CounterPunch has the article Pete Seeger: a Dissenting View.

Following the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Communist Party strongly opposed the “imperialist war,” and Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers made some great antiwar songs which were published in an album called “Songs for John Doe”
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After the Nazis invaded Russia, the Party line changed and the Almanac Singers began beating the drums for war: “Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?” When the U.S. entered the War they became patriots: “It’s gonna take everybody to win this war.” “Me and the landlord may not agree, but when a burglar breaks in you quit fighting with the landlord and throw him out. “ (Some missing words here, but the point is clear.

I bring this to your attention in the spirit of being fair and balanced, although I never promised that in the Introduction to this blog.

I make no pretense about balance on this blog. If you want balance, read another blog.

I am not averse to considering other points of view.  If you read the article, does this change your view of Pete Seeger?  Is there anything to be learned?

The Daily Dot has the article The rise and fall of Bitcoin mining.

Earlier this month, fans of Bitcoin – the world’s most popular digital currency—were caught in a whirl of panic as one group threatened to corner the market for new bitcoins.

Reader WayneP has been bugging me with the question  “Is Bitcoin foolproof?”  I brushed this question aside as irrelevant.  Well, with this article I am starting to see Wayne’s point.  The article does a nice job of putting the issue in context.  Further, it does explain some of the mystery that I felt about the issue of mining.

Stay tuned for the continuing saga.

The Daily Show has the segment Band of Blockers.

So, I suppose I ought to cut the President some slack.

It’s good that the President has decided to use executive orders. According to WikiPedia‘s Consolidated list of Presidents and Order numbers, George W. Bush signed 291, and President Obama has signed 167.  It is great to listen to the bleating hearts (that’s no typo) in the Republican party decry the use of executive orders.

Phys.org has the article Physicists create synthetic magnetic monopole predicted more than 80 years ago.

(Phys.org) —Nearly 85 years after pioneering theoretical physicist Paul Dirac predicted the possibility of their existence, an international collaboration led by Amherst College Physics Professor David S. Hall ’91 and Aalto University (Finland) Academy Research Fellow Mikko Möttönen has created, identified and photographed synthetic magnetic monopoles in Hall’s laboratory on the Amherst campus. The groundbreaking accomplishment paves the way for the detection of the particles in nature, which would be a revolutionary development comparable to the discovery of the electron.

I remember the use of the magnetic monopole concept in various EE and Physics courses in college.  One of my professors, Paul Penfield, Jr., had strong interest in this topic.  In trying to refresh my memory on the topic, I found an online copy of the book Continuum Electromechanics 1981, Melcher, James R.

For lack of evidence to support the existence of “free” magnetic monopoles, the total flux density due to all macroscopic fields must be solenoidal

While, I was in college, the magnetic monopole was a useful mathematical concept, but there was great controversy over whether or not such a thing could exist in isolation from its other pole.  As I recall, after I graduated, Penfield wrote a number of technical papers in the journals I regularly read concerning this topic.

Naked Capitalism has the article Mirabile Dictu! Reid Tells Off Obama on Fast Track, Killing Toxic Trade Deals for 2014.

Obama made yet another pitch in State of the Union Address for his gimmies to multinationals known as the TransPacific Partnership and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Today that idea went down in flames, at least as far as getting the deals done this year are concerned. From Huffington Post:

“I’m against fast track,” [Harry] Reid told reporters Wednesday on Capitol Hill, before suggesting a fast-track bill introduced by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) may not get a vote.

“We’ll see. Everyone knows how I feel about this. Senator Baucus knows, [potential backer] Sen. [Ron] Wyden knows. The White House knows.”

Indeed, Reid cautioned the president and his allies to back off.

“I think everyone would be well advised just to not push this right now,” the majority leader said.

When I heard this part of the SOTU address, I almost threw-up. How could he have said all he said about correcting inequality, and still think the TPP was a good idea? Given all the opposition from so many places, who is it that has him by the balls that he would even favor this let alone try to ram it through?

Not to pile on or anything like that, but The Real News Network has another interview Obama Misses Opportunity to Address Severity of America’s Poverty in SOTU.

James Henry: Obama’s State of the Union address should’ve been used to convince the public of the shared interest in solving the problem of poverty
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We know he has a hard time getting anything done in Congress, and he’s going off in the direction of trying to do executive actions unilaterally. I think it’s more important for him to actually use these opportunities to educate people about how serious a problem we’re facing.

To be fair, Obama did do some educating. You have to make some judgment about how much your audience can take. Maybe more talk about LBJ would help. The emphasis should be on how much LBJ accomplished in the War on Poverty and how much of those gains we have let erode. It’s almost like throwing the Taliban out of Afghanistan and then walking away and letting them back in.

Ok, so you knew I was going to have to say something negative about the State of the Union Address. The Real News Network has the interview Obama’s Address Fails to Look at Roots of Income Inequality.

JOHNSTON: No, not even close. It’s important that we restore the minimum wage. We’re not talking about raising it. We’re talking about restoring it. Back in the mid ’60s, it was almost $11 an hour. And education is certainly very important and too much neglected in this country. We put huge barriers to bright but poor and middle-class children getting first-rate educations, especially at college.

But we have much more fundamental problems than that. Many of these problems involve things like government rules that hardly anybody knows about that take money from the many and redistribute it to the few, the use of tax dollars to build factories, office buildings, and shopping malls, the rules that allow multinational corporations–not domestic, not mom-and-pop corporations, but multinational corporations– to actually profit off their corporate income taxes by delaying payment of them for 30, 40, 50 years and having you and I let them deposit that money with the government to collect interest while the value of the tax they owe erodes.

In thinking about the President’s speech, I felt that it was a pretty reasonable speech to give if you had a reasonable loyal opposition. The opposition that Obama actually faces is neither reasonable nor loyal.

Perhaps Obama was too afraid of getting people riled up. Then he could have said something like, “If you really wanted to solve the problem, you would make radical changes as proposed by the progressives. However, I am only proposing a few mild changes. If you block these proposals, there is no telling what you will be facing down the road when the voters wake up and start electing enough progressives to make a difference. The longer you suppress people, the more likely their eventual reaction will erupt in violence. Moreover, you have insisted that they have unfettered access to guns.”

Progressive Massachusetts has come out with the Shared Prosperity Agenda.  Here are a couple of items on that agenda.

QUALITY, FREE PUBLICLY FUNDED EDUCATION FROM PRE-K THROUGH POST-SECONDARY
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AN EQUITABLE TAX SYSTEM THAT RAISES SUFFICIENT REVENUE TO INVEST IN OUR COMMONWEALTH

Whether you agree with all or any of the items on the list, I think you have to admit it is pretty bold. The only way to change the terms of debate is to have the courage to come out and say what it might really take to fix things.

The Daily Kos has the article Another Major Medicaid Scandal for Rick Scott.  The article puts together two quotes from an another article.  First is the quote:

Before Fernandez, an individual had never given a check of $1 million or more to a candidate-aligned committee.

The second quote from the article is:

Two companies partly owned by the finance chairman of Gov. Rick Scott’s re-election campaign [Miguel Fernandez] have won contracts worth potentially billions to serve Medicaid patients in regions across the state.

The trajectory for honest government in Florida goes downhill from there in The Daily Kos article.

Brings to mind what I have been reading in Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ autobiography.  As he would sit before a Congressional committee and listen to the Representatives or Senators rail against the corruption and the inability to take action in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates would wonder if they thought the US government of which they were a part were doing much better than Iraq and Afghanistan.

This example in Florida would be good to compare to the corruption of the warlords and governors of areas of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Admittedly the following YouTube video is painful to watch.  The question I have is what else could Bernie Sanders have done?

So far my two favorite choices for words to use coming from the comments I read are:

Crazy Bachmann Bullshit (patent pending).

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Bernie should have just looked at her back and said “is there an off switch somewhere?”

The trouble with the Bachman side of the argument is that it is easy to flood the conversation with crazy ideas and double talk so that there is no chance to talk about good ideas. If Bernie spent all his time knocking down her crazy ideas, he’d have no time to talk about anything else. If he ignores her crazy ideas (and could find her off switch), then her insanity still hangs in the air like the odor of an angry skunk. Maybe when Bachman talked about what she learned as a tax lawyer Bernie could have turned to her and said,

“Either you know nothing about economics or you are pretending that you don’t or you would understand why what you said is utter nonsense. I would try to explain this to you, but you would just keep yammering away and it would be useless.”

I think it would be time better spent to have the conversation devolve into a discussion about why Bachman cannot listen and learn, then it would be to give any of her ideas the time that they were given.

I have just read the extremely well done analysis in The Daily Kos article Michele Bachman and Bernie Sanders spar on income inequality clash on CNN. The analysis is well worth reading. The conclusion matches my feeling about the debate.

Michele Bachmann continued to keep Bernie Sanders off message by interrupting him and with ample help from the moderator Wolf Blitzer. In this debate truth took a beating.

We have to learn how to defend the truth and protect it from such beatings.  We cannot expect any help from the moderators.