The Free Thought Project has the article Hawaii Sees 10 Fold Increase in Birth Defects After Becoming GM Corn Testing Grounds.

Waimea, HI – Doctors are sounding the alarm after noticing a disturbing trend happening in Waimea, on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. Over the past five years, the number of severe heart malformations has risen to more than ten times the national rate, according to an analysis by local physicians.

Note that the article is not blaming the GMO in the GMO crops. The blame is on the use of pesticides to see how pesticide resistant the GMO crops are. I don’t know how reliable the sources for this story are, but I think it is something that we need to watch to see how it plays out.

I wouldn’t consider the PBS News Hour to be a reliable source, but they have the story GMO seeds grow into big fight on Kauai. Remember that PBS receives less government funding than it used to, and receives much more of its funding from the oligarchs that run these big companies.

Some people see some similarities between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. I think there is one obvious question you need to ask yourself to see the key difference.

Do you want Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump to lead you into battle against your adversaries?

The one thing I would think you would want in a leader is someone who knows who the adversaries are. Bernie Sanders tells you the ones who rig the system against you and are getting all the income and wealth to your detriment are your adversaries. Donald Trump says your adversaries are the ones who have no control over the system, who have less than you do, and only own a tiny fraction of the nation’s wealth.

If Donald Trump were to enlist you into a war against the people who have nothing, what would you have after you won? Trump and his fellow oligarchs would still be rigging the system, will still be holding almost everything, and you’d just have a bigger share of nothing. With a Trump win, the country would be rid of the people at the bottom of the ladder, which would put you at the bottom of the ladder, and next in line to be got rid of.

I don’t think there is any other consideration that would outweigh the answer to this question.

Naked Capitalism has the article Congressional Black Caucus Still Trying to Hurt Their Constituents By Killing the Labor Department Fiduciary Rule.

This is an insane argument. In essence, asset managers are saying that they only way they can afford to offer financial advice to low and middle-income earners is if they screw them. If you force them to act in their clients’ interest, it won’t become cost-effective. So CBC members want to protect their constituents’ ability to get sham advice contrary to their interest? There is no question that these constituents would be better off with no advice at all.

I remember back to the days when I was writing and supporting simulation programs for the semi-conductor industry. Richard Newton, a professor at the University of California at Berkley, was a leading light in the academic world in this field. In discussing questions of accuracy when solving difficult equations in a simulator he often remarked that it was better to get no answer than the wrong answer. In other words, you could employ all sorts of techniques to get the simulator to find the answer in difficult situations, but you must guard against any technique that could come to the wrong answer and present it to the user as a solution to the equations. Better to just tell the user that the simulator was unable to solve the equations.

YouTube has the video Socialism For Dummies.

Professor Richard D. Wolff explains in 50 minutes what socialism is NOT.
Where does the American fear of Socialism, Communism and Marxism come from?

As a firm backer of Bernie Sanders, even I got quite an education from watching this video. It gave me a much more nuanced view of Socialism. I had not recognized, in quite the detail presented here, the difference between state run capitalism and true socialism. That doesn’t mean that I believe “true” socialism will work as imagined, whatever that may be. Organizing human society is a work in progress. Even thinking about how to organize is a work in progress. What this video did is to give me more ideas to think about.

September, 5, 2015

Here is part 2

If you don’t have the time to view this whole lecture, there is a very powerful part in the last 5 or so minutes during the Q & A. You can skip ahead to it. It’s at 1:06 into the video. I won’t give away the power of the surprise by saying anymore.

Naked Capitalism has the post Kaliningrad, Russia – The Dagger Points East and West. The article is full of charts, and maps, and words. It sort of takes it into the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read category), but I did skim most of the rest of it after I realized it was TL;DR.

Cutting to the chase, I came across this excerpt toward the end.

That leaves the US and NATO to promote subversion inside Kaliningrad. The first deployments are of the green men and volunteers known by their western cover as investigative journalists.

I don’t know if there are any good guys in this game that is being played behind our backs. What little we know of the game is being leaked to us by people whose motive’s we don’t know. Perhaps both sides are just acting like scared little children who don’t know how to get themselves out of the mess they are in.

It seems to me, that at the very least each side is responding to escalating provocations from the other side. Each is hoping that its own most recent provocation will finally make the other side give in. We have seen this scenario played out in the lead up to probably most of the wars we have gotten into.

Isn’t there any way to stop the escalation? Can the two sides get together, and agree that this is all getting out of hand? Can they agree that they need to find some way to stop the escalation?

The only people who seem to have a stake in the future are the people with children and grandchildren who are not believers in an after life. People without children may make it out of this world before it all blows up. People who believe in the afterlife, depending on their particular beliefs, may think that the sooner Armageddon arrives, the better. That’s when we will all be resurrected to live in a Paradise. Is it going to be left to the rest of us to find a way to prevent WW III?

Naked Capitalism has the potentially important article Michael Pettis: If We Don’t Understand Both Sides of China’s Balance Sheet, We Understand Neither.

China is a dynamic and unbalanced economic system entering into something that we might grandly call a “phase shift”, or less grandly the rebalancing process, and that it is doing so with a great deal of debt structured in a highly inverted way. Anyone who sees China this way would have been able to predict not so much the specific shocks, panics, and credit crunches that we have experienced, but rather that we would of necessity experience a series of very similar shocks.

As I read this the author seemed to be displaying an annoying propensity to dance around the issue without making it clear to me what he meant. Perhaps that is only because I didn’t understand his terminology rather than the fact that he refused to give me the specifics that would have made it clear to me.

I found one tantalizing sentence that hinted to me what this article was about.

I believe, however, that without a massive and fairly unlikely transfer of wealth from the state sector to the household sector, the average Chinese GDP growth rate under Xi Jinping cannot exceed 3-4%.

Nowhere else did he explain which balance sheets were out of whack, inverted, nor did he ever mention again the sector issues, let alone the specific state and household sectors. Over and over he talked about too much debt, but never said which sector was too much in debt.

Maybe a finance expert can read this, and explain to me the golden nugget of what this article is trying to tell me. I have a strong feeling that there is a golden nugget to be found.

I think there may be a relation between this article and a conundrum for the Chinese economy that I always wondered about. If the Chinese economy depends on massive exports, how is this going to succeed when all the buyers of Chinese products run out of the money to buy these products? The answer seemed to me to be having domestic demand in China sop up the products for which China could no longer find foreign buyers. Is this article saying that the state is keeping too much of the wealth, and not transferring enough of it to the private sector to spur private domestic demand? If the author would only say this, and talk about specifics on solving this problem, perhaps his disagreements with other experts could be resolved. I have a feeling that his disagreements arise because the other experts can’t figure out what he is getting at either.

I have posted that last paragraph as a comment on the article on Michael Pettis’ blog.

Blastr has the article Every second counts in hilarious, NSFW time travel short One-Minute Time Machine.

It’s not every day that you get to see a NSFW time-travel short film. But if you do, it’s not every day that you get one this good. At only five minutes runtime, One-Minute Time Machine is short. But it manages to pack a serious punch.

If all science fiction were as good as this, I would be a fan.

Consortium News has this great article America’s Short-sighted ‘Grand Strategy’. I’ll give you an excerpt from the conclusion, but you must read the article to see how the author came to this conclusion.

Today America’s central foreign policy problem and the problem of American militarism can be simply stated: Military strategy is trumping grand strategy. The result is not only a state of perpetual war, but as the emerging Ukraine and China policies show, it is one of an expanding confrontation that can lead to even more war and more blowback.

That, in a nut shell, is why it is time to do a grand-strategic evaluation of the coercive unilateralism that is evident in America’s ever-mutating war on terror, its meddling in Ukraine, and its so-called strategic pivot into China’s backyard to threaten China’s exceeding vulnerable sea lines of communication and “contain” China, whatever that means. The time is ripe for a substantive political debate on a real issue.

The article explains why I think that the war-like foreign policy of the Obama/Clinton administration is so reprehensible. The current need to demonize Iran even by supporters of the Iran Nuclear Deal is tragically short-sighted.

I am glad to be able to add this article to the arsenal of this blog in trying to explain what is so wrong with our unnecessarily aggressive foreign policy.