Garrison Keillor: When a red state gets the blues

The Republic of Texas believes in self-reliance and is suspicious of Washington sticking its big nose in your business. "Government is not the answer. You are not doing anyone a favor by creating dependency, destroying individual responsibility." So said Sen. Ted Cruz, though not last week. Sunday on Fox News, Gov. Greg Abbott said Texas would need upward of $150 billion in federal aid for damages inflicted by Harvey. The stories out of Houston have all been about neighborliness and helping hands and people donating to relief funds, but you don't raise $150 billion by holding bake sales. This is almost as much as the annual budget of the U.S. Army. I'm just saying.

Garrison Keillor. (Pioneer Press: Jean Pieri)

I'm all in favor of pouring money into Texas but I am a bleeding-heart liberal who favors single-payer health care. How is being struck by a hurricane so different from being hit by cancer? I'm only asking.

Houstonians chose to settle on a swampy flood plain barely 50 feet above sea level. The risks of doing so are fairly clear. If you chose to live in a tree and the branch your hammock was attached to fell down, you wouldn't ask for a government subsidy to hang your hammock in a different tree.
Ronald Reagan said that government isn't the answer, it is the problem, and conservatives have found that line very resonant over the years. In Sen. Cruz's run for president last year, he called for abolition of the IRS. He did not mention this last week. It would be hard to raise an extra $150 billion without the progressive income tax unless you could persuade Mexico to foot the bill.

Similarly, if a desert state such as Arizona expects the feds to solve its water shortage, as Sen. Jeff Flake suggested recently, by guaranteeing Arizona first dibs on Lake Mead, this strikes me as a departure from conservative principles. Lake Mead, and Boulder Dam which created it, were not built by Lake Mead, Inc., but by the federal government. The residents of Phoenix decided freely to settle in an arid valley and they have used federal water supplies to keep their lawns green. Why should we Minnesotans, who chose to live near water, subsidize golf courses on the desert? You like sunshine? Fine. Take responsibility for your decision and work out a deal with Perrier to keep yourselves hydrated.

Arizona is populated by folks who dread winter and hate having to shovel snow. In Minnesota, we recognize that snow is a form of water and it's snow melt that replenishes the aquifers. So we make a rational decision to live here. A warm dry winter is a sort of disaster for us but we don't apply to Washington for hankies. If we made a decision to live underwater on a coral reef off Hawaii, we wouldn't expect the feds to provide us with Aqua-Lungs. If we chose to fly to the moon and play among the stars and spend spring on Jupiter and Mars and we got lost out there, we wouldn't expect NASA to come rescue us. Get my drift here?

I was brought up by fundamentalists who believed it was dead wrong to get tangled up in politics. They never voted. Our preachers had no time for that. They knew that we were pilgrims and wayfarers in this world, and we shouldn't expect favors from the powerful. We were redeemed by unfathomable grace and preserved by God's mercy and our citizenship was in heaven. We looked to the Lord to supply our needs.

This has changed and godly Republicans now believe in the power of the government to change the world in their favor, of the Department of Education to channel public money freely to religious schools, of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and prohibit Joshua from marrying Jehoshaphat.

Conservatives blanch at spending additional billions to subsidize health care for the needy, but a truckload of cash for Texas? No problem. It makes me think that we Minnesotans should get a few billion in federal aid for recovery from the upcoming winter. It is going to be cold. This will cause damage to homes. Drive-in movie theaters and golf courses and marinas will suffer loss of revenue. We must salt the highways to prevent accidents and the salt corrodes our cars. And then there is the mental anguish.

If Minnesota gets billions of dollars for winter recovery, then I am going to seriously consider becoming a conservative. As a philosophy of governing, conservatism is rather sketchy, but if it helps Minnesota, I am all in favor. I have my principles but I can be bought, same as the rest of you.

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Robert Shiller wrote the book on bubbles. He says “the best example right now is bitcoin.”

Yale economics professor Robert Shiller won the Nobel prize for his work on bubbles. He wrote a seminal book on speculative manias, Irrational Exuberance, a deep analysis of the dramas over the centuries when otherwise sane people drove prices for tulips, stocks, and houses to inexplicable heights.

Shiller developed some of the tools that are considered vital for taking a sober look at markets. He helped create indexes for measuring real estate prices and his stock market valuation indicator, the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio, or CAPE ratio, is seen as one of the best forecasting models for stock returns.

As Shiller sees it, "big things happen if someone invents the right story and promulgates it." Quartz spoke with him about some of the frothiest assets today, from bitcoin to tech stocks. The conversation was edited and condensed for clarity.

Quartz: What are the best examples now of irrational exuberance or speculative bubbles?
Shiller: The best example right now is bitcoin. And I think that has to do with the motivating quality of the bitcoin story. And I've seen it in my students at Yale. You start talking about bitcoin and they're excited! And I think, what's so exciting? You have to think like humanities people. What is this bitcoin story?

It starts with Satoshi Nakamoto—remember him? The mysterious figure who may or may not be real. He's never been found. That has a nice mystery quality to it. And then he has this clever idea about encryption and blockchain and public ledgers, and somehow the idea is so powerful that governments can't even stop it. You can't regulate this. It kind of fits in with the angst of this time in history.
If you look at the third edition of Irrational Exuberance, I'm arguing that there's a fundamental deep angst of our digitization and computers, that people wonder what their place is in this new world. What's it going to be like in 10, 20, or 30 years, and will I have a job? Will I have anything?
Somehow bitcoin fits into that and it gives a sense of empowerment: I understand what's happening! I can speculate and I can be rich from understanding this! That kind of is a solution to the fundamental angst.

So I'm trying to deconstruct the bitcoin story. Big things happen if someone invents the right story and promulgates it.

So is bitcoin a bubble, or the biggest bubble?
I don't know how to quantify that. But I have a sense that something is exciting to you. Another thing that is exciting to people now is Donald J. Trump. You may have heard of this guy.
It's just amazing how he dominates and I think he has a genius at recognizing stories and listening to his audience and understanding what drives them.
He too is related to this fundamental angst that we have about where are we in this digitized society—international and digitized. And it's that angst that he spoke to, and he presented a story that involves you, the voter, as a success in this new world, and that's why the Trump story was so popular.
There really are idea epidemics.

Something you've written about is the role of media in speculative bubbles. In the past, you didn't seem convinced that the internet has boosted the media's ability to do that. Has that changed?
The big thing that happened wasn't the internet. It was the printing press, Gutenberg in the 1400s. It didn't really get going until the 1600s. It was then that we started seeing bubbles.
The problem with things going viral is that there has to be some transmission that's adequate to the job. You can still go viral without newspapers, but it's harder. There were celebrities and international stars, like Homer, who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. He did that by traveling from town and town and reciting his books. And it worked! He's still going, long after he died.
Things have always gone viral, it's the nature of civilization, but it got stronger with the printing press, much stronger. And then around the 1600s they invented the idea of weekly newspapers that told you what happened this week. And that really went like wildfire. People loved newspapers.
The internet takes it to another dimension. But I have a sense it's not as important as the printing press.

Hasn't the internet democratized information? Someone can promote their views widely without getting buy-in from editors or other gatekeepers? That's what Trump has done with Twitter.
One really important thing that's happened is that reputations don't seem to matter as much at this point in history. Maybe it will come back. You have news media that have developed their reputation for honesty and integrity. And something that's gone viral is a conspiracy theory that the news media, the mainstream media, are in a conspiracy, and it's embellished in crazy ways like the Rothschilds or George Soros, or somebody, are in a conspiracy to destroy America and have bought the media and are controlling them. Those are the extreme, crazy forms of the narrative.
But there's also a more general narrative that liberals are somehow soft and can't handle reality. This is another narrative.

You're asking about bubbles. These are the stories that drive the bubble. Trump speaks to these things, and he seems to be saying things that nobody else will say but maybe you're thinking.
He also legitimizes wealth. It wasn't that long ago that we held rich people in contempt. We have a billionaire president, and he's kind of welcoming: You can be rich, too. The Trump story helps inflate all kinds of bubbles, not just bitcoin. I think there are aspects of a housing bubble, and a stock market bubble right now.

Are your feelings on the stock market based on the CAPE ratio?
The CAPE ratio is just one indicator I'm particularly known for. I have another indicator you can find on my website that not many people pay attention to. Since 1989 I've been doing questionnaire surveys of both individual and institutional investors. I've been doing this a long time without getting much notice for it. But I believe in it, somewhat, though I don't think it answers everything.
I have something I call a valuation confidence index. I don't have it really up to date because it's only a six-month moving average based on small surveys. Maybe I should expand my size.
But valuation confidence is at the lowest it's been since around 2000. In other words, people think the market is highly valued. They don't have to look at CAPE. People think it. I know that. Both individual and institutional investors. We are in a time of mistrust of the market.

The only time mistrust of the market was lower since 1989 was in 2000. So around 2000, the peak of the dot-com bubble. It seems like the mindset is somewhat similar to the dot-com mindset. And that brings us to the FANGs [Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google], as well. High-tech companies are probably more exciting, as they were in 2000.
The year 2000 was kind of like 1849. That was the gold rush. It really created a viral explosion of men going out west in 1849 looking for gold. Now is the time, you can't wait until 1850! You have to do it now! It was the same thing in 1999 or thereabouts, when stories of some internet companies were coming out and people said, you know, this is the future, these guys are going to take over.
Usually these stories have an element of truth to them, but the question is how fast is it going to happen, and what's a realistic view for investors. And they got ahead of themselves with the dot-com bubble.
We're maybe doing that again with the FANGs.

Is low volatility a bubble, of sorts?
Well volatility is very low, both actual and projected in the VIX. So, why is that?
Some people say it's because of central bank accommodation.
I tend to think of it as something that reflects the quality of the narrative, which is not encouraging a lot of trading activity now. I'm guessing—I can't tell you why it's low.
One thing I emphasized in my book Irrational Exuberance is attention is capricious. There's a social basis for attention. We all focus our attention in the same way. Like we're all watching Donald J. Trump. When Houston floods, well that's got our attention. But part of the story has to be what Donald J. Trump said about it.
Somehow the attention is elsewhere than day-to-day motions of the stock market. It could suddenly change.

I remember in October 1987. That was the biggest one-day stock market drop ever. How did I hear about it? I was teaching my lecture in the morning. I noticed that one or two students were listening to transistor radios. Finally one of them raised his hand and said, "Do you know what's going on? There's a historic stock market crash." That's how you hear about it. It suddenly grabs people's attention. And it's just not there right now.
Monetary policy has entered a new regime. The only historical precedent for when interest rates were low for anything like this long was in the 1930s, the Great Depression, and how did that end? It ended with World War II.

It doesn't tell you what's going to happen now. Why are long-term interest rates so low? It's a big thing. It's been trending down since 1982. There's been a downtrend around the world in long-term real interest rates.

And it's nothing particularly to do with the financial crisis. News media like to tie things in with already popular narratives. The natural instinct of a newspaper reporter is to tie it back to that, but it's been going on longer than that.
I don't have any unique insight into why interest rates have gone down. But I know they're vulnerable to changing narratives.

Have you by any chance looked at initial coin offerings?
No, what is an initial coin offering?

It's like using a crypto token, not bitcoin itself but the blockchain architecture, and issuing these virtual encrypted tokens almost like shares, even though they say they're not shares.
How is it different from bitcoin?

It's somewhat like crowdfunding. Say you've started a bar, and you want to fund it by issuing these tokens. A token is worth one beer, but your bar will only ever serve a set number of beers. If people think it will be a really hot bar, the value of the tokens trades for up to $100 or $200. People are raising hundreds of millions of dollars this way, with pretty thin business plans.
Yeah, that's a classic bubble. I'll have to read about that. There are a lot of cryptocurrencies but they don't have as good a story as bitcoin. Maybe there's a new narrative. Maybe this is a more viral story.
You're making me think about writing something about this. You have my thinking going.

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Those 3% of scientific papers that deny climate change? A review found them all flawed

Amazing such doubt exists...whether or not climate change is caused by humankind, having an understanding of the mechanics since High School, climate change is and has been occurring and not too great of an understanding of science isn't needed to make one aware of how it happens and how humankind at the very least has aggravated it into the catastrophe we have now...if you don't get it then you didn't take science or never understand it

Hard to deny. (Reuters/Stringer)

It's often said that of all the published scientific research on climate change, 97% of the papers conclude that global warming is real, problematic for the planet, and has been exacerbated by human activity.

But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics have suggested that the authors of studies indicating that climate change is not real, not harmful, or not man-made are bravely standing up for the truth, like maverick thinkers of the past. (Galileo is often invoked, though his fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions—it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.)

Not so, according to a review published in the journal of Theoretical and Applied Climatology. The researchers tried to replicate the results of those 3% of papers—a common way to test scientific studies—and found biased, faulty results

Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, worked with a team of researchers to look at the 38 papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last decade that denied anthropogenic global warming.
"Every single one of those analyses had an error—in their assumptions, methodology, or analysis—that, when corrected, brought their results into line with the scientific consensus," Hayhoe wrote in a Facebook post.

One of Hayhoe's co-authors, Rasmus Benestad, an atmospheric scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, built the program using the computer language R—which conveniently works on all computer platforms—to replicate each of the papers' results and to try to understand how they reached their conclusions. Benestad's program found that none of the papers had results that were replicable, at least not with generally accepted science.

Broadly, there were three main errors in the papers denying climate change. Many had cherry-picked the results that conveniently supported their conclusion, while ignoring other context or records. Then there were some that applied inappropriate "curve-fitting"—in which they would step farther and farther away from data until the points matched the curve of their choosing.

And of course, sometimes the papers just ignored physics altogether. "In many cases, shortcomings are due to insufficient model evaluation, leading to results that are not universally valid but rather are an artifact of a particular experimental setup," the authors write.

Those who assert that these papers are correct while the other 97% are wrong are holding up science where the researchers had already decided what results they sought, the authors of the review say. Good science is objective—it doesn't care what anyone wants the answers to be.

The review serves as an answer to the charge that the minority view on climate change has been consistently suppressed, wrote Hayhoe. "It's a lot easier for someone to claim they've been suppressed than to admit that maybe they can't find the scientific evidence to support their political ideology… They weren't suppressed. They're out there, where anyone can find them." Indeed, the review raises the question of how these papers came to be published in the first place, when they used flawed methodology, which the rigorous peer-review process is designed to weed out.

In an article for the Guardian, one of the researchers, Dana Nuccitelli points out another red flag with the climate-change-denying papers: "There is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming," she writes. "Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that's overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other."

The Galileo example is also instructive, Nuccitelli points out. The "father of observational science," championed the astronomical model that the earth and other planets in our solar system revolve around the sun—a view that was eventually accepted almost universally as the truth. "If any of the contrarians were a modern-day Galileo, he would present a theory that's supported by the scientific evidence and that's not based on methodological errors," she writes. "Such a sound theory would convince scientific experts, and a consensus would begin to form."

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Yes - Close To The Edge

Close to the edge, down by the river

Down at the end, round by the corner

Seasons will pass you by

Now that it's all over and done

Called to the seed, right to the sun

Now that you find, now that you're whole

Seasons will pass you by

I Looked Into The Abyss

I looked into what I thought was the abyss,

Between soft blood red and black satin curtains,

The Wizard awakened from his work,

Turning and noting the slightly parted curtain through which I could see,

It thrust a single eye of truth,

That turned me away in fear...

---

ralphpitre

SKYGLOWPROJECT.COM: KAIBAB ELEGY

SKYGLOWPROJECT.COM: KAIBAB ELEGY from Harun Mehmedinovic on Vimeo.

As violence intensifies, Israel continues to arm Myanmar’s military junta

Responding to a petition filed by human rights activists, Defense Ministry says matter is 'clearly diplomatic'

And to whose benefit is Israel involved?

Sep 03, 2017 5:58 PM

A Rohingya man from Myanmar carries an elderly woman after crossing to Bangladesh by boat, Sept. 2, 2017. Bernat Armangue/AP

The violence directed at Myanmar's Rohingya minority by the country's regime has intensified. United Nations data show that about 60,000 members of the minority group have recently fled Myanmar's Rahine state, driven out by the increasing violence and the burning of their villages, information that has been confirmed by satellite images. But none of this has led to a change in the policy of the Israeli Defense Ministry, which is refusing to halt weapons sales to the regime in Myanmar, the southeast Asian country formerly known as Burma.

On Thursday, the bodies of 26 refugees, including 12 children, were removed from the Naf River, which runs along the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Of the refugees who managed to reach Bangladesh, many had been shot. There were also reports of rapes, shootings and fatal beatings directed at the Rohingya minority, which is denied human rights in Myanmar. The country's army has been in the middle of a military campaign since October that intensified following the recent killing of 12 Myanmar soldiers by Muslim rebels.

Since Burma received its independence from Britain in 1948, civil war has been waged continuously in various parts of the country. In November 2015, democratic elections were held in the country that were won by Nobel Prize-winning human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi. But her government doesn't exert real control over the country's security forces, since private militias are beholden to the junta that controlled Myanmar prior to the election.

Militia members continue to commit crimes against humanity, war crimes and other serious violations of human rights around the country, particularly against minority groups that are not even accorded citizenship. Since Myanmar's military launched operations in Rahine last October, a number of sources have described scenes of slaughter of civilians, unexplained disappearances, and the rape of women and girls, as well as entire villages going up in flames. The military has continued to commit war crimes and violations of international law up to the present.

Please try again later.

Despite what is known at this point from the report of the United Nations envoy to the country and a report by Harvard University researchers that said the commission of crimes of this kind is continuing, the Israeli government persists in supplying weapons to the regime there.
One of the heads of the junta, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, visited Israel in September 2015 on a "shopping trip" of Israeli military manufacturers. His delegation met with President Reuven Rivlin as well as military officials including the army's chief of staff. It visited military bases and defense contractors Elbit Systems and Elta Systems.

The head of the Defense Ministry's International Defense Cooperation Directorate — better known by its Hebrew acronym, SIBAT — is Michel Ben-Baruch, who went to Myanmar in the summer of 2015. In the course of the visit, which attracted little media coverage, the heads of the junta disclosed that they purchased Super Dvora patrol boats from Israel, and there was talk of additional purchases.
In August 2016, images were posted on the website of TAR Ideal Concepts, an Israeli company that specializes in providing military training and equipment, showing training with Israeli-made Corner Shot rifles, along with the statement that Myanmar had begun operational use of the weapons. The website said the company was headed by former Israel Police Commissioner Shlomo Aharonishki. Currently the site makes no specific reference to Myanmar, referring only more generally to Asia.

Who will supervise the supervisors?
Israel's High Court of Justice is scheduled to hear, in late September, a petition from human rights activists against the continued arms sales to Myanmar.

In a preliminary response issued in March, the Defense Ministry argued that the court has no standing in the matter, which it called "clearly diplomatic."

On June 5, in answer to a parliamentary question by Knesset member Tamar Zandberg on weapons sales to Myanmar, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Israel "subordinates [itself] to the entire enlightened world, that is the Western states, and first of all the United States, the largest arms exporter. We subordinate ourselves to them and maintain the same policy."

He said the Knesset plenum may not be the appropriate forum for a detailed discussion of the matter and reiterated that Israel complies with "all the accepted guidelines in the enlightened world."
Lieberman statement was incorrect. The United States and the European Union have imposed an arms embargo on Myanmar. It's unclear whether the cause was ignorance, and Lieberman is not fully informed about Israel's arms exports (even though he must approve them), or an attempt at whitewashing.

In terms of history, as well, Lieberman's claim is incorrect. Israel supported war crimes in Argentina, for example, even when the country was under a U.S. embargo, and it armed the Serbian forces committing massacres in Bosnia despite a United Nations embargo.

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"Walking is Controlled Falling" by Greg Faxon

Back when I was in middle school they found a tumor in his spine. After the surgery, he spent 5 weeks in bed before he was even able to make it to the bathroom. He had lost all feeling in his hands and feet.
Here are three things I learned from his recovery:

1. Falling Means Letting Go

You know that feeling when you think there is one more stair to go, and your leg kind of goes limp? Imagine that with every step.
My dad constantly felt like he was falling through the floor. He would have to look down to see if his foot had made contact with the ground. He (understandably) had trouble relaxing.
Walking is controlled falling because you need to let go in order to move forward.
If you never let your foot fall, your movements would be stilted and robotic. That's called marching. It's weird and awkward and people look at you funny when you do it.
It's also not a very enjoyable way to live.
Sometimes it might seem like there is no ground under you to take the next step. Trust that it will be there. Let yourself fall.

2. Control Is Learned

Of course, walking is not all falling. You still need to be able to ground yourself between steps.
How?
By understanding where you are are in space. During his recovery, my dad became incredibly self-aware.
Self-awareness means knowing your beliefs, strengths, and values. It means knowing what you want. Most of all, it means knowing when to push back.
As a coach, the most important thing I do is help my clients develop a personal framework for making decisions. They learn when to surrender and when to resist. This requires a lot of practice.
Control doesn't come from sitting in a room somewhere. It comes from conscious engagement. So engage.

3. Walking Involves Fear

Walking is second nature to us now, but there was a time when it wasn't. Walking is actually pretty complex. We had to fall on our ass a lot before we got the hang of it.
My dad went through that whole learning process again. It was hard and painful, and he knew how vulnerable he looked in front of his son.
But when the alternative is going nowhere, suddenly it becomes much easier to try.
Last weekend, my dad ran a Spartan Race with me. It's incredible how far he's come.
Look: None of us really knows what the hell we are doing (anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or marching). We are always falling just a little bit. And that's fine, as long as it's done deliberately.

It's okay to be scared. It's okay to look stupid. Walk anyway.

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A controlled fall...

for a moment, 
you imagine the meme you've sprouted is unique to you
but no, 
a quick search answers your query 
and there are songs and story and commentary that attest to the fact that even thousands of years 
before one can apply technology to it 
the meme was planted...
learning to fly they say..
before there was flight, but there was the dream...
birds, once dinosaurs, are metaphors 
they live the dream of liberty 
we are still dinosaurs, 
weighted by gravity, 
our lives a metaphor for our lives itself

@ralphpitre

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Regret

Regret at so young an age...

is regret unto itself…

one looks at so brief a life 

and regrets the unfortunate choices made 

as battles lost 

without ever having fought them…

@ralphpitre