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Two Contradictory Arguments That Dodd-Frank is Crony Capitalism | Next New Deal

I’m pretty convinced that the term “crony capitalism,” as deployed by the right, is useless as a political or analytical tool. I keep a close eye on how conservatives talk about financial reform, and according to the right, Dodd-Frank is crony capitalism. Oh noes! But what does that mean, and how can we stop it? Here’s a fascinating case in point: two AEI scholars with different publications argue that we need to stop Dodd-Frank from enabling crony capitalism, and then proceed to describe two opposite, mutually exclusive sets of problems and solutions.

I missed this the first time around, but I’m glad I got a chance to read it. This is worth a read. There are a few words that are now meaningless in political discussion because they are used to mean different things, even contradictory things. Crony Capitalism joins Socialism as a term that means something I don’t like and has lost all other meaning.

Patton Oswalt on political correctness

That idea of context doesn’t matter is a scary thing. Especially because the oppressive, racist, homophobic forces in the world don’t have comedy as a weapon. We progressives do. If we’re going to start giving that up and start policing progressives twice as hard as we do the conservatives and homophobes and haters, then we’re fucked. Then they get to be the rebels and they’ll find a way to make homophobia and racism look cool. Because all we’re doing is attacking each other.

Patton Oswalt nails it.

American transit activists need to speak up about exorbitant construction costs

But the problem hits transit the hardest because the basic fact of the matter is that political and economic elites don’t rely on mass transit. The clearest case is the growing popularity of mixed-traffic streetcar projects. These are much cheaper than grade-separated light- or heavy-rail, but still far more expensive than a conventional bus without actually moving people any faster. In terms of offering a transportation service, spending money on a streetcar is much worse than spending the same amount of money on multiple new bus routes or upgrades to existing ones. Soon this bus will have a streetcar in its way | Elvert Barnes/Flickr Streetcars appeal, however, because those high costs create construction jobs and because the aura of classiness around them appeals to real estate developers and other would-be drivers of gentrification. So cities across America are opening stub streetcar lines rather than investing in improving the transit experience of bus riders.

The Strange Tale of a New Species of Lizard

In the 1960s, scientists noticed that some whiptail lizard species had a strange genetic makeup. They have two copies of each chromosome, just as we do, but each copy is very different from its counterpart. The genes look as if they come from different species. Perhaps stranger, many species produce no males. The eggs of the females hatch healthy female clones, a process known as parthenogenesis. Normally, unfertilized animal eggs have only one set of chromosomes. The second set is derived from a male’s sperm following fertilization. But parthenogenic female whiptail lizards can duplicate the chromosomes in their offspring without males. These findings led scientists to a hypothesis for how these strange species came about: Sometimes individuals from two different species of whiptail lizards interbreed, and their hybrid offspring carry two different sets of chromosomes.

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.