Stable Genius Liberal

A Canadian City Once Eliminated Poverty And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It

Between 1974 and 1979, residents of a small Manitoba city were selected to be subjects in a project that ensured basic annual incomes for everyone. For five years, monthly cheques were delivered to the poorest residents of Dauphin, Man. – no strings attached. And for five years, poverty was completely eliminated. The program was dubbed “Mincome” – a neologism of “minimum income” – and it was the first of its kind in North America. It stood out from similar American projects at the time because it didn’t shut out seniors and the disabled from qualification. The project’s original intent was to evaluate if giving cheques to the working poor, enough to top-up their incomes to a living wage, would kill people’s motivation to work. It didn’t. But the Conservative government that took power provincially in 1977 – and federally in 1979 – had no interest in implementing the project more widely. Researchers were told to pack up the project’s records into 1,800 boxes and place them in storage. A final report was never released.

Climate change deniers are not skeptics.

Skepticism is all about critical examination, evidence-based scientific inquiry, and the use of reason in examining controversial claims. Those who flatly deny the results of climate science do not partake in any of the above. They base their conclusions on a priori convictions. Theirs is an ideological conviction—the opposite of skepticism.

The key words being flatly deny. Its fine to be critical of climate science where there are gaps or issues with the models. That’s skepticism. But to conflate weather and climate. Or argue that it isn’t happening because something-something, that’s denial.

Republicans Believe in the Power of the Free Market—Except in Cuba, Apparently

There is no precedent for setting full democratic reform as a precondition to economic relations. Since 2011, Raul Castro has implemented 250 economic reforms modeled after the system in Communist China. In the 1970s, the U.S. normalized trade relations with China, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary after they took similar steps to implement preliminary economic reform. Even after economic normalization, the U.S. continued to pressure these countries to improve their human rights practices. As Obama said, “We know from hard-learned experience that it is better to encourage and support reform than to impose policies that will render a country a failed state.”

It seems foolish to think you can push for political or economic reforms in isolation. The two must go hand in hand if you want either reform to yield positive results.

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

Wow.

Jeb Bush Wants a Tougher Cuban Embargo

the benefactors of President Obama’s ill-advised move will be the heinous Castro brothers who have oppressed the Cuban people for decades.

Or maybe the embargo was more beneficial to the Castro brothers. The fact that they held on to power for a half century while all the other communist nations, except for North Korea, either reformed or fell should tell us something.

Bitcoin is the worst investment of 2014

The year started with Bitcoin advocates making grand claims about how Bitcoin was going to be the death blow to statism, taxes and the welfare state and usher in a new golden age of capitalism. The year ended down 52% down.

Is Russia 2015 Venezuela 1983?

Venezuela then, like Russia now, was a petro-economy which had consistently run external surpluses. But it was nonetheless a vulnerable debtor, because all those external surpluses and more had in effect been recycled into overseas assets of the corrupt elite.

Rand Paul’s “anti-torture” sham: Why his ignoring CIA scandal says so much – Salon.com

Put simply, if Sen. Paul’s commitment to his small government vision extended beyond the GOP’s usual hatred of taxes, throwing himself into the CIA torture scandal by vocally and repeatedly demanding the summary’s release would be the perfect way to prove it. If Paul’s libertarian rhetoric is just a branding exercise to separate him from the rest of the 2016 presidential pack, however, then going after the “patriots” who tortured “evildoers” for George W. Bush is not in his best interest.

I predict that the 2016 GOP pack will come out strongly for the use of torture. I expect Rand Paul to take a lukewarm stance against

Why Poor People Stay Poor

I once lost a whole truck over a few hundred bucks. It had been towed, and when I called the company they told me they’d need a few hundred dollars for the fee. I didn’t have a few hundred dollars. So I told them when I got paid next and that I’d call back then. It was a huge pain in the ass for those days. It was the rainy season, and I wound up walking to work, adding another six miles or so a day to my imaginary pedometer. It was my own fault that I’d been towed, really, and I spent more than a couple hours ruing myself. I finally made it to payday, and when I went to get the truck, they told me that I now owed over a thousand dollars, nearly triple my paycheck. They charged a couple hundred dollars a day in storage fees. I explained that I didn’t have that kind of money, couldn’t even get it. They told me that I had some few months to get it together, including the storage for however long it took me to get it back, or that they’d simply sell it. They would, of course, give me any money above and beyond their fees if they recovered that much. I was working two jobs at the time. Both were part time. Neither paid a hundred bucks a day, much less two. I wound up losing my jobs. So did my husband. We couldn’t get from point A to point B quickly enough, and we showed up to work, late, either soaked to the skin or sweating like pigs one too many times. And with no work, we wound up losing our apartment. It’s amazing what things that are absolute crises for me are simple annoyances for people with money. Anything can make you lose your apartment, because any unexpected problem that pops up, like they do, can set off that Rube Goldberg device.

Three quarters of whites don’t have any non-white friends – The Washington Post

Going back to Chris Rock’s point, the average black person’s friend network is eight percent white, but the average white person’s network is only one percent black. To put it another way: Blacks have ten times as many black friends as white friends. But white Americans have an astonishing 91 times as many white friends as black friends.