Naked Capitalism has the article Mussolini-Style Corporatism, aka Fascism, on the Rise in the US. This article has an introduction to, and then republishes the Thom Hartman article on Alternet Tea Party and the Right: The Sad Truth of Our Politics: It’s Basically Turned into a Competition Among Oligarchs to Own Everything: It could still happen here.

In all the years I have known about fascism, I have never seen the definition that clarifies what the word really means until reading this article.

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is, “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

All I ever really knew was that fascism is what Mussolini did, but I never knew what exactly he did that was called fascism. Are there other people whose education about history was as faulty as mine? Do you suppose there is a reason why people in the 1950s and 1960s and beyond were never taught the true meaning?

Naked Capitalism has the article “Stunning” Rise in Death Rate, Pain Levels for Middle-Aged, Less Educated Whites.

One of the long standing patterns in economies showing economic growth is longer life spans, and falls are see[n] the result of severe distress and dislocation, as took place in the period right after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the expectancies of adult men fell by over seven years.

The US has just become the first country to approach this appalling record. A stark warning about the level of distress in America comes from an important study by Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel prize winner in economics, and his wife Anne Case.

Over the course of my career, I have seen the deterioration of the work place environment in terms of stress inflicted on even the best educated workers, let alone the ones with just high school diplomas or less. Based on my own observations, the result of this study seems almost inevitable.

For the strong anti-choice advocates, I have to wonder how “pro-life” they really are when they keep voting for politicians who keep advancing the redistribution of wealth from the middle-class to the rich. The middle-class is so stressed out by this shift that it is affecting their health.

From the oligarchs point of view, this seems to work out just fine. They don’t have to spend their money on expensive death panels, when the workers perform that duty for themselves and for free.

Junior College has the article Study says ‘everything in moderation’ may be bad dietary advice.

Dietary diversity and food count was also associated with higher intake of unhealthy and healthy food.

Otto added, “An unexpected finding was that participants with greater diversity in their diets, as measured by dissimilarity, actually had worse diet quality”.

Take that, you people who scoffed at our limited diet. With so many restrictions on our diet these days, low fat, low salt, low carbs, there aren’t that many things left to eat.

Venture Beat has the article As HP does the corporate splits, a look back at 10 years of ineptitude and lowlights.

The other company has selected the electrifying name: Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Oooh! Sizzling! Whitman will run this business, which will retain the server, data storage, networking, and software products. With some of these businesses in only moderate decline, this is known in investment banking jargon as: The Slightly Less Short End Of The Stick.

I think “the other companyu” is the one that will continue to pay my meager pension. I hope they live longer than I do.

If it goes belly up, at least I will have the picture from the article and the emoticon to remember.

Whitman goes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Daily Kos has the article The Truth about the Spring Valley “Officer Slam” Assault on a Teen Girl.

Not many news agencies have reported, or even wondered why she was asked to leave in the first place. As it turns out she had momentarily looked at her phone during class, and apologized for it at the time. Nor have they wondered why the phone issue, which she had already put away, escalated to an administrator and then the now fired school resource officer who had a reputation around the campus as “Officer Slam” for his tendency to throw students to the ground, assaulted her in the first place.

Is this the kind of thing that the parents in Sturbridge wanted or expected when they supported having a School Resource Officer on the premises of our schools? Now that they know, will any minds be changed about the appropriateness of an untrained police presence in our schools?

PC World has the article US Army tests swarms of drones in major exercise.

Their use on the battlefield raises the stakes in the push to detect, spot and control drone flight.

“This is a first step toward a continuing saga, trying to stay ahead of the bad guys,” said Hatchett. “We have much to do but we are now out of the blocks and moving forward.”

<sarcasm>It’s nice to know that gun control is now the least of our problems</sarcasm>