Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

The killer also claimed to love al Qaeda and Hezbollah. At the same time.

He was also, apparently, a closeted gay man, married to a woman, born to parents who were Afghan and, I guess, Muslim (I say "I guess" because I have to wonder if they were at all devout, given his inability to figure out if he preferred the Shiite-killing Sunnis or their opposites).

If you've reached clear conclusion of the extent to which this fucked-up individual was motivated by general hatred of gay people, his own self-hatred for being gay, the dogma of ISIS, and other factors, congrats.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I have a feeling that if the terrorist were a Trump supporter who called 911 to declare his allegiance to the Tea Party and said he was committing these acts in the name of Jesus, it would not have been omitted from the transcript, and the AG's placement of blame would be somewhat more direct than the answer to how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I'm sure the only reason the AG made the statement that you refer to is because she secretly (or, in your view, not secretly) supports ISIS and wants to see the US fall under the Caliphate.



But what does it mean to be "a Trump supporter"? This guy was "an ISIS supporter", but also an al Qaeda supporter and a Hezbollah supporter. Which indicates he really wasn't any of those, but rather someone who hated gay people and read a lot of anti-US and anti-gay screed on the Internet. It is highly unlikely that he ever did anything to "support" any of those organizations, and I would doubt that he ever spoke to anyone who was in any way connected to any of those organizations. And he was "an ISIS supporter" who attended gay nightclubs and used gay dating apps, like Grindr. Compare that to your "hypothetical" above and tell me if yours shows as many, or any, serious contradictions in the individual's professed "support".

Do you see that there is genuine reason to question what was really motivating this individual? It seems like the GOP has its own version of political correctness, that requires that you must see this as "ISIS terrorism," period.

I am assuming you can have a rational discussion about this. If not, let me know.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

All that, but it was still weird to release the redacted transcript, especially as we knew what was redacted.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Weird, and also stupid. But not really what I was trying to address. I just don't see the motivations in Orlando as being so clear, when compared to (say) Fort Hood, or even San Bernadino.

Fortunately, we have lots of mass shootings here so there are ample points of comparison.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I was thinking how each mass shooting there are groups of people waiting to hear the shooter's name, hoping it will support their narrative- one group hoping for a crazy American born- the other hoping for a Muslim. And as you say we get enough that both groups get their theory reinforced often enough. But this one is a beaut, cuz everyone got what they were hoping for! But yeah, this one seems more self-hate. Fueled by standard Islam hate for gays, or Isis driven? Who knows.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

It's true. It seems there is just one thing that all these mass killings have in common.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Two: men and guns.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

It was Clinton's fault.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Not just politicians.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Wow, Britain.

A colossal fuck-up by David Cameron, so good-bye to him.

Bad news for the US as well.

Another example of the failure of consensus politics to deliver for most people, not least consensus macroeconomics, which the Europeans have been using to mishandle things for the last decade. Eventually those chickens come home to roost.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I'm torn on how much of this to put on macroeconomic failure (the ECB sux, but is only indirectly relevant to the UK), and how much to put on good old fashioned racism and xenophobia.

Of course, the two are somewhat related, but the former seems to get used to excuse/explain the latter in a way that I think misses some of the point.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

All bets on Iceland now?

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Whenever you fear the immigrants are going to ruin the economy, it makes sense to just do it first so they can't.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

R.I.P. Mister Worrell

Make sure you listen to the last part of this, great horn work in there too.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

As I've noted before, the average person on the street does not see any benefit from globalization. What they see is that as the world gets smaller, fewer and fewer people get more and more resources and they may not be able to prove causation, but they see correlation. They also know that their lives suck today and they are going to suck tomorrow. Their prices have gone up and their income has gone down or remained stagnant while those on the upper rungs have gotten fat.

Trump isn't promising that things will get better in an absolute sense, just that less pie will be going to the Other. That's his big appeal and it's why the Democrats really do need to find a way to push some wealth downstream or we will wind up in the same cesspool.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Oh wow, I was actually about to put up Funkentelechy for the Daily Dose but then had to run to happy hour, because I am a shallow bad person.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

This is a better tribute. Flash Light. The "bass" line was written by Bootsy, but it was played by Bernie on keys. A rare weekend Daily Dose in memory of a great funkateer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F7xbF7OnxU

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Yes, the average person on the street listening to a device invented by a Syrian-American to play Reggae music while they eat their tacos.

I think globalization is an easy way to blame distant forces, when the biggest contributor to today's income disparity is the union busting that really took off under the Reagan administration, as well as the failure of our policy to adequately support unionization efforts abroad.

In general, prices of things like electronics and foodstuffs, heavily affected by global markets, have declined, while prices of real estate and education, which are more locally driven, have gone up.

I agree that wealth has to be pushed downstream, but I disagree that that has much of anything to do with "globalization". Indeed, I think globalization generally benefits the US. From a legislative perspective, minimum wage increases, elimination of cap gains, and promotion of union efforts are the kinds of things that can have an impact; from an adminstrative policy perspective, deals like TPP, that require opening markets to unions and eliminating slave labor as a quid-pro-quo for joining, are where the real action is if you care about income disparity.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

And the plan for getting China to establish worker friendly unions is.........?

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I agree with some of what you say, but I was talking perception. It's easy for you to say that it's a lack of understanding, but that lack of understanding is what drove Brexit and it's what is being exploited by the Tea Party, to the extent it still lives, and what's being exploited by Trump.

If you expect to get your legislative and administrative agenda to fly (again, much of which I agree with), it's going to take some re-education.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

First thing is to avoid simple solution. I'm probably mostly right, of course, but not entirely - I mean, even Barney Frank disagrees with me on some of the economics of trade.

But perception won't change until some people start talking glowingly about the wonders of globalization, which greatly enriches our lives. And start speaking glowingly about unions, whose demise has cost us dearly. And stop blaming every problem on one word bogeymen, whether they be "immigrants", "muslims", "the establishment" or "trump".

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Labor arbitrage is like fossil fuel consumption. It'll only end when it can't possibly be continued. There are two paths to this:

1. Labor costs across all markets reach parity (somewhere around 2200); or,
2. Globalization is rolled back (this usually involves trade wars, actual wars, regionalism, etc.)

Unless we figure out a way to deal with the worldwide ever expanding glut of bodies without useful skills, we can look forward to a very long conflict between populism/nationalism and globalization. Brexit isn't a last gasp of angry old cranks. More an opening shot across the bow.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Tech already knows the solution -- let in the skilled immigrants. The ugly "other side" of this is to keep out any surplus of the unskilled beyond those needed to do necessary menial labor.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Or the old dying off. Trump's and Brexit's biggest supporters are geriatrics.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

We have to delegitimize notions of classical economics and politics that view labor and capital as fundamentally different and opposed things. Labor as used by unions is identical to capital as used by investors. And unions are not "communist" or "socialist." They are aggregators of assets (labor) of their members designed to maximize members' return on risk.

Classical economics needs a radical overhaul. Capital has enjoyed far too much of an advantage from an illogical and incorrect demonization of unions as "anti-capitalist."

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

There is no more screwed up academic discipline than economics. Labor and capital are both useful concepts to a degree, but economists rarely know much about degrees, once they label a concept with a variable and work it into a formula it loses all subtlety. Then they put the formula in a poorly constructed excel spreadsheet, misread the data, and pontificate their new religion.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

labor costs move faster than that. It took about 5 years for Indian lawyers to figure out western rates and jack theirs up accordingly, and the tech workers there are closing the gap quickly. India has a very highly mobile workforce, and folks leave jobs quickly when the new company across the street offers a few cents more an hour, resulting in a very fast cycle.

You look at a place like China and there is stuff there unions here would have to fight decades to get, like mandatory severance pay. Wages are lower but are increasingly rapidly, especially for mental rather than physical labor. Much of the Chinese growth magic was just as much the result of aggressively managing currency as low wages.

In other words, it's not all simply cheap slave labor already, it's more complex than that.

But we're going to see a lot of labor unrest in some of these countries in coming years, especially some places like Vietnam and the Philippines where they're getting a lot of the work that China and India used to do, in part as a result of the agreements they're making in TPP.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Article from @obsoletedogma bound to make you think. Sebby and Wonk will both find it very interesting.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

This made me think, too. It made me think, "Damn, that shit's funky." Your Daily Dose is "People Say" by The Meters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IydYLIsT9LA

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I'm increasingly thinking that Brexit isn't actually going to happen.

But maybe I'm a wild-eyed optimist.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

At this point, they ought to just give the keys to the place to Iceland.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

They lose to a team from a country with 100,000 fewer residents than the city of Manchester, which has two teams that could probably beat the Iceland national team. In other news, Chile (which beat Mexico 7-0) and Argentina (which beat us 4-0) were unable to score a goal in 120 minutes. The game went to PKs and Messi missed his first penalty kick ever, and Argentina lost, causing possibly the best player in the world to announce his resignation from the national team at the age of 29, two years before the Russia World Cup.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I blame bankers. And insurance companies. And Pharma. And I'm mostly correct.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I fear you're right.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Capital has enjoyed far too much of an advantage from the fact that the people making the rules have been the people with capital.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

By 1971, funk was squarely in the pockets of big industry. What was once an upstart underground musical movement had become BigFunk, a maze of interconnected giant faceless corporations. And there was no better example than Funk Inc. and their soulless corporate commercial megahit, "Bowlegs." Your Daily Dose:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StbK5ihLmQo

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

That all sounds somewhat familiar. Jacques Barzun wrote a book several years back, called From Dawn to Decadence.The book posits as its central thesis that history effectively operates on a roughly 500 year cycle, from upheaval and revolution, to a progressive orthodoxy that moves humanity along the line of greater technical and cultural prowess, into an eventual decline. Naturally, he places us in the death throes of the current era. While there is much in the book I don't agree with, and some that is just plain bitch-slapping wrong, it is hard to argue with his main premise and it gets harder every year.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Pharma's got it's problems, but I don't think it has much to do with un- and under- employment. It doesn't have much to do with employment, either, in the grand scheme of things. It's just not a huge employer.

The big banks and the i-banks have a special place in hell. I'm not sure there is a way to effectively regulate an industry based on purified greed. But one of the major failures of the left is to fail to provide any alternative for finance. The Berniacs have zero vision, Liz Warren is looking to regulate what is there, Barney Frank tried pretty damn hard with some of his public financing vehicles but, unfortunately, seems to have failed and done little more than carved out a niche.

I still think the solution is most likely a mix of smaller banks, specialized banks, and credit unions/coops, but those generally don't have a way of financing bigger deals. The last Mass. treasurer, Steve Grossman, former head of the DNC, tried to use state deposits and financing as a way of leveraging up those banks' capacity and getting them to work together in group deals more, but that approach needs a lot more work to get traction.

But the ibankers are by nature evil.