Elizabeth Warren has sent an email defending who she is. It is a great way to stand up to a bully.

She finally makes a point that I made in my May 8, 2012 post, Scott Brown The Great Distractor.

My grandparents told me of their flight from Russia in the early 1900s to the safety of the United States. With their frequent bedtime stories of their travails in coming to this country and getting a family started, and their descriptions of bringing their parents to this country, too, I believe that I have a Russian-Jewish heritage.

Why would I even think that I need further documentation to believe what I believe about my heritage? Why should Elizabeth Warren be any different from me with regard to what she believes is her heritage?

Reader RudyH has provided a Spanish translation of Elizabeth Warren’s email.

Governor Deval Patrick strengthens Elizabeth Warren’s message – “Elizabeth Warren – Senator for Massachusetts”. The way Elizabeth Warren stated it – “Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts” – was just too subtle for me. Many potential voters don’t know what office she is running for. You cannot be subtle when you want to communicate an important message. It is amazing how one word can turn a weak slogan into a powerful one.

The media is not going to spread this word for us. We need to take care of the responsibility to spread it ourselves.

Italian PM – Austerity Not Leading to Growth is Pt.2 Fareed Zakaria’s defence of neo-liberalism runs into trouble when Italian PM says “fiscal discipline” destroying domestic demand.  I previously posted Fareed Zakaria’s Neo-Liberal Defense of Germany Pt1.

One wonders how Fareed Zakaria can promote one idea in a segment of his show when he has obviously prepared remarks for the second part that contradict what he said in the first part.

Judge for yourself.

Here is the endorsement by Governor Deval Patrick of Elizabeth Warren for U.S. Senator in 2012.

I guess The Daily Ticker on Yahoo! is the ultimate exemplar of fair and balanced with this interview Blame the Fed for JPMorgan’s Big Loss: Mike Pento.

Whereas Faux Noise is unbalanced because they only have idiots as pundits, and The Real News is unbalanced because they only have knowledgeable people as pundits, The Daily Ticker is balanced by having a preponderance of knowledgeable people with a few idiots thrown into the mix.

I watched 1 minute and 22 seconds of this 4 minute interview before coming to the following conclusion.

Pento in this interview is an idiot. We had regulatory rules during the crises he names, but Bush appointed heads of these agencies so that they would not enforce the rules.

Nobody who is brought on as a pundit for a Business channel should be touting the gold standard.

I’ll take my financial advice from someone who looks at facts, not from someone who bases his advice on faith in the all powerful intelligent designer.

100% reserve banking indeed. You can try to enforce that on the official banks, but try enforcing that on the shadow banking system. Halt naked short selling if you can before you contemplate other rules for the shadow banking system.  If you could figure out how to stop naked short selling, then I could at least imagine that you could impose 100% reserve banking on the shadow banking system.  It would still be a horrible idea, but you’d have some credibility in saying you could actually accomplish your horrible idea.

By the way, 100% reserve banking is a bad idea because it would shrink our economy by a factor of 10 or more in an instant.

The way that banks make money is to lend the money that is not required to be held in reserve.  If you cut off that source of income (which is also providing a service to the community), the banks will be forced to come up with “creative” solutions.  They could start charging you for the service of holding onto your money in safety.  Or they could attempt to cheat on the rules.  How often is the Fed going to check every bank to make sure they actually have their 100% reserves?  I can envision a whole new industry of shifting reserves around to banks just ahead of the bank examiners.

To go along with birth certificates, and family trees, we have this new controversy.

As Bill Maher says, I have no idea as to whether or not any of this is true. All Mitt Romney has to do is to say that he has only ever had the one wife he is now married to, and I would take him at his word.

In all fairness, however, I can suppress this story that other people might think is important to discuss.

The Real News is carrying the story Fareed Zakaria’s Neo-Liberal Defense of Germany Pt1.

To save the suspense, I will give you the featured quote from The Real News interviewee,

John Weeks Pt1: Zakaria’s (of CNN and Time Magazine) analysis of the Greek crisis is nonsense that misses the entire context of the problem

Who is John Weeks that we should listen to him?

John Weeks is Professor Emeritus and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development Policy and Research, and Research on Money and Finance Group at the School of Oriental & African Studies at the University of London.

Here is the data that John Weeks uses to back up his analysis, The Euro Crisis in 7 Simple Charts: They’re telling you a real pack of lies.

McClatchy has the article Companies offer differing perspectives on Bain Capital.

Is Bain a predatory vampire sucking workers’ lifeblood? Or is it a capitalist angel injecting crucial seed money for job-providing startups?

Actually, it’s both.

Except for this silly spin on the topic, you might actually find a few more details from this article about the controversy.

When the question of whether or not a person has committed a crime comes up, we don’t look at all the times a person did something good or did not commit a crime when the opportunity presented itself.  The crime either was or was not committed independent of what that person may have done in completely different circumstances.

I use the word “person” above because of the Supreme Court’s decision that corporations are people.  By the same logic, it must be true that people are corporations.  So whatever you can say about a person, you can say about a corporation and vice versa.

By the way, how come I am taxed on income, but other people (corporations) are taxed on net income.  Why can’t I deduct everything a corporation gets to deduct.  Corporations are people, too.  And people are corporations.

I don’t suppose the Supreme Court might consider the possibility that while Corporations may have some aspects that are analogous to people, that in no way is justification for treating people and corporations exactly alike for no other reasons than the occasional similarity.

Here is Elizabeth Warren’s Memorial Day Message.

Elizabeth Warren explains why Memorial Day means so much to her.

I am no expert in biology, genealogy, or whatever else you might need to be to answer questions of ancestry.  So I will just pose a few questions from a non-expert.

If you have one parent who is 1/4 Native American and another parent who is 1/4 Native American, does that make you 1/2 Native American?  If both parents are 1/2 Native American, does that make you whole native American.  If they are also both 1/2 French, does that make you two people, 1 who is a whole Native American and 1 who is all French?  Or is it true that your blood can never be more concentrated than the concentration of one of your parents?

If you have 23 chromosomes and you get some from one parent and some from the other, can you be a smaller fraction of 1/23 of anything?

If you can trace your mitochondrial DNA all the way back to Eve, does that mean you can get fractional chromosomes?

If you are 1/32 of a full blooded Native American and you donate 1 pint of blood, does that mean you have given 1/2 ounce of Native American blood?  Or do you have some other kind of blood up to 31/32 of your height and the top 1/32 (or is it the bottom 1/32) is Native America?

Or is this like homeopathic medicine?  After enough dilutions, you don’t even have one molecule of blood that can be identified as a specific type?  Except for your mitochondrial DNA which can be traced back to Eve.

Does any of this have anything to do with whether or not JPMorgan will crash the world financial system?  If corporations are people, what mixed race are they?  Is their any Morgan left in JPMorgan?

As I thought about this some more, I started to think about the fact that in humans, cells replicate. So perhaps there could be a gene that would kill off majority blood and reproduce more of a minority blood cell. In that case you could be more fully blooded of one kind than your parents.

Most people would look at someone’s hair or skin color, and immediately repudiate this supposition. On the other hand, you can inherit a recessive gene from each parent, which then makes it dominant and it expresses itself in some recognizable attribute like having blue eyes when neither parent does.

Like people, corporations are said to have cultures. Where does that come from? Many people wonder if a CEO can impose a culture on a corporation. If corporations are like people, then people must be like corporations. Therefore people must have something analogous to a CEO that can impose a culture that is stronger than the ones inherited from your ancestors. Maybe the equivalent is an adoptive parent.

Perhaps Trofim Lysenko’s theories of genetics will be resurrected yet. In fact, what happened with Lysenko’s theories is something to think about when studying theories of intelligent design.