A Quarter for a Truism

Dday at Digby's quotes Russ Finegold speaking about Somalia.

Moreover, until a functioning economy can be established, piracy will remain the most lucrative business in the region.

Replace "Somalia" with any polity and Bob's your curiouser strange not related personage.
Or:
As Mark Twain might have observed: "Go thou and do likewise."
--ml

More Beer!

The filtering vat, which makes
a pleasant sound,
You place appropriately on [top of]
a large collector vat.
Ninkasi, the filtering vat,
which makes a pleasant sound,
you place appropriately on [top of]
a large collector vat.

Rinse and repeat 4,ooo years ago. Then go out and create ... civilization?
--ml

Simple Definitions

Outlaw: What most of are forced to do one time or another by ignorance, stupidity, greed, or in response to coercion.

Criminal: Those who break laws as a profession or career to satisfy their ignorance, stupidity, greed, or in response to coercion.

Pirate: The power elite who plunder everyone.

--ml

Cookingisscienceiscookingisscienceiscookingis...

One of my favorite anecdotes was one she told to illustrate why it's important not to be too easily offended. Sometimes what seems like overt racism/sexism is simply poor social skills or awkward phrasing (we all suffer sometimes from foot-in-mouth syndrome). Case in point: she applied for a summer job at MIT in a physics lab as an undergraduate. She didn't have any specific lab experience, but the professor asked, "Well, can you cook?" When she said yes, he told her she was hired. Jackson, confused, replied, "To do what?" It was not, as it happens, to whip up some tasty grits for his breakfast each morning; rather, the professor assumed that if she could cook, she had the practical skills necessary to learn her way easily around the lab.

Yum: go read the rest!
And Happy Ada Lovelace day
--ml

Aaaagh

$170,000,000,000 with no strings attached.
$165,000,000 With tons of outraged: "They can't do THAT!"
but only after the fact.

Kids, it is a problem of scale. Don't worry about the missing bubblegum after the car disappeared.
--ml

Deep Thought #73/A-145

Why does this culture make us all so angry?
Is anger the only resolution?
--ml

Dum Luks Stockpot, politics

Deep Thought #47509

The world is a closed system.
As presently operated, there are too many people for it to sustain. A very few have considerably more than enough. Most have less than enough.
The solution is not to eliminate the excess.
The solution is to change the system to create a means to support all who are here.
And to increase that number only if the new system supports it.
--ml

Dum Luks Stockpot, economics, politics

Horton Hears a Jack Boot

Per McJoan at DailyKos, Scott Horton offers:

We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship.

I remain astonished that Shrub and Darth climbed into their helicopters and beat into the sunset on January 20th. The only time I wish to see either again is at their war crimes trial at the Hague.
--ml

Dum Luk's Stockpot, Politics, Scott Horton, John Yoo, G W Bush

Come One! Come All!

Tom Walker, a.k.a. the Sandwichman, invites us to join him in a Facebook group dedicated to the care and feeding of The Greenest Elephant in the Room!.
Walker, a noted Vancouver economist, expounds on the value of working less to gain full employment, a more productive economy, a better comity and a happier society in a greener environment. It is rumored he also contains lanolin. Read through his posts at  Econospeak for a fascinating account of an economic idea that has been shunted aside in as errant an act of piracy as any that festered the Gilded Age. It is that part of Keynesianism that dare not speak its name -- at least in the Halls of Conventional Wisdom.
Do -- please -- check it out.
--ml

Dum Luks Community, economics, Politics

Another POV

According to the best guess of the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security is well funded until 2040, about 6 election cycles from now. (By the way, it is well funded because the baby boomers agreed to tax themselves to pay for their own as well as their parent's retirement, so as not to impose too large a burden on the smaller baby boomlet of their children.)

There is no question that the US pays the most for health care. It has a poor return for that compared to the rest of the developed part of the world.

Of the $1.4 some odd trillion the world spends on War, the US spends $771 trillion, or 48% of the total.

Based on the above facts, it is obvious that the only way to achieve fiscal balance is by cutting Social Security benefits.

Right.
--ml

Dum Luks's stockpot, Politics