balance_factor

skills and professionalism can be valued by the free market by people competing for them; why, despite pure populism for the lowest common denominator, someone wants to return to something like this, is completely beyond me.

The real determination of where the money goes is by the owners of the business. If one looks over the Forbes 400 richest list, we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from the labor of those who work - the Kochs, the Waltons, the Johnson family. The Rockefellers fell off the list in the past few years, $2 billion is the individual cutoff and I suppose Forbes doesn't know of any individual in the family worth more that that. But I can assure you if they and their three siblings are worth 1.5 billion each, and their first cousins are all worth 1.5 billion each, they are not out there breaking the bricks.

It's amusing to hear about meritocracy and the rat race for education, skills etc. when these heirs are the people controlling the economy, and causing so many economic and other problems due to its increasing lopsidedness towards them. What are their skills and professionalism that are valued? The money they suck off from those who work is the truest lowest common denominator, rule by parasites. At least Lenin, Stalin and Molotov rose due to their merits, not their birthrights. Russia went from being a country pushed around by the Japanese, with an GDP equivalent to 1917 Brazil, to a superpower sending satellites, men into space, probes to the Moon (the first country to do so). It also had little crime and little poverty.

I am supposed to get into a tizzy about someone with less skills getting the same pay as me, when the money is being sent off to the heirs who do no work? I certainly would prefer that the people actually doing the work alongside me get the money.

Or maybe people are naturally more attracted to the extremes (left and right) when given the choice.

If by given a choice you mean people are usually not given a choice, but in mid-1600s England, late 1700s France, mid 1800s USA, and most of the world in the early-mid 1900s, then yes. Or there can be changes in the forces of production and its various superstructural elements that cause this to happen. People are drifting away from the center and status quo in Greece, but unemployment was at 28% in 2013, and is still above 20%. Thus many people are boun bouncing between anarchism, fascism, and communism. The current prime minister is head of a party of what were called in the 1980s "euro-communists" - people on the right wing of the communist movement (the KKE are the left wing communists).

Heredity can be measured via twin studies - if twins are adopted into two different families or cultures: what commonalities can we still find, beyond random variability.

And how often does this happen? It is about as common as a sighting of the Higgs boson - and you need a large sample group. Of "identical" twins separated at birth (identical twins are not genetically identical) and sent to two culturally/class-based different families, with little contact.

The Pioneer Fund (you can read about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund ) funded studies like the Minnesota Twin Family Study, but it was found to have many deficiencies, such as what I noted. Often twins in the cohort were only raised apart for a few years and so forth.

On occasion I watch television, and see wealthy heirs like the Hilton heiresses or Kardashian heiresses, or watch documentaries like Born Rich with various heirs and heiresses, and it's quite obvious why such a class spends its money on endeavors that says nature rules over nurture. Like the heir Wickliffe Draper did with the Pioneer Fund. That they are born superior without having to work or do anything. For the past ten millennia they said the gods favored them, like Socrates noble lie ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic ). The popes crowned them king. In our post-enlightened age this does not work so now they say their superiority comes from chains of amino acids. Of course, history tends to depose of them any how, the God-ordained superior genetics of the Romanovs were not as well adapted as the Bolshevik soldiers who rid the earth of them (tangential note - their inbreeding caused hemophilia which brought in Rasputin and hastened their downfall). It's an argument for laziness and parasitism - to not look at people by their work, but by the genetic superiority which they were supposedly born with. It's pathetic and parasitic.

It is an old argument, and I think a correct one. Money at the top is mostly spent on capital investment. Capital investment makes commodities which are sold to consumers/workers. Who is going to buy all these things if people are tapped out? You can kick the can down the road for a bit with debt, but if the income split stays the same, that just ultimately makes the problem worse when you reach maximum indebtedness.

In terms of smaller returns, you can see this with cell phone manufacturing. So much capital is on the sidelines that when it sees a chance to turn a profit, capital floods in, a massive infrastructure for building cell phones springs up, and returns shrink. The only exception is Apple, for a variety of reasons including that the initial iPhone was a product of high quality and convenience compared to its competitors at the time.

When the Russian Revolution took place, many of the areas you discuss were part of the Russian empire. So "Russian occupation", if that is what it was, did not start with the Bolsheviks.

Hungary is a different story, but then of course, the Hungarians established themselves as a communist republic in 1919 with no Russians in sight. This was actually put down by foreign intervention - Romanian invasion and guns, with strong support from England in the background. So you could say the Red Army was just restoring what had been taken away by foreign invasion in 1919.

Starting in 1945, Russia had a very strong desire to pull out of Berlin and east Germany, it never wanted to be there. England and the US had agreed that Germany would be demilitarized, but then reneged on that promise, and formed a military alliance against Russia which west Germany joined in 1955. That was two years after Radio Free Europe in west Berlin was advocating riots to east Berliners and east Germans - which took place. And only six years after this was a wall built. Imagine if Iran occupied half of San Francisco or New York City and Iranians became indignant a wall was put up around their section? Of course much of the Nazis and SS high command was put to work in west Germany after the war in intelligence and business (union-busting etc.) other than their cleaner hands leaders like Reinhard Gehlen, or less clean hands such as Nazi and SS leader Hanns Martin Schleyer who was head of the post-war German Employers' Association (but whose past was not discussed much, most references to him are in regards to "far-left Red Army Faction terrorism"). Also, the Rhineland was the heart of German industrial might, the Russians got the duds in Germany other than a divided Berlin which caused them and the DDR's leaders headaches.

Whereas Austria, which Russia had occupied but which did not go remilitarize and join NATO, was withdrawn from by Russia, just like Russia pulled out of Iran and a number of other places as agreed. The allies had agreed Germany not be remilitarized and made a military threat to a twice invaded Russia within a 30 year span, but then England and the US broke that deal.

So Russia, who wanted to leave and have Germany reunite, was stuck by US/UK policy. Actually, as has been revealed, Margaret Thatcher was forcibly against east Germany reuniting with west Germany at a time when the Russians wanted it. So this thread stretched all the way from 1945 to 1990.

It was also the year of the Tet offensive, an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces, and of more than 16,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War, more than in any other year.

Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called "an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces".

How about an enormous attack by "South" Vietnamese forces, like the National Liberation Front? Who took over the American embassy in Saigon, the "North Vietnamese forces"? It was a local NLF C-10 Sapper batallion. The North Vietnamese attack had its main thrust toward the Vietnamese border, the ARVN's I Corps Tactical Zone. Further south it mostly aided the NLF (and local populace) uprising.

The Tet Offensive was costly to the NLF - after years of fighting the French, the Americans, and their Vietnamese collaborators, the NLF was somewhat worn down, and the Tet Offensive was kind of its last hurrah. From 1968 on, the resistance in southern Vietnam became more dependent on North Vietnamese aid.

Insofar as "North" and "South" Vietnam, these themselves are created entities. In 1940, Vietnam was under the control of the Vichy French, who were somewhat hostile to the US. Then it fell to Japanese control. In March 1945, the Vichy French were completely ousted. The OSS was arming and supporting Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, people like Archimedes Patti.

At the end of 1945, the French wanted to take colonial control of Vietnam again (Ho Chi Minh had declared independence with a very pro-US speech and policy, seemingly approved by local American government officials). The French did not have the manpower to take over Vietnam though and asked the English for help, as French/English interests were not 100% US-aligned (see Suez crisis). The English did not have the manpower either so they sent Nepali Gurkhas to take back Vietnam. Many events took place in the next weeks and months, I can't go into it all here, including the British rearming the Japanese to fight against the Vietnamese.

So years of guerilla warfare ensue between the Vietnamese and French colonialists, ending in the 1954 Geneva conference. There, a promise for elections is made. Also pledged is reunification. The US is not a party to the conference.

Eisenhower says in his memoirs he could not allow elections as Ho Chi Minh would have won. So the US starts a policy against the promised elections and reunification. Like the Japanese, French and English, the US at some point invades southern Vietnam. It begins a war against the mostly southern NLF resistance, which includes not just communists but Buddhist monks, Vietnamese nationalists etc., all of these comprise the NLF. Of course, on the long war from 1954 to 1975, including things like the Phoenix Program where the CIA went around south Vietnam murdering school teachers, newspaper columnists and anyone seen as being against US forces being in Vietnam. By 1972 the US began pulling out, and was ousted in 1975. By then the southern resistance forces had been decimated (along with millions killed in the south) and the "northern" forces had become more prominent.

There are two sides in every war, and in the war on poverty, those fighting to create and preserve poverty currently hold most of the cards.

Harken back to 2000 and let us read the business press...I will pick one article by example ( http://money.cnn.com/2000/05/05/economy/employ )...what does the article say?

"Joblessness at 30-year low...The U.S. unemployment rate tumbled to a 30-year low of 3.9 percent in April, the government reported Friday, as worker-starved companies raised wages and went on a hiring spree that created 340,000 new jobs. But the good news for workers on Main Street sparked fears on Wall Street"

What? Workers looking for a job being more easily able to get a job is something that sparks fear on Wall Street ?

"Still, the markets took the data in stride...The markets harbor no doubts of the Fed's concerns over labor market tightness."

Both "the markets" and "the Fed" are concerned that so many people are employed?

Basically this CNNfn article is saying, correctly, that Americans wanting a job being able to get a job is something that is feared by Wall Street, "markets", The Fed etc., not something that is desired.

As that is the way the system is set up, and this is not the only business press article or pronouncement of that time saying this, one has to be skeptical of the desire for a "war on poverty". Because as it says, Wall Street, "the markets", The Fed and most of the powers that be are deathly afraid of that happening. They are in the business of preserving poverty, and creating it when necessary.

Of course, this article was written by a corporation owned by people who feel this way. So this is about as blunt an explanation as you're going to get from them, or the mass media, which is completely owned and controlled by them. For a clearer explanation of all of this from a source independent of that, you might try consulting a source such as this - https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and...

The example Ricardo gave for comparative advantage was Portuguese wine for English cloth.

More than two centuries later, Joan Robinson reexamined comparative advantage using Ricardo's original example. How had such trade affected the two economies - Portugal staying a more agricultural society, whereas in England, textiles served as one of the backbones for the country's industrialization. The analysis Robinson came up with should be obvious - both countries did not benefit by the trade of cloth for wine, it had been much more to England's advantage, and Portugal would have been better off staving off free trade and building up its textile and industrial base. The original example given for the benefits of comparative advantage for all parties turned out to itself be a fallacy.

What happened very quickly in 1917 was the development of committee power, so the development of local, direct democracy in terms of local committees, soldiers� committees and, of course, the Soviets. And I think that those institutions need not have become the instruments of class war, which is what the Bolsheviks used them for, or encouraged them to do. You could have had, as some in the Bolshevik Party, in the Left-Menshevik wings, were thinking, a combination of local soviet-style structures with a national parliament.

There are a lot of silly ideas contained in the last two sentences.

First off committees like those mentioned have sprung up in every revolution since the French Revolution. Back then they were Les Enrages, the sans-culottes, and they have emerged in revolutions since then up into the 20th century, be they called councils or soviets or whatever. The notion that "those institutions need not have become the instruments of class war" is preposterous, because workers taking control over their own lives and halting the exproporiation of their surplus labor time is the centrality of class warfare. If workers had control over their own labor time, instead of punching a clock at some corporation owned by heirs, which directed their work and expropriated surplus labor time from them, then there would be no classes. The only way to prevent workers managing their own affairs in local committees from not being engaged in class warfare would either be to dissolve the committees, or alternatively neuter them to where they were completely powerless.

In terms of the idea of a national parliament and local soviets being the basis of a government, that is exactly the situation Russia was in in February 2017 - what was called dual power. It's an untenable situation. Up until April 1917 the idea was generally that socialists might be able to take power, but should instead subordinate themselves to the bourgeoisie, in a society where the capitalists would rule through a modern bourgeois parliament.

Lenin spells out why this was not done at the beginning and end of his April Theses: one of the main things that made him realize the time for socialists to stop subordinating themselves to capitalists and bourgeois parliaments was it was leading to the degradation of the socialist parties, the center-piece of which was German social-democrats supporting entry into World War I. The option Lenin saw being handed to him was - support World War I, pitting Russian workers against German workers (including left-wing pacifistic German socialists), or turn completely against the government. Lenin chose the latter course. Figes neglects to mention this - Lenin's only real alternative to taking the path he took would be to support Russia's continuation of World War I.

This is the sort of thing that led to the decline of the Soviet economy, which had been doing very well up until that point. People nowadays usually remember the creaking Soviet economy of the late 1980s, but from the late 1920s to Stalin's death, the Soviet economy grew by leaps and bounds. While the US was in a depression, Russia was building massive steel plants in Magnitogorsk. In fact Russia didn't even have enough manpower to do it, so imported American and European labor, and contracted to American and European firms.

The aim was to build up the means of production (capital, in western parlance) to western levels.

However when Stalin died, and the revolutionaries of 1905 and 1917 died and faded away, the second generation of Khrushchev's and the like slowed down the infrastructure capital spending and started increasing consumer production and freebies like this. A number of other things happened as well around this time, but all in the same direction - capital spending went lower, sops to the populace started, and a long economic, and then political decline set in. This sop was part of that. Ultimately, the money to keep up the park came out of capital spending, leading to the decline of the USSR on some level.

It's interesting what words are not in the article. Words like heir, inheritance, profit, interest, rentier. The word rent is there, but assumed as a tenant, not landlord.

I assume the Forbes 400 richest are in the 1%. How did the Koch brothers get their $100 billion? Where did the Waltons get their $140 billion? Where did the Mars family get their $75 billion? The article makes it sound like these people became rich when they decided whether or not to go to law school.

It's important to note how in the US how FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) and health care affect the economy. But a lot of what puts people at the top is at which hospital they took their first breath.

The Quora link you put says the reason the 1980s report is no longer relevant is the drawdown from Cold War nuke levels.

The Nature letter was written by Russell Seitz, who is also skeptical against the harm cigarette smoking can do, that climate change has, and so on. I don't know of any scientific views not aligning with profits of military contractors and big business that he is not skeptical of. He is associated with the Marshall Insitute, founded by his cousin Fred Seitz, who himself was skeptical of cigarette's harm, global warming, deterioration of the ozone layer etc.

The Skeptoid link references the same thing as the Quora link - that nuclear stockpiles have decreased to where a full-scale war would be less than in the 1980s, when the stockpiles were much higher.

For political reasons, it was necessary from the 1940s to 1980s to minimize fears of the impact of a full-scale nuclear war. I used to have an old Stanford Research Institute report which said that if the US and USSR had a full nuclear exchange, the US would get back to current GNP levels - in five years!

I don't know how this is science gone wrong - two of the links you put say this is no longer applicable due to post-Cold War drawdowns, and the other one is by someone who is skeptical not only of this, but that cigarettes are harmful, that climate change is happening and on and on.

1) Capitalism is creating commodities, like corn, and then shipping them. Picking one billion corn stalks is a lot more cost and effort than picking one corn stalk.

With software nowadays, you create the first product, and then with the push of a button, can duplicate and distribute it to billions, almost instantly, almost for free. What this means is you are not really making a commodity any more. Which means that in those parts of societies where this mode of production prevails, you're not even really working within a system of capitalism any more. The system of production outgrows the economic system it is in, just like town trade and manufacture outgrew feudalism centuries ago.

2/3) The helpful thing is to look at what is actually happening, as in a scientific experiment. The real world is not people sitting on top of piles of money, like a dragon in some fairy tale. Those who get the fruit of other's labor by rentier means - landlords, lenders and most importantly stockholders and owners, can only spend so much on luxury goods. They also need only so much as that aforementioned stacks of Credit Suisse gold bars stored somewhere for a rainy day. Most of the money is reinvested.

Where is the money invested? New construction projects, new companies, new loans - or further capital for existing projects. At companies owned, San Francisco apartments etc., more and more of wages go to profit and rent, as that is necessary for inequality. So the worker has less money to buy commodities. But more and more capital is being spent to build more and more commodities. The workers/consumers can not buy these increasing commodities made by the more enriched investors. Credit can kick the can down the road for a time, but if things don't go back to equilibrium, things get worse (see the 2008 taxpayer TARP bailout of banks, 2000 dot-bomb crash etc.)

There's a documentary called the One Percent, where a conversation between Bill Gates Sr., Warren Buffett and Chuck Collins (Oscar Meyer heir) is retold. He is talking about the inheritance tax (now corporate spinned to be called the death tax) and says if things are as unequal as they are now without an inheritance tax, what will happen when one does happen?

I myself don't think there's some liberal, social democratic solution. Idle class heirs have this self-destructive tendency to pull more and more power to themselves, to the point where they begin to undermine their own long-term power. At some point a very radical change comes. That has been the history of the past centuries. The US depression of the 1930s was so long ago, it's hard for Americans to fathom it, and I would guess most people think it could never happen again, but it could. It could even be worse.

It's great that these RFE's are happening, and Trump should have closed things up even earlier. There are plenty of people with skills out there who may not know every feature of Vue.js 2.5.3, or who are 30 years old and thus "not a culture fit". Companies will start having to look for these people instead. Enough is enough. There's not even an argument, it's whether the programmer gets to make a salary in an industry where you're chucked overboard at 40, or whether billionaire heirs get that money added to their pile of riches. It's no contest. As far as Indians, they can work in India, or Europe, or apply for a green card.

Different things can be shown by different measurements. Income disparity in Brazil is high, so you have a few people like Jorge Paulo Lemann worth tens of billions of dollars, and then a lot of poor people. So per capita GDP there is more an indication of how he is doing than everyone else (GDP divided by population).

One metric we can use is hours worked per week. Obviously, the less hours of required work needed, the better for the average worker. Of course measurements like this are not the focus of many blog posts. And you yourself are probably deficient in this respect to many hunter-gatherer bands, who do less than 40 hours of work per week. They spend the rest of their time in leisure activities. Marshall Sahlins "Stone Age Economics" goes into this. You yourself are probably required to work more hours per week than native people in Polynesia and other areas.

The percentage going to military spending out of total government spending is only as small as it is on the chart if it's decided to try to have a very narrow view of what constitutes military spending, but a broad view of what can fit in other categories. If you include not just DoD spending, but DoD retiree and healthcare, veteran's benefits, interest on the debt of previous military spending, the defense-oriented outlays of the DoE, NASA, Homeland Security, the State Department and the intelligence agencies, then the defense percentage will be larger, and other portions smaller, including what is put under entitlement programs from fromer military/intelligence etc. getting retirement and health benefits.

I suppose it's the fading light of England's imperial hubris that is oblivious to why a Chinese man would fail to appreciate that he is the "subject" of a monarch who lies over 9,500 km away.

What rights do those the British try to "subjugate" in the six counties of north Ireland have? Diplock courts, the Special Powers act, shoot-to-kill, military/intelligence collusion with loyalist death squads etc.

England's army occupies the six north counties of Ireland, so as to make its people subjects of the queen. Those who have stood up and fought back, to drive out this foreign army are "terrorists", and Rudd demands the ability to see the communications of the queen's subjects, on top of whatever else Orwellian CCTV monitoring nightmare the Ununited Kingdom already has.

Where are the transcripts of British intelligence collusion, when the English military gave guns to the loyalist death squads?

the "oppressed"

Sure, how are they oppressed? In 1938 Barcelona was bombed because the army wanted to destroy the republic and what existed of Catalonia autonomy. So any existing Catalonia autonomy or democracy of any form was crushed in 1939, replaced by a military dictatorship, and only started to recover in 1977-1978. The Spanish dictatorship killed thousands of Catalans after the 1939 takeover.

The same forces in Spanish society who did that are the same forces which seek to destroy Catalan autonomy again. By the same means, policemen kicking down the door. You dismiss prior referendums, fine. There is going to be one in 11 days. So if those polls you cite are true, then it seems independence will not happen. It's bizarre to call a referendum in ten days "outrageously undemocratic", while decades of a brutal dictatorship established by an invasion and the murder of thousands afterward goes without mention.

The tech giants negotiations are relying on the monopoly that the state provides. Just to pick one piece of legislation, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the government disallows various worker/employer agreements that benefit those doing the work. Meaning corporate America generally outlawed certain deals that could happen, when the workers were in a good position, that the corporation was willing to do. That is relying on the monopoly the state provides.

The Taft-Hartley act also bans secondary strikes, so unions are further restricted (this restriction was increased more with the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act in 1959).

The Taft-Hartley act also allowed the president to ban strikes in the case of a "national emergency". Of course, national emergencies were seen all over the place since then, including in 2002 on the west coast docks with the ILWU.

There are the people doing all the work and creating all the wealth, then there are the heirs and such who feed off their expropriation of the surplus labor time of those doing all the work. The idle class relies on the monopoly that the state provides.

In fact, if you look to history and the creation of the first states in Sumeria thousands of years ago, the raison d'etre of those states were to use violence and propaganda so that an idle class could expropriate surplus labor time from their slaves doing all the work.

Standard Oil came about through mergers. This is the one where antitrust fits -- you break them up, problem solved.

Problem solved if they're actually broken up. Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (Standard Oil of New York) merged in 1999. Chevron (Standard Oil of California) did not merge into this behemoth, it's been busy over the past 20 years sucking in companies like Unocal and Texaco, in addition to the other oil companies it sucked up over the past century.

I see no evidence that the CIA directly gave weapons to Al-Nusra or other Al-Qaeda affiliates. And zero evidence of any direct funding or support of ISIS

You stick a very key word there, directly. In fact the US is who funded and armed Osama bin Laden and his followers jihad against the secular government of Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s - but the CIA did it via the Pakistan ISI. The Maktab al-Khidamat actually had connections to organizations all over the USA.

The US press says Cambodia was taken over in 1975 by communists led by Pol Pot, and in a de facto sense that is somewhat true but in a strict de jure sense it is not. Sihanouk, the Cambodian king who had been ousted by a CIA-backed coup by Lon Nol was who officially ran the government. He was in a political, governmental and military coalition with the communists. The US government and press saw his role as a figurehead and it's not that inaccurate. OK, the Cambodian communists are ousted in the 1979 and suddenly the US is looking to oppose Vietnamese communist influence in Cambodia. So who do they fight to keep the UN seat of? Who does US intelligence fund and arm? The political/military coalition of Sihanouk and the Cambodian communists. Which in the 1970s was called the Khmer Rouge. But suddenly things aren't happening directly, and the fig leaf of Sihanouk and other minor figures and groups becomes much bigger. This was reported in the New York Times at the time, and Nightline went even further, taking a camera crew to Cambodia and showing exactly what was going on - that the US was arming the "Khmer Rouge" rebels whom it had been accusing of genocide a few years earlier.

If a direct link is what is needed then you're not going to find much, as they're not that dumb and incompetent.

Of the four gospels, it is generally said that Mark was written first, and John was written last.

The earliest manuscripts of the gospel of Mark do not mention the resurrection at all.

Later manuscripts have verses tacked on, in what is nowadays called Mark 16. You can read about this online, there is several centuries worth of discussion about it.

instead of relying on twin and adoption studies

Twin and adoption studies have never been reliable. They have ranged from dubious methodology to outright fraud such as in the case of Cyril Burt.

Russia is said to be currently supplying arms to the taliban. Their goal there (to disrupt american efforts) would be the same as in NK.

And of course, the original supplier of arms to the people who formed the Taliban was the United States. The goal for the US was to arm and empower the Islamic extremists who had launched a jihad against the secular Afghan government, and to disrupt Russian efforts to support it.

As it is rarely mentioned in the US media, I'd just note that the US pretty openly interferes in Russian elections, and has been doing so for a long time. It's curious this is virtually never mentioned amidst all the accusations of Russia involving itself in US elections.

There are many tentacles to the US octopus, for starters you can look at an organization created by and funded by the US congress, the soi disant National Endowment for Democracy. They have a conference opening next week containing some of the people the US has been using to interfere in Russian elections ( https://www.ned.org/events/prospects-for-russias-democratic-... ).

I can't think of any country in the western world who has a social welfare system on the same low level as the US - and yet we don't have such a 'decline in social indicators'. Quite the opposite.

But I thought the paper said "That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents."

The US has a welfare state if the banks need a TARP bailout, or if Cheney needs more contracts for Halliburton etc. Not so much for the rest of us. Actually, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage is lower in the US now than it was in the early 1970s.

One difference you have to remember about the US is the history of Africans in the US. There was slavery until 1865, then Jim Crow, then in the 1960s there was segregation, lack of voting rights, restriction on those of African background drinking from certain water fountains, sitting in certain bus seats, using certain bathrooms etc. Peaceful demonstrations against this were greeted by police dogs, fire hoses, batons, as well as extra-judicial Ku Klux Klan murders, bombings etc. Any how, some attempt to remedy this started in 1964 but by the 1978 Bakke ruling there was already enormous pushback. In fact Reagan announced his presidential candidacy in an obscure rural town unknown for anything aside from three people registering black people to vote being killed their by the Klan. As has been in the news, a white supremacist killed someone this year because they wanted a Civil War statue in their town taken down. In short, the US from its beginning to now has expended an enormous amount of energy in subjugating people of African background. Google has very few engineers of African background, but fellow engineers like James Damore are incensed even about that due to what he perceives as his biological superiority. Now he's a hero on HN and much of the US. Polls show the majority of Americans are against towns taking down their civil war statues, and state legislatures are forbidding towns from tearing down statues celebrating a slaveholder uprising against the US government.

The writer mentioned talks about the "the anti-'acting white' rap culture of inner-city blacks". Even putting aside what I mentioned before, the "rap culture" is marketed by and controlled by the big media corporations. The real indigeneous inner-city black culture can more be seen by books written by and for blacks, which you can see in small stores and sidewalk tables, which the white, bourgeois companies don't sell for some reason. Perhaps it's not lucrative enough. In fact blacks have been saying for years that rap culture is bourgie junk corporations try to foist on black youth.

North Korea has been making peace offers for a while, South Korea has been in discussions with them, the US has turned them down without much consideration.

North Korea, China and Russia all think Trump's bellicose attitude towards North Korea has been unhelpful. This test is a quite rational response to the pressures that are being turned up on North Korea.

The current governor of Texas once sued the EPA because the EPA claimed global warming could affect public safety.

Of course, denial that burning carbon fuels can cause climate change including more powerful hurricanes was one of the cornerstones of the president of the USA's campaign. Texas voted for him in a big way.

None of these things stopped the storm from wacking them and Louisiana though. As Richard Feynman once said, nature cannot be fooled.

Trump just announced the feds are sending federal aid and support to Texas. The governor and president are both fighting to expand these disasters, then we the taxpayers have to bail them out.