RichardH thinks this conveys an important message. I have to agree with him.

Did you get distracted even after I warned you?

The Real News Network has the interview Islamic State Born of Deteriorating Economic Conditions in Iraq.

Poverty and inequality created by the plunder of Iraq’s wealth by elites and multinational corporations after the US occupation of Iraq a great recruiting tool for ISIS says Sabah Alnasseri, Professor at York University’s Department of Political Science.

In the main stream media we hear about how the youth around the world are being recruited to fight in places like Iraq on the side of ISIS. I have yet to read a serious discussion of what it is that attracts people to join. This video starts to fill in what is missing in the understanding that I have.

I’ll have to confess that I have not been keeping up-to-date with The Real News Network as much as I have in the past, so I probably have missed a lot of the explanation here that I have been missing elsewhere.

It is sad to contemplate how much damage the Bush administration did by deciding to force American style government onto another country in the name of Neocon ideology. The Bush administration had a firm view on what they thought was wrong with Iraq, but they had no clue about what was right.

I say “American style government”, but that is not completely true. For thirty or forty years or more, the Neocons have been destroying what has worked in America and transforming it to their liking. If they didn’t have a US Constitution and traditions that restrained them here, they might have done to the US in the same amount of time they were able to do it in Iraq.

MSNBC has the article and video Mary Landrieu doubles down on controversial race remarks.

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu faces a heated race to keep her seat, and decided to do the unthinkable; she told the truth about inequality the South. Ed Schultz, Zerlina Maxwell and James Paterson discuss.

Do you think the people of Louisiana don’t know what is going on there? Perhaps some Louisiana voter thought, “I am not going to vote for Obama because he is black, but that is not racism”?

EcoWatch had the article Watch Jon Stewart Welcome His Newest Advertiser: The Koch Brothers.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart traveled to Texas this week to broadcast from Austin, offering Texas-based guests and commentary. But one advertiser that cropped up on the show this week may be having second thoughts.

I think we really have to be worried when the Koch brothers think they can buy the love of the liberals who watch The Daily Show. Do you believe in subliminal advertising? (Although this advertising seems liminal. Or as the previous links calls it, supraliminal.)

Maybe there is hypnotic suggestion. Do you have your foil hat to protect you?

The Daily Kos has the article Maffei ad hits back at attacks on where his baby was born.

Rep. Dan Maffei is out with a new ad hitting back at attacks by Republican John Katko that Maffei has abandoned his Syracuse district because his baby was born in the wrong place.

I love a demonstration of political jujitsu. Take the momentum of the attacker’s ad to flip him over your head and onto his back.

The Daily Kos has the article Chris Christie blows his top after angry constituent confronts him at press conference.

New Jersey’s biggest bully, Gov. Chris Christie turned up for a press conference yesterday and had a surprising spat with a New Jersey man who turned up to tell Christie he needs to do more for residents who are still displaced from their homes after Hurricane Sandy.

I am going to do a biased experiment here.  I am telling you what it is.  I am going to put the second Daily Kos video first to see what you think of the first Daily Kos video after you see their second one.

I think you will get more pleasure from seeing it in the order I present it. I can probably understand why The Daily Kos presented it the way they did, but I think it had unintended consequences.

The YouTube statistics on the first video they showed had 135,509 views, 180 thumbs up, 68 thumbs down. The second video that The Daily Kos showed had 2,666 views, 35 thumbs up, 1 thumb down.

Do you think the approximately 133,000 people who saw only the first video and not the second video got the same impact as the people who saw both videos? What about people who saw only the second video?

New Economic Perspectives has the article The New York Times Claims Democratic Leaders in Latin America are “Military Dictators” by William K. Black.

The NYT wrote an extraordinarily arrogant, insulting, dishonest, and hypocritical editorial attacking a series of Latin American democracies. The editorial manages to insult their democratically elected representatives and their electorates.

The editorial claims that it was prompted by the democratic reelection of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia. The editorial concedes that he was reelected in a well-deserved, democratic “landslide.”

“It is easy to see why many Bolivians would want to see Mr. Morales, the country’s first president with indigenous roots, remain at the helm. During his tenure, the economy of the country, one of the least developed in the hemisphere, grew at a healthy rate, the level of inequality shrank and the number of people living in poverty dropped significantly. He has also given the Andean nation, with its history of political turmoil, a long stretch of relative stability.”

I haven’t had a chance to read the whole article, but I am saving a link to it here. I just know that the NYT piece is going to be used as proof by some that the democratically elected leaders are military dictators. I can then come back to this post, read the whole article, and refute what is being said.

Naked Capitalism reprints the article Exploding Wealth Inequality in the United States by Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics, University of California Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman, Assistant Professor of Economics, London School of Economics. Originally published at VoxEU

I pull a few snippets to give you a hint of the article content.

In other words, family fortunes of $20 million or more grew much faster than those of only a few millions.

When you hear top 0.1% or top 1% or top 10%, it may be hard for you to figure out where you stand.  Putting a dollar amount on the net value of your family fortune gives you a handle on where you stand.  If your family fortune is less than $20 million, you aren’t rich enough to be able  to expect to get much richer.  So now you know which side is your side in the class war.

Since the housing and financial crises of the late 2000s there has been no recovery in the wealth of the middle class and the poor. The average wealth of the bottom 90% of families is equal to $80,000 in 2012 – the same level as in 1986. In contrast, the average wealth for the top 1% more than tripled between 1980 and 2012. In 2012, the wealth of the top 1% increased almost back to its peak level of 2007. The Great Recession looks only like a small bump along an upward trajectory.

So now you can understand why the view of how well the economy is recovering is quite different if you are a Charlie Baker from what you see if you are a Martha Coakley.

There were several interesting graphs, below is the caption to one of them.

Today, the top 1% families save about 35% of their income, while the bottom 90% families save about zero (Saez and Zucman 2014).

Oddly, the authors talk about incentives for increasing savings.  Here is paragraph from the conclusion:

There are a number of specific policy reforms needed to rebuild middle-class wealth. A combination of prudent financial regulation to rein in predatory lending, incentives to help people save – nudges have been shown to be very effective in the case of 401(k) pensions (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) – and more generally steps to boost the wages of the bottom 90% of workers are needed so that ordinary families can afford to save.

If you read between the lines, maybe the authors are recognizing that incentives for saving will only help people at the top of the bottom 90%.  The rest of the bottom 90% don’t save because they are unable to, not because they don’t have motivation that can be enhanced by incentives.

Now back to some things from the body of the article.

Ten or 20 years from now, all the gains in wealth democratisation achieved during the New Deal and the post-war decades could be lost. While the rich would be extremely rich, ordinary families would own next to nothing, with debts almost as high as their assets.

I hear talk that Elizabeth Warren should not run for president until after Hillary Clinton’s term is over.  Since Hillary has a very weak understanding of these issues compare to the strength of Warren’s understanding, waiting another 10 years ordinary families would already have next to nothing or be  very close to being in that situation.

Progressive estate and income taxation were the key tools that reduced the concentration of wealth after the Great Depression (Piketty and Saez 2003, Kopczuk and Saez 2004). The same proven tools are needed again today.

This is a lesson that some young, self-declared Democrats haven’t seemed to learn in their study of history.

The Daily Kos has a fundraising page to support GOTV (Get Out The Vote).  To be fair to The Daily Kos, I ought to urge you to follow the preceding link before (or after) you watch this amusing video below.

I tend to squirrel away snippets like this to use when someone challenges me to show a single instance where Faux Noise has ever lied. This is not to say that Faux Noise has a monopoly on shoddy journalism. I just can’t stand it when people try to tell me that Faux Noise is the most truthful news source the world has ever seen.

The Daily Kos article Colorado Station Busts Megyn Kelly for Outright Lying; FoxNews Offers No Correction adds the video below to the mix.

Pacific Standard  – The Science of Society has the article We Are All Confident Idiots.  Turns out that the article is much more interesting than the off putting title and accompanying graphic would make you believe. It would be a shame if people are turned away from reading the article by the very teaser meant to attract them. One might even call that ironic, given the actual content of the article.

As I read the article, I copied down a few snippets that I found intriguing.

Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you.

This reminded me that we should not be smug about how other people fall into this trap.  The title of the article did say that it applied to all of us.

In the classroom, some of best techniques for disarming misconceptions are essentially variations on the Socratic method. To eliminate the most common misbeliefs, the instructor can open a lesson with them—and then show students the explanatory gaps those misbeliefs leave yawning or the implausible conclusions they lead to.

Given my own feelings of the inadequacy of the Socratic method, I was almost ready to dismiss the article.  However, the quote does give a hint that the very implausible conclusions that the Socratic method leads to would insulate you from falling victim to the method.  My first and second impressions were both wrong.  In the end, this issue of the Socratic method is probably only a red flag for me.

For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls “considering the opposite.” To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions.

This is probably the best lesson you can learn from the article.  Which is not to say that reading the whole article to see how we get to this conclusion isn’t also very worthwhile.

Thanks to João Geada for posting this on his Facebook page.