Here is a little musical interlude.

Here is an email I got about their Kickstarter Campaign to fund a new CD.

North America’s only touring Russian-American balalaika-piano duo! Click here to watch Russian Duo’s Kickstarter Video! Dear Friends, We would like to thank all of you who have already backed our Kickstarter Campaign to record a new album. And we want to invite everyone else to join the fun. Time is of the essence to reach our goal. We have raised $3,215 of the $5,400 needed to record our new album. (That’s 60% with 15 days to go.) If we don’t reach our goal by December 3, the project will not be funded and we will not receive any of your heartfelt pledges. This new album celebrates our 7 years of collaboration. We get to share our beautiful new repertoire with fans, friends, colleagues, supporters and future audiences. In exchange, depending on your pledge, you will receive a digital download, a real CD, a Dalcroze Eurhythmics session, chamber music session, Oleg’s solo concert or a Russian Duo house concert! On the career side of things: we need a new album to represent our current level of performance, we need new material to apply for a prestigious grant from Chamber Music America, and we need professionally recorded repertoire to enter juried showcases around North America. By the middle of December (with your help!) we will have spent time in the recording studio and will be well on our way to a finished product. In just 2 short weeks our campaign will be over. We hope you will partner with us – soon! – to make this project a reality! Watch our Kickstarter video for a glimpse of Russian Duo in action and to learn about the process. With Best Wishes, Terry & Oleg Terry, after a recent concert in Ohio. Oleg singing a Soviet song in concert. www.russianduo.com Our mailing address is: 3003 Euclid Heights Boulevard Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118

Our Time has the article Our American Nightmare? The New American Dream Is Much Different Than It Used To Be. (Sorry, I just couldn’t stand to post as my subject line the title the way it was written.)

We learn to view the world through the lens of our environment, which explains why neighborhoods have such a large impact on one’s future financial situation. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the economic segregation of neighborhoods effected mobility; in particular, urban areas with distinctly separate wealthy and poorer sections had lower levels of success among the underprivileged. Logically speaking, this makes sense – with no peers or neighbors to serve as examples of a different lifestyle, people living in areas of concentrated poverty have no reason to believe that their actions can impact their lot in life.

As I read this, I kept thinking that there was nothing new here.  We learned this all in the 1960s.  Then I remembered that I am always telling people that we need to keep repeating these lessons for the people who weren’t around in the 1960s to learn all this stuff.  How are these new people supposed to understand the problems we are trying to solve if they don’t go through a learning experience like some of us did?

Slate has the article Why Democrats Can’t Win Over White Working-Class Voters. I’ll give you the ending paragraph to think about as you read the article.

But the United States doesn’t have a political party to support that kind of social democracy. Instead, it has the Democratic Party, a collection of disparate interests which—at its best—is nervous about economic liberalism and hesitant to push anything outside the mainstream. And worse, it has a presidential frontrunner who—more than anyone else—is connected to the kinds of elites and the kinds of policies that would push the party away from the muscular liberalism it needs.

From the tone of the comments (and even the article itself) it seems people are still wondering.

For those that are wondering what the Democrats ever did to convince the white folk that the Democrats don’t care, why not think about this?  During the Obama administration, the incomes and wealth of the bottom 90% or income earners declined.  This is the first time in recent history where this decline kept happening during a “recovery” of which the Democrats are so proud.

Obama’s refusal to even charge a single criminal executive in the financial sector only made the great shift of wealth to the wealthy seem more unfair.  Oh sure the corporations that were defrauded by their high ranking executives were made to pay fines, but those executives didn’t pay a nickel.  They got to keep the great transfer of wealth that came their way.  The share holders got to pay the fines.  Worse yet, the corporations took tax deductions for the fines so that the tax payers had to pay more in taxes to make up for what the corporations got to deduct.

The front runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination is closely related politically with these fraudsters, Do people really think she will help them recover from their declining wages and wealth?  Her husband was the great welfare cutter, budget balancer, and financial fraud promoter.  Perhaps some working class sense that what Clinton did is not helping them at all.

We woke up on November 14, 2014 to the first snow of this winter season in Sturbridge.

The Healthy Home Economist has the article The Real Reason Wheat is Toxic (it’s not the gluten) | The Healthy Home Economist.

You’re going to want to sit down for this one. I’ve had some folks burst into tears in horror when I passed along this information before

If you can’t go to the article to read it, the answer will be revealed if you open the spoiler alert. Of course the article has many more details that you’ll want to read once you open the spoiler alert. It is more entertaining if you read the article without seeing the spoiler.

Thanks to Carol Peters for posting this on her Facebook page.

Facebook also presented this Examiner article for my consideration Bogus paper on Roundup saturates the Internet. This Examiner article casts aspersions on Dr. Stephanie Seneff of MIT who is one of the sources for the above paper.

So was this bizarre article peer-reviewed by actual biologists? No matter, neither Samsel nor Seneff are biologists either. Seneff is associated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Her homepage says she has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

I was just wondering how Facebook decided to show this related article to me. Was it chosen purely algorithmically by matching up certain keywords in the original post to keywords in the related article? Or has Monsanto paid Facebook to put up rebuttal articles to anything negative that is posted about Monsanto products?

So the debunking article isn’t being completely honest about Dr. Stephanie Seneff.

Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She received the B.S. degree in Biophysics in 1968, the M.S. and E.E. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1980, and the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1985, all from MIT. For over three decades, her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation.

Do your own Google search – roundup wheat harvest.

One article that I found was North Dakota farmers encouraged to use glyphosate-sprayed crops for feed, not seed.

Used properly, glyphosate is a terrific product. In recent years, however, our seed lab has seen an increase in samples with poor germination that has been attributed to the use of glyphosate as a harvest aid. We have seen numerous examples in many crops including wheat, durum, flax, lentils and field peas.

The wheat is too damaged to use as seed, so best to just eat it. Sounds logical to me.

The idea for this post was inspired by a post on Bernie Sanders’ Facebook page. Here is the graphic that went with the post.

Certain countries make a living being tax havens for corporations.  I imagine they charge companies a significant amount of money as far as the countries are concerned, but an insignificant amount compared to what the companies would pay if they incorporated in their home country or had an honest set of books that said where in the world they made their profits.

So I had an idea from my own little pointy head.

All non-tax haven countries should adopt a policy of applying their tax policies on the profits companies make in their own country and to all the profits those companies claim to make in tax haven countries.  That way, the companies would pay the normal rate to many countries  on profits they  claim they make in tax haven countries.  The only way a company could avoid this many multiples of taxation would be to declare their profits in a non-tax haven country.

The tax haven countries would be free to offer whatever they wanted to companies, but what they offered would be of little value.  Problem solved with no interference in the internal affairs of the tax haven country 🙂 – as if they aren’t interfering with our internal affairs.

It also allows the non-tax haven countries to make tax decisions without fear of corporate profit flight to tax havens.

Can anyone see any problems with this modest proposal except for a possible global war over the issue?

For people who like their political wisdom in cartoon form, The Daily Kos has the article Cartoon: Who’s looking out for Lucky Ducky? featuring this Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon.

I am bound and determined to get this message across to the centrist Democrats who just don’t want to hear it.

The Daily Kos has the article and comment board Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges fires back at #pointergate scandal.  The article has a pointer to Mayor Betsy Hodges’ complete response to pointergate.

If the fourth option is correct, my commitment to this work means that the head of the police union or other detractors will pitch more stories that attempt to defame that work and its leaders to various media outlets. So be it. I know the charge that I have been given by the people of Minneapolis and by my own conscience. I will continue to follow that charge.

This mayor will not be bullied.  I wish Ferguson, Missouri  had a mayor like this.

Salon has the article Loretta Lynch’s Wall Street friends: What you should know about AG nominee’s finance past.

Despite all the unabashed punditry, relatively little is known by the country about Loretta Lynch, the low-profile U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, whom President Obama nominated on Saturday to replace Eric Holder as attorney general. We’ve heard about the cases Lynch has prosecuted for the government, from the police shooting of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima to public corruption cases against the likes of Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y.

But what’s less known is Lynch’s career in the private sector. After reviewing her record in this capacity, it’s not that she’s openly corrupted by the forces that increasingly rule our government, so much as she’s marinated in their worldview, in their cultural milieu. To ask her to take on powerful interests in finance would be like asking someone to rat out their friends.
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Eventually, Lynch went back to run the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn for a second stint in 2010, serving there until her nomination for attorney general. But in between, she worked in corporate law and white-collar criminal defense at two mega-law firms for nearly two decades.
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To take this out of the realm of theory, let’s look at some of Lynch’s recent corporate crime actions as a federal prosecutor. She was instrumental in two financial fraud settlements, which President Obama touted in announcing her as attorney general. One was the $7 billion mortgage-backed securities fraud case against Citigroup, part of a series of high-profile settlements that amounted to public relations vehicles for the Justice Department, so they could claim to have “gotten tough” on big banks. In reality, shareholders paid the fines, the perpetrators faced no jail time, investor victims received no compensation, and the public never got the full story on the extent of the wrongdoing.

Lynch’s other major financial fraud case was a $1.9 billion deferred prosecution agreement with HSBC for facilitating money laundering for terrorists and Mexican drug cartels. Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations basically gift-wrapped this case for federal prosecutors in an extensive report, relating lurid tales of HSBC collaborating with some of the worst people on the planet for years. But nobody from the bank went to jail or paid any fines. Lynch’s office didn’t even force HSBC to plead guilty; the deferred prosecution agreement just imposes a fine and a monitoring process as an out-of-court settlement. As Matt Taibbi pointed out at the time, a kid caught with a few ounces of drugs will get thrown into jail for years, but a bank helping the criminals sell billions in drugs to those kids will have no trouble.

In my previous post Obama to nominate Loretta Lynch for attorney general, I voiced my suspicions based on Lynch’s employment history and her lack of record in criminal prosecutions of bank executives.  It is unfortunate, but no surprise, to see my suspicions confirmed in a more detailed look at her record.

Maybe the Democrats who stayed away from the election in droves, knew something that the few of you who voted did not know.

I  did know, or suspect this, but I voted anyway.  At least the Democrats I voted for did not directly refuse to prosecute executive crime on Wall Street as certain people, who were not directly on the ballot this time, did.

All the pretty numbers of how well the top 10% of  income earners have fared under Obama, does not cover up some ugly truths.  With this appointment, it appears that Obama is still deaf to the cries of the people he could not get to come out to vote for him.  What vote could they have cast to get his attention?

CBS News has the story The young voter turnout in 2014. Near the beginning it says:

Voters ages 18-29, a core part of the Democratic party’s coalition, made up 13 percent of the national electorate this year, compared to 19 percent in 2012, representing approximately 14 million fewer young voters–an early estimate based on exit polling and the number of votes cast for the House of Representatives.

Then it goes on to give you lots more fascinating pieces of data.  Remember that as Nassim Nicholas  Taleb said in his book The Black Swan, and here I paraphrase, people run into trouble not so much in telling what happened historically, but they run into trouble when they try to tell you why.

Nevertheless, I have been raving on about why it happened ever since the election.  So trust me, folks, I am an exception to what Taleb said. 🙂