Slate has the article Partisan Gerrymandering Got the Sotomayor Treatment.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor posed a very simple inquiry that cut to the core of the case: “Could you tell me what the value is to democracy from political gerrymandering? How does that help our system of government?”
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Sotomayor then drilled down and posed an even sharper follow-up question to Murphy: “It’s OK to stack the decks so that for 10 years—or an indefinite period of time—one party, even though it gets a minority of votes, can’t get … the majority of seats?”

Murphy couldn’t come up with a truthful answer to any of these questions. Perhaps the Supreme Court can come to the rescue of this country.

Scientific American has the article Black Holes, Cosmic Collisions and the Rippling of Spacetime.

Gravitational wave astronomy, where we view the Universe not in light or particles but by picking up the vibrations of spacetime itself, is a true revolution in our view of the cosmos. We can only guess at what it might show us as we continue to feel our way forward into the vast unknown.

If you want an explanation of the concept of spacetime, look at my previous post CERN scientists simplify space-time in 3 short videos. That should clear up any questions you might have. 🙂

New Economic Perspectives has the article The Poorest Tax Payers to Pay the Most Under Trump Plan.

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network and says that both Republicans and Democrats are financially illiterate when they speak about the deficit, and Trump’s economic experts are ‘completely disconnected from the real world.’

The title on the YouTube video is Trump’s Tax Plan Increases Marginal Taxes for Only the Poorest Tax Payer.

I was of two minds about posting this video. It has a lot of good information in it, but it has a few flaws. The flaws muddy up the message.

The good stuff you can get from the video include the fact that taxes do redistribute income (lately the redistribution is in the upward direction). Bill Black cares about tax cuts because it just redistributes even more income to the wealthy.

Bill’s explanation of the difference between the deficit and the debt is somewhat off point, but possibly exactly backwards. I am surprised that he, of all people, would confuse that issue. The national debt the accumulation of deficits over the years. I bet he wishes he could take back what he said.

Talking about losing political arguments, the one about taxes not funding spending may be literally correct, but is too strange a claim to be worth using.

Proto Thema has the article Russia writes off over $20bln debt to African countries.

“We have written off more than $20 billion of African countries’ debts as part of an initiative to help out the world’s poorest and most deeply indebted nations,” President Vladimir Putin told reporters after meeting with his Guinean counterpart Alfa Conde on Thursday.

There go those nasty Russians again. Trying to win over the hearts and minds of people by forgiving their countries’ debts. Why we can’t win their hearts and minds by pushing for austerity for those people seems to remain a mystery to our politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike. If the people don’t like austerity we can offer to overthrow their elected governments for them and introduce our own dictators to help them see the light. What’s not to like about what we offer compared to Russia?

Of course there is always this from my quotes page.

James Galbraith – posted here December 19, 2012 – source
A debt that can’t be paid won’t be paid.

Business Insider has the article A history of the US gold standard.

After expressing his own political views about the matter, the author shifts gears.

So instead, I want to lay out the facts of America’s past relationship with gold as a currency and dispel some of the misconceptions people might have.

I have not fact checked the article, but the story of our off and on relationship with the gold standard seems plausible to me. I record a link to this story on my blog because I think it is a good idea to have some perspective on our history with the gold standard.

Rawstory has the article Here is how the Republican Party has conned America for over 30 years.

And it all seemed to be going so well, just as it did in the early 1920s when three consecutive Republican presidents cut income taxes on the uber-rich from over 70 percent to under 30 percent. In 1929, pretty much everybody realized that instead of building factories with all that extra money, the rich had been pouring it into the stock market, inflating a bubble that – like an inexorable law of nature – would have to burst. But the people who remembered that lesson were mostly all dead by 2005,

I am too young to have experienced the 1930s, but I am old enough to have studied economics before Reagan came upon the political scene. That is why I have been trying to promote awareness of the information in this article since before I started this blog.

It is definitely an uphill battle to get people to acknowledge what we knew for the 50 years preceding Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy.

TedEd has the article with videos CERN scientists simplify space-time in 3 short videos.

Space is where things happen. Time is when things happen. And sometimes, in order to really look at the universe, you need to take those two concepts and mash them together. Space-time is a pretty confounding subject to wrap one’s head around, though, so we asked CERN scientists (and all-around super nerds) Andrew Pontzen and Tom Whyntie to break it down for us. Below, the full three-part series, complete with black holes, space-time diagrams and a load of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.

You’ll have to click on the link to the article above to see the videos that they mention as being below.

Do these videos clear things up, or does it boggle your mind even more? Depending how you answer this question says something about you, but I don’t know what.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Hy Minsky, Low Finance: Modern Money, Civil Rights, and Consumer Debt. It is hard to know what you are going to get from this article by just looking at the title. I’ll start by quoting a conclusion stated in the article.

We have an economy that eats people’s fundamental rights for breakfast.

Now, I will back up to a couple of paragraphs that I think supply some of the justification for this conclusion. MMTers are proponents of Modern Money Theory which just explains how our monetary system works.

Consumer finance, in general, is becoming increasingly complex and moving faster and faster, meaning it’s becoming harder for people to see the forest through the trees. Today, in the current environment of federal deregulation, the American Bankers Association is trying to get banks back into balloon-payment payday loan. Subprime mortgages are coming back, auto finance is a total racket, healthcare woes will churn medical debt until we fix that system, and student debt is just going to get more abusive under Betsy. Additionally, there’s a debt crisis for living expenses in many major cities. I’ve encountered mattress debt, sewing machine debt, and puppy dog debt. Then, on top of all this, and this is for other folks on the panels, people are taking out loans so they can pay their debts to courts, municipalities, prisons, and other entities other folks on the panel will talk about.
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So what do we about all this? MMTers already have the answer: we spend money for public purpose on things that actually make people’s lives better as whole people. We can’t just throw money at people. (I mean this in the context of lending, obviously, but if you’ll indulge me a minute, I’m also talking about some approaches to Basic Income here. If you’re just receiving a check, but you don’t have any increased, structural power over other aspects of your life, the money is just going to go down the drain. Forget income, people are in debt up to their eyeballs, and they’re being plundered. The way things are going now, if we get UBI without transforming the underlying structure of the economy, people are going to get their UBI money on prepaid Chase debit cards loaded with fees, their financial data is still going to surveilled by anyone who can check a consumer reporting system, and they’re going to lose their checks on the back-end to abusive, fraudulent debt collectors.)

The Intercept has the article Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet? by Glen Greenwald.

Last Friday, most major media outlets touted a major story about Russian attempts to hack into U.S. voting systems, based exclusively on claims made by the Department of Homeland Security.

I just scanned the article on The Intercept. Would The Department of Homeland Security consider tha as an attack. How are we supposed to use the internet without scanning files and web sites?

Does the Department of Homeland Security have the slightest understanding of how the internet works? They probably think it is a bunch of vacuum tubes that suck information out of computers. I don’t know what they think happens to computers that are subjected to such vacuuming.

Here is a line printed at the bottom of this blog page.

This page has been read 5,074,590 times from 164,666 internet addresses.

I wrote the software that tracks the information and prints out that line. Does The Departmenf of Homeland Security think they have to tell me which IP addresses are scanning my blog?

Here is a summary report from some security software that watches over my web site. This is just a list of the top IP addresses that did suspicious enough activities to be blocked by the security software. Notice, that it can figure out in what countries the IP addresses are located.

EraBlog.com has the article Paying for public services, in a monetary sovereign state.

Every time our national Government spends, it creates some of its money for the purpose. I know commercial banks create a great deal of deposits for themselves, and a great deal of what is normally defined to be ‘the money supply’ by lending to their customers, but they can only do this because they have access to Government money, in the form of their reserves at the RBA. There are two ways for this money to be created. One is the Government spending this money (permanently) into existence, and the other is the RBA lending this money (temporarily) into existence.

This is a very good explanation which should be easy to accept if you don’t think really deeply about this.

Having thought a little more deeply about MMT (Modern Money Theory), I have some minor quibbles with some of the wording. The post does eventually get to mention that the Fed buys a lot of bonds. This explanation mitigates some of my quibbles about previous statements.

One of the things I have come to quibble with about MMT explanations is that MMT uses accounting balances in sectors to come to certain conclusions that are overstated. What is overblown is To say that fractional reserve banking in the private sector does not produce high powered money because for every dollar given out as a loan the books also carry a counterbalancing accounting entry of the borrowers promise to repay the loan. In a static accounting sense this balance is certainly true. However, the static accounting balance does seem to blind MMT to the dynamic impact of giving out spending money immediately and the counter balancing transaction is to repay that money later, sometimes much later.

That lent money has tremendous economic impact in the time between the giving out of the money and when it has to be paid back. The article’s statement that government bonds that pay interest are the equivalent of deposits at the Fed is one of those instance where the article ignores the time shift factor. To get cash for a bond that has not matured, the owner has to get someone to buy that bond back. If the Fed buys it, then the bond was no more than similar to a reserve account at the Fed. If someone in the private sector has to put up the money to buy the bond, then it has a different economic impact (the amount of money available to be spent in the private sector) than if the Fed buys it.