Tag Archives: Featured Stories

The myth of markets How is it that a market created by Madison Avenue becomes prescient? Omniscient? It doesn’t. It isn’t; never was. Like capitalism, the primacy of private healthcare and the myth of markets are a big lie.The planet is dying from our burning of fossil fuels, yet we hear ‘news readers’ demand that alternative energy needs to be competitive with fossil fuels. Like hell, it does. Markets may, probably do, have a place in an economy,...

Hah got your attention there. The connection is Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr pionere of Cinematic nudity, Marine drone technology and the anti jamming anti interference technology on which WiFi is based. Notable for the first Hollywood full frontal nudity scene and the concept of an un jammable, uninterceptable, radio controlled torpedo. Lamarr was born in Austria and married a guy who owned a company which made torpedoes. Post WWI when...

Based on a recent article in New York Review of Books, I read the novel “Independent People” by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. The book was originally published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935. Laxness won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1955, in part on the strength of this book. Like Moby-Dick, I approached this novel as an obligation. I put it down once, after a few pages, in exasperation with its rambling faux-Norse folklore beginnings,...

Then I really was going to skip today, even as–indeed, because–it is the 50th anniversary of 11 September. The original 11 de Septiembre, that is. Once is history, twice is parody. Feuerbach, as with Marx, was an optimist. Chile took only 17 years to get rid of Pinochet, and they did it at the ballot box. Twenty-two years later, the U.S. is still recovering something, though I’m no longer certain what. Are we trying to avoid torture?...

Today, several folks have posted 9/11 remembrances online. I’m fine with that. We should remember the people who died as a result of the plane crashes, as well as their families and friends. But don’t stop there. Also remember how this tragedy was cynically exploited for political purposes by folks like Rudy Giuliani and George Bush. How it was dishonestly used to justify the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq*, the torture and abuse of...

In 2010 Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Acts (there were 2) from now on called the ACA. One of the aims was to bend the Medicare spending curve and, they hoped (or dreamed) stop the increase in spending per beneficiary. The spending per beneficiary ceased increasing. Oh crap Chrome refuses to upload an image (and says I am offline while also opening other pages. I should have kept my oath). sorry for...

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder first came to my attention in a footnote of an article in The New York Review of Books. The footnote gave a link to a series of 23 online lectures on the history of Ukraine, which I binge-watched over a period of about five days. I also read his books “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth.” Snyder also has a subscription-only Substack blog to which I subscribe. Snyder travels frequently to Ukraine these days, and his latest...

TANSTAAFL. There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Someone pays, somehow. The standard textbook example is pilots who refill their plane at a gas station that offers them a “free” steak dinner while charging five cents a gallon more than another station at the same airport. The pilot and co-pilot get $50 dinners for free, the gas station gets an “extra” $150 for the gas sold, and everyone is happy. I believe this story is better at...

This is the Big Story: a 100+ year near-record decline in commodity prices is enabling continued record wage growth and employment  – by New Deal democrat No important economic data today, so let me elaborate on the matter of “immaculate disinflation,” i.e., the decline in inflation without a decline in growth. I’m going to argue that, to the extent there is causation, it is the reverse of what is generally assumed, to wit: that there is...

This is the Big Story: a 100+ year near-record decline in commodity prices is enabling continued record wage growth and employment  – by New Deal democrat No important economic data today, so let me elaborate on the matter of “immaculate disinflation,” i.e., the decline in inflation without a decline in growth. I’m going to argue that, to the extent there is causation, it is the reverse of what is generally assumed, to wit: that there is...