Potholer54 - The cause of Australia’s bushfires – what the SCIENCE says

This video by Peter Hadfield is really good because it's latest and so it's very up to date. He really hammers the deniers in this one.

Arson? Lack of hazard reduction? Nothing new? This video looks at what fire chiefs and scientists say is the REAL cause of the 2019-2020 fires in Australia, in response to amateur theories proposed by media commentators and bloggers.

KV vs Tony Heller - Climate Change Debate - Twitter Part 1

I had a debate with Tony Heller today on twitter. He didn't debate with me for long, although his followers did - all afternoon!


I will write a more detailed report about it one day because I think I did manage to exposed their conspiracy theory for what it is.

Tony Heller Tweet

With record cold in Alaska, rain in Australia, and normal sea ice extent,, where will the climate clown show move next? 

My tweet

Alaska needs several -40°F to -60°F outbreaks to have a normal winter — not one outbreak every few years

The Washington Post

Alaska to plummet to minus-50 degrees but is still a ‘near lock’ to see its warmest year on record

Tony Heller

Alaska is having one of their coldest years on record. 

My Tweet

That just a 10-day weather forecast! 

Bat Soup

No wonder they all want to leave and come here...

Coronavirus outbreak could be linked to bat soup sold at Wuhan market https://t.co/MMSQcY2Amo

— The Sun (@TheSun) January 23, 2020

What is hydropower and can it be the renewable energy source that replaces fossil fuels?

This video does sound like promotion for hydropower, but I have no problem with that. It says that we only have about 30 years of fossil fuel left, so why waste it by burning it when we need it for fertilisers, plastics, and chemicals?

The billionaires who run the fossil fuels companies are wealthy beyond belief, and the oil was never going to be wasted, because we would have just made it last longer, so oil was always going to be a good source of income for them.

Bank governor credits Liberal stimulus with stronger economy

This rather messes up neoclassical and Conservative economic theories.

OTTAWA -- Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz is crediting the Liberal government's Canada Child Benefit program with the country's strengthening economy, calling it "highly stimulative."

The federal government introduced the amended formula for providing money to parents of children under 18 years old as its first order of business in 2015. It wasn't promoted as a stimulus measure, but as part of a package to help middle-class families.

CTV News

Bank governor credits Liberal stimulus with stronger economy

Andrew Austin - How I See The US After Living In Sweden For 6 Years

Andrew Austin takes a non-partisan look at Sweden and much prefers it to the US. The pace of life is slower in Sweden with much lower stress levels. In the US everyone is rushing about all the time, he says.

In Sweden he says how people love to sit in coffea bars and socialise, but in America he would be drinking his coffea while driving to work.

As Andrew Austin is non-partisan so he then says what he likes about America, and he adds how great it would be if the Amazon model was applied to everything, including healthcare. But that means more stress and that people wouldn't have earn enough money to drive the economy. I think he's just trying his best to be balanced here, because he much prefers the Swedish model.

Adam Schiff Is a Dangerous Warmonger, BY LIZA FEATHERSTONE

Adam Schiff, the liberal hero of impeachment, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the military-industrial complex and a fervent exponent of permanent war.

I can't think is anything more disturbing than war. To think that some people want wars so they can sit back and make a lots of money out of it is horrendous. What could be more evil? 

Guess what these companies want? War with Ukraine. Why wouldn’t they? Last October, the United States approved a $39 million sale of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, a joint contract between Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The previous year, Ukraine bought $37 million worth of missiles from the same two companies. As a missile-maker, Zacks Equity Research has noted, Northrop Grumman also benefits richly from conflict in Ukraine, as missiles are heavily used in cross-border wars.

Jacobin


Adam Schiff Is a Dangerous Warmonger, BY LIZA FEATHERSTONE

Links — 24 Jan 2020

Asia Times (Historical and geopolitical backgrounder)
Why the New Silk Roads are a ‘threat’ to US bloc

Pepe Escobar

Kazakhstan (Think it's nowhere? Think again. Dimash is here to tell you it ain't so — and to prove it.)

Center for Citizen Initiatives (Background on Putin)
Shake-up in the Kremlin? Putin Selects a New Leader?

Sharon Tennison

Counterpunch (Historical backgrounder)
The Long History of Elite Rule: What Will It Take To End It?
Chuck Churchill

Counterpunch (Chapin as social critic)
Charlie Chaplin and Truly Modern Times

Daniel Warner

Counterpunch (more about the transition away from neoliberal globalization)
A Modest Proposal for Socialist Revolution

Chris Wright

Craig Murray Blog
The Troubling Decline of International Law
Craig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee

Irrussianality
Striking back
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Mint Press News (Lula rats out Obama and HRC)
Former Brazilian President Lula da Silva: Obama, Hillary Ordered Me Not to Negotiate with Iran

Alan Macleod

Mint Press News (Duh.)

Houthis Anticipate US Assassination Attempts, Warn US Troops Will Be Targeted in Retaliation
Ahmed Abdulkareem

Mint Press News
Enormous Crowds at Iraq’s Million Man March Tell America to Leave for Good

Alan Macleod

Moon of Alabama
Associated Press Sees "Hundreds" Where Pictures Show Millions

Venezuelanalysis.com 

The New Society Will Emerge in the Commune: A Conversation with Angel Prado
Cira Pascual Marquina

RT (Trump said "headaches.")
34 US troops suffered brain injury in Iran’s revenge strike for Soleimani’s killing – Pentagon

SouthFront
Declassified CIA Documents Describe Kiev Regime’s Hero Stepan Bandera as “Hitler’s Spy” and Nazi

Sputnik International
Former US Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Dunford Joins Board of Lockheed Martin

Sputnik International
Iran's Fars New Agency Says Its Website Blocked Due to Recent US Sanctions Against Country

Sputnik International
Trump Administration Steps Up Efforts to Topple Venezuela's Maduro - Senior Diplomat

Productivity, Labor Complexity, and Wage Determination Procedures — Peter Cooper

This post concerns an implication of Marx’s treatment of productivity and labor complexity for the appropriateness of alternative processes of wage determination. For simplicity, it is assumed that all activity is productive in Marx’s sense (that is, productive of surplus value) and that conditions are competitive in the Marxian (and classical) sense that investment is free to flow in and out of sectors in search of the highest return. Introducing unproductive labor, including a substantial role for public sector and not-for-profit activity, and non-competitive elements would considerably complicate the analysis. The point of the exercise is to consider the incentive effects of alternative wage-determination procedures, from the perspective of Marx’s theory. It is suggested that Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor implies that centralized wage determination, more than alternative wage-setting approaches, will be conducive to productivity growth....

heteconomist
Productivity, Labor Complexity, and Wage Determination Procedures
Peter Cooper

Tulsi Gabbard speaks out on $50M lawsuit against Hillary Clinton

It's shocking to hear Hillary's conspiracy theories, invented to knock the rivals out of the race.

Pat Buchanan - Hillary Puts Bernie Into Her Basket of Deplorables

I thought this was interesting. Pat Buchanan shows no fondness for Bernie, and neither does he defend him against Hillary's ludicrous claims that he is a sexist. In this way, it's quite a neutral report.

It sounds to me as if Hilary is playing the feminist card to garnish womens votes. I don't know that for certain, but I don't recognise Hillary's depiction of him. Politics is a dirty business.

From her own words, Clinton regards Sanders as a nasty man running a misogynistic campaign and a political phony whose achievements are nonexistent and who lacks the temperament to be president.

Unz Review 

Pat Buchanan - Hillary Puts Bernie Into Her Basket of Deplorables

Body Language: Putin & Assad In Damascus, Trump Joke

This person studies body language and has made an interesting video about Putin and Assad. She seems to like both of them, even though you're not supposed to say that in the West.

Fed Repo down $43B last week

Where are all the Fed repo doomsday d-bags reporting this policy change????  Where???

Repo down $43B from $229B last week to $186B this week.

TGA up $31B  to $411B.

Thus total Reserve Assets at the Depositories DOWN $64B from $1,673 to $1,609 in last week.

KV Tweet - Are climate change deniers like flat earthers?

I'm still arguing with the climate change deniers on twitter, but cut one head off and two come back. They are mad, and no matter what science you show them, they say it's a conspiracy. What's disturbing is that some people on the left seem to be deniers now, and even Richard Werner is liking denial tweets.

The Off-Guardian takes this position too, like many others I follow. They may accept global warming, but believe the 'Alarmists' are exaggerating climate change, so that the bankers can get governments to raise taxes, so they can make a lot on money.

I came across the site, What's Up With That, a denier site, and found the Off-Guardian and many others I follow were following it. These lefties believe that the corporations control the world and our media, which is mostly true in my opinion, but these lefties can't help but see conspiracies in everything. What's ironic, is that they follow What's Up With That which is funded by the Koch Brothers, via the Heritage Foundation. These so called lefties are being hoodwinked by the corporations and the powerful elite that they say they oppose.

They all hate Greta Thunberg, and call this little girl despicable names. The Denier industry saw a huge threat from Greta, and so set out in full gear to discredit her.

When I bring up NASA, the deniers shout, 'fake news - goverment agency!'. When I show them science articles, they shout, 'MSM!'. When I show them the scientific reports of the research, they shout, 'the climatologists lie!'. And so it goes on.

KV Tweet

1) Are climate change deniers like flat earthers?

Members of the Flat Earth Society claim to believe the Earth is flat. Walking around on the planet's surface, it looks and feels flat, so they deem all evidence to the contrary, such as satellite photos of Earth as a sphere, to..

2).. be fabrications of a "round Earth conspiracy" orchestrated by NASA and other government agencies, such as satellite photos of Earth as a sphere, to be fabrications of a "roundconspiracy" orchestrated by NASA and other government agencies.

Are Flat Earthers being serious?

Harry Dunn: Anne Sacoolas extradition request rejected by US

The US has turned down an extradition request for one of its citizens who was charged with causing the death of teenage motorcyclist Harry Dunn.

Mr Dunn, 19, died after a crash in Northamptonshire in August which led to the suspect, Anne Sacoolas, leaving for the US under diplomatic immunity.

The Home Office had launched extradition proceedings on charges of causing the death by dangerous driving.

A spokeswoman said the decision by the US "appears to be a denial of justice".

Washington, however, said granting the request would "render the invocation of diplomatic immunity a practical nullity".

The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo turned down the extradition request in an email to the UK Government on Thursday evening, family spokesman Radd Seiger said.

The BBC - Harry Dunn: Anne Sacoolas extradition request rejected by US

Bernie Sanders tweet - Joe Rogan

“I think I'll probably vote for Bernie... He’s been insanely consistent his entire life. He’s basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from.” -Joe Rogan

Links — 23 Jan 2020

Anti-Empire
Putin Has Deprived the Children of the Elite of Their Political Future
Marko Marjanović

Anti-Empire

EU Declines to Recommend Members Ban Huawei’s 5G as Sought by US

Bloomberg

Elijah J. Magnier
Iran is ready to attack again: Will the US forces withdraw from Iraq?

Indian Punchline
US plotting return of ‘strongman’ in Iraq

M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service

Fast Company

Doomsday Clock scientists are so freaked out, they adjusted the countdown to seconds rather than minutes

Arianne Cohen

Fort Russ News (I have been saying for some time that Poklonskaya is a woman to watch. Star material. So is Gritter. The 21st century is going to be the woman's century.)

Is WWIII coming? It’s already on — Poklonskaya

Fort Russ News
MAJOR: Russia at Least 5-10 Years Ahead, Deploying Hypersonic-Detecting Radars in Arctic Before US Even Acquired Hypersonic Missiles

Drago Bosnic

SouthFront (Who has the most to gain, and lose, in assassinations and targeted killings? Dangerous game for the Empire to be playing when it's Americans who are exposed around the world. This is a time-honored what of driving back empires.)
United States Officially Threatens To Assassinate New Leader Of Iranian Quds Force

Sputnik International (ROFLMAO. Conventional economics has as run up inequality to obscene levels and threatens the planet with climate destruction by ignoring negative externality. The result is lack of true price in markets that vitiates economic calculation. Good work, guys, and, yes, you are just about all guys. Clueless or compromised?)
'Is She the Chief Economist?': Mnuchin Tells Greta Thunberg to Go Study Economics in College

Mnuchin says US must cut spending and reduce the deficit: Recipe for guaranteed recession.

Mnuchin says the U.S. government must cut spending and reduce the deficit. This will absolutely guarantee a recession.

It's amazing that these views still prevail. Complete and total ignorance.

Finally!

somebody said it!

Treasury Sec. Mnuchin says climate activist Greta Thunberg is in no position to give economic advice until she’s gone to college and come out with an economics degree. https://t.co/gfJmRHQjvt

— ABC News (@ABC) January 23, 2020

Links — 22 Jan 2020

FAIR (The Nazis were especially great that this.)
Netflix, Iran and the Documentary as Geopolitical Weapon

Brian Meir

Commentary (The soft coup against POTUS by the intel services)

The FBI STory

Eli Lake

The Nation (The oligarch's oligarch)
Mikhail Khodorkovsky: the Man, the Myth, the Movie

Lucy Komisar

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
The Empire’s War On Oppositional Journalism Continues To Escalate
Caitlin Johnstone

Elijah J. Magnier
Immediate US withdrawal due to its violation of the agreement and Iraq sovereignty

Fort Russ News
IRAQI PARLIAMENT: US Forces Given a Year to Leave Iraq

Drago Bosnic

Intel Today
The Douma Conspiracy — France Role in Rigging the OPCW Report

Irrussianality
And now for the details
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Mint Press News
World’s Super Rich Meet in Davos to Discuss the Climate Change Problem they Created

Brazil’s Right-Wing Gov’t Charges Journalist Glenn Greenwald with Cybercrimes
Alan Macleod

Progressive Pulse (It may be in the maths, but the cause is in the system design and policy.)
Wealth always trickles up – it’s all in the maths
Peter May

The Grayzone
OPCW investigator testifies at UN that no chemical attack took place in Douma, Syria
Ben Norton

The Unz Review
No Radical Changes In Russian Cabinet

Anatoly Karlin

The Vineyard of the Saker
The new Russian government: a much needed evolution but not a revolution
The Saker

Zero Hedge
IRGC Commander & "Soleimani Ally" Shot Dead By Masked Assassins On Motorcycle
Tyler Durden

Zero Hedge
Trump Says Middle-Class Tax Cut To Be Announced Within Three Months

Tyler Durden

Slate
Donald Trump Says He’s Willing to “Look” at Entitlements “Toward The End of This Year”

Jordan Weissmann

Emmanuel Saez — Saying Inequality Has Not Increased in the US “the Equivalent of Being a Climate Change Denier”

In an interview with ProMarket ahead of his upcoming Stigler Center visit this week, UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez discussed the impact of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, the disproportionate political power of the super-rich, and whether he agrees with Bernie Sanders that billionaires shouldn’t exist....

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Emmanuel Saez: Saying Inequality Has Not Increased in the US “the Equivalent of Being a Climate Change Denier”

Asher Schechter interviews Emmanuel Saez

Political Economy? — Peter Radford

One of the dominant themes of the last century was this general assumption that human activities can be studied through an ever increasingly rational lens. That may be, but economists then went too far: they projected rationality into the subject of study. Instead of using the tools of reason to tease out regularities of interest, they made the subject matter itself entirely rational. So the regularities they thought they saw were simply echoes, or mirrors, of their own thought processes. People in markets suddenly became economists, which made studying them more easy. The entire enterprise became a massive “if only” exercise. If only people behaved like economists it would so much easier for economists to study them! So that’s what happened. Entire Nobel winning careers were built around what was nothing more than a gigantic bout of self-absorption.

No wonder the discipline rapidly became so sterile.

And irrelevant.

Now, however, there are feint signs of hope....

Inequality is a policy variable that depends on how much rent the elite are permitted to extract. Growing inequality suggests elite capture of the government.

The Radford Free Press
Political Economy?
Peter Radford

Randy Wray — STATEMENT: House Budget Committee, “Reexamining the economic costs of debt”, Nov 20, 2019

This blog is based on the testimony I provided to the US House of Representatives. My written statement will be published in the Congressional Record (a version is also at the Levy Economics Institute: http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/statement-of-senior-scholar-l-randall-wray-to-the-house-budget-committee. The full statement was co-authored with Yeva Nersisyan.I will argue that the Federal Government’s deficit and debt are not so scary as we are led to believe.Neither the deficit nor the debt ratio is on an unsustainable path. In some sense, chronic deficits and a rising debt ratio are normal.They are not due to out of control spending—now or in the future. They serve a useful public purpose. In any case they are largely outside the control of Congress....

New Economic Perspectives
STATEMENT: House Budget Committee, “Reexamining the economic costs of debt”, Nov 20, 2019

L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, Bard College

Job Guarantee as a Policy Variable — Brian Romanchuk

The Job Guarantee is the most natural implementation of the concept of having the central government act as a price setter. By making an open bid for labour at a fixed price, an effective minimum wage is created in the economy, and it will eliminate almost all involuntary unemployment. This discussion will not cover the tricky question of implementation details, but will instead discuss how this fits in with the Monetary Monopoly model....

Bond Economics
Job Guarantee as a Policy Variable
Brian Romanchuk

Bill Mitchell — Tax the rich to counter carbon emissions not to get their money

Tax the rich! That has become a misguided progressive Left mantra. The intention is to maintain public services including health, education and income support which are core issues for progressives. But then the neoliberal indoctrination that has infested this group intervenes. They seem to think the government needs the money of those with lots of it before it can provide essential and progressive public services and fight the climate emergency. They support political parties that set as their primary macroeconomic target the achievement of a bigger fiscal surplus than the conservatives at a time when there are more than 13.5 per cent of available and willing labour resources not working (either unemployed or underemployed) and households are carrying record levels of (unsustainable) debt. And these parties keep losing elections – it is a global phenomena, most recently observed in Britain. One of the reasons we need to tax the rich is to deal with their (grossly) disproportionate impact on carbon emissions. That is one of many reasons. But you should never include among those reasons a need by government for their cash in order to facilitate spending. Any progressive who articulates that argument is just reiterating neoliberal frames....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Tax the rich to counter carbon emissions not to get their money
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

BREAKING: Tulsi Gabbard SUES Hillary Clinton For $50 Million!

Kim Dotcom Tweet - I support SenSanders for President

I always thought Kim Dotcom would be more on the libertarian right, but he recently tweeted about climate change and his followers went nuts as most were deniers. Now with this tweet the same is happening, and there isn't many liberals tweeting.

Kim Dotcom is a very wealthy IT serial entrepreneur who is into cryptocurrency, and so it seems a lot of his followers also thought he a was on the right.

Kim Dotcom tweet.

I support @SenSanders for President. No more warmongers and deep state. End mass surveillance. Protect free speech. Free Julian Assange. End corporate corruption in US politics. Change greed for compassion. Being a capitalist doesn’t mean you can’t be socially fair. #Bernie2020

Modern Monetary Theory: meet the economists fighting the economy

Morning Star editor Ben Chacko speaks to BILL MITCHELL about the new hypothesis disproving the core assumptions of neoliberalism

A good interview of Bill Mitchell.

In his 1980s book on walking Britain’s coast The Kingdom by the Sea, Paul Theroux notes the Thatcher government’s determination to close branch railway lines because they aren’t profitable — before observing “though neither are motorways.”

The fact that you pay for things because they are useful, rather than profitable, is the whole rationale for public services from the fire brigade to the police force, but disappears as soon as services are marketised — hence the government’s drive to remove guards from trains despite the social benefits of ensuring disabled access to transport or protecting those travelling alone from harassment or assault.

The Morning Star

Modern Monetary Theory: meet the economists fighting the economy

Kim Dotcom retweet - Joe Rogan says he's voting for Bernie

This surprised me as I thought both Joe Rogan and Kim Dotcom tended towards libertarianisn.

Lee Jones - How Will the Tories Rule? Understanding Boris Johnson's Political Project

A non-partisan look at Johnson’s Tory Party and what Labour needs to do to win again. According to Lee Jones, Johnson’s party has shifted slightly to the left and has become more liberal, but it will still fail to tackle the problem of the financial sector in the UK.

Far from being “far right” or Thatcherite, Johnson’s new project is “Red Tory”, projecting a communitarian ethos and proposing far greater state intervention in the economy. This post-neoliberal conservatism is a significant departure, but it is plagued by internal contradictions.

The Full Brexit 

Lee Jones - How Will the Tories Rule? Understanding Boris Johnson's Political Project