Politico of all places has a fairly positive article Elizabeth Warren’s book tour: ‘Run, Liz, run!’

Interviews with more than a dozen Warren supporters in both cities showed that her message — the system is rigged against the little guy to the benefit of Wall Street and corporate America — is resonating, and any Democratic presidential hopeful will have to convince the Warren wing of the party that they get it. The conversations also revealed that enthusiasm for Warren often goes hand in hand with wariness of a President Hillary Clinton.

I am waiting for that convincing from Hillary Clinton.  The problem is that Clinton will cede the progressive wing of the electorate to Warren who will not be running.  Therefore the tone of the debate will not even address income inequality, the abandonment of all levels of government in investing in the country’s future, the guilt of Wall Street bankers, and the war mongering of the oil people hankering after Ukraine’s oil shale. Clinton will court the middle and the right.  This will alienate a large number of potential enthusiastic campaign volunteers and voters.  Clinton’s campaign will not bring out the votes that the Democrats have and that are needed to defeat the Republicans.

The Republicans could run John Ellis Bush (aka JEB) and maybe beat Clinton.

By the way, I have not been able to verify Warren’s attitude on the Ukraine issue, so what I said above about the Ukraine may only be my issue.  I could understand that, but I would be disappointed.

President Obama’s weekly address to the nation is very good this week.

A speech like this makes me feel that President Obama does really still care. It makes me wonder if this is the same President who refuses to hold Wall Street accountable for the damage they have done? Is this the same President Obama who will tell CIA lies to get a war started in the Ukraine to satisfy the demands of wealthy capitalists? Is this the same President who listens to the self-interest of Wall Street to learn his economics? Is this the same President who caved to the health insurance industry and to big pharma to give them a health “reform” act that shovels more money their way? Is this the same President who sees that support for public universities has dropped from 3/4 to 1/4 of college costs, but says nothing about it?

All the while that students have accumulated $1.2 trillion of debt to make up for what government has stopped doing, Obama is still concerned about cutting the deficit. The observation of this debt build up seems to be one more piece of evidence that Modern Monetary Theory is right. When the government cuts its spending, it comes out of the hides of the people in the private sector of the economy.

I wonder who else beside Elizabeth Warren understands that putting this kind of debt load on the young (and not so young parents of these students) prevents them from buying homes, setting up households, and the other things that keep the economy humming. Does Hillary Clinton get this? Is she shouting about this from the rooftops? All I hear from Hillary these days is that she wants more sanctions on Russia because they refuse to knuckle under to our aggression against them.

The Daily Kos has the post So this is how Net Neutrality dies, under a Democratic President.

3:57 PM PT: Another argument I am often seeing is the whole “Well Netflix and Youtube use so much bandwidth, it is only fair they pay more!” This is the exact argument the ISPs fall back on when people challenge them on wanting to destroy Net Neutrality.

Don’t buy that for a second. Yes, Netflix and other streaming services use loads of ISP bandwidth. They also have customers who PAY THESE ISPs for cable access in large part to use their services.
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Also compare to other countries:

Average internet speeds in South Korea and Japan are many times faster than ours, and cost far less, and also use plenty of streaming services. In Tokyo for example, you can get 2 gigabit internet speeds (TWICE google Fiber) for $50 a month. The only reason we can’t have that here is because ISPs are greedy and don’t want to establish faster networks if they can charge you more per month and give you 1% what someone in Tokyo can get. World’s fastest Internet arrives in Tokyo: 2Gbps for $50/mo.

There is a White House Petition to sign.

Maintain true net neutrality to protect the freedom of information in the United States.

True net neutrality means the free exchange of information between people and organizations. Information is key to a society’s well being. One of the most effective tactics of an invading military is to inhibit the flow of information in a population; this includes which information is shared and by who. Today we see this war being waged on American citizens. Recently the FCC has moved to redefine “net neutrality” to mean that corporations and organizations can pay to have their information heard, or worse, the message of their competitors silenced. We as a nation must settle for nothing less than complete neutrality in our communication channels. This is not a request, but a demand by the citizens of this nation. No bandwidth modifications of information based on content or its source.

You have to wonder if President Obama gives a damn anymore.

Moon of Alabama has the article Kerry Lies, Repeats Debunked State Department Claim.

Yesterday the New York Times Public Editor criticized the paper’s handling of the story:

It all feels rather familiar – the rushed publication of something exciting, often based on an executive branch leak. And then, afterward, with a kind of “morning after” feeling, here comes a more sober, less prominently displayed followup story, to deal with objections while not clarifying much of anything.

The pictures from the coup government in Ukraine distributed through the U.S. State Department are obviously fakery and purely anti-Russian propaganda. The story of Russian “special operations personnel” in east-Ukraine is a lie. It has been debunked as such in several U.S. publications. Despite that Kerry yesterday repeated it proving himself to be exactly what Putin had claimed, a liar.

I have read and viewed many of the sources mentioned in this blog post by Moon of Alabama. Moon of Alabama has assembled these pieces in a well constructed way that is worth featuring on my blog.

For those who think they know what Russia is up to because they have bought into the lies that the US is telling, I refer back to my Mark Twain quote, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

I also find it gratifying that The New York Times Public Editor is as skeptical as I am about the (mis)information that the newspaper so often publishes.

Wired has the article New Quantum Theory Could Explain the Flow of Time.

Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”
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“What’s really going on is things are becoming more correlated with each other,” Lloyd recalls realizing. “The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations.”

The idea, presented in his 1988 doctoral thesis, fell on deaf ears. When he submitted it to a journal, he was told that there was “no physics in this paper.” Quantum information theory “was profoundly unpopular” at the time, Lloyd said, and questions about time’s arrow “were for crackpots and Nobel laureates who have gone soft in the head.” he remembers one physicist telling him.

“I was darn close to driving a taxicab,” Lloyd said.

I have read books about quantum entanglement, and I still struggle with some aspects of the idea. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I did drive a taxicab for a week while I was suffering from Sophomore slump during my MIT career.