The Real News Network features the video Ken Burns’ “The Republican Civil War”
On YouTube, it comes with this brief teaser:
Coming soon from the acclaimed filmmaker: The story of a conflict that would have seared men’s souls… if anybody involved had them. “The Republican Civil War”
Do I have to put some kind of explanation on this video, or can most of you figure out what this is?
Just as a jumping off point for my inane comments, I will use the Los Angeles Times report Israel’s Netanyahu and Pope Francis exchange gifts, talk policy.
Netanyahu presented the pontiff with a Spanish translation of “The Origins of the Inquisition,” a book written by the Israeli leader’s late father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, an acclaimed historian known widely for his research on the topic. “To his Holiness Pope Franciscus, a great shepherd of our common heritage,” Netanyahu inscribed on the inside cover.
Francis thanked Netanyahu and gave him a bronze plaque of St. Paul.
I am sure there is more to the story of the gifts, and it probably makes sense, but…
When I first read of this story, I thought surely Netanyahu must either be autistic or at least have Asperger’s syndrome. Why else would Netanyahu have a diplomatic mission to the Vatican and choose this particular present? Maybe there is a “rub their nose in it” theory of diplomacy that I had not heard of before.
Maybe Pope Francis had two gifts he could have chosen to give Netanyahu. When he saw what Netanyahu gave him, he decided to give a Catholic religious symbol to the Jewish Prime Minister. What is the equivalent in Spanish of touché?
I haven’t touched on this subject for a while. I got Billionaires & Ballot Bandits Official Trailer from YouTube.
Since the Court killed the Voting Rights Act, we’ve decided to re-do the film with the latest and strangest from the weird world of the Ballot Bandits and the Billionaires who love them.
Help us get on the tube, the ‘net, and in front of the policy makers investigative reports so funny, so revealing, and “so relevant they threaten to alter history” (Chicago Tribune).
As the video says, if you are not aware you could be saying “Hail to the Thief in 2016.”
Here’s a two for the price of one addition to this blog post.
Vultures and Vote Rustlers Trailer
Naked Capitalism web site has the video Steve Keen: The International Financial Architecture. Naked Capitalism describes the video, thusly:
In this video, Steve Keen reviews the history of Keynes’ proposed international currency, Bancor, and why it failed to come to fruition at Bretton Woods. Keen thinks its time has finally come and supports the Central Bank of China’s call for its introduction.
As posted on YouTube by Steve Keen, it has the description:
My speech to the Meeting of Finance Ministers of Latin America in Quito on November 29th 2013. I explain Keynes’s proposal for an international unit of account called the Bancor, and support Zhou Xiaochuan, the Governor of the Central Bank of China, in calling for its introduction. I also argue that Latin America should in the meantime develop its own unit of account for intra-CELAC trade.
The speech even mentions some open source software called Minsky. That way, you can do your own economic modeling and predictions. The video also shows a link to Steve Keen’s Debtwatch blog.
On a superficial level, this presentation is fairly understandable. However, there is a depth to what is being said that requires deeper thought to fully understand.
I am afraid that my understanding of all of this does not live up to MardyS’s tongue in cheek claim that I am the smartest person in the room. It’s going to take quite a while for all of this to sink in and to reconcile with what I have been reading elsewhere. However, I bet that there other readers of this blog that will get it much faster than I will.
JoãoG should be happy with what Keen has to say about the Efficient Market Hypothesis.
The Real News Network featured the video Ask a Slave: What About the Indians?
Be sure to stay for the last question.
I just don’t understand the obsession that the media has with bipartisan compromise. The Boston Globe article Bipartisan group finds bridges hard to build is but the latest example.
Why can’t people understand what happens at a fork in the road?
Target fixation occurs when you are so focused on the target that you want to avoid, that you inevitably miss all the other options and exactly run into the one thing you did not want to run into.
Here we are at the fork in the road. One party wants to go right while the other party wants to go left. If we have a bipartisan compromise, we go straight ahead, and hit the sign post. There is no middle road option. You can dream about the middle road option, you can pray for it, you can keep writing about it, but it does not exist.
It looks like this country is doomed to either sitting still at the fork in the road or crashing into the sign unless the voters make a decision in enough time. If we can’t make a decision, then mother nature may come barreling down the road and crash into us.
Perhaps if the media would stop pretending that there is a third option, it might help people to wake up to the truth.
Here is the picture of the current situation as I see it.
In an online conversation with MardyS, he recommended a book, Holt, Jim (2012-07-16). Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story. Liveright. Kindle Edition.
I found the book to be a very interesting and erudite discussion that was focusing on the question “Why is there something instead of nothing?” The author seemed to be quite knowledgeable in physics, discussing Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, The Big Bang Theory, Quantum Gravity, and the like.
The following statement in the book broke the mood completely.
To begin with, nothing in the concept of causation says that a cause must always precede in time its effect. Think of a locomotive pulling a caboose: the motion of the former causes the motion of the latter, yet the two are concurrent in time
To say that “the two are concurrent in time” shows an abysmal lack of understanding of elementary physics. It also shows a lack of knowledge about how to run a train.
I finally found a definition of Slack Action in WikiPedia:
In railroading, slack action is the amount of free movement of one car before it transmits its motion to an adjoining coupled car. This free movement results from the fact that in railroad practice cars are loosely coupled, and the coupling is often combined with a shock-absorbing device, a “draft gear,” which, under stress, substantially increases the free movement as the train is started or stopped. Loose coupling is necessary to enable the train to bend around curves and is an aid in starting heavy trains, since the application of the locomotive power to the train operates on each car in the train successively, and the power is thus utilized to start only one car at a time.
So, clearly, on a macro scale, the motion of the engine and the caboose are not concurrent in time in starting and stopping. This can be generalized to any change in speed. If there is no slack when the train tries to accelerate, then you may have to look to the “draft gear” or look at the microscopic level of stretching of the physical components of the train.
I leave it up to you to think of what The Second Law of Thermodynamics has to say about whether a cause precedes its effect in time.
The quoted selection from the book Why Does The World Exist? is not the first one that casually dismisses an idea with reasons that are unwarranted. So while the book is interesting to read, I stopped looking for a definitive, scientific or philosophical answer to the book’s main question. Sadly, I just stopped reading.
Truth Out has the article Privatization and the Affordable Care Act. Of course the article is talking about contracting the design and implementation of the ACA web site to a private company.
Following award, there must be proper oversight of a contract. Once an agency has decided to privatize IT work, it often loses in-house expertise capable of contract oversight. There is simply more money to be made by working for contractors. Even the Defense Department, with the Defense Contract Management Agency devoted to this task, had a hard time finding the oversight people for the vast increase in service contracts in the past 20 years.
Since the Reagan administration, privatization has been the preferred way to provide services, such as IT, in the government. The problems with implementation of the Affordable Care Act highlight the ways in which this policy can go wrong. Opponents of the act will use its IT problems as a way to attack the progressive goal of providing greater access to health care to those who cannot afford necessary insurance. It will be cruelly ironic if the conservative policy of privatization will, by failing, further another conservative goal of restricting access to health care.
In a previous post, What Would You Ask To Investigate the ACA Website Debacle?, I tried to layout the questions I would ask based on what I have learned about software projects from a 40 year career doing software development and management. That post touches on some of the issues highlighted in the Truth Out article.
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has the report Rescuing The Recovery: Prospects and Policies for the United States. Surprise! Surprise! Here are some words excerpted from the conclusion.
The range of strategic policy options for the United States is limited. Bringing down the stubbornly high unemployment rate and reversing the decline of household fortunes are urgent priorities. Accelerated economic growth and increased aggregate demand will not come about from private expenditures while the household sector continues its deleveraging trend. Rescuing the recovery will require using expansionary fiscal and monetary policies.
What other kind of report did you expect me to put on this blog?
Start your children, nieces, nephews, and grand children off right with this MMT coloring book.