YouTube has the video Richard Wolff Interview: Capitalism Con Job, MMT, “Booming” Economy.

Worth every second to watch this video.

Of course being an engineer, I tend to focus on the exceptions.

As for reform solving our problems, I don’t think the problem in trying to reform was such a failure. It succeeded pretty well from after the war to about mid 1970s as Wolff said. The trouble was that people who were moderately happy with those reforms did not see the massive effort that was going on to undermine those reforms. Moreover, as the older generation goes away, and the younger generation takes over, they weren’t steeped in the reasons why the reforms were necessary. They were easy targets for the propagandists who explained to them the horrors of the reforms. The liberal/progressives failed in counter-education to the people who hadn’t lived through it. By the time we got to Obama, he was too young to know this himself.

As for MMT, Wolfe is partly right, but partly ignorant of what the MMT proponents see as their whole program. Sometimes I even chide the MMT people for thinking that it is all about monetary policy perhaps because the name ot the theory has the word money or monetary in it. Keynes, back in the 30s, explained why monetary policy is like pushing on a string when you are trying to fix economic recession or depression. You need a very strong fiscal policy with direct purchases of goods and services by the government. MMT people see it is there, but they don’t give fiscal policy enough emphasis. MMT people see the Job Guarantee as an integral part of MMT, which is in part Fiscal policy. MMT is what opens the policy choices for far more fiscal stimulus. Anything to do with fiddling with taxes is mostly monetary policy. Government direct investment in expanding the economic capacity of the country is the fiscal policy that needs more emphasis.

All of the other reforms that Wolfe mentions are also part of fixing our problems. MMT is only part of the solution. I know that, and I think even the MMT bigwigs know that.

The dreaded New Your Times Magazine has the article How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution.

The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can’t be explained by natural selection alone — so how did it come to be?

What the author of the article, Ferris Jabr, fails to appreciate is something that Nassim Nicholas Taleb pointed out. A description of something observed is on firmer ground than any attempt to explain why it happened. Jabr somehow doesn’t show enough appreciation for the observation of beauty in nature because Jabr is so anxious to know the explanation.

I find it interesting to apply some of the observations in the bird kingdom to the behavior of sexual selection in humans. It seems like the fashions of what women and men find to be attractive in each other changes more rapidly than in the other animal kingdoms. Since we are part of nature, this is natural selection, too, even if a lot of it is in our minds (or the eyes of the beholders).

Vanity Fair has the article The Real Story Behind the Havana Embassy Mystery. I think this is the story the internet is citing as the idea that the cause was crickets. Here is the excerpt that mentioned crickets.

And, in fact, once experts listened to the YouTube recording, there was an almost embarrassing revelation. What did many hear? Crickets.

Literally, crickets. Specifically, Gryllus assimilis, a.k.a. the Jamaican field cricket, also known sarcastically among bug experts as the “silent cricket.” And while Gryllus can get as loud as, say, a vacuum cleaner, it’s not noisy enough to cause deafness. Or, others argued, the sound might be cicadas. ProPublica’s groundbreaking investigation into the embassy mystery last winter quoted a biology professor named Allen Sanborn as saying that the only way a cicada could injure your hearing was if “it was shoved into your ear canal.”

In my scanning the article, I don’t think it is really postulating that crickets are the cause. However, crickets sounds cute as a meme going around the internet. Read the article your self, to see if you can figure out the most likely cause raised in the article. I thiink a Cuban attack is pretty thoroughly ruled out.

This excerpt gets to what I think the article is concluding as the cause.

“Think of mass psychogenic illness as the placebo effect in reverse,” says Robert Bartholomew, a professor of medical sociology and one of the leading experts on conversion disorder. “You can often make yourself feel better by taking a sugar pill. You can also make yourself feel sick if you think you are becoming sick. Mass psychogenic illness involves the nervous system, and can mimic a variety of illnesses.”

The article mentions another term that we might be more familiar with.

As it happens, there is and always has been one mechanism that produces precisely this effect in humans. Today it’s referred to in the medical literature as conversion disorder—that is, the conversion of stress and fear into actual physical illness. But most people know it by an older, creakier term: mass hysteria. Among scientists, it’s not a popular term these days, probably because “mass hysteria” summons the image of a huge mob, panicked into a stampede (with a whiff of misogyny thrown in). But properly understood, the official definition, when applied to the events in Havana, sounds eerily familiar. Conversion disorder, according to the International Journal of Social Psychiatry, is the “rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms among members of a cohesive social group, for which there is no corresponding organic origin.”