The Los Angeles Times has the story Don’t believe the light: Supernova in ‘Einstein Cross’ is a cosmic trick.

An international team has discovered four separate images of the same distant supernova arranged in the shape of a cross — and this unusual trick of the light could help scientists test the structure of the cosmos. They reported their find in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

Every time I read a story that demonstrates some non-intuitive phenomenon of physics, I think of all those people who are arguing for biblical interpretations of the universe, let alone classical physical interpretations.  They seem to have no idea how many generations of physics that they are behind in what they think they understand.

Ready For Warren has a Facebook post highlighting the Occupy Democrats‘ article House Democrat Introduces Bill to End All Government Shutdowns — Forever.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has a solution, and he is currently seeking co-sponsors for a bill that would “shut down the shutdowns.” Grayson’s bill would “automatically extend existing appropriations levels for another fiscal year whenever Congress fails to fund agencies before their money expires,” according to the Washington Post.

The Washington Post article is Tired of shutdown battles? This bill would end them for good.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) said this week that he is seeking co-sponsors for a “Shut Down the Shutdowns Act” that would automatically extend existing appropriations levels for another fiscal year whenever Congress fails to fund agencies before their money expires.

Some people complain about what can’t be done, while others file legislation that tries to get those things done. Less complaining, and more doing might actually change something. Occupy Democrats only asked us to spread the word.

Naked Capitalism has the article Look Who is Selling the TransPacific Partnership by Yves Smith.  Her email introduction to this article said:

Some Serious Economists have signed a letter supporting the TransPacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The missive says a lot about the discipline, and not in a good way.

The article is a call to action to counter this letter with calls to your Congress people.

By the way “serious economists” is meant, in this case, as a pejorative.  These are economists that the Lame Stream Media treats as knowledgeable, but in fact are just paid shills for the oligarchy.

I read through the list of signatories to come up with the following classification:

Not surprising
Alan Greenspan
Charles L. Schultz
Martin Feldstein
R. Glenn Hubbard
N. Gregory Mankiw
Ben S. Bernanke
Austan D. Goolsbee

Astonishing
Christina D. Romer

I’ll let you read the letter to see what organizations these people claim to be from.

The Washington Post has the article Netanyahu enters never-never land by Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria brings up some history as a way to judge whether or not even tougher sanctions would work to get Iran to capitulate.  Here is some of what he said.

We have some history that can inform us on the more likely course. Between 2003 and 2005, under another practical president, Mohammad Khatami, Iran negotiated with three European Union powers a possible deal to place its nuclear program under constraints and inspections. The chief nuclear negotiator at the time was Hassan Rouhani, now Iran’s president.

Iran proposed to cap its centrifuges at very low levels, keep enrichment levels well below those that could be used for weapons and convert its existing enriched uranium into fuel rods (which could not be put to military use). Peter Jenkins, the British representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Inter Press Service , “All of us were impressed by the proposal.” But the talks collapsed because the Bush administration, acting through the British government, vetoed it. It was certain, Jenkins explained, that if the West could “scare” the Iranians, “they would give in.”

What was the result? Did Iran return to the table and capitulate? No, the country withstood the sanctions and, unimpeded by any inspections, massively expanded its nuclear infrastructure. Iran went from 164 centrifuges to 19,000, accumulated more than 17,000 pounds of enriched uranium gas and ramped up construction of a heavy water reactor at Arak that could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

Now, I don’t think of Fareed Zakaria as an infallible interpreter of the Middle East, but his repetition of history matches what I remember of that history.  Most people seem to think the history shows Iran to be intractable and irrational.  However, I read about what the Bush administration was up to at the time it was happening.  Clearly, the Bush administration made nice on the surface, but made sure to slap Iran with the backs of their hands in private to make sure no agreement ever could be reached.  If I could read about it in the news at the time, it always mystified me how so many other people could pretend that this wasn’t happening.  When people couldn’t get it right at the time, there would be no hope that they would remember it correctly years later.

Jill Stein of the Green Party has announced the forming of an exploratory committee for the 2016 run for President.  She has an announcement page on her web site.

Here is a video of the press conference.

I have had several requests for an opinion on Jill Stein as a candidate. I didn’t (and still don’t) know too much about her. I’ve decided that as I learn more about her, I will be posting what I find out on the blog. Adding her voice to that of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in the run-up to the 2016 election can only amplify the progressive message. In answer to another question I received, amplifying the message is one approach to changing people’s thinking about politics.

Naked Capitalism has the article Robert Parenteau: The Large Fly in Krugman’s New Keynesian Soup.

Paul Krugman had a delightful field day with his March 2nd New York Times column trashing media poseur economists like Larry Kudlow – economists who somehow manage to survive on their entertainment value alone, despite their repeated analytical errors. No doubt their prolonged shelf life has more than a little to do with the fact that the points of view they espouse tend to encourage their readers (or viewers) to think that their self interests are perfectly aligned with the self interests of say, oh, the Koch Brothers and their ilk. Useful idiots is the phrase that comes to mind. Useful idiots engaging in willful ignorance.

On his way to skewering the clownier clowns of the economics profession, however, Krugman could not help but to once again remind his loyal readers that everything you ever needed to know about macroeconomics was already discovered and described in his 1998 paper on Japan’s alleged liquidity trap. Humility is not one of Krugman’s strong suits, but we will allow you to come to your own conclusions after reading yet another of his repeated attempts at shameless self pimping in the March 2nd piece:

I thought it might be fun to see Paul Krugman being skewered, but by the time I got to the end of the article, my head was spinning.  Then I read the comments among very well read people arguing over who did or did not say what or how you could or could not interpret their words.

I offered the following comment:

Let me see if I can bring this discussion back to reality by quoting Greenberg’s Law of Reverence

Principles are not great because a revered person spoke of them. A person is revered because he or she spoke of great principles.

The argument about what Keynes did or didn’t say is not useful in proving or disproving the correctness of any economic principle. The economic principle is either correct (or applicable) based on reality. To the extent that Keynes is revered, it is because the principles he espoused were correct (applicable). Pretending or interpreting an idea as something that Keynes said is not proof of that idea.

The upshot of this understanding of Greenberg’s law is that it is a blind alley to pore through the writings or sayings of Keynes to find out if he did or did not say something, when what we should really be after is whether or not an economic idea is both correct and applicable to the current situation. This talk about economic experts is devolving into an almost Biblical discussion of whether or not you can find something in the Bible to support your argument.

The graph of economic growth versus real interest rates should not be surprising. The economy (society) is so full of competing forces that it is foolish to think that you can find a single measure that will always correlate with (much less be the cause of) one single other measure.

Besides the complexity argument, you have the idea of reflexivity (credit to George Soros, not reverence for him). The actors in this complex system read about what is said about how the system works, and they make judgments on how others will behave given this knowledge. No physical system of inanimate objects bases its behavior on what it thinks the other objects know. So thinking you can ever make a model of the system the way physicists do in purely inanimate systems is going after a fool’s errand.

<ironic self deprecation>I so fell in love with my brilliant analysis that I decided to blog about this whole episode.</ironic self deprecation>.

There is a YouTube video Sanders on Netanyahu Speech.

The irrational “journalists” ask if the Iranian leaders are irrational.

The fact that we and Israel have made it very clear to Iran that they will get no respect, but only bullying if they do not have nuclear weapons makes it extremely rational for them to want nuclear weapons. Even so, they have made no claim that they want nuclear weapons. So who is it that is rational and who is it that is irrational?

See my previous post Netanyahu Feeling Like Trip To US To Start World War III Went Pretty Well. One of these posts is an “actual” news show and the other is satire. I think the satire is so good, that you may have trouble figuring out which is which.

The Onion has the article Netanyahu Feeling Like Trip To US To Start World War III Went Pretty Well.

“I think I did a good job laying the groundwork for a nuclear holocaust that will kill billions of people and eventually end the world as we know it. Sounded like everyone really liked it, too.”

Found this as a comment on a Facebook post.

Come on people, do I have to tell you what kind of web site The Onion is?

Elizabeth Warren has posted Let the NLRB do its job on her Facebook page. You can join the conversation there.

Instead of implementing policies that strengthen the middle class, Republicans are pressing a bill to stop the National Labor Relations Board from modernizing its procedures because it might help – yes, help – America’s workers. Share this video to help tell Congress: Let the NLRB do its job.

I imagine it is Facebook rules that make it difficult to find the video to embed in my blog, but I managed to find it on YouTube anyway. There is is called Sen. Warren to GOP: Stop Ambushing Workers’ Rights.

In a speech on the floor of the United States Senate on March 4, 2015, Senator Elizabeth Warren urged Congress to reject a Republican resolution aimed at stopping implementation of the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) new rule to make workplace union elections more efficient and effective.

I wonder what potential candidates for the Democratic nomination to run for President in 2016 have to say about this. Can you hear their voices as loudly? For some reason, I am hearing only silence.

If You Only News has the article Watch Elizabeth Warren Destroy Every Stupid Anti-Vaxxer Argument In 2 Minutes (VIDEO).

I am not a believer that you should ever hide the facts in order to prove a valid point, so I offer the article Former Mooresville child compensated by federal ‘vaccine court’ from The Charlotte Observer.

As they started their family, Mooresville residents Theresa and Lucas Black dutifully got their children immunized, never doubting their doctor’s word that vaccines are safe and necessary.

But their faith in those promises was shaken in 2001, when their 3-month-old daughter, Angelica, developed life-threatening seizures and brain damage just three days after getting several vaccinations.

For some balance to the balance, you might want to Google “vaccine court”. The WikiPedia article Vaccine court provides some perspective on the “vaccine court”.

Vaccine court is the popular term which refers to the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which administers a no-fault system for litigating vaccine injury claims.

To add even more balance until you topple right over, you might want to refer to my previous post Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks.

I can imagine how the author of the aforementioned book might respond to some of what is in The Charlotte Observer article mentioned above.

Today, two of the Blacks’ oldest children have children of their own, and they’re struggling with vaccine decisions.

Stephen, now 22, has a daughter who’s had some vaccinations, but when she was 12 months old, after getting the MMR for measles, mumps and rubella, she “lost all the verbal skills she had attained,” Theresa Black said. The child is now getting fewer vaccines at a time. At 20 months, she’s seeing a speech therapist to help regain what she lost.

The fact that two generations of this family have had problems might indicate to some that there is an inheritance of the sensitivity to vaccines. Another possible interpretation of the correlation which does not mean causation (see Diversion–Highway Fatalities and Lemons) is that the medical problems of both children had nothing to do with the vaccine and everything to do with a genetic disorder that runs in the family.