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.

At The Real News web site, this item is headlined J.P. Morgan Funds Senate Finance Chair, Even Bigger Problem in the Wings. If you follow the previous link, you will be able to see the video and read a transcript of the interview.  It really does start out with the topic they headline, but I think my headline may focus on something even more important that was discussed later.

Thomas Ferguson: But the truth is, I think what you’re learning here is that you can’t believe anybody’s assurances that risks are controlled. You can’t believe the banks themselves. You can’t believe the regulators. The warning here, I think, is that you’ve got to devise mechanisms that will prevent this sort of thing from happening, that don’t rely on just the confidence, however much you repose in a single individual or a bank. And, indeed, the whole cult of the star CEO, the truth is is that nobody seemed to know for much of the last few weeks quite what the real story was—even in the bank, if you believe some of the reporting in the press.

Permit me to take a brief break from the all important story of Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage, and concentrate on something trivial that may only be a life or death issue for poorer people.

Clip from May 25, 2012, The Rachel Maddow Show where Rachel and Washington Post columnist, Ezra Klein, discuss and analyze Mitt Romney’s embrace of Republican Reverse Robin Hood economic and tax policies (i.e., steal from the poor and give to the rich).

You wonder if the reporters who delve into the gutter of personal attacks on family heritage have to take a shower after they use Republican political talking points to try to divert attention away from the real issues of the day.

From William Black on New Economic Perspectives, we have When Romney Messes Up and Tells the Truth About Austerity.

The latest example is his May 23, 2012 interview with Mark Halperin in Time magazine.

“Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office?  Why not do it more quickly?

Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%.  That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression.  So I’m not going to do that, of course.”

So Romney is castigating President Obama for failing to do what Romney himself says he would not do if he became President.  He also admits to knowledge that for the most part he pretends he doesn’t have.  That knowledge being, that shrinking the federal budget at the wrong time would throw us into a recession or depression.  This is exactly what the professional economists have been saying for the past 60 or 70 years.

Was it better to think that Romney just didn’t know, or to find out that Romney knows full well what to do, but will say anything to undermine recovery while a Democratic President is in office?

The Daily Beast has the article Michael Tomasky on the Media’s Foolish Elizabeth Warren Witch Hunt.

The appearance Thursday morning of this Suffolk University poll (linked to above) made me think: Well, this story line is about to wrap up. If more than two-thirds of voters don’t care, then that’s that. But no—still going strong! And now it’s not the loopy, right-wing, and pro-Brown Herald, which pushed the story first, but the Globe trying to play catch up. Yes, yes, it’s all in the public interest. What, you say, the public says it isn’t interested? Well, we’ll teach them what’s in their interest!

Not being a subscriber of “the loopy, right-wing, and pro-Brown Herald, which pushed the story first”, I had no idea that The Boston Globe was pushing this story so hard because it was “trying to play catch up.”

Thanks to reader RichardH for pointing me to The Daily Beast article that completes my education on this story.

The New Economics Perspectives web site has this very interesting article, Are There Spending Constraints On Governments Sovereign in Their Currencies?.

The discussion is about “Governments sovereign in their own currency.”  In other words a government that borrows in terms of its own currency and only accepts payments in terms of its own currency.

The counter-narrative of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is that such a currency issuer can never involuntarily run out of money, though it can default voluntarily from an excess of stupidity. And because such nations can’t run out of money and can buy anything for sale in their own borders, including all labor resources, that means that their governments can spend what they need to spend to help solve the problems they encounter. They can afford job guarantees for anyone wanting full-time work at a living wage with a full package of fringe benefits, universal single-payer health insurance for all, a first class educational system, re-inventing their energy foundations, cleaning up their environments, re-creating their infrastructure, and doing anything else necessary to create good, democratic societies. For Governments sovereign in their own currencies, running out of money is never an issue. The real issues are resource constraints, political constraints, and constraints of poor decision making. But they are not fiscal in nature.

The fact that “such nations can’t run out of money and can buy anything for sale in their own borders” will be hard to accept for a lot of people.  The reason they cannot accept it amounts, “well, it just can’t be true.”

If you follow the link to the article, you will see lot’s of explanations of why it can be true, but if you just firmly believe that it can’t, then what more is there to be said?

Such discussions remind me of one I had with my father shortly after I started studying physics at MIT.  I told him that the crack of the whip is the sound of the tip breaking the sound barrier.  He refused to believe that.  His explanation was that nothing that is on the ground can break the sound barrier.  Only things that can fly can break the sound barrier.

Under some prescribed circumstances, the speed of sound is 768 mph.  If you can go faster than that, you break the sound barrier.  It doesn’t make any difference whether or not you gain the speed because of friction against the ground or you are using one of Newton’s laws of motion in air.

My father could never accept that, because, well just because it was so obvious.