Stable Genius Liberal

Rich Kid, Poor Kid: For 30 Years, Baltimore Study Tracked Who Gets Ahead

a study published in June suggests that the things that really make the difference — between prison and college, success and failure, sometimes even life and death — are money and family.
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They found that a child’s fate is in many ways fixed at birth — determined by family strength and the parents’ financial status. The kids who got a better start — because their parents were married and working — ended up better off. Most of the poor kids from single-parent families stayed poor.

At this point this a typical story about how poverty self perpetuates. Bad options, bad choices leading to bad results.

Then I got to this part:

The researchers found that more affluent white men in the study reported the highest frequency of drug abuse and binge drinking, yet they still had the most upward mobility.

Great options, bad choices, great results. How do you explain that?

Charles Koch: The people I pay agree with me, so should you.

According to George Mason University’s Mercatus Center,

calculated the Competitive Enterprise Institute

Mr. Koch failed to mention that he funds the people he is quoting. I for one am not surprised the people he pays to reach the conclusions he supports are in total agreement with him.

C.I.A. Hires Yossarian to Censor Torture Report

In Joseph Heller’s anti-war satire, “Catch 22,” the hero, Yossarian, is assigned to a censorship detail. He amuses himself by deleting all the adverbs and adjectives from soldiers’ letters, then all the articles, then everything but the articles, and so on. His job was to delete details that threatened operational security. The result was gibberish. It seems the Central Intelligence Agency was inspired by Yossarian’s example.

This will eventually come out and like always, the coverup will be worse than the crime.

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Fox News Hasn’t Mentioned the GOP Report That Says There is No Benghazi Scandal (Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

CEO pay for performance: This graph shows why it’s a sham.

I think it’s debatable if stock price is the best way to judge CEO performance, let alone the only way, but this is a response to a really odd claim from Businessweek that attempts to link the two.

CIA admits to spying on US Senate computer network

Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between SSCI (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) and the CIA in 2009

This will go not be investigated because the GOP is too busy being outraged by Obama’s fictional abuses of power.

Can we start discussing Israel’s actions as possibly motivated by a little more than pure defense yet? Can we agree that it’s possible to be critical of Israeli overreach without being opposed to Israel’s right to exist? The Times of Israel published an article on “when genocide is permissible.” Here’s their funder – Vox

Two Theories of Poverty

Poverty replicates itself in very predictable structural ways.

Not a perfect article but worth a read. I’ve never seen any reason to support the pull-your-pants up view of poverty being a defect in individuals. If it were true the great depression would have been the great slack where a fifth of the nation decided to become lazy and live off free soup.

Qatar World Cup: migrants wait a year to be paid for building offices

Migrant workers who built luxury offices used by Qatar’s 2022 football World Cup organisers have told the Guardian they have not been paid for more than a year and are now working illegally from cockroach-infested lodgings.

Who could have guessed that without labor laws, companies would act this way?

Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless

The characteristics measured by the test have almost no predictive power on how happy you’ll be in a situation, how you’ll perform at your job, or how happy you’ll be in your marriage.

I view the Myers-Briggs as an updated version of the horoscope.