New Economic Perspectives has the article The Urgent Need to Save Orthodox Economists from their Crippling Myths by William K. Black.

The failure to understand the role of epidemics of accounting control fraud in driving each of our three modern financial crises is not a small failure of orthodoxy, it should be viewed as a crisis that endangers the global economy. We should all be working together urgently to repair that failure, which will require a multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological effort. Some of us have been trying to do this for decades. We hope the blogger will join us in that ongoing effort. Your fears that you need to learn a newly invented, secret and “occult” methodology in order to practice effective economics are baseless. Reading Akerlof and Romer (available free on line) and some of our hundreds of freely available articles is a good start.

This article explains why the orthodox economists, like the ones who criticize Bernie Sanders’ economic proposals, keeps them from being able to predict the behavior of the modern economy. I think that their inability to believe that people commit fraud, is similar to what prevents them from believing what John Maynard Keynes explained in the 1930s and 1940s. A simple Keynesian explanation is so obvious an explanation for the current economic stagnation, that I just cannot fathom why these so-called liberal economists refuse to accept it. Perhaps these economists just refuse to believe that Milton Friedman practiced academic fraud when he “disproved” Keynes’ explanation. I learned my economics before Milton Friedman came on the scene to spout his malicious clap-trap. Maybe that is why I was not fooled by it, even though the author of the book from which I learned my economics, Paul Samuelson, had to admit that he mistakenly changed the book after I read it because of being duped by Milton Friedman.

Naked Capitalism has this very interesting article Why the Oregon Refuge Occupiers Had a Legitimate Grievance…..Just Not the One They Went After.

I had no ideas of the complex shenanigans that big business and the Republicans were playing to set this whole process in motion. It is all part of the play that Bernie Sanders is trying to stop. Bernie Sanders has a good grasp on the big picture that I know about. I wonder if he has a grasp on some details that this story tells, and that I had not thought about in the big picture. Although, I must say, I was aware of how Walmart drives its suppliers to lower prices below all reasonable levels. Somebody ends up paying the consequences of this pressure from Walmart, and it sure isn’t the Walton family.

What President Obama Tried To Do to Help Small Ranchers

After his election in 2008, President Obama took up the cause of independent farmers and ranchers against the excesses of meat packers. Starting with a series of 5 meetings with various farm groups representing cattle, hog and chicken farmers, the USDA who was charged with rewriting regulations and President Obama found themselves blocked by a Republican controlled House. While the Senate supported appropriations for the overall meat industry, the House went full out blocking food stamp and food safety programs. No one wanted to place the poor at risk. In December 2011, the USDA published 4 watered down regulations of which the only full strength regulation eliminated arbitration. In May 2012, the DOJ followed through with a report on the five 2010 meetings detailing a lack of competition. The DOJ went to state:

“It could not act to address these wrongs because, no matter how outrageous the conduct of the processing companies, their actions did not amount to “harm to competition” as defined by the current antitrust framework” which was skewed to protect consumers. Obstructionist Republicans in the House not only blocked any reform efforts but also any change to the law or USDA regulations and threatened budget cuts to the Department of Agriculture. It would be interesting to discover which Republicans blocked the reform efforts of Obama and the DOJ and came out in support of grazing rights for ranchers.

If you think about why this information has not come out before, you can realize why the corporate media and the Republicans want to keep the public in the dark. That makes me wonder who knew about this, and should have brought this to the public’s attention, but didn’t. The answer was staring me right in the face. The Obama administration who was fighting this fight and being blocked at every turn are the ones who should have blown the whistle.

This is the perfect example of the failure of the Obama administration to engage the grass roots political organizations to rally to the cause. President Obama acts like he has to fight these battles by himself. When he is defeated, he just swallows the defeat, rather than turning that defeat into one more brick in the case he should be building against his opponents. He simply fails to realize the power he has to build the case example by example of what the Republicans and corporate Democrats are doing to this country.

This case against the oligarchs is the one that Bernie Sanders is trying to build, and the one that Hillary Clinton wants to keep buried. Whether or not Bernie Sanders is going to be the one to finally wake up the ire of the voting public enough to have them take back their power, remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, he has certainly added fuel to the coming revolution. If only more people, like President Obama, were helping him build the pressure, he wouldn’t have to do this all by himself.

Well, it can’t be all politics all the time.

Here are the unofficial Sturbridge Presidential Primary results posted on the town web site.

The highlights are:

Even I beat Hillary Clinton in Sturbridge.

Here are the results that you can read without needing spreadsheet software.

Smoking Hot Political Junkies has the post Black Votes Matter – and South Carolina, You Just Got Played by Hillary Clinton by Kimberley Irvin.

As a Black female, I just can’t wrap my head around it. Why in the hell would ANYONE, especially a person of color, waste their vote on another Clinton?

One factor in the SC blowout that I had not fully understood is something that Clinton said in the debate. She chastised Bernie Sanders for disagreeing with President Obama. For many white voters, it was a “so, big deal” issue. She wasn’t aiming that remark at white voters. She was aiming that remark at black voters. Despite everything, President Obama is still extremely well regarded in the black community for the symbolism he represents, not necessarily for anything he has achieved.

Either because of Clinton’s remark, or the fact that Sanders has disagreed with Obama on wars, failure to prosecute Wall Street crooks, trade policy, and deportation of immigrants, I think that there are many black people who just aren’t going to listen to Bernie Sanders no matter what he says and no matter how much their material interests are in sync with his platform.

Naked Capitalism has the article James Galbraith Describes Major Forecast Failure in Model Used by Romers to Attack Friedman on Sanders Plan.

So why do the Romers say so confidently that Friedman is off base? They are using a different model. And as Galbraith explains long-form, it’s one with a pretty crappy track record in post-crisis America. And Galbraith gives an important warning:

In the real world, forecasts are a very weak guide to policy; when attempting to make major changes the right strategy is to proceed and to take up the challenge of obstacles or changing circumstances as they arise. That is, after all, what Roosevelt did in the New Deal and what Lyndon Johnson did in the 1960s. Neither one could have proceeded if today’s economists had been around at that time.

This is a shocking description of the failures of the ecnomists in the Obama administration who are now throwing stones at Bernie Sanders.

One of the things about Obama that I voted for was the belief that he was a practical guy who would follow Roosevelt’s technique “proceed and to take up the challenge of obstacles or changing circumstances as they arise”

I knew that Obama had failed to meet my expectations in this regard, but until I read this article, I never realized the depths of that failure.

I think I have a special appreciation for the mathematics underpinning the wisdom of constantly checking your results, and adjusting to deviations from expectations.

My explanation below is even more abstract than the James Galbraith explanation of the problems of economic forecasting. I really don’t expect anybody to undersyand what comes below except for people who have also been in my trade of simulation of the behavior of integrated circuits.

When I first got into the business in 1969, there were severe limits on the performance of circuit simulation programs. If you tried to make too large jumps in time in your simulation, the results could predict wild oscillations in the circuits where none existed.

This was due to a method called explicit integration. In that method, you would take a few historical points in time of your simulation, and use it to predict behavior at the next point in time. You never checked to see if that prediction was continuing to satisfy the equations governing the system as a whole. To prevent the problem of oscillation, you were forced to limit yourself to time steps not larger than those limited by the smallest time constants anywhere in your circuit. This limitation would keep the errors to a reasonable level, but it really slowed down the simulator by orders of magnitude. The reason why people stuck to explicit integration was that solving the circuit equations to check for errors was an extremely compute intensive process.

In the early 1970s, The University of California at Berkeley, and others introduced ways to use implicit integration instead of explicit integration. The reason why they could use implicit integration was they had found a technique for rapidly solving the system circuit equations to see if the error was within bounds. Those rapid solving techniques are called sparse matrix techniques. With sparse matrix and implicit integration, you used the predictions from previous time points, but then you checked how accurately those predictions satisfied the equations for the circuit at the time you were trying to estimate. If the predictions were too far off, you would adjust then until they the result was acceptable. If you couldn’t find acceptable results at the new predicted time, you would try a smaller time step into the future at an earlier predicted time. This method allowed you to take much larger time steps than explicit integration allowed while not introducing wild oscillations into the results. The new method was also more suitable for simulating highly non-linear circuits like those found in computers.

In effect, you only had to worry about small time constants in parts of the circuit that were actually changing significantly. Small time constants in parts of the circuits that weren’t very active would not cause your solution to go wild.

I liken this behavior to the Roosevelt economic plan. Forecast something, do something according to your forecast, measure what happened as a result, and adjust if you see deviations from plan.

It’s not rocket science, but it is science and math. I only wish I could explain this to the lay public who are not engineers and mathematicians. Well, at least I can take comfort that I laid it all out there, even if very few will get it.

The Morning Ticker has the story What the heck are gravitational waves? Here’s the beautiful explanation [VIDEO].

The discovery of gravitational waves has been perhaps the biggest moment in science since the discovery of the Higgs boson — but what exactly are they and what makes them so important? A physicist was on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to break it down for everyone in America.

Here is the featured video Gravitational Waves Hit The Late Show.

I always love the analogy of the bowling ball on the trampoline and the representation of gravity bending space in the three dimensional plot superimposed on images of planets. It is such a simple concept to grasp, and the plots and explanations make you think you have learned something. Then I say to myself, a three dimensional plot has three axes. In the ones being shown, the horizontal axes represent two of the three space dimensions, and the third axis is what?

When we are talking space/time, it has four dimensions of its own. If you could conceive of a five dimensional plot, what is the 5th dimension? I did look this up on Google once and came up with some understanding of these questions, but now I have forgotten what I learned.

If you would prefer, just walk away thinking those plots have taught you something about general relativity, and be satisfied. You can nod your head knowingly whenever you see such a presentation in the future.

Naked Capitalism has the very interesting article Introducing Kuznets Waves: How Income Inequality Waxes and Wanes Over the Very Long Run.

The pro-inequality trends will be very hard to overturn during the next generation, but eventually they may be – through a combination of political change, pro-unskilled labour technological innovations (which will become more profitable as skilled labour’s price increases), dissipation of rents acquired during the current bout of technological efflorescence, and possibly greater attempts to equalise ownership of assets (through forms of ‘people’s capitalism’ and workers’ shareholding).

Now, these are of course the benign factors that, I think, will ultimately set inequality in rich countries on its downward path. But history teaches us too that there are malign factors, notably wars, in turn caused by domestic maldistribution of income and power of the elites (as was the case in the World War I), that can also do the job of income levelling. But they do it at the cost of millions of human lives. One can hope that we have learned something from history and would avoid this destructive path to equality in poverty and death.

The author starkly sets out what I have been thinking are the two options. I’d much rather we promote the benign forces than the malign ones. The wealthy are probably thinking about the same possibilities, but are hoping they can ignore the benign ones because the malign ones probably won’t happen in their lifetimes. As always, the rich don’t realize there is no place for them to hide if the malign options happen.

ars technica has the article Nissan’s connected car app offline after shocking vulnerability revealed.

When a Leaf owner connects to their car via a smartphone, the only information that Nissan’s APIs use to target the car is its VIN—the requests are all anonymous. Those are the findings of Troy Hunt and Scott Helme, who published their findings on Wednesday. Thursday, Nissan took the service offline.

As a retired software engineer with 40 years experience, and now as a blogger, I know that the art of providing computer security is more complicated than what I can manage, so I depend on experts in the field of computer security to do the work for me. I wish that more large companies had software engineers working for them that had an inkling of how unqualified they are to design security into the systems they deploy. They need to seek out the experts in the field to advise them on security matters.

Such amateur behavior on the part of these software designers gives professional software engineers a bad name. More importantly, this amateur behavior erodes confidence in computer systems of the consumer public. Amateurish behavior of software engineers almost sank President Obama’s health care initiative.

I have not supported the idea that engineers working for a large corporation should all have professional engineer credentials to ply their trade, but these sorts of incidents leave me wondering. I guess I can have these thoughts now that I am safely retired and won’t have to get professional engineer accreditation.