[hrothgar]

barmar, on 2015-May-07, 09:46, said:

While I don't expect to see federal government policies move in the right direction, there have been a few actions by some major employers that give me optimism. Walmart is raising their minimum wage well above the federal minimum (and so have a number of states). And I heard yesterday that Starbucks is going to pay for a college education for any employee working at least 20 hours/week (it's an online enrollment at ASU -- not Ivy League, but far better than nothing).

So there are some CEOs who understand that what's good for the country is good for them in the long run.

I don't know know much about the online classes offered by ASU, but the brick and mortar college is very well regarded.

Strong engineering program and an excellent business school.

[hrothgar]

blackshoe, on 2015-May-07, 00:56, said:

I thought perhaps this post might be of interest to some here.

Here's a lovely little quote from Murry Rothbard (the founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute). The quote can be found in "Right- Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement" (For any who have not read this, it is a spirited defense of the policies of Klansman David Duke

Quote

5. Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums.

Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go?
Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear

Blackshoe really might want to avoid associating himself with the view of such blatant racists, especially when discussing urban renewal....

[PassedOut]

hrothgar, on 2015-May-07, 13:01, said:

Blackshoe really might want to avoid associating himself with the view of such blatant racists, especially when discussing urban renew....

As is his wont, he left ambiguous his own views about the reference he gave. But the main thesis of the piece he recommended seemed to be, "We're scum, but so are the democrats." Perhaps the subtext is, "Why even try?"

But I remember that Lincoln and both Roosevelts did try and did accomplish quite a bit.

[blackshoe]

I didn't see anything racist in the article I linked. Neither, apparently, did Hrothgar. He simply mentioned that Rothbard, who was "the founder" of the Mises Institute*, wrote an article years ago that many consider racist, labelled Rothbard a racist, and, painting with the usual broad brush, labelled anyone associated with the Institute also a racist. Unless he was only referring to Rothbard and Duke when he used the plural.

For the record, I was not aware that Rothbard had written that article, or that he had ever been labelled a racist. I do not know if he ever changed his mind from what he wrote. I do know that I do not agree with the policy espoused in that article of Rothbard's. I also know that my disagreement with that does not mean that I automatically disagree with everything else he ever wrote.

*Also for the record, the Mises Institute website says the organization was founded in 1982 by Lew Rockwell. Rothbard "headed [their] academic programs until his death in 1995".

[hrothgar]

blackshoe, on 2015-May-07, 15:42, said:

I didn't see anything racist in the article I linked. Neither, apparently, did Hrothgar. He simply mentioned that Rothbard, who was "the founder" of the Mises Institute*, wrote an article years ago that many consider racist, labelled Rothbard a racist, and, painting with the usual broad brush, labelled anyone associated with the Institute also a racist. Unless he was only referring to Rothbard and Duke when he used the plural.

For the record, I was not aware that Rothbard had written that article, or that he had ever been labelled a racist. I do not know if he ever changed his mind from what he wrote. I do know that I do not agree with the policy espoused in that article of Rothbard's. I also know that my disagreement with that does not mean that I automatically disagree with everything else he ever wrote.

*Also for the record, the Mises Institute website says the organization was founded in 1982 by Lew Rockwell. Rothbard "headed [their] academic programs until his death in 1995".

Comment 1: I should have referred to Rothbard as "a founder" rather than "the founder" of the von Mises institute

Comment 2: While there is plenty of information about Rothbard's history of publishing racist claptrap, this is dwarfed by accusations about Lew Rockwell. (Remember all those racist Ron Paul newslatters from the 80s and 90s? Guess who was ghost writing and editting them? Lew Rockwell) The only semi convincing defense that Rockwell has come up with pretty much goes "I'm not really a racist. I just write racist literature to con money from the the crackers"...

for amusement value, here are a few choice quotes from the Ron Paul Newsletters:

Quote

"Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

"We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational."

After the Los Angeles riots, one article in a newsletter claimed, "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks."

Comment 3: I am glad that you agree that Rothbard wrote some despicable stuff. And for what its worth, I agree with you that this doesn't automatically invalidate everything else that he wrote. With this said and done, I do think that its important that people understand the political history of these writers because it makes it a lot easier to hear the "dog whistles" and understand the biases that they are trying to cover up.

Comment 4: Hell yeah. If I know that a institute was founded by a bunch of racist neo-confederate loons this is going to effect the way that I interpret articles that they publish talking about blacks

[kenberg]

PassedOut, on 2015-May-07, 07:28, said:

I see that Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio collaborated on explaining How to revive the American Dream. As clear and obvious as the steps they outline are, it's sobering to reflect upon how unlikely it is that they will be taken.

There are quite a number of suggestions there, one of which is "Give every child access to full-day pre-kindergarten."
I have a suggestion.
Run Kindergarten the way it was when I was a child and then........
Let four year olds in.

I entered Kindergarten whe I was 4 and first grade when I was 5. Kindergarten now is taught at the level that first grade was then. So of course a kid has to be 5 to enter Kindergarten, just as we had to be 5 to enter first grade.

It actually has not been a great leap forward to make Kindergarten as tough now as first grade once was, and then to decide that since that is so we now need the kids to be 5 instead of 4 to take it. Of course them you need Pre-K for teh 4 year olds, with Pre-K run as K used to be.

True I only went to K for half a day, but that can be fixed. The main point is to bring back Kindergarten as in once was, then let the 4 year olds in, then go on to a different problem.

[y66]

And now a brief interruption to plug the The Marshall Project:

Quote

Mission Statement

The Marshall Project is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization founded on two simple ideas:

1) There is a pressing national need for high-quality journalism about the American criminal justice system. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any country in the world. Spiraling costs, inhumane prison conditions, controversial drug laws, and concerns about systemic racial bias have contributed to a growing bipartisan consensus that our criminal justice system is in desperate need of reform.

The recent disruption in traditional media means that fewer institutions have the resources to take on complex issues such as criminal justice. The Marshall Project stands out against this landscape by investing in journalism on all aspects of our justice system. Our work will be shaped by accuracy, fairness, independence, and impartiality, with an emphasis on stories that have been underreported or misunderstood. We will partner with a broad array of media organizations to magnify our message, and our innovative website will serve as a dynamic hub for the most significant news and comment from the world of criminal justice.

2) With the growing awareness of the system’s failings, now is an opportune moment to amplify the national conversation about criminal justice.

We believe that storytelling can be a powerful agent of social change. Our mission is to raise public awareness around issues of criminal justice and the possibility for reform. But while we are nonpartisan, we are not neutral. Our hope is that by bringing transparency to the systemic problems that plague our courts and prisons, we can help stimulate a national conversation about how best to reform our system of crime and punishment.

[hrothgar]

blackshoe, on 2015-May-07, 15:42, said:

I didn't see anything racist in the article I linked. Neither, apparently, did Hrothgar. He simply mentioned that Rothbard, who was "the founder" of the Mises Institute*, wrote an article years ago that many consider racist, labelled Rothbard a racist, and, painting with the usual broad brush, labelled anyone associated with the Institute also a racist. Unless he was only referring to Rothbard and Duke when he used the plural.

I am attaching a length quote from the blog "Bleedingheartslibertarians which discussed the von Mises Institute in general.
(Its not just me who dismisses them as a racist cesspool. Even libertarians agree)


http://bleedingheart...r-so-damn-much/

Quote

As some of you might know, I’ve been stirring up quite a bit of trouble on Facebook the last few days discussing the Ron Paul newsletters story. Matt suggested I write up some of what I’ve been saying for the audience here at BHL, which I’m happy to do. First let me note that the posts by Gary and Jacob below are right on the money in their own ways. Some of what I will say below will echo Jacob in particular, but I want to explore the history of this whole thing a bit more and offer some more reasons why it should matter to bleeding heart libertarians.

To start, those of us who have been around the movement since the 1980s knew all about this stuff and knew that those newsletters would never go away. As Jacob says, the attempt to court the right through appeals to the most unsavory sorts of arguments was a conscious part of the “paleolibertarian” strategy that Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard cooked up in the late 1980s. What’s happening right now is that the chickens of that effort are coming home to roost with large external costs on all of us as libertarians. In other words, we are experiencing “blowback,” and Ron Paul supporters of all people should understand that when you poke at sleeping dogs, you should not be surprised when they turn around and attack you, even if it takes a couple of decades. Now Paul’s supporters understand viscerally what he’s rightly argued about US foreign policy.

...

This led to the paleolibertarian strategy by the end of the decade after Rothbard broke with the Kochs and helped Lew Rockwell found the Mises Institute (originally located on Capitol Hill – right smack inside the hated beltway, it’s worth noting). The paleo strategy, as laid out here by Rockwell, was clearly designed to create a libertarian-conservative fusion exactly along the lines Jacob lays out in his post. It was about appealing to the worst instincts of working/middle class conservative whites by creating the only anti-left fusion possible with the demise of socialism: one built on cultural issues. With everyone broadly agreeing that the market had won, how could you hold together a coalition that opposed the left? Oppose them on the culture. If you read Rockwell’s manifesto through those eyes, you can see the “logic” of the strategy. And it doesn’t take a PhD in Rhetoric to see how that strategy would lead to the racism and other ugliness of newsletters at the center of this week’s debates.

The paleo strategy was a horrific mistake, both strategically and theoretically, though it apparently made some folks (such as Rockwell and Paul) pretty rich selling newsletters predicting the collapse of Western civilization at the hands of the blacks, gays, and multiculturalists. The explicit strategy was abandoned by around the turn of the century, but not after a lot of bad stuff had been written in all kinds of places. There was way more than the Ron Paul newsletters. There was the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, which was another major place publishing these sorts of views. They could also be found in a whole bunch of Mises Institute publications of that era. It was the latter that led me to ask to be taken off the Institute’s mailing list in the early 1990s, calling them “a fascist fist in a libertarian glove.” I have never regretted that decision or that language. What the media has in their hands is only the tip of the iceberg of the really unsavory garbage that the paleo turn produced back then.

Through it all though, Ron Paul was a constant. He kept plugging away, first at the center of the paleo strategy as evidenced by the newsletters. To be clear, I am quite certain he did not write them. There is little doubt that they were written by Rockwell and Rothbard. People I know who were on the inside at the time confirm it and the style matches pretty well to those two and does not match to Ron Paul. Paul knows who wrote them too, but he’s protecting his long-time friend and advisor, unfortunately. And even more sadly, Rockwell doesn’t have the guts to confess and end this whole megillah. So although I don’t think Ron Paul is a racist, like Archie Bunker, he was willing to, metaphorically, toast a marshmallow on the cross others were burning.

Even after the paleo strategy was abandoned, Ron was still there walking the line between “mainstream” libertarianism and the winking appeal to the hard right courted by the paleo strategy. Paul’s continued contact with the fringe groups of Truthers, racists, and the paranoid right are well documented. Even in 2008, he refused to return a campaign contribution of $500 from the white supremacist group Stormfront. You can still go to their site and see their love for Ron Paul in this campaign and you can find a picture of Ron with the owner of Stormfront’s website. Even if Ron had never intentionally courted them, isn’t it a huge problem that they think he is a good candidate? Doesn’t that say something really bad about the way Ron Paul is communicating his message? Doesn’t it suggest that years of the paleo strategy of courting folks like that actually resonated with the worst of the right? Paul also maintained his connection with the Mises Institute, which has itself had numerous connections with all kinds of unsavory folks: more racists, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, the whole nine yards. Much of this stuff was ably documented in 2007 and 2008 by the Right Watch blog. Hit that link for more.

[blackshoe]

"The paleo strategy was a horrific mistake".

With that, I agree. And I can understand why that author severed his ties with the Mises Institute. But the fact that the Institute's leaders pursued that policy twenty years ago doesn't mean that the Institute is doing so now.

What the heck is a "bleeding heart libertarian" anyway?

[hrothgar]

blackshoe, on 2015-May-08, 09:39, said:

With that, I agree. And I can understand why that author severed his ties with the Mises Institute. But the fact that the Institute's leaders pursued that policy twenty years ago doesn't mean that the Institute is doing so now.

It is certainly true that people and institutions can change. However, the von Mises institute has not.

The institute continues to cross hire with organizations like the League for the South.
The institute continues to publish authors like Hans-Herman Hoppe and maintains them as fellows.

In this case, the leopard hasn't changed its spots.

[blackshoe]

What's wrong with Hoppe?

[PassedOut]

blackshoe, on 2015-May-08, 12:38, said:

What's wrong with Hoppe?

Seriously? Have you read his Democracy: The God That Failed?

Quote

One would be well on the way toward a restoration of the freedom of association and exclusion as is implied in the idea and institution of private property, and much of the social strife currently caused by forced integration would disappear, if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States: to post signs regarding entrance requirements to the town, and once in town for entering specific pieces of property (no beggars, bums, or homeless, but also no Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Catholics, etc.); to expel as trespassers those who do not fulfill these requirements...

Quote

There can be no tolerance towards democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. They — the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism — will have to be physically removed from society too, if one is to maintain a libertarian order.

And on and on...

[blackshoe]

The only think I've read of Hoppe's is The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, and I haven't finished that.

[Winstonm]

This is interresting.

Quote

Scientists Find Alarming Deterioration In DNA Of The Urban Poor

[kenberg]

I had never even heard of a telomere before reading Winston's reference.
So of course I went to the Wik
Apparently there are things that you can do to enlarge your telomere.

Quote

A 2013 pilot study from UCSF took 35 men with localized early-stage prostate cancer and had 10 of them begin "lifestyle changes that included: a plant-based diet (high in fruits, vegetables and unrefined grains, and low in fat and refined carbohydrates); moderate exercise (walking 30 minutes a day, six days a week); stress reduction (gentle yoga-based stretching, breathing, meditation)" and also "weekly group support". When compared to the other 25 study participants, "The group that made the lifestyle changes experienced a 'significant' increase in telomere length of approximately 10 percent. Further, the more people changed their behavior by adhering to the recommended lifestyle program, the more dramatic their improvements in telomere length."^[39] A 2014 study entitled "Stand up for health--avoiding sedentary behaviour might lengthen your telomeres: secondary outcomes from a physical activity RCT in older people" indicated somewhat contradictory results, stating, "In the intervention group, there was a negative correlation between changes in time spent exercising and changes in telomere length (rho=-0.39, p=0.07). On the other hand, in the intervention group, telomere lengthening was significantly associated with reduced sitting time (rho=-0.68, p=0.02).[

[Winstonm]

PassedOut, on 2015-May-08, 12:58, said:

Seriously? Have you read his Democracy: The God That Failed?



And on and on...

Sounds a lot like KKK and other white supremacy group ideology.

[PassedOut]

Australian Jim Jeffries has a funny routine about an American sacred cow: https://youtu.be/lL8JEEt2RxI

[kenberg]

PassedOut, on 2015-June-21, 10:45, said:

Australian Jim Jeffries has a funny routine about an American sacred cow: https://youtu.be/lL8JEEt2RxI

If it were a debate I could quarrel with this or that. But largely I agree. I think that what I agree with most is the general notion that the argument in favor of access to guns is that the person likes guns. The rest is just hooey. Way way back Tom Lehrer had a song, Smut, about the Supreme Court and pornography. He said something like "The folks who argue for this have to argue for freedom of expression and freedom of speech, but we know what's really involved. Dirty books are fun to read. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right not guaranteed by the Constitution, unfortunately".So it is with guns. Some people get a kick from it. I don't, they do. Some overweight guy munching on pretzels and downing his fifth beer explains that he has to own a gun because he is concerned about personal safety? Sure, sure.

[PassedOut]

kenberg, on 2015-June-21, 16:49, said:

If it were a debate I could quarrel with this or that. But largely I agree. I think that what I agree with most is the general notion that the argument in favor of access to guns is that the person likes guns. The rest is just hooey.

I am one of those "responsible gun owners" that he pokes fun at, but I laughed a lot watching his routine. I do like to go to the range with my sons when we get together, and we always have a good time.

On the other hand, we do have a terrible problem with gun violence in th US, and we've got to put the brakes on that somehow. Australia did have that problem, and they did manage to put the brakes on (and their government was conservative when they accomplished that).

[mike777]

1) what was the problem in Aust?
2) did they solve it?
3) if so ok, if not sure ok...
In any case is the problem in Baltimore?