New Years Eve toast

🥂

Webster’s Dad

👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽

A very Paul Christmas everyone

Happy Christmas John, Happy Christmas Yoko

Stuff I like

I saw most of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Sunset Boulevard.  Now these two are going to haunt me to watch the end like Bell, Book and Candle...I still haven't seen the end of that.  I did watch the end of Lair of the White Worm and I can't wait to watch it again.
I did finish an old Twilight Zone episode..huh, even two actually.  I didn't like the second one as much. It was about a hypochondriac that made a deal with the devil to live for a million years.  He was so fucking stupid.  As soon as he lost his fear of dying he kept trying to kill himself.  What's the point?!  The first one was called Walking Distance and it was about a guy that went back to his hometown and found that he actually went back in time and met himself when he was 11 years old.  I really liked his childhood home, I never considered that style before...you know, if I decide to purchase or build an enormous home..ok, girl dreams.  The guy was supposed to be 36 and he seemed much older, funny how more mature people looked back in the Old World...uh-oh, gotta share it:
this is so me--


Also, I think I really like William Holden as an actor, but there is also something unsavory about him.  Picnic is fantastic.

no comment

Stealing Christmas

of interest

http://www.chechensinsyria.com/?p=25591

https://www.the-parallax.com/2017/12/14/stolen-email-net-neutrality/

Garry Kasparov retweeted these articles.  FCC is the canary in the coalmine.

The Donald on The Cyber:
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/364498-trump-strongly-objects-to-cyber-provision-in-defense-bill

Get the popcorn

So Twitter sources are saying something is up in trumpland, in honor of that I present my favorite thing about Twitter:

 

Articles that interested me today

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/

https://www.salon.com/2014/04/18/the_plot_to_overthrow_fdr_how_the_new_deal_sent_conservatives_into_a_rage_partner/

Was the New Deal the reason for 1950s prosperity?  Why do Republicans loathe social safety nets?

from HyperHistory:
Remedies 
The most famous remedy to overcome such economic paralysis was proposed by the English economist J. M. Keynes. 
Keynes maintained that government must  not be run like a business, because the rational thing for business to do in the midst of an economic downturn is to cut costs, but this is the worst thing to do from the point of view of the national economy as whole as it further reduces spending, resulting in a further spiral into decline. 
Instead Keynes proposed increased government spending for such things as relief payments and public works projects during a depression to get the economy rolling again. After a depression ends and prosperity returns deficit spending should then be reversed. 

The Roosevelt administration acted on this idea in an attempt to lift the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930's. Roosevelt's 'New Deal' introduced certain features which automatically produced government deficits during a depression. The social security system, including unemployment insurance, and the income-tax system both are set up so that government revenues fall off while government expenditures increase as a depression gets under way. These features were called  built-in stabilizers.

Roosevelt began relatively modest deficit spending that arrested the slide of the economy and resulted in some astonishing growth numbers. (Roosevelt's average growth of 5.2 percent during the Great Depression is even higher than Reagan's 3.7 percent growth during his so-called 'Seven Fat Years!') When 1936 saw a phenomenal record of 14 percent growth, Roosevelt rejected Keynes' advice for heavy deficit spending, instead he eased back on the deficit spending, worried about balancing the budget. But this only caused the economy to slip back into a recession in 1938.

( Note: In 1934 Sweden followed a policy of Keynesian deficit spending and became the first nation to recover fully from the Great Depression )

In order to pay for the New Deal programs Roosevelt raised the top tax rate, and to finance the war economy the top tax rate was raised even more. It remained at 88 percent until 1963, by which time the entire war debt was payed down.
At that time the top tax rate could be lowered to 70 percent. During this period, America did experience the greatest economic boom it had ever known until that time. General income for everybody did raise dramatically. (Unlike the boom of the 1980's when middle class income stagnated but top incomes did raise sharply.)

In the 1980's a renewed scepticism of large-scale government intervention led once more to far reaching deregulations. Keynesian concepts got rejected and his warning about runaway money supply got dismissed.

In a repeat of the 1920's the top tax rate was lowered and the slogan became once again : 'Government is dumb, markets are smart'. The stock market saw again a spectacular rise and for a time the less regulated market forces led to considerable economic successes. (example: the hightech bubble in the 1990's). Blinded by success the money supply got even more increased by so-called derivatives - a development which alarmed some economists. But such warnings got curtly dismissed by most experts of the time as old-fashioned Keynesian politics.
(The legendary investor Warren Buffett called derivatives ' financial weapons of mass destruction.')

Towards the crisis of 2008

In contrast to Roosevelt's tax increases during World War II, the Bush administration tried to
' finance' the Iraq war with tax cuts resulting in a trillion dollar debt. Vice-President Cheney declared famously ' that deficits don't matter anymore'  At the same time the middle class income remained stagnant, which meant that people amassed huge credit debts in order to keep up their expected lifestyles - a situation that proved unsustainable in the long run.

The ideological split widens

As the U.S. Senate designed a bill to stimulate the economy it was revealed that most Democrats accept the Keynesian position that stimulus takes place by government spending replacing temporarely the spending that the private sector is not providing. But Republicans dislike Keynesian economics and think of stimulus more as tax cuts. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican leader, says "we know for sure that the big spending programs of the New Deal did not work." What got the U.S. out of the Great Depression, he adds, "was the beginning of World War II."

Conveniently left out is the fact that the biggest stimulus ever was the U.S. government spending for the war economy. It was the war wich finally made the opponents of the New Deal accept large deficit spending - the resulting debt was completely payed down in 1963 on account of higher tax rates. (During this period, America did experience the greatest economic boom it had ever known until the oil shock of 1974)

Wow, this Hyper History author is awesome!

Thank you Alabama

tick tock it's bed bug time

Last Saturday December 9th, I woke up in the wee hours to find that I couldn't bend my pointer finger without pain.  It felt swollen.  My thought were this is what sore joints feel like, I must have arthritis in this finger.  When I got out of bed around 7, my finger wasn't as stiff, but still sore.
A little later when I returned to fix my bed I noticed a big tick on my bedding.  Since it's winter I didn't know if it was dead or even if it really was a tick.  I smashed it to see if it would die.  After staining my bedding with a blood spot I realized that it was an somewhat engorged tick.  I took the rest of it and flushed it down the commode.
Soon after I noticed that there was a splinter or something in my finger.  So that made me feel better that I didn't have sudden onset arthritis, but it did make me wonder how I got the splinter in the middle of the night.  After I got the splinter out, it occurred to me that it might of been the tick that caused my finger to have pain and that the "splinter" was really part of the tick.  I got out what I could see asap.  No rashes yet and I'm not sure I got the whatever it was completely out of my finger because there is a little pain.
Ticks in December....ugh.  I looked up the tick and I think it was a deer tick too....man..

Update..it was a bed bug...we found the problem and removed it and haven't had any bugs since.

I kept saving the bugs in glass jars and putting them outside on the back porch.  They were like the world's worst pets...pest.  In all but one jar I remembered to put either alcohol or diatometous earth.  The bugs in the treated jar died.  The one jar that wasn't, bug multiplied.  I threw the other jars away, but kept the live bugs...I didn't know what to do with them.  I was afraid to open the jar in case one got out, but I didn't want to toss it in case the jar broke and wreaked havoc wherever it ended up.  I had a ticking time bomb.  I ended up throwing it in the trash after many weeks of unnecessary worry and strife. What a wonderful day that was.  I can't believe we got rid of them.  If you see a tick in your house in the winter it is not a tick.

What's goin' on?

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait says Mueller’s investigation is in "mortal danger." E.J. Dionne Jr. of the Washington Post says the campaign to fire Mueller is pushing us "closer to the precipice" of lawlessness. 
-from this article

Make sure you know your protest spot if Mueller is fired.  If he's fired before 2pm the protest is at 5pm; if he's fired after 2pm we meet the next day at noon.  High noon.
I can't believe I have to tell my husband that we have to do this if Mueller is fired.  I can't believe I have to take my kids to protest against the dictatorship of Donald Trump.  But here it is.  So be it.  The fight continues.

Why did NPR call the MBS power grab in Saudi Arabia an economic restructuring?  Why don't they ever say that this purge started right after Jared Kushner took an unannounced trip and stayed up late with MBS?  Jared's idea for peace in the Middle East?  Why do NPR hosts nervously laugh about the terrible Trump things?  I say it all the time now, but they want normal so bad.  You know what?  It's okay to be outraged.

What are Cuties?  Depending on the season they are either Clementine mandarins or Murcott mandarins.  Clementine are a hybrid between a mandarin and sweet orange.  Murcott are the same, also called a tangor which is also called a temple orange.  A tangerine is a closely related or probable type of mandarin.

Happy holidays! pic.twitter.com/EX890qJRAD

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) December 11, 2017

SSS-Cool Time: Earth Tidbits/Seasonality

Season variations are a response to changes in the sun's altitude or the angle between the horizon and the sun.

Seasonality also means changing daylength or duration of exposure.

Season in concert:

Earth's revolution in orbit around the sun; its daily rotation on its tilted axis; the unchanging orientation of its axis, and its sphericity...and the sun, always the sun.

Merry Hexmas

Bell, Book and Candle is a Christmas movie!

Do they get back together?  I don't know!  I didn't get to finish the movie.  It's hard these days, but eventually I do see the end.

Tra-la-la-la-dee-da! 

Personal reflection

I just realized what my job for the earth is...propagating dandelions and milkweeds one blow at a time.  I've even propagated two humans to take over for me when I am gone.  You're welcome.

Friday feeling

We are going to need love plus one more than ever.  December, here we go. https://www.justice.gov/file/1015026/download