The Wall Street Journal blog has the post De Blasio to Skip Clinton Rally, Praises Rival Sanders.

In April, Mr. de Blasio said in an interview on NBC that he wouldn’t endorse her “until I see an actual vision of where they want to go.”

“She’s a tremendous public servant,” he told NBC. “I think she is one of the most qualified people to ever run for this office. And by the way, thoroughly vetted, we can say that. But we need to see the substance.”

Much if not most of what Hillary Clinton says is laudable. The issue is all about what she refuses to say or to talk about.

Thanks for Nacy Weinberg for posting this on her Facebook timeline.

John Oliver did a fantastic routine in the video Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Infrastructure (HBO).

America’s crumbling infrastructure: It’s not a sexy problem, but it is a scary one.

The one mistake that John Oliver makes along with other politicians is to think that the rebuilding of infrastructure needs tax funding. The building, rebuilding, and maintenance of our infrastructure requires physical and human assets to accomplish. The creation of the money to fund this requires a few keystrokes on a computer by someone at The Federal Reserve bank.

As long as the real assets are freely available to be bought with U.S. currency, then there is nothing stopping us but politicians and a misinformed public.

Naked Capitalism has the article Why the Consensus Process Has a Poor Track Record in Activist Movements.

If the forty-year persistence of consensus has been a matter of faith, surely the time has now come for apostasy. Piety and habit are bad reasons to keep using a process whose benefits are more notional than real. Outside of small-group settings, consensus process is unwieldy, off-putting, tiresome, and ineffective. Many inclusive, accountable alternative methods are available for making decisions democratically. If we want to change the world, let’s pick ones that work.

The article is short on listing the techniques that work, but we shouldn’t fault the article for that. It is valuable to be able to see a problem that others have not seen so well, end explain its origins and symptoms. Coming up with definitive and workable solutions to these problems is a much rarer talent than is the already rare talent of identifying a problem few others can see. In other words it is too much to expect that everyone who can articulate a problem can also find a solution to it.

Naked Capitalism has the article People and Power – The Technology Threat featuring an Al Jazeera documentary. If me telling you the source of the documentary puts you off, then it is your loss, not theirs. It is time to wake up about the huge amount of intelligence that resides in the Arab world and the media organizations that they control.

When the talk of what historic waves of technology innovation did to jobs before, everybody in this documentary leaves out one very important piece of history. The benefits of more jobs at better wages did not happen automatically in any of the previous industrial revolutions. The people, unions, and governments all took actions to make sure that the gains from these revolutions were not concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few. We need to be thinking of how this problem is going to be solved this time around. Did anyone think of asking Watson for a suggestion on how to fix the problem?

I’d hate to see people come to the conclusion that we must shut technology down to save the world. The real point is that we must learn what social/political actions we must take so that the most people get the most benefits out of this great new technology. We can’t leave it to the markets to solve the distribution problem. Any politician who does not actively address this issue is not one that we need to elect in the next few decades.

We need to test each politician to see if that person has the vision to see the problem and to imagine ways to begin to address the problem. Another test might be that any politician who claims to have all the answers we need about this problem is not one who is either telling the truth or one who understands the depth and breadth of the problem.

I don’t think I can remind you enough of one of the quotes on my quotes page.

Scott Santense – posted here June 3, 2015 – source

If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”

The New York Times has the article What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? by Gary Taubes Published: July 7, 2002. Note that this was published 13 years before the article in a previous post Four Decades of the Wrong Dietary Advice Has Paved the Way for the Diabetes Epidemic: Time to Change Course.

As I was reading The New York Times article I was wondering if they cribbed their material from the article of my previous post, and then I reminded myself which article came first.

After 20 years steeped in a low-fat paradigm, I find it hard to see the nutritional world any other way. I have learned that low-fat diets fail in clinical trials and in real life, and they certainly have failed in my life. I have read the papers suggesting that 20 years of low-fat recommendations have not managed to lower the incidence of heart disease in this country, and may have led instead to the steep increase in obesity and Type 2 diabetes. I have interviewed researchers whose computer models have calculated that cutting back on the saturated fats in my diet to the levels recommended by the American Heart Association would not add more than a few months to my life, if that. I have even lost considerable weight with relative ease by giving up carbohydrates on my test diet, and yet I can look down at my eggs and sausage and still imagine the imminent onset of heart disease and obesity, the latter assuredly to be caused by some bizarre rebound phenomena the likes of which science has not yet begun to describe. The fact that Atkins himself has had heart trouble recently does not ease my anxiety, despite his assurance that it is not diet-related.

This perfectly describes my ambivalence at trying out the low-carb diet. Our reason for trying it was mainly about blood sugar test results that showed our blood sugars to be higher than what our Doctor wanted to see. The diet seems to have immediately brought our blood sugar levels down to an acceptable range. The fact that we also lost weight was not our primary motive, but had also been suggested by our Doctor.

I will be getting a dietary consultation to see what a dietician thinks about this issue some 13 years after The New York Times article was written.

Thanks to Mary and Andy A. for sending me the link to the NYT article.

Medium has the article Dear America: Meet Bernie Sanders. Properly, this time by Emil Mella. This one is too good for me to just post it on the Sturbridge For Bernie Sanders Facebook page.

In the race to decide the next President of your arguably great nation, there is one candidate who has been drawing the largest crowds of any candidate visiting the key primary state of Iowa (including the Republican primary candidates, who probably estimate about 1% of the American population at this point). A candidate who out-fundraised Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul in any of their first 24 hours as candidates. A candidate whose policies align with the majority of Americans on everything from income inequality to money’s role in politics to the minimum wage to federally financed political campaigning to abortion to overturning Citizens United to global warming and government taking action to combat it to the affordability of a college degree to gun control to government surveillance to passing a law legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states. A candidate who was one of the thousands of Americans who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in his historic March on Washington in 1963. A candidate who has served as a mayor (being one of the earliest proponents of a lot of the policies that are nowadays commonplace in municipal government), a congressman and a senator, with deep knowledge of the American political system and equally deep, authentic convictions that he has held onto for his entire political career.

This explains that the media is doing a lousy job.

It is not the media’s job to decide what the American people can and cannot hear. That is dishonesty, that is lying. It is the media’s job to keep the American people informed. That’s what it’s there for, and doing anything else is simply abusing the trust millions and millions of Americans have for the current news media system.

Mella goes on to explain why the media is doing such a lousy job, but it’s not hard to figure it out for yourself.

Naked Capitalism has the article Ilargi: QE Breeds Instability.

This is the logic behind the actual “liquidity trap” presented by Keynes in his general theory. Specifically, Chapter 15 entitled “The Psychological and Business Incentives To Liquidity.” Here he argues that every fall in the interest rate relative to what is commonly believed to be a “safe” rate increases the “risk of illiquidity”. The the “risk of illiquidity” is the risk of holding an asset not easily convertible into money at “book” value (this also means an asset is more or less “liquid” based on the relative easiness to convert into money “book” value). Further, rather then seeing interest as a return to “waiting”, Keynes argues that it is “a sort of insurance premium to offset the risk of loss on capital account”.
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….if the interest rate rises too fast those “middle-class people” will take much larger losses on the value of many of their assets than they will get back in interest….That is without even taking into account the higher borrowing costs that many would most likely face. Remember also that at such low interests rates “too fast” is actually a very small increase. To go back to Keynes:

If, however, the rate of interest is already as low as 2 per cent., the running yield will only offset a rise in it of as little as 0.04 per cent. per annum. This, indeed, is perhaps the chief obstacle to a fall in the rate of interest to a very low level. Unless reasons are believed to exist why future experience will be very different from past experience, a long-term rate of interest of (say) 2 per cent. leaves more to fear than to hope, and offers, at the same time, a running yield which is only sufficient to offset a very small measure of fear.

If you own bonds for “safety”, you’d better understand what is being said here. I cannot understanding why one invests in a commodity that is at its absolute tippity top in price, has nowhere to go but down, and does not pay you enough interest to cover the risk. How anyone can think this is safe, just defies logic to me?

Remember that this investment advice is worth every penny you paid for it, and not a cent more. So ignore it if that is what you think best.

JamesZ emailed me about the Life Of The Law article and audio Life of the Law #26 – School Discipline program which he had heard on WGBH. I think this was originally aired on January 28, 2014

About ten days after Kyle’s arrest, there was a disciplinary hearing with the assistant superintendent.

”She just kept saying, ‘well, you know what Kyle?’” Lisa Thompson remembered, “‘You seem like a nice kid and your mom seems like she really cares’ and she kept saying, ‘You are exactly the kind of kid we want at Harrison. Your mom is exactly the kind of parent we want at this school.’

“She said that, I don’t know, five times,” Thompson continued. And she said, ‘unfortunately Mom, I’m going to have to tell you something you don’t want to hear…I’m going to have to, I’m going to have to expel him for 180 school days.’”

I try to always maintain the proper amount of skepticism. I know that the story is edited to make you come to one conclusion, so I have to remind myself that we don’t really know what happened. I can still be outraged at the fact that something like this could have happened even though we don’t know for sure whether or not it happened this way in this instance.

This story is relevant to Sturbridge residents because it was just a few years ago that Town Meeting struggled with the issue of funding a school resource officer for Tantasqua Regional High School. At the time, I was in favor of funding the officer, but that is not what the town decided to do. In my mind, I bought into the worry of the bad things that could happen that might be mitigated by the presence of the SRO. It never occurred to me that there could be negative consequences to having an SRO. The above radio program certainly makes it clear what those bad consequences are. The bad consequences of having an SRO aren’t nearly as rare as the consequences of not having one. Having the students get to know a police officer from daily interaction or at least his presence in the school might actually be overrated according to these statistics. Interestingly, the problem is not with the police officer, but it is with the teachers and administrators. Having an SRO and a school administration with zero tolerance policies are a toxic mix.

There are a number of my friends in Sturbridge who have disagreed with my thinking on the SRO. I just could not understand their issues. Now I have a much better grasp of what they may be thinking. For those friends, I used to agree with on this issue, sorry, I have now switched sides.

June 6, 2015

I have found the following in the platform on Jacob Ryan’s web site as a member of the Tantasqua School committee.

I am proud to stand with a bipartisan group of people in support of a School Resource Officer at Tantasqua. The Democratic controlled state legislature and the conservative NRA agree, having an officer in a school system is to the benefit of all involved, especially the students.

Burgess Elementary has proved that an officer not only acts as a safety mechanism if something were to occur, but is a resource for the students, staff, and parents that helps strengthen the relationship between the community and law enforcement. The debate is over however, the state now requires us to have an officer on campus. And because I believe strongly in this issue and want to work within state law, I will push for the institution of this officer as soon as possible.

If the Town is required by the state to have an SRO, I think the least we can do is to also have a funded defense lawyer to protect the civil rights of any student accused of a crime for which the SRO gets involved. This defense lawyer must be called in immediately to warn the student of her or his Miranda rights. I’d like to see the state law amended to require this along with the SRO. I’d also like the school to be required to keep statistics on how many arrests get made, and the outcomes of these arrests and also keep track of the race and the LGBT status of the accused.

When we get into criminal matters, it is a very very bad idea for an accused person to say anything to anybody, especially a police officer, without the accused’s having legal counsel present. Otherwise, the accused is being taken advantage of and is being denied her or his rights. This is one lesson that ought to be taught at Tantasqua. After all, it is part of our Constitution.

See my previous post Don’t Talk To The Police.

June 6, 2015

Jacob Ryan >responded on Facebook.

Intriguing post, one correction though. Sturbridge has always stood by the funding for the resource officer. Every attempt to strip the funding at town meeting has failed. We currently fund the position at Burgess and Tantasqua but the Tantasqua school committee has not adopted the position. Sturbridge is for the position.

Truth Out has the article Four Decades of the Wrong Dietary Advice Has Paved the Way for the Diabetes Epidemic: Time to Change Course.

Yes, fat is the problem. But it’s not the fat you eat that’s the problem. It’s the fat that your liver makes when overwhelmed with a huge sugar load!

I am thrilled to see this article. It explains exactly what I have wanted to know since we just switched from a low fat diet to a low carb diet. Sharon will be thrilled when she sees the article, too.

Ever since my heart attack in 1988, I have been on a low fat diet. After a heart bypass surgery in about 2007, the detailed reasons for a low fat diet were reinforced for us in the rehab course that I went through.

When we were living in Oregon before the bypass, I railed at the fact that a friend’s orthopedic surgeon wife was going on a low carb, all the fat you want diet. How could a doctor who should know better do this? Well, “Oops, my bad!”

For the last few years our doctors have been warning us that our blood sugar levels have been a little higher than they would like to see. While we were in a hospital gift shop waiting for an appointment that I had, we found a little book on low carb diets. It seemed to fit right in with our need to lower our blood sugar.

When you cut out carbs, fat, and salt, what the heck is there left to eat? Our typical cereal and toast breakfast added up to around 55 grams of carbs. This is after we had already eliminated orange juice because of the sugar. The only thing we could eat that satisfied us was bacon and eggs and one piece of lower carb bread. That’s about 10 grams of carbs instead of 55 grams. All these years we had been avoiding those two items like the plague. The book is what gave us the “permission” to make this change.

However, I wondered how this could fit in with what I had been prescribed for my heart health. The book gave a little indication of what had been wrong with that advice, but I still felt a tug from opposite directions.

One of the nurses that took care of me after a recent kidney stone removal operation told me that I should ask my primary care doctor for a nutrition consultation. That was on my todo list, when this article fell into my lap.

I may still get that consultation, but this article seems to reconcile what seemed to be two opposing recommendations.

The result of our being on this low-carb diet for about two weeks or so, is the loss of about 10 or more pounds for each of us, and a lowering of our blood-sugar down to within safe limits. In Oregon, Sharon had been diagnosed as a pre-diabetic, so she already had all the blood sugar monitoring equipment. Her fasting blood sugar level is now well below the level where doctors will take note of it anymore. I measured my blood sugar level only once since being on the diet, and I am now safely below the threshold, too.

Now remember, this medical advice is worth exactly what you paid for it, and not a penny more.

Campaign For America’s Future has the article Warren to SEC Chair: “Step Up” (Or Step Down).

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday released a blistering 13-page letter to Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White, calling out her “extremely disappointing” leadership of what should be the chief cop on the financial beat, accusing her of “broken promises” and telling her to “step up.”

The internet is full of stories about this letter, but I haven’t found a one of them that will print the letter or tell you where you can read it.

Link To The Letter

Not surprisingly, Elizabeth Warren has published a link to the letter. I am about to read it myself, but I didn’t want to hold you up in case you want to read it too.