consistently too weak to employ the economy’s resources, except during unsustainable asset or debt bubbles. Japan has been suffering from secular stagnation since the 1990s; a number of economists, myself included, believe that the whole advanced world now has much the same problem. www.brookings.edu/articles/secular-stagnation-even-truer-today-larry-s
ummers-says/

What’s the solution to secular stagnation? The answer, according to people like Larry Summers, is a big increase in public spending on infrastructure: roads, bridges, ports, and, if you happen to live on a planet without breathable air, terraforming.

The point is that when you’re in a secular stagnation economy, virtue is vice, prudence is folly, and good news can be bad. Even wasteful government spending can be a helpful stimulus. Before the outbreak of peace, Mars was a healthy society because it had a grand project; when that grand project became unnecessary, instead of freeing up resources to do other things, things got much worse.

So The Expanse is basically a show about the need for higher public investment. Well, and also monsters, alien technology, and space Mormons.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, December 19, 2019 8:11 AM

JO753

rezident owtsidr

Soundz like a great show! I will woc it.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, December 19, 2019 8:54 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by JO753:
Soundz like a great show! I will woc it.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

The Expanse has 46 episodes, so far. Maybe Firefly would have 46 if Amazon Prime had been financing the show in 2002, rather than FOX.
www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B018BZ3SCM/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, December 20, 2019 7:49 AM

JO753

rezident owtsidr

Odd coinsidens - Saw a commercial for The Expanse today.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.7532020.com .

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, December 21, 2019 8:30 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Voter Suppression By GOP Isn’t Enough Anymore

From Justin Clark, a top adviser to Donald Trump’s reelection campaign:

Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are….Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.

Naturally Clark tried to pretend he hadn’t said what he said, but a recording of the entire conversation makes it clear that, in fact, he said what he said. And who knows what this much bigger, more aggressive program for 2020 might be? Whatever it is, I’m sure it will be entirely on the up and up.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/quote-of-the-day-voter-suppress
ion-isnt-enough-anymore/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, December 21, 2019 10:18 AM

Uh huh.

Can you whiny little bitches possibly cry anymore?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 22, 2019 11:14 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Uh huh.

Can you whiny little bitches possibly cry anymore?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Two years ago, US president Donald Trump signed into law a sweeping tax cut dubbed “a mighty fine Christmas gift.”

The law’s opponents insisted it was a massive giveaway to the super rich — one that would make the federal deficit skyrocket. Who was right?

The early data doesn’t look good for Trump’s top legislative achievement.

“We saw a short-term boost to output and investment that really seems to have largely dissipated. GDP is growing more slowly and investment is actually shrinking over the past two quarters,” said Ben Page, an economist at the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “There’s almost no evidence for a big inflow of foreign capital.”

In the meantime, the government now estimates it will lose $600 billion more in tax revenues than it initially thought, bringing the cut’s total cost to $1.6 trillion. Boosting the deficit while the economy is growing and at a late stage in its cycle is irresponsible, Page argues. “Usually at the peak of the economic cycle, that should be when deficits are at their lowest,” he said. “The economy is not going to grow forever, and at that point deficits will boom…stimulus policy will be needed. That’s one of the worries about running those deficits when times are relatively good.”

Big companies are having a field day — with FedEx coming to exemplify corporate America’s response to the cut. The firm’s CEO lobbied hard for the bill on the premise that mass investment by businesses would follow. It then became one of 91 companies, including Amazon and IBM, whose effective tax rates dropped to zero in 2018 — in Fedex’s case, from 34% the year before. The company then cut its capital spending in both 2018 and 2019.

Even those who argued for a big cut are struggling to find enthusiasm for the law. “I don’t think I’m disappointed — I’m just saying don’t give up on the TCJA just yet,” said Aparna Mathur, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She argued it could take 5 to 7 years before seeing its full effects. Or maybe never will Trump’s promised benefits appear.

https://qz.com/1769421/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 22, 2019 12:04 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
SIX:
Uh huh.Can you whiny little bitches possibly cry anymore?

SECONDRATE, WITH HIS USUAL POO: Two years ago, US president Donald Trump signed into law a sweeping tax cut dubbed “a mighty fine Christmas gift.”

The law’s opponents insisted it was a massive giveaway to the super rich — one that would make the federal deficit skyrocket. Who was right?

The early data doesn’t look good for Trump’s top legislative achievement.

“We saw a short-term boost to output and investment that really seems to have largely dissipated. GDP is growing more slowly and investment is actually shrinking over the past two quarters,” said Ben Page, an economist at the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. “There’s almost no evidence for a big inflow of foreign capital.”

In the meantime, the government now estimates it will lose $600 billion more in tax revenues than it initially thought, bringing the cut’s total cost to $1.6 trillion. Boosting the deficit while the economy is growing and at a late stage in its cycle is irresponsible, Page argues. “Usually at the peak of the economic cycle, that should be when deficits are at their lowest,” he said. “The economy is not going to grow forever, and at that point deficits will boom…stimulus policy will be needed. That’s one of the worries about running those deficits when times are relatively good.”

Big companies are having a field day — with FedEx coming to exemplify corporate America’s response to the cut. The firm’s CEO lobbied hard for the bill on the premise that mass investment by businesses would follow. It then became one of 91 companies, including Amazon and IBM, whose effective tax rates dropped to zero in 2018 — in Fedex’s case, from 34% the year before. The company then cut its capital spending in both 2018 and 2019.

Even those who argued for a big cut are struggling to find enthusiasm for the law. “I don’t think I’m disappointed — I’m just saying don’t give up on the TCJA just yet,” said Aparna Mathur, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She argued it could take 5 to 7 years before seeing its full effects. Or maybe never will Trump’s promised benefits appear.

https://qz.com/1769421/

You think this is some sort of revelation? Gee, I could have predicted this. In fact I DID predict this.

I posted, more than once, that in order to create a manufacturing renaissance Trump would HAVE to do more than tariff incoming goods, repatriate money from abroad with tax cuts, and cross his fingers. I would call tariffs and capital necessary but not sufficient

Trump would have to literally direct investment to steel, chemicals, clothing, chips, energy distribution, infrastructure, consumer electronics, and all of those goods that might be considered critical or which cause a huge drain on our trade balance. Because without those directives, the companies will do what they usually do with spare cash: buy back their own shares, speculate in hedge funds, and give themselves giant bonuses. Unfortunately for Trump he believes in capitalism and assumes that TPTB want to make money by making things instead of thru financialism. He has a libertarian POV, which (so far) has never worked to explain or fix anything.

So ... why are you posting this? Do you think it would sway anyone here from Trump? I still prefer him over anyone except Tulsi Gabbard.

when will the DIMS get onboard with some sort of realistic plan to create a self-sufficient economy that DOESN'T kowtow to big business and that DOESN'T plan onautomating everything? The economy is supposed to be working for us, not the other way around.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, December 24, 2019 6:57 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Cruelty Is the Point

President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear. October 3, 2018

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.

The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.

Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

More at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572
104/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, December 24, 2019 12:44 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

You haven't managed to disprove a single thing Signy posted.

Why do you think anyone should bother reading anything you post if you can't use logic on facts, and instead have to rely on an ever-shifting gish-gallop of nothings?

FLIES SHIT.

NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, December 25, 2019 7:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future
From 25 years back: 7 April 1994

Neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers. None of them are poor and they therefore cannot benefit from the more generous welfare payments that the moderate Left is inclined to offer. Nor are they particularly envious of the rich, and they therefore tend to be uninterested in redistribution. Few of them are actually unemployed, and they are therefore unmoved by Republican/Tory promises of more growth and more jobs through the magic of the unfettered market: what they want is security in the jobs they already have – i.e. precisely what unfettered markets threaten.

A vast political space is thus left vacant by the Republican/Tory non-sequitur, on the one hand, and moderate Left particularism and assistentialism, on the other. That was the space briefly occupied in the USA by the 1992 election-year caprices of Ross Perot. And that is the space that remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people. Such a party could even be as free of racism as Mussolini’s original was until the alliance with Hitler, because its real stock in trade would be corporativist restraints on corporate Darwinism, and delaying globalisation. It is not necessary to know how to spell Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to recognise the Fascist predisposition engendered by today’s turbocharged capitalism.

More at www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n07/edward-luttwak/why-fascism-is-the-wave
-of-the-future

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, December 26, 2019 9:14 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Public company CEOs heavily favor Republicans.

Researchers at Harvard Law School and Tel Aviv University found that CEOs of the 1,500 largest US public companies donate “disproportionately more” to the Republican party and its candidates, with the median CEO directing 75% of his or her political contributions to Republicans. They also found that Republican-leaning CEOs lead companies with almost twice the asset value of companies led by Democratic-leaning executives.

The study looked at campaign contributions by more than 3,800 CEOs of S&P 1500 companies between 2000 and 2017. To be classified as “Republican” or “Democratic,” at least two-thirds of the executive’s donations had to go to either party; otherwise they were classified as “neutral.” Overall, roughly 57% of the CEOs were classified as Republicans, and about 19% as Democrats.

The researchers also looked at how CEO political preferences differ by geography, based on the location of the company headquarters. In the Northeast and in the West, Republican CEOs outnumber Democratic CEOs by less than 2-to-1, while Republican CEOs are about seven times as numerous as Democratic CEOs in both the Midwest and South.

Indeed, the Republican tilt was evident in all regions and sectors. The industries with the strongest Republican preference were the energy, manufacturing, and chemical sectors.

More at https://qz.com/work/1772370/

The Politics of CEOs
Journal of Legal Analysis, Vol. 11, 2019, pp.1-45
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3355690
2. THE POLICY STAKES
This section discusses the importance of the political preferences of CEOs for public policy and politics. The CEOs of S&P 1500 companies are a very small group, numbering less than 0.001 percent of U.S. voters. However, as this section explains, public-company CEOs are likely to have a disproportionate influence over American policymaking and politics, and understanding their political preferences is therefore important for understanding the inner dynamics of the U.S. democracy.

Although public companies represent only 0.06 percent of the total number of U.S. firms, they account for 31.3 percent of private-sector employment, 41.3 percent of sales, and 51.1 percent of pretax profits. As key decision-makers within their firms, CEOs thus preside over a significant portion of the nation’s economy. Their decisions can have an enormous impact on jobs, wealth, tax revenues, and even the social fabric of local communities. These facts naturally make public-company CEOs important agents in the economy. Most importantly for the purposes of this article, however, their positions enable CEOs to influence policymaking and politics through two important channels.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, December 26, 2019 10:42 AM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Cruelty Is the Point

It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
More at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572
104/

Wow and Damn - so well written and so accurate. I am reminded of that quick video clip of Trump with Epstein at a party as they discussed women dancing. It was very buddy buddy, kids having a laugh at the expense of others. Of course that's not where those thoughts end. Reducing people to things for your amusement while feeling completely untouchable and unrepentant, that is got to be one heck of a power trip.

I am also reminded of another Atlantic writer that summarized a lot of Putin's behavior as "an immature sense of masculinity." You can see that in Trump supporters and political allies, so it's not hard to see why Trump and Putin get along so well.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Friday, December 27, 2019 6:24 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Medicare-for-all

Ezra Klein said:
If you really dig into what is happening in this debate there are two different views of what the constraint is on political change. One version is more or less the one that we are articulating here: public opinion constraint — people don’t like change and that dislike is catalyzed by campaigns run by insurance companies and Republicans.

But there’s the more left view that the public is led by elites. And the problem is really that it’s people like Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein making these arguments, saying that people have this small-c conservatism. If every elite was actually onboard Medicare-for-all, then people wouldn’t be afraid anymore. This side believes that public opinion is only a constraint insofar as it reflects where elite opinion already is. I’m curious how you parse that argument.

Paul Krugman said:
It’s hard to test. But polling says that a public buy-in to Medicare is very popular, but a replacement of private insurance that is not voluntary is not nearly as popular. How many people in all of that do you think are really taking their cues from me or you?

The international evidence is that it’s just very hard for to make radical changes in social programs. The shape of them tends to be fixed for a really long time. US Social Security is widely held up as a role model of doing it right because we got it right at a time when things were still pretty amorphous and uninformed. On the other hand, our health care system is a mess because of decisions we made around the same time that left us with bad stuff entrenched in the system.

So, I think the notion that this whole thing is extremely plastic — that if only the big shots would line up behind radical change, then the public would come around behind it as well — is a hell of a risky bet.

More at www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/12/26/21011830/paul-krugman-obam-climate-med
icare-robots-single-payer-andrew-yang

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, December 28, 2019 9:18 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump’s economic policy is basically a lefty one:

From trade to spending, from the Federal Reserve to paid parental leave, Trump has embraced policy changes that historically are more in line with the approach of Democrats — establishing a forceful role for government in setting the terms of the economy — than of Republicans.

….On trade, Trump has reached a “phase one” trade deal with China that reportedly includes promises to buy far more in U.S. exports. He has completed a revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada that some liberals are cheering for labor protections and pharmaceutical policies. Trump co-opted a demand from the left to urge the Fed to cut interest rates despite the relatively strong economy, a position the central bank ultimately adopted after seeing signs the economic expansion might waver.

The president has blown away traditional GOP concerns over the rising federal deficit, cutting bipartisan deals to expand government spending and even extend a new paid-leave benefit to the federal workforce. He unilaterally implemented a farm bailout that could prove more expensive than the auto bailout was a decade ago — a move that conservatives had criticized as wasting taxpayer dollars.

Not everything Trump has done is out of the lefty playbook. Progressives favor trade deals with stronger labor and environmental protections, for example, but they don’t generally favor massive trade wars that are mostly aimed at reducing trade deficits. At the same time, conservatives don’t favor massive trade wars either. For the most part, Trump’s trade policy is purely born out of his own id.

More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/donald-trump-is-a-keynesian/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 30, 2019 6:03 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

No matter how loud or organized they have been in the past couple of years, Democrats and progressives are still conforming to a historic pattern; they are more politically energized when they are obviously losing. Democrats are a movement of losers—a movement that has practically forgotten what winning means. The Democratic national leadership of the last thirty years has embodied this. The likes of Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer seem actually averse to defeating Republicans. Unlike their opponents, they don’t appear to think that the job of Team Blue is to take on the other side as forcefully as possible. On the contrary: to this day, they apparently believe that the very idea of a Team Blue is distasteful and that Democrats should, whenever possible, bolster the GOP’s standing as a good-faith party with goals and principles as valid as their own. Their core mission is to practice a ceremonial innocence about the unshakable virtue of American conservatism—and to do so even as the worst, full of passionate intensity, are cleaning their clocks.

Recall, for example, the 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the Supreme Court seat that had been held by Justice Scalia. A sixty-three-year-old centrist, Garland was the most elderly and GOP-friendly candidate that President Obama could have chosen. When the Republican Senate, led by Mitch McConnell, announced that it would block any nominee, Obama lamented that it “defies the Constitution, defies logic.” He added, “I understand the posture they’re taking right now. I get the politics of it, I’m sure they’re under enormous pressure from their base and their constituencies around this issue. I’ve talked to many of them, and I’ve told them I’m sympathetic.” As late as July 2018, Schumer, the Senate minority leader, advised President Trump to renominate Garland “as a way to unify the country.” After McConnell learned of Schumer’s advice, @TeamMitch (an official Twitter account of the senator) posted a GIF that showed Michael Jordan rocking with laughter. Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh.

When ordinary people are emptying their wallets, getting arrested, and putting their careers on hold to fight for the Democrats’ cause, the least they expect of the well-paid professional politicians they have worked to elect is that they will conduct themselves with equal determination and will side with them, not Republicans. Republican politicians, some Democratic officials seem not to grasp, are not guys in a bar with opinions different from your own. They are people who have chosen to devote their lives to undermining the core interests of your supporters and their families and communities. When Representative Peter King, a Republican from Long Island and a loud Trump fan, recently announced his retirement, he was lauded by Schumer for being “principled” and having “stood head & shoulders above everyone else.” If the Democratic Party is to remain viable, that kind of thing has to stop.

Joe Biden, like so many other Democratic leaders of a certain age, possesses sensibilities, strategic instincts, and values shaped by decades of losing ground to the GOP. He asserts that, once Trump is gone, Republicans will have an “epiphany” and discover inner moral resources. You could call Biden and his ilk Charlie Brown Democrats. They believe, against all the available evidence, that Lucy van Pelt, from the GOP, will one day let them kick the football. This generation of whiffers views Republican dominance as natural and, ultimately, acceptable. That won’t cut it.

More at www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/19/no-more-nice-democrats/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 30, 2019 8:10 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by captaincrunch:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Cruelty Is the Point

It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
More at www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572
104/

Wow and Damn - so well written and so accurate. I am reminded of that quick video clip of Trump with Epstein at a party as they discussed women dancing. It was very buddy buddy, kids having a laugh at the expense of others. Of course that's not where those thoughts end. Reducing people to things for your amusement while feeling completely untouchable and unrepentant, that is got to be one heck of a power trip.

I am also reminded of another Atlantic writer that summarized a lot of Putin's behavior as "an immature sense of masculinity." You can see that in Trump supporters and political allies, so it's not hard to see why Trump and Putin get along so well.

Uh huh. That's completely one sided. lol

Watch any of the Antifa protests on the streets of Portland or the college campus riots and tell me who's enjoying the suffering of others. Hell, just look at Wishy's posts here. No need to leave your house.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 30, 2019 8:24 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Uh huh. That's completely one sided. lol

Watch any of the Antifa protests on the streets of Portland or the college campus riots and tell me who's enjoying the suffering of others. Hell, just look at Wishy's posts here. No need to leave your house.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You must not hang out with Trump lovers for hours, make that days, at a time like I do. (I am an undercover Democrat.) The conversations about killing queers, niggers, Mexskins and that fuckin' Nancy Pelosi I find highly entertaining. And please don't mention Jew Soros because then the talk gets really angry and crazy. (I'll start laughing at how out-of-their-minds crazy these Trump lovers are and that will ruin my cover.) But that is how East Texas Trump lovers are.

"Poll: Almost a third of US voters think a second civil war is coming soon" June 2018
www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/06/27/civil-war-l
ikely-voters-say-rasmussen-poll/740731002/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 30, 2019 10:46 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Uh huh. That's completely one sided. lol

Watch any of the Antifa protests on the streets of Portland or the college campus riots and tell me who's enjoying the suffering of others. Hell, just look at Wishy's posts here. No need to leave your house.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
You must not hang out with Trump lovers for hours, make that days, at a time like I do. (I am an undercover Democrat.) The conversations about killing queers, niggers, Mexskins and that fuckin' Nancy Pelosi I find highly entertaining. And please don't mention Jew Soros because then the talk gets really angry and crazy. (I'll start laughing at how out-of-their-minds crazy these Trump lovers are and that will ruin my cover.) But that is how East Texas Trump lovers are.

"Poll: Almost a third of US voters think a second civil war is coming soon" June 2018
www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/06/27/civil-war-l
ikely-voters-say-rasmussen-poll/740731002/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

OK. Sure.

When, exactly, are you an undercover Democrat?

Would it be when you are firing all of your non-Democrat employees for their political beliefs?

Nobody I know goes around talking about wishing death on other people, let alone committing the act themselves.

Honestly, the only two that I know who do that are right here in the RWED. It's you and Wishy.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 30, 2019 12:30 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

OK. Sure.

When, exactly, are you an undercover Democrat?

Would it be when you are firing all of your non-Democrat employees for their political beliefs?

Nobody I know goes around talking about wishing death on other people, let alone committing the act themselves.

Honestly, the only two that I know who do that are right here in the RWED. It's you and Wishy.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

It is impossible to get to know a Trump lover well if you are reminding them that they are dishonest, lazy ignoramuses with far too many misunderstandings about simple things such as smoking causes cancer and drinking causes liver damage and adultery causes divorce and stealing from me will get them a felony conviction.

Maybe Trump lovers you know aren't as bad as the ones I know, the ones who believe that if they haven't been convicted they haven't done anything wrong, kind of like Dear Donald Trump.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Monday, December 30, 2019 10:42 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

OK. Sure.

When, exactly, are you an undercover Democrat?

Would it be when you are firing all of your non-Democrat employees for their political beliefs?

Nobody I know goes around talking about wishing death on other people, let alone committing the act themselves.

Honestly, the only two that I know who do that are right here in the RWED. It's you and Wishy.

Do Right, Be Right. :)
It is impossible to get to know a Trump lover well if you are reminding them that they are dishonest, lazy ignoramuses with far too many misunderstandings about simple things such as smoking causes cancer and drinking causes liver damage and adultery causes divorce and stealing from me will get them a felony conviction.

Maybe Trump lovers you know aren't as bad as the ones I know, the ones who believe that if they haven't been convicted they haven't done anything wrong, kind of like Dear Donald Trump.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

To be honest, I don't even know any Trump "lovers".

60+ Million people voted for him, and 60+ Million people are going to vote for him again. I seriously doubt there are a huge number of people who are in love with the guy though. I think the amount of people that go around wearing MAGA hats is pretty low too. I've actually never seen anyone wear one in real life.

I'm pretty sure on the flip side, there's not really any Democrats who are in "love" with any of the Democrat candidates either. Except maybe some Socialist lefties who are for Sanders and Tim Pool who's head over heels for Gabbard.

I'd imagine most people who vote for Trump are doing so because the alternative is just so amazingly awful.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, December 31, 2019 12:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Biden is an Idiot: Democratic contender Biden says he would consider a Republican running mate

Joe Biden, a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, said on Monday he would consider choosing a Republican running mate if he is the party’s nominee next year. “But I can’t think of one right now.” In the primary, I am not voting for fucking moron Biden. He can't even decide what side he is on ... D? Or R?

www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-biden/democratic-contender-bid
en-says-he-would-consider-a-republican-running-mate-idUSKBN1YZ025

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, December 31, 2019 12:27 AM

To be fair, Biden doesn't even remember what he ate for dinner tonight.

That's your front-runner.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, December 31, 2019 7:23 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What Should The Distribution Of Wealth Be?

A 2011 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, of Harvard’s Business School, found that the average American thinks the richest 25% of Americans own 59% of the wealth, while the bottom fifth owns 9%. In fact, the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% controls only 0.3%. An avalanche of studies has since confirmed these basic facts: Americans radically underestimate the amount of wealth inequality that exists – and the level of inequality they think is fair is lower than actual inequality in America probably has ever been. As journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.”

Thomas Piketty ramped up the inequality debate, a couple of years later, with “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, a massive 250-year survey of wealth inequality. He discovered that r > g. That is, the rate of return on investment is always greater than growth rate of the economy. (For the USA, g was 2.1% for GDP while r was 28.5% for S&P 500 in 2019) The rich really are getting richer – and the poor? Well, not so much. The post-war middle-class, Piketty warned, may well have been a historical anomaly. Economic inequality is likely to get worse – and never get better – without coordinated political action. The good news is that not one, but two, serious candidates in the current Democratic Presidential Primary are endorsing versions of Piketty’s “Wealth Tax” – Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

More at www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2019/12/what-should-the-distribution
-of-wealth-be.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, December 31, 2019 9:12 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What Should The Distribution Of Wealth Be?

A 2011 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, of Harvard’s Business School, found that the average American thinks the richest 25% of Americans own 59% of the wealth, while the bottom fifth owns 9%. In fact, the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% controls only 0.3%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Tuesday, December 31, 2019 10:00 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

6ix, "Preferential Attachment" (intuitively, "the rich get richer" or "success breeds success") fits the data describing wealth inequality far better than Zipf's Law. And the math for preferential attachment is simpler than Zipf's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment

Also see the "Matthew Effect", a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968. Its name is from the Parable of the Talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. One person invested money and another hid his in a hole in the ground. The one who invested was praised and became wealthy while the one who dug a hole had his money taken away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, January 1, 2020 8:28 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

According to a report, Global Waves of Debt, pre-published by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development:

Waves of debt accumulation have been a recurrent feature of the global economy over the past fifty years. In emerging and developing countries, there have been four major debt waves since 1970. The first three waves ended in financial crises—the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Asia financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the global financial crisis of 2007-2009.

A fourth wave of debt began in 2010 and debt has reached $55 trillion in 2018, making it the largest, broadest and fastest growing of the four. Global Waves of Debt has done a signal service by reminding us that this time may be no different.

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/32809

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, January 1, 2020 9:26 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, "Preferential Attachment" (intuitively, "the rich get richer" or "success breeds success") fits the data describing wealth inequality far better than Zipf's Law. And the math for preferential attachment is simpler than Zipf's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment

Also see the "Matthew Effect", a term coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968. Its name is from the Parable of the Talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. One person invested money and another hid his in a hole in the ground. The one who invested was praised and became wealthy while the one who dug a hole had his money taken away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The math might be easier, and in the case of money specifically it might explain the causality of why, but Zipf's law can be applied almost universally to any situation.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, January 1, 2020 9:38 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

The math might be easier, and in the case of money specifically it might explain the causality of why, but Zipf's law can be applied almost universally to any situation.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

I have actually seen this play out in real life many times. For one example, I have a cousin, a Trump lover if there ever was one, who I offered a business deal to, along with a bunch of other people back when I was poor. The cousin would NOT invest, no damn way, but he has been angry for years that he did not get a "fair" share of the money. He will NEVER comprehend that because he did no work, was no help, invested nothing, all he did was run his big mouth and make stupid comments that showed he knew nothing, that his fair share was NOTHING. I gave him a few shares for his nothing contribution, but now he is angry that I didn't give him more. What a greedy dumb-ass he is, but then again, he voted for Trump and will do it again.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, January 1, 2020 10:16 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The 2020 election will be unprecedented, no matter what. Either President Donald Trump’s victory will shatter expectations and academic theories, or his defeat will. If Trump wins in 2020, he will be the first and only impeached president to win reelection. Barring a major change in national polls, he will also be the first president to be elected twice without once winning the popular vote. And if he loses? It would mark “the greatest presidential fumble of economic and market tailwinds in modern history,” according to Michael Cembalest of J.P. Morgan. A traditional formula for predicting modern presidential elections goes like this: The national economy determines the national vote. Strong economies have historically favored the incumbent candidate or party. Weak economies, or even brief dips, have helped the challenger.

…As for 2020, unemployment is at its lowest point in more than 60 years. The S&P 500 has tripled in the past decade. Wage growth, while still somewhat disappointing, is rising fastest for full-time low-income workers. In a vacuum, this would augur a reelection landslide for the sitting president. According to Cembalest’s index of economic strength—combining data on unemployment levels, home prices, per capita GDP, stock-market growth, and inflation—“Trump as an incumbent benefits from the strongest tailwinds” since 1896. (Bill Clinton’s reelection year of 1996 comes close, but unemployment and inflation were higher, and home values and the stock market were only on the cusp of their late-’90s boom.)

www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/01/the-2020-election-will-break
-history.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, January 2, 2020 6:06 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

William Greider obituary

William Greider tackled gigantic subjects: the Federal Reserve (“Secrets of the Temple,” 1987), the evaporation of American democracy (“Who Will Tell the People,” 1992), globalization (“One World Ready or Not,” 1997), society’s deformation by the military-industrial complex (“Fortress America,” 1998), whether we can reinvent the U.S. economy (“The Soul of Capitalism,” 2003), and what to do when the people running this country seem determined to destroy it (“Come Home, America,” 2009).

Each of these books is still completely relevant — something that almost never can be said about aging political writing. Pick up, say, “Game Change,” the bestseller by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin about the 2008 election, and you’ll find it’s now as fascinating as gossip about the Harding administration.

Greider pulled this off because he didn’t care about the daily political garbage tornado. Instead, his focus was always on the huge subterranean battles that actually determine our lives, i.e., capital vs. labor, creditors vs. debtors, marketing vs. people, and capitalism vs. democracy.

The message running through his work is that, for decades, one side in these fights has been absolutely beating the shit out of the other. But Greider didn’t spend his life diagnosing America’s disease to make us despair. It was the opposite — he did it because he believed we can develop the cure, if we put in the work. He thought that normal humans were capable of understanding the world, and governing ourselves.

Greider made the case that the people in charge have no more idea what they’re doing than anyone else, and often less. During his career in journalism, he wrote in “Who Will Tell the People,” “I have seen up close the frailties of power. At the pinnacles of political command, whenever I have been able to peer behind the veil of platitudes, I have usually glimpsed a scene of confusion … trial and error, folly and misapprehensions.”

Meanwhile, Greider wrote, “this is a nation of people who are mostly smart and capable and, on the whole, generously disposed.” Even in the most brutalized parts of the country, “I frequently came away thinking to myself: Those people would be running things if they had been born with a bit more luck. … There is a vast pool of unrealized ability dwelling in the American population.”

Toward the end of his life, Greider was overjoyed to see the burgeoning movement behind Bernie Sanders and the rise of young politicians and activists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His case had never been that something like it would happen, but just that it could, that it was within the capability of Americans to do this and much more. As he put it, “Power can accumulate in mysterious ways, if citizens believe they possess this right.”

More at https://theintercept.com/2020/01/01/william-greider-obituary/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, January 2, 2020 9:17 AM