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.”

Paste Magazine has the article Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Singlehandedly Shifting the Overton Window

This is how politics gets done. We think of the president as having a “bully pulpit” because everything they say is newsworthy given their power, but anyone can have a bully pulpit. All you need is popularity and some media savvy and you can drive the conversation. This is what this last generation of Democrats failed to demonstrate they understand. They are obsessed with West Wing-style civility politics, and believe that scoring amorphous bipartisanship points with the mainstream press is more important than achieving truly liberal policy outcomes. AOC hasn’t even been a congresswoman for a week, yet she is setting the terms of the debate inside the Democratic Party. No one had heard of the Green New Deal before she joined Sunrise Movement’s protest outside Nancy Pelosi’s office a couple months ago, and now Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke have come out in favor of the most ambitious policy proposal of most people’s lives.

Failure to understand this is what made Clinton’s “let’s be practical” approach so maddening. Elizabeth Warren’s support of Clinton’s politics was so unbelievable because Warren had shown that she understood the need to shift the Overton Window.

Back on December 22, 2018, I posted this video from Bernie Sanders. Five Ways to Trump the Border Wall.

I had occasion to post this again, so I decided I’d better have a reference copy here on my blog as well as having it on Facebook.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking has the interview The New Feudalism.

Are Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos the new feudal elite?

Anand Giridharadas talks to INET President Rob Johnson about how the titans of Silicon Valley use “philanthropy” to control more of our lives.

Here is another book that has gone onto my “must read” list. “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World”

Naked Capitalism has the article The Economics of Cryptocurrency Pump and Dump Schemes.

The surge of interest in cryptocurrencies has been accompanied by a proliferation of fraud, largely in the form of pump and dump schemes. This column provides the first measure of the scope of such schemes across cryptocurrencies. The results suggest that the phenomenon is widespread and often quite profitable, and highlight the need for concerted efforts from industry and regulators to fight cryptocurrency price manipulation.

The above excerpt is too kind to the whole idea of cryptocurrencies. I think that the only reason why these cryptocurrencies have become so popular is the opportunity they present for the pumping and dumping operations. If you are thinking of “investing” in cryptocurrencies, just remember these things were invented for suckers like you.

The Real News Network has published the 4 parts of this two part series.

On RAI with Paul Jay, Senator Bob Graham explains why he persists in making the case that facts directly connect the Saudi government with 9/11 conspirators – a REPLAY of a 2013 interview by Paul Jay

Investigating the Saudi Government’s 9/11 Connection and the Path to Disillusionment – Sen. Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt 1

Revealing the 9/11 Conspiracy Would Undo the Entire US-Saudi Alliance – Sen. Bob Graham on RAI pt2

Why Would Saudi Arabia Support the 9/11Conspirators, Why Would the US Gov. Cover it Up? (3/4)

On RAI with Paul Jay, Senator Bob Graham says the Saudis had a high certainty that the US government would not reveal their role and would take out its vengeance on some place else

The 9/11 Conspiracy: Did Bush/Cheney Create a Culture of Not Wanting toKnow? – Sen. Bob Graham on Reality Asserts Itself pt4

On RAI with Paul Jay, Senator Bob Graham says there was a pervasive pattern in police and intelligence agencies and “you don’t have everybody moving in the same direction without there being a head coach somewhere who was giving them instructions as to where he wants them to move”

New Economic Perspectives presents J. D. Alt’s patent application for a Macroeconomic System for Climate Change.

Abstract:

A macroeconomic system including the issuing of a fiat currency by a sovereign government; the establishment of a tax regime on the government’s citizens wherein the taxes levied can only be paid with the sovereign government’s fiat currency; the sovereign government’s debiting of its tax collection account to purchase goods and services from its citizens and their commerce; the sovereign government’s issuing of future fiat currency certificates—to be redefined as “treasury bonds”—which it trades, at a discount, for existing fiat currency held in private financial markets; the sovereign government then spending the traded-for existing fiat currency to purchase goods and services from its citizens and their commerce over and above what it is able to purchase by debiting its tax collection account; the management of the value of the said fiat currency relative to goods and services by the general means of draining the currency from circulation through the sovereign tax regime—and by the specific means of controlling the discount and time-to-maturity of the issued future fiat currency certificates (treasury bonds); and wherein the sovereign government’s spending is thereby enabled to be orders-of-magnitude greater than what the government collects in taxes—without encumbering the government with debt, and without devaluing the fiat currency with respect to the citizens’ commerce; said macroeconomic system thus enabling a sovereign government to spend whatever fiat currency is necessary to enable and assist its collective society to mitigate and adapt to climate-change.

This sounds remarkably like the bonds I used to get as a child in the 1950s. These were modeled after the bonds that were sold during WW II so that the government could spend huge amounts of money on the war without causing inflation in the civilian economy. It was considered to be very patriotic to buy these bonds. 🙂

Science News has the review of two books, ‘Beyond Weird’ and ‘What Is Real?’ try to make sense of quantum weirdness.

Ball especially favors the perspective on quantum physics offered by the notion of quantum decoherence. Very roughly, the decoherence process dissipates various possible quantum realities into the environment, and only those versions of reality that are robustly recorded in the environment present themselves to observers. It’s of course much more complicated than that, and Ball admirably conveys those complications even at the occasional expense of clarity. Which puts his account closer to the truth.

“Beyond Weird” by Philip Ball is the book I am going to want to read.

The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies has the article The Bond Market Doesn’t Control Anything; the Currency-Issuing National Government Does by Ellis Winningham.

This means that the national government no longer must maintain a certain level of currency in circulation through taxation and borrowing, save for the consideration of the real production ability of the domestic economy, because there is no peg to defend.

As MMT folk are quick to point out that real production ability of the domestic economy is a very important limitation on what the government should do with the money supply. It is not just an after thought that can be easily dismissed from the conversation.

Next I want to comment on this Ellis Winningham statement.

Monetary policy is a blunt, ineffective tool, which relies on the manipulation of interest rates to “encourage” the economy whereas fiscal policy is a direct manipulation of the economy.

This is something Warren Mosler wanted to argue with me when I pointed this out. In my previous post, Warren Mosler: MMT Explains Taxes Are Needed to Prevent Private Sector Spending I quoted Mosler as saying:

Taxes are more powerful than spending.

To which I commented:

This is not always true. Taxes are more powerful than spending for reining in excess spending in the private sector. However, when there is insufficient spending in the private sector, government spending is more powerful than tax cuts.

You can give people all the money you want in order to get them to spend, but if there is a rational reason for them to want to save rather than spend, you cannot force them to spend. In that situation, the government has to do the spending.

I leave it to Ellis Winningham and Warren Mosler to argue it out and try to come to some conclusion that they both can agree on.