A serial accumulation of memory, incident, consideration, reconsideration, personal discovery and attempts at truth.
It is intended for my attention and that of other interested persons
If that changes, I will extensively re-edit.
Warning:
I attempt to use inductive logic.
Dr. David S. Seres of Columbia University writes that the former
Florida governor’s own record “should be of far greater concern,
particularly where the right to self-determination and medical
decision-making are concerned.”
Presidential Election of 2016; Life-Sustaining Support Systems, Withdrawal Of
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER, PATRICK McGEEHAN, JAD MOUAWAD and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG | May 18th 2015
As most railroads expect to miss a congressional deadline for
upgrades, lawmakers in Washington are now fighting — not over whether to
extend the deadline, but for how long.
The ruling is part of an effort to untangle the mess left after
the conviction of a state chemist, Annie Dookhan, whose mishandling of
evidence affected as many as 40,000 cases.
Crime and Criminals; Chemistry; Suits and Litigation (Civil)
The state has all the resources to establish the facts.
Lies about the facts from the state cannot be tolerated.
By DAVE PHILIPPS and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT | May 18th 2015
Federal officials said they found no evidence to confirm that a
projectile broke through the window and hit the conductor of the Amtrak
train that derailed in Philadelphia last week.
Railroad Accidents and Safety
"On Sunday, Mr. Sumwalt, appearing on several talk shows, said recordings
of radio traffic showed that the engineer did not call dispatch to say
his train had been struck, nor did the Septa engineer recall having a
conversation with Mr. Bostian."
"“We’re so early in, we don’t have any theories on the table at this point,” said Peter Knudson, the board’s spokesman."
A fermentation process that produces heroin’s raw ingredient has
stirred debate over whether the drug trafficking trade could benefit
more than the pharmaceutical industry.
Drug Abuse and Traffic; Pain-Relieving Drugs; Opium; Morphine; Heroin; Drug Cartels
The yeast will get loose a few years after it is developed.
Webb Simpson chipped in twice for birdies and shot a
five-under-par 67 for a share of the second-round lead with Robert Streb
at the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, N.C.
Bill de Blasio will call for significant new financial help from
the city and for squeezing more revenue out of the housing projects and
their residents.
Public and Subsidized Housing
Unlikely.
The city built the projects because they had to have them.
"Against willful stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain. So it’s no surprise that Simon Wren-Lewis
is having a hard time of it. Still, it’s amazing just how dependent the
pro-austerity camp has become on one dumb trick — misunderstanding, or
pretending to misunderstand, the difference between levels and rates of
change.
Take basic national income accounting (and ignore the foreign sector, for simplicity): the basic GDP identity is
GDP = C + I + G
or, if you want to look at changes,
Change in GDP = Change in C + Change in I + Change in G
If you’re trying to
understand how fiscal policies — which affect both government purchases G
and, via taxes and transfers, consumption C — move the economy, you can
tell a story either in terms of levels or in terms of changes; in the
end, it shouldn’t matter, because these stories should be consistent.
Now, the story Simon has been telling all along, and which I essentially picked up in my Guardian piece,
is that the Cameron government did a lot of fiscal tightening in its
first two years, but not much thereafter (illustrated in this case by
cyclically adjusted balances):
Photo
Credit
Furthermore, almost everyone concedes that this is in fact what happened.
And what you’d expect from this time path of policy is that the current level of GDP would still be below what it would have been otherwise, but that the negative impact on the rate of growth
of GDP would have occurred only in the first couple of years, not
thereafter; hence the pickup in growth since 2013 isn’t inconsistent
with the view that austerity is a drag on the economy. I don’t think
this is a hard point; surely it’s not a point anyone who writes
regularly on economics should have trouble getting straight.
Yet what we get over
and over are pieces that get this simple point wrong. Austerity critics
say that the pace of fiscal tightening slowed after 2012 — aha, you’re
claiming that austerity was reversed, which it wasn’t! You said that
cutting spending depresses the economy relative to where it would have
been otherwise — aha, you’re all wrong, because the economy started
growing again in 2013!
This is, not to put
too fine a point on it, stupid — and it has to be willfully stupid,
because the people writing such stuff have to know better.
I’m actually used to
such things; people are constantly pulling phrases out of stuff I’ve
written, claiming that I was saying something I wasn’t. The way to
assess such claims is to look at the overall shape of the argument I was
making. If, for example, I was writing many pieces about the dangers of
a slow, jobless recovery, then no, I wasn’t endorsing the Obama
administration’s forecast of a V-shaped recovery, even if you can find a
pull-quote that, taken out of context, might be read to say that; and
so on.
Anyway, what you
really learn from this “debate” is how weak one side really is. If you
can’t make your argument without messing up levels versus changes and
deliberately misreading simple statements, you must not have much of a
case."
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