Are you tired of blog posts that tell you what is wrong with the world and offer no solutions?

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Job Guarantee which tells you some things that are right, in other words, it offers solutions.

NEP’s Pavlina Tcherneva appears in the following video by Rebecca Rojer. The video condenses a lecture by Pavlina explaining what a job guarantee is, its economic impact, and what we can learn from her research on the Jefes (“Heads of Households”) Program in Argentina.

I received an email with a link to Charles Krauthammer’s article Sea of easy and open bigotry is rising.

Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary, and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange.

I found The Real News Network story Israel’s Bedouin Face Displacement Despite Apparent Gov’t Concessions.

LIA TARACHANSKY, TRNN PRODUCER: On November 30, the Bedouin Arabs of Israel’s Negev Desert launched a coordinated day of protest that saw solidarity around the world. They were protesting the so-called Prawer law that would forcefully urbanize them and on the lands from which their villages would be demolished construct Jewish ones.

Did I miss the profoundly democratic political system’s application to Bedouin citizens of Israel? Are we now to conclude that official apartheid policies can be part of a profoundly democratic system? The gong of cognitive dissonance that is echoing in my head has made it hard for me to think.

Makes me ask “Was the way the native Americans were pushed off their lands by European settlers profoundly democratic? What have we learned from our history?”

For further information on the plan discussed in the video see my subsequent post The Prawer Plan: Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev.

The Boston Globe published the article Treasurer wrestles with potential conflicts over family firm on December 16, 2013.

State Treasurer Steven Grossman’s family marketing firm touts an impressive list of high profile clients that includes some of Boston’s biggest private sector names: the Bruins, the Celtics, J.P. Morgan Chase, and the high-powered law firm Mintz Levin.

Those organizations each have something else in common. They all have lucrative financial relationships with the state Treasury or the Massachusetts State Lottery, which Grossman oversees.

I saw the headline when the story first came out, but I didn’t get around to reading it.  Then I realized I was making decisions based on the headline rather than what was in the story.  So, I finally went back and read the story.  I am not quite sure what to make of it.  Maybe you can read it, and then tell me what the significance of this story is in regard to the political race for Governor of Massachusetts.  Steven Grossman is one of several seemingly progressive candidates in the upcoming election.

Here is an excerpt from a campaign email that I just received from Steven Grossman:

My vision for Massachusetts deals decisively with the issue of rampant economic and income inequality – the central and defining challenge we face. When we empower those citizens and communities that have been left out and left behind for far too long, we will build one Commonwealth that thrives together. It’s an ambitious vision, but it is absolutely essential to our success.

The Inter Press Service News Agency has the article Gates Conceals Real Story of “Gaming” Obama on Afghan War by Gareth Porter.

The leaking to the news media of a politically damaging version of internal debate between the White House and the coalition pushing for a major escalation was nothing less than shot across the bow from Obama’s principal national security officials, including Petraeus, Mullen, Gates and Clinton. They were signaling to the president that he would incur a significant political cost if he rejected the McChrystal request.

I have often wondered if the Obama administration’s excessively belicose (warlike or hostile in manner or temperament) foreign policy was a product of his then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or if it  came from Obama himself.

The fact that since John Kerry has taken over there have been a number of diplomatic breakthroughs makes me even more suspicious that Clinton was the one pushing the belicose strategy.

If this suspicion proves true, it would make me even less likely to want Hilary Clinton to be our next president.

Creditslips blog has the article The Behavioral Economics of Bitcoin by  Adam Levitin.

Bitcoin is a completely decentralized peer-to-peer currency and payments network. There is no central Bitcoin authority that verifies transactions, etc. This also means that there is no central for-profit manager that has to be paid to operate the system.  Instead, every Bitcoin user has a Bitcoin wallet on a personal electronic device (or webhosted). This wallet consists of open-source software that interfaces with other Bitcoin users’ software.

The above excerpt is only the beginning of the explanation.  There is something called bitcoin mining that is the mechanism for creating bitcoins.  I had heard about this, but hadn’t found an explanation until reading this article.  I won’t steal Adam Levitin’s thunder by quoting it here.  You’ll have to read the article yourself.  The explanation is pretty brief, but it is enough to satisfy me for the moment.