AMERICAN DEMOCRAT POLITICAL DIALOGUE

Hey, there are, like, no more fish in the oceans.

Then we'll have to get back into power, in the next mid term elections!

VOLTAIRE THE ENLIGHTENMENT SHOULD PREVENT THE MASSES FROM LEARNING TO READ

Clark, citing Darnton, p 100.

MY FAVORITE THINGS

Trump vs Justice, LIEO bullshit.

(LEONHARDT WOULDN'T KNOW THE ACTUAL RULE OF LAW WORLD HERE IF IT BIT HIM IN THE BUTT...)

One of 'My Favorite Things': to jam a cynical degenerate pundit (BBC) article up another dumb naive and cynical pundit's (NYT) ass.

The sense of justice that we're losing?.....He thinks it's a recent phenomenon, like Brooks' meritocracy, that only sprang up into being in 1980...... utter nonsense. 

Whig pundits want you to think that history began, almost, yesterday, or at least only recently, because that is when their last story was written, and because the Whig interpretation requires that history be viewed only through the prism of the present.

Monday, April 30, 2018

RE GLOBALIZATION FALL OUT BBC WHY THE US STILL HAS DEBTORS' PRISONS

44% of Americans are in these circumstances. 

$400 is a lot of money for any of the poor and getting poorer bastards....for a fine for a tail light out on a car. 

They are 'lucky' to even have a bad car to struggle on with...

$400 is the annual income for many millions of foreign folks looking for better wages, for your wages.

This great debtors' prison heritage was not caused by globalization, but it will not get better within it, only progressively worse and worse and worse.

Prison labor camps, and offshoring camps, is another likely area for further expansion. 

The poor already pay for their own incarceration (To what purpose? Keeping that penal system funded). 

Also middle class property owners usually pay a disproportionate share, in property taxes and assessments, of local jails' costs, which frankly don't return them a dime in economic value, or a better quality of life, in fact the opposite.

I could spend a long time narrating only some aspects of the situation here, both in the criminal system and the economic system. 

Why bother, really?

Theme music: Coltrane

RE GLOBALIZATION FALL OUT BBC WHY THE US STILL HAS DEBTORS' PRISONS

44% of Americans are in these circumstances. 

$400 is a lot of money for any of them....for a fine for a tail light out on a car. They are lucky to even have a bad car to struggle on...

$400 is the annual income for many millions of foreign folks looking for better wages, for your wages.

This great debtors' prison heritage was not caused by globalization, but it will not get better within it, only progressively worse and worse and worse.

Prison labor camps, and offshoring camps, is another likely area for further expansion. 

The poor already pay for their own incarceration (To what purpose? Keeping that penal system funded). 

Also middle class property owners usually pay a disproportionate share, in property taxes and assessments, of local jails' costs, which frankly don't return them a dime in economic value, or a better quality of life, in fact the opposite.

I could spend a long time narrating only some aspects of the situation here, both in the criminal system and the economic system. 

Why bother, really?

RE MASS CHILD SACRIFICE FOUND IN PERU DATING TO THE 1400S

Hard to wrap a Whig interpretation around such widespread recent human past events. Human sacrifice and cannibalism were common in many prehistoric societies, notably Greece, Medea, and Judea, eg Abraham and Isaac, etc.

Not only did they sometimes sacrifice their own offspring, and  animals, on a massive scale, but they also practiced cannibalism on them as well, presumably as part of the ritual itself, not as a separate unrelated act. 

What do you think their reasoning might have been?

The article gives some clues. One obvious rationale would be hunger, for whatever reason.

Another reasonable explanation might bad royal and or priestly guidance.

But who now can say? Maybe it was at that time good guidance, given a state of affairs impossible now, or ever, to reconstruct.

THE MENU ANCHOVY SUBSTITUTION IMPROV IN MEMORY OF ELIZABETH DAVID

Many dishes call for these little devils.
They are very salty.
There are some less salty substitutes:
You can throw in a few minced baby smoked oysters.
You can toss in a macerated sardine or two. A crushed kipper. Even a mackerel fragment! Why not?
You can even toss in a little of the juice, of whatever variety, oil, vinegar, tomato sauce, from the cans or jars! Juice from canned tuna!
Why not?
I now like to dribble in a few drops or more of the classic, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, for a faux Caesar salad dressing, it has anchovies already in it!

Any of these thing can be dribbled sparingly over a simple pasta with olive oil and either Parmesan or Romano or both.

Swirl some into home made mayonnaise for tonnato sauce, for cold veal or chicken.

THE MENU SOUP IMPROVS RE ELIZABETH DAVID

I am in good company, re improvs, with Elizabeth David. 

She has several soup recipes in Mediterranean Food, Soup of Haricot Beans, made of leftover cassoulet, and a Soup with Risotto made with leftover risotto.

A Mediterranean Fish Soup looks like a soup of leftovers, since it starts with a cod's head, and an already cooked crawfish, after all.

See her recipe for gaspacho....Gautier claimed that a dog of any breeding would refuse it!

Terms search: dog

I AM JUST GOING TO EXPLAIN A VERY FEW LITTLE THINGS TO YOU

which even a non insider knows, from events:

North Korea is a vassal state.

North Korea has been given a scripted role, first, as agent provocateur.

Yet, its role is not actually to provoke actual armed conflict, fundamentally, but rather to distract all, who can be distracted, from other much more important realities, now long under way.

This strategy has worked very well regarding the US, a guppy for stuff like this. Other Asian states have been worried. That was what was intended.

it has now been given a new role, friend of South Korea, and peacemaker.

Bad cop, then good cop.

If Trump paid North Korea off, that is merely icing on the vassal cake, not the main point.

CAPTURED BY PYGMIES THIS GOES WITH PYGMY FUN

"Are these pygmies?"

"No. They are dwarves."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZut2wXtY1A

RE DK POST THE IMPACT COMMENTS POSTSCRIPT

These comments are a useful squib on American economic theory. 

Saturday, April 28, 2018

RE DK POST THE IMPACT

Doris Gazda

Having a government led by people who chose to not believe in science, this will only get worse.

Bruce Wilder:

Your observations in this post are of the moment in a particularly urgent way.

I like that you relate it to college Economics in the 1960s and the figure of Milton Friedman, who was hugely influential as an individual and as the leader of Chicago School economics. He had opponents -- you mention Galbraith whose books were popular and widely read, but who had no "school" or following in the academy. Galbraith was an institutionalist in the tradition of Veblen, and institutionalism was wiped out after the war with the advent of Samuelson's mathematical codification of core economic theories. Samuelson wrote his Ph.D. thesis, which was published in expanded form as his landmark, Foundations, at Harvard, but he came from Chicago and went to MIT where he shared an office with Robert Solow, another giant of late 20th century economics, for good or ill.

I wonder if Economics 1 used Samuelson's textbook. My college used the number 2 textbook of the day, Lipsey Steiner, which followed much the same outline and pedagogy as Samuelson's, but the authors were noted sceptics regarding the implicit precepts of the Chicago approach to economics. The Chicago School built up its economics by attempting to outline how an economy might work as a system of markets, coordinated by market competition driving toward an equilibrium in price. Samuelson had given the Chicago School approach an elegant expression as a system of theorems, a kind of Euclidean geometry: sweeping, insightful, and consistent in a way that invited bright minds to extend its application. 

The Chicago School model of an economy as a system of markets stabilized by its own seeking after a general equilibrium in market price was an idealization and the general method of economics was to try to understand the economy by comparing this elaborately worked out logical ideal with the "messiness" of institutionalized reality. The economists among the architects of the New Deal and the international order constructed during and immediately after WWII were only sometimes of the Chicago School; more commonly they were institutionalists like Galbraith, who administered the system of price controls during the war. The American economy of the 1960's was a carefully constructed, complex and managed system dominated by private and public bureaucracies, the existence of which was scarcely imagined in Samuelson's Euclidean system. Friedman's genius was to feed the anti-authoritarian impulse with a story of the economy as an example of spontaneous self-organisation, in which the deliberate planning of the second Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority or the elaborate financial engineering of Carter Glass, not to mention public utility regulation, industrial unions, professional associations and so on. 

A generation educated in the economics of "the market economy" was ill-equipped to resist the politics of dismantling the institutional economy of carefully balanced "countervailing power" (Galbraith's phrase). A leftish neoliberalism formed to offer token resistance after the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, but accepted the basic ideological assumption that policy ought to promote "market" solutions. The collapse of the communism of the Russian Revolution (right on a schedule of generational change that ought to impress: 72 years exactly, with the death of Stalin as its midpoint) was interpreted triumphantly.

Energy Flow

https://qz.com/1250100/income-inequality-russia-and-the-us-are-now-equally-unequal/?utm_source=qzfb

http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2018/04/10/capital-in-russia/

I did MBA studies in early 90s and got that free market globalist inoctrination and later took up import export where I helped expand China's trade surplus. Now I see things much like you do. 

Above some links with graphs from piketty on wealth inequality over last century between USA, Russia, France. We are all back where we started except France but they have growth problems. So loosening the reins helps but can cause situations of inequality which lead to revolution. Trump election is Friedmann's fault, in a nutshell. Protest against wealth inequality. All this left wing attack against his racism, against deplorables, against Putin are missing that Bill Clinton embraced, like Tony Blair, European social democrats the unitary globalist philosophy of Friedmann that growth, inequality are the price tp pay for progress. Apparently the French and Italians never got the message and live in a slow growth statist society where ghe rich have less freedom. So realistically seen, life is a tradeoff. If I work a job if I am an acheiver I stay, otherwise bye bye it will be exciting but stressful, otherwise boring, constricting, safe. This is a difficult choice of lifestyles on a national scale. If we can turn it around to more fairness when both parties are in pockets of industry and follow free trade, globalist, free market agenda is question here. New parties or party takeover from base must happen. Military, pharmas, wal-mart, Amazon are huge. Money buys influence in congress and press. Naysayers can be targeted for smear campaign as conspiracy theorists or in extreme cases die mysteriously if too insistent on muckraking, rocking the boat. We are back to where GM got union activists murdered. The more tthings change the more they stay the same. Like I read that after Kennedy assassination around 55 people died mysteriously who talked to, itnessed key events in the process. Why does Trump change from isolationist to military expansionist so quickly? Maybe he values his and his family's life. Why are Chinese, Russian, Iranians so afraid of USA, UK, because they never saw a contract they didn't find a way to break, like the social contract between classes after WWII under Reagan, Bill Clinton(bipartisan effort). Basicaly a big crisis with war, financial collapse could change things for the better, otherwise it seems very difficult. Next week or so you will be back on page with neo pravdian mainstream propaganda dissing our illustrious leader in his battle with DNC or agreeing with fictitious chemical false flags to provoke WWIII instead of seeing what is root of problem as you have touched on today. 'Follow the Money, cui bono'.

(LIEO PUNDITS) ROLEX DEALER CUSTOMER DIALOGUE

Rolex dealer: We have 40 years of experience recommending Rolex watches.

Customer: Which brands do you recommend?

Dealer: Rolex!

Customer: Great! I've long heard they are the best!

(There was a Rolex dealership in Sarasota, and that was actually the argument of their radio ad: They had 30 years of experience recommending Rolex watches!)

ECONOMISTS POLITICIAN JOURNALIST PUNDITS MORE FREE TRADE GLOBALIZATION PLEASE ONE TRICK PONIES THE MENU SMELL TEST

Even the likes of Rodrik...

That's how you use the More Globalization, or More Free Trade, Please, smell test I am giving you. 

You don't even have to think about the so called details of whatever argument is being presented. It will be rather Mickey Mouse in any event.

This is a self evident smell test, on sight truth, at those code words, more globalization, more free trade. 

Just bestially, reflexively, jerk away your nose in disgust that it's actually a putrid pseudo religion, masquerading as a clean pseudo scientific discipline.

They say the dog returns to its vomit:
Master(Editor): "What did you just eat?"
Rover(Subscriber): "Yesterday's free trade article."
Master(Editor): "What are you eating now?"
Rover(Subscriber): "Today's!"

I am trying to cure you from this primitive, natural law, failing, by brute, but somehow enlightened, training.

On a similar note, you have to applaud Leonhardt, for seeking to broaden, yet not deepen, his readership's daily diet...

Just think of us as brothers in arms.

RE DK POST THE IMPACT

http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-impact-of-free-markets.html

Professor

Great stuff. Thanks for this post.

Economics.I agree with almost all of it.

One wonders if the macro course went back and hit Ricardo and Smith. I am sure it did. The font et origine of the free market concept.

This was one of the passages I noticed because I took up Piketty's work after reading your posts...

"It began with a simple insight, one I think that was also at the foundation of the first Capital, by Karl Marx: capital tends to accumulate faster than the rate of economic growth.  That's another way of saying that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Piketty paraphrase

This is really, in recent decades, a point about the top .1%. What about the other 99.9?

As I noted on my posts, there are other implications...The capital that accumulates most is increasingly dispersed to only the very highest elites everywhere, not to the middle 90 or so %. The wealthier societies will see, and are beginning to see, an enormous drain of prosperity, over time, from the convergence of average or median incomes.

Capital accumulates faster than economic growth, true enough.

For the middle 90% in the West this spells not merely stagnation but steep decline, going forward, as higher average incomes inexorably converge toward lower ones. The lower global incomes, believe me, are incredibly low, and are shared by billions of people, far outnumbering Western poor.

I have posted some notes on this topic on my site.

All the best

AUGUST 2013 POSTS A GREAT MONTH FOR ME

This is just one Krugman China DK post:

RE KRUGMAN THEY EXPORT BETTER TO CHINA AND DK'S CURRENT POST

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2010/08/re-krugman-what-about-germany.html

One trick pony.

Here was the 2010 post referred to:

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

RE KRUGMAN WHAT ABOUT GERMANY?

Yes, but one wishes, reading this, that he had elaborated, just a little more, re: 

"There are a number of reasons that’s foolish..."

as well as just this terse, graphic, comment. 

He does point out a few things, in fairness, but not enough to explain the differences well enough. 

Saying they export better to China is not a good sign, of good advice, going forward, in my opinion. 

That exporting will end, some day, perhaps sooner rather than later, and then what engine of economic prosperity would one be left with, in Germany?

Let's put it this way, for the intellectually challenged out there, imports from China, and other low labor cost sites, and exports to them, facilitating those good imports, 

are a little like crack cocaine.

American 'producers', and consumers, certainly Wall Street, various state capitols, and Washington, have been on this 'crack' foreign production, since the early 60s. 

Started out innocently enough, with the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods, but quickly morphed into a whole other market capitalist, economic, state department, series of agendas.

WHIG FALLACY EXAMPLE

Clark points out an especially egregious example of Whig Interpretation sophistry applied to American colonial revolutionary motivation: Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, p 84

RE MCCONNELL NYT

Even the NYT senses danger here, remind readers it was Johnson who set in place the Senate current system.

STAR TREK DIALOGUE STAR DATE 20 SOMETHING

Sir, the Chinese have taken over the Federation.

Beam me up, Scotty!

The system was made in China!

Oh!

KRUGMAN'S POVERTY TRAP CLAP TRAP

RE KRUGMAN FERGUSON TRUMP AND THE CONVERGENT GLOBAL HOBBESIAN POOR

The real Poverty Trap for the Western elite poor, is global income convergence, which he likes.

That is the Real Poverty Trap, not Krugman's Clap Trap about cutting chicken shit programs here for the poor.

Those programs themselves have been designed, and function, to partially mask the real global income convergence Poverty Trap I describe.

APPARENTLY THE NYT WANTS TO SEND THE ISRAELI ARMY INTO SYRIA

Smart shopping!

NEOCON ORTHODOX JEWS AND EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS

Why do fools fall in love?

The Diana Ross version is good.

RE KRUGMAN FERGUSON TRUMP AND THE CONVERGENT GLOBAL HOBBESIAN POOR

It is easy to criticize Trump's war on the poor, when you can then, later, doff your populist cap, and don your liberal globalist fedora, criticizing free trade critics as flatly wrong, again.

Krugman's economists' 99% ideal world is based on the same globalist free trade logic he uses to criticize Trump's 1% tax cuts, a world that ends up, either way, being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. 

Krugman left out Hobbes' adjectives 'poor' and 'solitary', although he uses the term poor as a noun for only the Western poor, thereby begging the larger global poor convergence question, which Piketty, whom he has lauded, also begs. 

Which really makes the poor here more poor, tax cuts for the rich, which you detest, or rising (albeit pathetic) wages for the Rest, which you applaud?

You can't help some poor without hurting other poor. 

The poor here are rich by global standards. But that is really what is changing most now. 

The economist has to call it a move toward global equilibrium. Those are the requirements and constraints of his discipline.

Keynesianism had presupposed a robust domestic economy, which is now dead. 

The feud between Krugman and Ferguson some years ago was an exercise in passe economists' intramural joint shadowboxing. They are both fine with convergence. 

See my recent post re Ferguson's article in The Guardian, 2006:

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

FERGUSON'S EXPLANATION 2006 GUARDIAN FOR WHAT I HAD DESCRIBED REALLY IS CONVERGENCE

If America hasn't always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the brightest, it hasn't been so advised by economists, or journalistic pundits, ever.

This post is dedicated to David Brooks, who has claimed that we became a meritocracy around 1980!

MY OWN VIEW ON ISRAEL

We ought to offer Israeli Jews refugee sanctuary here. 

We should strong arm allies to take as many as they can, as well, now. Don't wait.

I have said something like this before. I don't care what the Israelis think. I don't care what American liberal or Orthodox Jews think, either.

Israel is another Syria waiting to happen.

THE PIVOT

American foreign policy is rather like a very large person trying to negotiate a very small toilet stall.

Just getting into the stall, through the stall door opening involves some abrasion.

Then, how best to pivot around toward the seat, the stall walls touching at every point?

Should one, after all, have backed in?

Go in from the side?

Does going in from the front preclude a 180 degree rotation?

THE MACKEREL TORN THE GONG TORMENTED SEA

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

THE MACKEREL TORN THE GONG TORMENTED SEA TRUMP BANNON

Rather like two dying mackerel, flopping around, near each other, on the deck. But they are mackerel, not men.

Yet, they, at least, sense, blindly, if you will, that we, not just they, may have gone down for the count.

One cannot even say as much, about the Democrats, still swimming.

No one knows it here, and won't for some time, I am sure, but we have already in all likelihood given up our dominance on the world stage to an apparent alliance between China and Russia.

Against that enormous fact, American domestic politics, Democratic or Republican, radical left or right, pales, goes white, into utter, and rather pathetic, insignificance....

David Brooks, Thomas L Friedman, etc., are still swimming, nonchalantly in either the Black, the Caspian, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, The Sea of Japan, the South China Sea, or somewhere else. 

It doesn't matter where, really, because to a mackerel, the surface, when you hit it, seems flat....

Smell the coffee.

AND BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

BROOKS THE END OF THE TWO PARTY BONOBO SYSTEM WORK IN PROGRESS OR DIGRESS

This really is a tour de force. 
I sort of have to go line by line...

First point, the title itself: he is not talking really, deep down, merely about the two party system as such at all, but rather things much bigger...

First half 90s, WSJ, nothing but good news (for him, back then; not at all, even back then, for me), sort of sets him up as having been in La La Land for rather a long time already, 

rather like Michael Pillsbury's confession, re engagement with China, hope springing eternal for a very long time (40 years)...

The War in the Balkans, the most important event for him...supposedly emblematic of zero sum conflicts (borrowing a term for military conflicts made famous from Thurow's liberal economics book.

The war in the Balkans was not the most important event back then, by far. The conflicts in the Middle East were far more important.

He thinks there has been a transformation in 'an unconscious mind set'. 

If 'it', whatever he thinks he is talking about, were unconscious, as he claims, how would anyone, especially Brooks, ever know?

How would anyone ever know, for sure, that what they each thought of as their unconscious mind set, was the same or even similar to anyone else's? 

How would one see or measure an unconscious mind set in the first place to then determine whether another ostensible mind set were a total transformation of the first? Maybe he got this philosophical psychology from someone at The Stone Desk.

He says there was an unconscious abundance mind set....

The idea of an ever broadening field of progress, of the ability of science to improve the lot of all mankind, was hardly an unconscious mind set. It has been the self conscious bedrock notion of the Enlightenment:  

"Paradoxically, the men who trusted so highly in the powers of intelligence regarded the mind as essentially vacant and inert; the idea of the passive mind was indispensable to their system.  it was the guarantee that the truths of nature might be perceived without distortion.  It was the basis for the distinction, then so important and so clear, between enlightenment and prejudice.  It was the metaphysical groundwork for the belief that men were equal, and that they possessed the quality of perfectibility, that is, susceptibility to progress.  Minimizing the effects of will, denying original predisposition, refusing to see any inevitability in human nature, the doctrine was flatly contrary to the Christian idea of sin; and by representing man as a passive child of circumstances, easily abused by his environment, it slipped sometimes into a notion that human nature, when crude, is good; and that order, restraint, discipline, and suppression are affronts to man's dignity and freedom."  Palmer, p 133, 134

What was, however, also part and parcel of the Enlightenment was Locke's disastrous epistemology, described very briefly above, and its tendency toward psychologism, individualism, intuitionism, skepticism, and of course Brooks' unconscious.

But let's move on.....

Guess what? This unconscious mind set is only among people in the West and the US.

The unconscious mind set of the billions of people of the Rest is the opposite of Brooks' mindset of scarcity: theirs' is increasingly one of abundance.

One group's unconscious mind has mysteriously taken over another groups unconscious mind!

They are rather like counterposed groups of zombies! Or a cross between zombies and bonobos!

Call it a trading places, a la Prestowitz, of unconscious mind sets, between the West and the Rest!

He makes it sound like our problems really only started in the 1990s. That is where his whole essay begins, sadly. The mind set of scarcity only gradually developed from then until now.

Because pundits like Brooks and Friedman and Krugman had sold the educated American, both Democratic and Republican, on endless growth and prosperity, it is little wonder that he would now say that an insidious mind set of scarcity should have somehow gradually, and unconsciously, arisen, against his will, and his advice, to oppose his benevolent ideological rule, and his unconscious realm of abundance.

The unconscious mind set people of scarcity are Children of Darkness, while Brooks' unconscious mind set people  of abundance are Children of Light.

Brooks' Enlightenment reminds of Voltaire's, a pseudo liberal Simon Says Religious Revolt against a relatively liberal Catholic Establishment and the Old European Order. See Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, circa p 7.

Call Brooks' Enlightenment The Simon Says Enlightenment.

The test of liberalism, its raison d'etre, is gathering progressive abundance, not abundance in the mind, but abundance in the real world around one; the failure of liberalism is scarcity in the real world, not a mind set of scarcity.

You know you've got a problem when you believe in endlessly, though fitfully, increasing prosperity, progress, and perfectibility, call them the PPPs.

 

The shift in philosophies (not unconscious psychologies, now), from abundance to scarcity, is really a shift from philosophy to anti philosophy, according to Brooks.  He has thrown off the mask of pop Freudian depth psychology now. This is sort of classic Voltaire rhetoric. 

 

After all, the philosophes were the only philosophes, weren't they. All others were imposters or orthodox Catholic apologists, or Jansenists.

 

We might see Trumpism as a sort of Rousseau esque natural man Romantic populism, the idiot fringe but also the spirit of the Enlightenment, but that would be speculating beyond Brooks' effort here.

Brooks' pretzel logic:
Reagan abundance mind set: Philosophy.
Trumps scarcity mind set: Anti Philosophy.
Utter shallow sophisms.
A way to distract readers from any deeper, or farther back in time, realities.

Reagan had been elected by duping the electorate, an electorate, already in the late 70s, demoralized by stagnation and relative decline, reflected in stock market malaise. It was hardly a time of an 'abundance mind' set among the electorate.

Trump has now been elected under similar, and further decaying, economic conditions, after Reaganomics, and Clinton globalism, combined, have not produced anything like abundance for the average or lower than average income American. Although the stock market has been booming (until the past number of days), that has not been of much benefit to many Americans.

Brooks cuts loose in the latter part of the article...
The scarcity mentality demands a perpetual warrior style, he claims, utterly without foundation.

These two, together, then, also without foundation, are claimed to be incompatible with any civilized political creed.

Evangelicalism, now under the sway of the scarcity mentality and the perpetual warrior style, being incompatible with civilization itself as he has claimed, turns into a siege mentality, and worships a pagan immoralist.

Even liberalism itself breaks down under the weight of Brooks' metaphysical framework.

The scarcity mentality ends up eating the host mentality (it turns out it was always a parasite) because it operates at a more fundamental level of the Brooks unconscious psyche.

Now he drops the bomb, these are not unconscious dueling mind sets at all, but rather they are brought on by real underlying conditions of scarcity in the real world (not the products of an unconscious scarcity mind set) which he asserts are only going to get worse.

This really spells the death of his kind of liberalism. 

He can twist and turn, but the proof of laissez faire Adam Smith liberalism has always been in the pudding.

Where there is no pudding, there is no liberalism.




 

RE DK CURRENT POST LEONHARDT KINSLEY GAFFE PUNDIT GAFFE

"It used to be, there was truth and there was falsehood. Now there is spin and there are gaffes. Spin is often thought to be synonymous with falsehood or lying, but more accurately it is indifference to the truth. A politician engaged in spin is saying what he or she wishes were true, and sometimes, by coincidence, it is. Meanwhile, a gaffe, is when a politician tells the truth — or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. A gaffe is what happens when the spin breaks down." Kinsley Gaffe.

The Boomerbuster Butt is related to the Pundit Confession. Both are hard to ever recover from. Leonhardt has already committed the Pundit Confession, as I have pointed out here. 

Brooks, for example, a sort of greased pig at the county fair, never committed so elementary a blunder, as far as I know, but then I read him only intermittently.

By far the most common American politician faux pas is simply to make an utterly untrue statement, but one made not out of indifference to the truth at all, as described in the Kinsley Gaffe, but rather an even more elementary failing, a statement made not knowing what the truth would be if it bit the politician in the butt... 

The politician, himself, not merely his statement, then becomes a Boomerbuster Butt. It is worse than a Kinsley Gaffe, from which the politician himself perhaps, with therapy, can recover.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

SOME THINGS TRUE EVEN IF TRUMP SAYS THEM

We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue! DT

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

re THOMAS FRIEDMAN SOME THINGS ARE TRUE EVEN IF TRUMP BELIEVES THEM

Friedman clings to his philosophy here, even while he lists an exhausting list of experts who all say we have long been getting screwed by China.

Friedman still believes in free and open trade. He believes in big time trade with China. Nixon opened the door. Clinton normalized trade relations leading to the boom that never stops. 

WTO bemoaned now by Friedman and his experts. 

What a ridiculous long term fiasco.

He believes also that the world is flat.

Some things are false even if Trump doesn't believe them either.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

WHY HAVE THE LIBERALS HAD SUCH A HARD TIME SEEING WHAT EVEN TRUMP CAN SEE?

Monday, April 2, 2018

LEONHARDT'S CONFESSION TWO WORDS MEA CULPA YOU FOOLS

For the rest, he is now telling you that business is finally, now, really, really, too big.

RE BBC NEWS ARTICLE GOOGLE YAHOO ALIBABA

Sunday, July 31, 2011

RE BBC NEWS ARTICLE GOOGLE YAHOO ALIBABA

(see also:
NEWS OF THE WORLD, MILITARIES, BIG BANKS Goldman BIG GOVERNMENTS Russia China ENTREPRENEURS Zuckerberg Ma etc.) 


positioning, somehow, for the 'new realities', 


so to speak.


Do you think anyone here is playing three, or more sides?


Terms search eg: playing three sides, fattening things up

NYT NOW WANTS PROGRESSIVE THEY HAD LONG WANTED LIBERAL

Do they want liberal? 

Do they think they want progressive, socialist action?

Do they want centrism, whatever that means?

Do they now want to represent all sides possible? 

Leonhardt talks like that now, be a mouthpiece for anything not beyond the pale.
They been queered.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Friday, July 29, 2011

RE THE CENTRIST COP-OUT KRUGMAN NON REFORM RANT

The problem with American politics right now is Republican intransigence. Of course, they are the worst 'symptom' right now.

But, at the deeper level, not just 'right now', several problems with this. 

It is really still a cop out, by almost all Americans, including Krugman, 

to acknowledge that they really need a better political system.

They don't need merely a tweak toward more tax and spend, because that has not worked to keep us in front of political competition in other places.