Robots are coming for your job

"Powerhouse consultancies like McKinsey & Co. forecast that 45% of today's workplace activities could be done by robots, AI or some other already demonstrated technology. Some professors argue that we could see 50% unemployment in 30 years.

Deniers of the scope and scale of this looming economic upheaval point hopefully to retraining programs, and insist that there always will be a need for people to build and service these machines (even as engineers are focused on developing robots that fix themselves or each other). They believe that such shifts are many decades away, even as noted futurist Ray Kurzweil, who is also Google's director of engineering, says AI will equal human intelligence by 2029. Deniers also talk about all the new jobs they assume will be created during this Fourth Industrial Revolution. Alas, a report from the 2016 World Economic Forum calculated that the technological changes underway likely will destroy 7.1 million jobs around the world by 2020, with only 2.1 million replaced."

Link here.

About time someone acknowledged the obvious

Bravo for Assad – he is a vile tyrant but he has saved Palmyra from Isil

The Syrian regime, with military help from Russia, is succeeding where the West has failed

"It is alas very hard to claim that the success of the Assad forces is a result of any particular British or indeed Western policy. How could it be? We rightly loathe his regime and what it stands for, and for the last few years we have been engaged in an entirely honourable mission to build an opposition to Assad that was not composed simply of Isil. That effort has not worked, not so far.

It has been Putin who with a ruthless clarity has come to the defence of his client, and helped to turn the tide. If reports are to be believed, the Russians have not only been engaged in air strikes against Assad’s opponents, but have been seen on the ground as well. If Putin’s troops have helped winkle the maniacs from Palmyra, then (it pains me to admit) that is very much to the credit of the Russians. They have made the West look ineffective; and so now is the time for us to make amends, and to play to our strengths."

Exactly.  Because "The West" was not serious about defeating ISIL.  And I'm not sure why it should pain him to give credit where its due.

Link here.

The American Imperium in Zombie Mode

"The policy wonks are up in arms over the NYTimes andWaPo interviews with Trump on foreign policy and trade. They simply can't say enough about how uninformed Trump is on this topic.... but there's something wrong with this picture.

The same wonks who claim to "know" everything have gutted the US economy, gotten us into wars we can't win, and plunged entire regions of the world into chaos & terrorism.

Personally, I like that both Sanders and Trump are isolationists. People profoundly out of step with the demands of an "Imperial Presidency" In my view, the Imperial Presidency beloved by the policy wonks should have died with the end of the cold war.

Yet it's still here, eating our future, in Zombie mode.

Have fun,

John Robb

PS: What if, and this is a crazy notion, we simply focused on making the United States a success story, rather than a poorly run Imperium?"

Link here.

THE MEDICAL MARIJUANA MESS (from Brookings)

"Medical marijuana policy in the United States is putting Americans at risk. The federal government keeps people who live in states that don’t have medical marijuana programs from accessing a product that could benefit their health. And even as it prevents some people from having it, it erects barriers against research into the safety and efficacy of a product used by tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who do live in states that have legalized it.

Although there are a number of policy changes, large and small, that Congress and the administration could make to overcome the deficiencies of this system, thus far they have chosen not to do so. Yet, as numerous organizations like the Marijuana Policy Project and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws have documented, a substantial majority of Americans in every state that has been polled supports changes (in some form) to the nation’s medical marijuana laws. Gallup and CBS News polls have pegged national support for reform at between 70 and 85 percent.

While elected officials cling to the status quo, failing to recognize and address the inherent hypocrisies in the nation’s laws, patients like Jennifer Collins and her family, and business owners like Rabbi Kahn and his family, are enduring unnecessary hardships. Far from being outliers, they are typical of the many people victimized by an unjust, arbitrary, and downright harmful system that hinders access to a clinically proven medical benefit.

It is time for government to transform medical marijuana policy into a system that is rational, functional, consistent, and informed by science—not politics."
Link here.

Saudi Arabia Uncovered, by ITV, the UK

Story link here.

Twilight of the neoconservatives (we can only hope . . .)

"The movement's unlikely 20-year reign over the GOP could now be coming to an end.
by Max Fisher on March 10, 2016"

"Are neoconservatives leaving the party, or is the party leaving neoconservatives?

Like so much of what Trump says, his claim to have opposed the Iraq War from the start turns out to be a lie. But this is hardly the point. Trump has positioned himself as challenging Republican Party orthodoxy, and, for months, one of the orthodoxies he has most loudly and single-mindedly challenged is the wisdom of invading Iraq.

'George W. Bush made a mistake,' Trump said in a February debate, as one of many examples. 'We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.'

This is different from Trump's other heresies in two ways. First, unlike his base-appeasing rhetoric on torture or immigration, this is a position that makes Trump morerather than less viable in a general election. In a 2014 poll, for example, 71 percent of Americans said the Iraq War wasn't worth it, including about half of Republicans.

In theory, then, Republican elites supposedly concerned with electability should welcome Trump's position; he has found an issue that can clearly appeal to GOP primary voters as well as nationally — as well as being an issue on which Trump could challenge Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war.

But that brings us to the second way Trump's position here is different from his usual heresies: Unlike his plan to build a giant border wall or to bar Muslim foreigners, his view on Iraq is heretical not because it violates the basic norms of human decency but rather because it breaks with party orthodoxy.

And therein lies Trump's real threat on foreign policy: He is demonstrating that it would be within the Republican Party's political interests to jettison the neoconservatives.

He has proven that there is a real constituency for opposing neoconservatism among Republicans; that an anti-neoconservative foreign policy — even one as incoherent and nonsensical as his own — can succeed with GOP voters, and would have a far better chance in a national election.

He is showing, in other words, that the Republican Party has already left the neoconservatives behind, whether party elites recognize this or not."

Link here.

Another good piece by Brenner - Obama Foreign Policy

17 MARCH 2016

THE OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY INTERVIEW by Michael Brenner

"The deference and passivity accorded the upholders of the conventional wisdom exposes the critical flaw in Obama’s interpretation of his authority as Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief. He is not a constrained Doge of Venice under strict surveillance by the Great Council of aristocrats. He is not just the custodian of some Holy Grail in the sacred custody of a vestal priesthood. He is not the prize student being tested in a simulation exercise by masters of the guild. The Washington Consensus embodied by the head-nodders of the think tanks and op. ed. pages is nothing more than the calcified corpus of failed ideas which have brought the United States nothing but wrack and ruin for (at least) the past 15 years. The Iraq debacle cut the ground from under it – thereby helping to clear the way for Obama's entry into the White House. His historic task was reformation. Instead, he decided that acceptance into the ranks of the Establishment was worth a ritualized surrender."

Link here.

THE U.S. MIDDLE EAST KILLING RACKET

THE U.S. MIDDLE EAST KILLING RACKET
by Jacob G. Hornberger

March 11, 2016

"The U.S. government goes into the region, initiates regime-change operations, and produces mass chaos, including civil wars, mass exoduses of immigrants, massive death and destruction, and crooked, corrupt, and tyrannical regimes.

And then all that chaos is used as the excuse for killing more people in the name of waging a 'war on terrorism.'

And the more people the kill, the worse the chaos. The worst the chaos, the great number of people they feel they have to target for killing.

It’s really the perfect racket. It’s the greatest terrorist-producing machine in history. And it ensures that Americans don’t question the existence of the Cold War era national-security establishment. 'We are here to protect you from the terrorists,' the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA tell us. 'We are killing them before they come to get you and cart you away to study the Koran,' they explain. 'Without the national-security establishment, American would fall to the terrorists, the Muslims, the radical jihadists, the drug dealers, and maybe even the communists.'

The war on terrorism is actually better than the war on drugs, a war that they’ve been waging for decades. They’ve been killing or capturing drug dealers for years. What good has it done? Those who are killed or captured are quickly replaced by others.

And that’s what’s been going on for the past 25 years in the Middle East. As soon as they get rid of one 'bad guy,' he is replaced by another 'bad guy.' The death and replacement process is perpetual."

Amen.

Link here.

War Is A Racket

By . . .

Smedley Darlington Butler

• Born: West Chester, Pa., July 30, 1881
• Educated: Haverford School
• Married: Ethel C. Peters, of Philadelphia, June 30, 1905
• Awarded two congressional medals of honor:

           capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914
           capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917

• Distinguished service medal, 1919
• Major General - United States Marine Corps
• Retired Oct. 1, 1931
• On leave of absence to act as director of Dept. of Safety, Philadelphia, 1932
• Lecturer -- 1930's
• Republican Candidate for Senate, 1932
• Died at Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, June 21, 1940

From Chapter 1 . . .

"WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [WWI] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations."

Link to full document here.

Stock Buybacks Keeping S&P 500's Bull Market Alive

Link here.

You can see the same thing here . . .

Link to FRED chart above.

Tulsi Gabbard nails it!!

"We can cast our vote for Hillary Clinton who we know the directions under her words will continue to take us down this path of spending trillions on regime change wars," the Hawaiian congresswoman argued. "Or we can vote for Bernie Sanders, end these costly counter-productive wars and use those resources to rebuild our community and our future here at home. Because we cannot afford to do both."

Bad Arguments About Israel

"I’ve said this before and I will say it again. If you aren’t OK with Jews living in ghettos, you can’t morally support the treatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and especially Gaza and you can’t support the settlements. It’s not OK because of what happened in 1944. You don’t get a moral exception because of terrible things that happened to your ancestors."
Link here.

The Saudis get good return on their dollars spent in the US

Eleven Months of the Appalling War on Yemen

"Since the Saudis and their allies started pummeling Yemen with indiscriminate bombing and the use of inherently indiscriminate cluster munitions last March, the U.S. has been reliably backing the Saudis in this unnecessary and indefensible war with weapons, refueling, and intelligence. The U.S. has helped the Saudis to whitewash and obscure their crimes, and the Obama administration has done this despite credible reports from multiple human rights organizations and the U.N. that the Saudi-led coalition is likely guilty of war crimes and possibly even crimes against humanity. It isn’t just Yemenis who can see no moral or legal justification for what has been done to their country, for there is no justification for it to be found. The U.S. should immediately halt its deplorable support for this war and apply whatever pressure it can to get the Saudis and their allies to stop the intervention."
Link here.

We can't hear youuuuuuuuuuuu

After all this huffing and puffing . . .

Will Mitt Romney's Anti-Trump Pitch Work?
The Atlantic-Mar 4, 2016

Romney: Vote For 'Whoever Has The Best Chance To Beat Trump 
Daily Caller-Mar 3, 2016

Romney to Lay Out Case Against Trump in Speech Thursday
In-Depth-Bloomberg-Mar 2, 2016

Hill Republicans push anti-Trump effort
WDIV Detroit-Mar 2, 2016

Romney to lay out case against Donald Trump in speech Thursday
OCRegister-Mar 2, 2016

Will Trump Voters Be Trumped By GOP Establishment?
MediaPost Communications-Mar 3, 2016

Romney implores: Bring down Trump
CNN-Mar 3, 2016

How did that work out?  Not so well, apparently.

State	Date	Trump		Cruz		Rubio		Kasich	Carson
Kansas	3/5/16	17,062	23%	35,207	48%	12,189	17%	7,795	511
Kentucky	3/5/16	82,493	36%	72,503	32%	37,579	17%	33,134	1,951
Louisiana	3/5/16	124,818	42%	113,949	38%	33,804	11%	19,355	4,544
Maine	3/5/16	6,070	33%	8,550	46%	1,492	8%	2,270	132
3/5/16 Total		37%		37%		14%

And thank goodness that empty suit named Rubio is on his last legs.

The US Role in Sustaining Islamic Terrorists

LETTER FROM WASHINGTON — From the January 2016 issue
A Special Relationship
The United States is teaming up with Al Qaeda, again

By Andrew Cockburn

"Even as we have continued our desultory bombing campaign against the Islamic State, Ahrar al-Sham and Nusra are creeping closer and closer to international respectability. A month after the London Eleven meeting, a group of scholars from the Brookings Institution published an op-ed making the case for Ahrar al-Sham: 'Designating [the] group as a terrorist organization might backfire by pushing it completely into Al Qaeda’s camp.' (The think tank’s recent receipt of a multiyear, $15 million grant from Qatar was doubtless coincidental.)

Over the past year, other distinguished figures have voiced support for a closer relationship with Al Qaeda’s rebranded extensions. David Petraeus, another former head of the CIA, has argued for arming at least the 'more moderate' parts of Nusra. Robert Ford, a former ambassador to Syria and a vociferous supporter of the rebel cause, called on America to 'open channels for dialogue' with Ahrar al-Sham, even if its members had on occasion slaughtered some Alawites and desecrated Christian sites. Even Foreign Affairs, an Establishment sounding board, has echoed these notions, suggesting that it was time for the United States to 'rethink its policy toward al-Qaeda, particularly its targeting of Zawahiri.'”

Link here.

Marijuana Legalization and the Drug Cartels

"The Mexican drug cartels are finally meeting their match as a wave of cannabis legalization efforts drastically reshapes the drug trafficking landscape in the United States. It turns out that as states legalize cannabis use and cultivation, the volume of weed brought across the border by Mexican drug cartels dramatically decreases — and is putting a dent in their cash flow.

A newly-released statistical report from the U.S. Border Patrol shows a sharp drop-off in cannabis captured at the border between the United States and Mexico. The reduction in weed trafficking coincides with dozens of states embracing cannabis use for both medical and recreational purposes.

In fact, as the Washington Post reports, cannabis confiscations at the southern border have stumbled to the lowest point in over a decade — to only 1.5 million pounds. That’s down from a peak of four million pounds in 2009."

Full article here.

Where do you fall on the national income distribution?

WSJ link.

Political Calculations link.

The State of American Retirement

"Today, many Americans rely on savings in 401(k)-type accounts to supplement Social Security in retirement. This is a pronounced shift from a few decades ago, when many retirees could count on predictable, constant streams of income from traditional pensions (see “Types of retirement plans,” below). This chartbook assesses the impact of the shift from pensions to individual savings by examining disparities in retirement preparedness and outcomes by income, race, ethnicity, education, gender, and marital status."

Link here.

Former UK Ambassador on Syrian Conflict

“I think sadly, but inevitably, he is. Realistically, Assad is not going to be overthrown. This becomes more clear with every day that passes. Western analysts have been indulging in wishful thinking for 5 years; it’s time to get real, we owe it to the Syrian people to be much more realistic and hard headed about this. The West has to stop propping up the so-called ‘moderate opposition’, which is not moderate at all by the way, and it has to allow the Syrian Army backed possibly by the Russians to deal with IS.”

Article link here.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimus Bosch

"Wander through the painting

Zoom in on the Garden of Earthly Delights and discover the many stories hidden behind the images inside the painting. Click on the white text boxes to listen to and/or read the stories. Allow yourself to be guided by the sounds, the music – and the images of course! In this case we would strongly recommend you to wander around."

Link here.

Sushi - one of life's good things

A Friday night treat . . .

Evolution is real . . . and you can see it.

"Rather than attempt to reconstruct history with fossils, Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University, decided to watch convergence and contingency unfold in real time, in the controlled environment of his laboratory. In 1988, he separated a single population of Escherichia coli bacteria into 12 separate flasks containing liquid nutrients, and let them each evolve separately. Every few months for the past 26 years, he or one of his students has frozen a sample of the bacteria. This archive of frozen microbes gives Lenski the ability to replay E. coli’s tape of life from any point he wishes, simply by thawing out the samples. Along the way, he can examine how the bacteria change both genetically and in ways that are visible under a microscope. Lenski says, “The whole experiment was set up to test how reproducible evolution was.”

In 11 of Lenski’s flasks, the E. coli cells grew physically larger, but bacteria in one flask divided itself into separate lineages—one with large cells and the other with small cells. “We call them the smalls and the larges,” says Lenski. “They have coexisted now for 50,000 generations.” No other population in the experiment did the same; a historically contingent event seemed to have taken place. Even 26 years later, none of the other E. coli lineages evolved it. In this case, contingency seems to have won out over convergence."

Article link here.

Speadsheet on Dividend Paying Stocks

U.S. Dividend Champions
U.S. Companies with 25+ Straight Years Higher Dividends
Link here.

From this website.

Ratio of Wilshire 5000 and Equity Values to GDP

One to watch . . .

Link here.

Essay: Anatomy of the Deep State

"There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power."

"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude."

Full article here.

Why Am I Moving Left?

"I used to be right down the middle. But America’s changed, and so have I."

"This has all made me shift my thinking, not so much about partisan politics but in feeling a sense of disquiet about both major political parties—and about our entire system. I suspect there are others who feel the same way. I certainly found it striking when earlier this week, retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who in 2003 was the first American administrator in occupied Iraq, told a Florida audience: 'I grew up absolutely in love with this country and believing everything the government said . . . . In the last 10 years, I’ve gotten so disenchanted with the government, so disappointed with it.'”

Amen.

Full article here.

Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Bernie Sanders

How refreshing to hear the truth from a member of Congress . . .