This is a brilliant 50 minute discussion by two of the world's most intelligent and thoughtful economists who aren't enamored by free market ideology to the point where they are blind-sided by reality.

In this episode, Richard Wolff and Yanis Varoufakis examine Biden’s first year in office, and share their perspectives on the current political and economic order and its future, from techno-feudalism to the new Cold War on China. They also speak about the ongoing pandemic and the profound transformations taking place in our time.

The discussion starts at around the timestamp 8:01.

Quentin Kopp is a farce. He gets free reign in my district monthly publication to promote his bullshit and lately I have been fighting back with logic, common sense, and words.

Here is my response to this

Editor:

My Response to Mr. Kopp’s November commentary

Mr. Kopp:

You obviously did not read my precise reasoning about why government needs to invest where private investment cannot. Your argument is specious. Hide behind your cherry-picked Utah State professor all you want.

Namely,“Lambast the ‘tax, tax, spend’ all you want, but a society functions best when wealth is syphoned off by taxes into a government entity that can spend on investments that the previous wealth holders would never make. Do you think the interstate transportation system, or the national railroad network that developed after the the civil war would have developed without government funding? Or the internet infrastructure? Private corporations make decisions about short-term profits that are often not in the best interest of the larger society. If we want to leave the decision making to private for-profit entities alone, what evolves is a society distorted by the motivations of those who gain control of the for-profit private entities, and those motivations quickly diverge with the larger interests of the larger society over time, sometimes very quickly. Government agencies are captured, legislatures are bribed, media entities are owned, … it’s a long repetitive history that we have to unfortunately relearn every 100 years. It’s just that now, the benefits of technology make us think that private for-profit entities are benevolent and long-term in their thinking, when that is only transitory. Eventually the private for-profit entities begin to dominate the public forum to the point that the public forum becomes captured by the lobbyists of the private for-profit entities, twisting the public interest into their own interests, and making sure they hire spokespersons who provide sophistic arguments that justify the status quo. People like Mr. Kopp.”

By the way, how was that awesome private investment on 50-year-old San Bruno gas conduits that couldn’t pass PIG tests (look it up )? It took government spending to change a poor decision by a private firm that prioritized profit over public safety.

We didn’t get internet because Comcast made a long-term investment 50 years ago. We got internet because the government created the ground floor investment that 50 years later Comcast could use to create a profitable private industry.

If you actually understood the history of symbiosis between the government and the private economy then … well, I guess that is expecting too much from a hired propagandist living well in his suburbia confines, willing to be the icon for carrying the tawdry arguments of the short-term interests against the long-term interests. Money is blind. It is only usefull when it creates something that benefits the long-term functionalism of any social system. If money becomes hoarded or aggregated that long-term functionalism will be sacrificed.

That is not a counterfeit utterance. Speak for yourself, I guess, but that is the gat-dern truth, Mr. Kopp.

Sad. Actually pathetic.

Gino Napoli

Born in the Richmond District and current resident of the Richmond District

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ update: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I added this comment to Mr. Kopp's November commentary.

With all due respect Mr. Kopp, when someone confronts me with a reasonable statement that might initially counter that which I myself view, my first instinct .. is to question my own views. Maybe that reasonable statement has merit and it is me who needs to reflect and consider that I might be wrong.

I don’t double down on what I insist. If that is your first instinct, then I think that automatically disqualifies your next thought process as beneficial. Self-introspection and criticism is necessary for a true evolution of understanding, otherwise it’s just a blind reaction to some underlying insecurity that being confronted means a denigration of your being. Criticism does not mean decimation.

Personally I can disagree with someone and still have a long term friendship. Not everyone can do that. However when I send my screeds, I am really trying to reach out and help you understand a point of view that has some merit and legitimacy. A point of view that is held by a wide variety of academics, including professors of economics. I could but I won’t mention their names, because you can do that research yourself.

It’s all on you dawg. Which path do you choose to take? Just remember that those who listen to irrationality are not really doing you any favors. Fawning over nonsense is no different than obsequious fans who tear the clothes off of their heroes while said heroes run for lives to their waiting limousines hoping to get back to the hotel without having to encounter the ravenous public.

Think about that.

Heme Iron is more absorbable and only comes from meat. There is inadequate evidence that red meat causes cancer. Lower levels of iron in children are correlated with IQ. "The higher the iron intake throughout the pregnancy, the more mature or the more complex grey matter was at the time of birth."

This is an excellent channel for Scientific knowledge by an American who lives in Japan called "What I've Learned"

Carbohydrates for humans are like alcohol to humans. Our bodies managed a way to handle Carbs and Alcohol because they naturally occur within the eco-system's food chain by which humans evolved to eat. However, beyond a certain amount alcohol and carbohydrates create a dysfunctionality that wreaks havoc on your body and body's cells that eventually will kill. It's essentially low level toxicity over a long period of time accumulating into a metabolic disease that manifests in many different ways : cancer, diabetes, alzheimers, parkinson, ciliac, autoimmune, et cetera.

This is Dr. Gary Fettke from Tasmania.

The body goes through great lengths to remove Carbohydrates from the blood, so it's presence is treated by the body as a toxin.

The interesting thing is how rapidly the body removes these things from the blood (Glucose and Fructose)... the human body does not like leaving glucose and fructose in the blood. So why are glucose and fructose removed so actively. Well, just maybe, glucose and fructose are toxic.

The circulating level of glucose is about 4 grams or one teaspoon. Anything more the body sees as toxic.

Sten Ekberg is a great resource.

I am responding to the San Francisco crank who gets a platform in my district monthly newspaper, Quentin Kopp:

Why are you giving Mr. Kopp a platform?

It would be one thing if Mr. Kopp presents an opinion. Everyone has a right to their opinion. It is quite another thing however if Mr. Kopp presents a pompous obfuscation of reality that pretends to be an opinion, even if there is a small percentage of people in the community who have been hoodwinked by the allure of what Mr. Kopp is using as the foundation upon which he is propping up his obfuscation of reality that I am politely calling an opinion. Because this is not an opinion. This is a purposefully designed intentional diatribe meant to slice and dice any attempt at preventing the wealthy from hoarding and making sure society re-invests because the people that sponsor the ilk of Mr. Kopp would rather live under the illusion that Adam Smith’s unfettered “invisible hand” inevitably means progress. A book Mr. Kopp probably hasn’t read, because Adam Smith actually understood that unfettered capitalism actually undermines society and the functioning of the economy.

I will ignore all of the political-bombs Mr. Kopp tosses out like a proud sailor relieving himself over the side of a sail boat. However, uttering the mantra of “Tax, tax, tax and spend” is a straw man argument. We live in a society where we pay taxes and make investments in society in order to have a functional society and a functional economy. When you pretend that tax cuts to the wealthy pay for themselves, and then increase spending so that you can give connected insiders sweet government contracts, that’s not the remedy for the mantra that pillories the straw man argument. That is simply a dishonest argument. The fact that Mr. Kopp is using it speaks volumes.

Lambast the “tax, tax, spend” all you want, but a society functions best when wealth is syphoned off by taxes into a government entity that can spend on investments that the previous wealth holders would never make. Do you think the interstate transportation system, or the national railroad network that developed after the the civil war would have developed without government funding? Or the internet infrastructure? Private corporations make decisions about short-term profits that are often not in the best interest of the larger society. If we want to leave the decision making to private for-profit entities alone, what evolves is a society distorted by the motivations of those who gain control of the for-profit private entities, and those motivations quickly diverge with the larger interests of the larger society over time, sometimes very quickly. Government agencies are captured, legislatures are bribed, media entities are owned, … it’s a long repetitive history that we have to unfortunately relearn every 100 years. It’s just that now, the benefits of technology make us think that private for-profit entities are benevolent and long-term in their thinking, when that is only transitory. Eventually the private for-profit entities begin to dominate the public forum to the point that the public forum becomes captured by the lobbyists of the private for-profit entities, twisting the public interest into their own interests, and making sure they hire spokespersons who provide sophistic arguments that justify the status quo. People like Mr. Kopp.

Meanwhile we sink into the state of France prior to the 1780’s, a feckless government owned by competing members of the aristocracy, insisting upon economic privileges, unable to see the damage that the hijacking of the economic system by the hoarding of wealthy has caused upon large swaths of the population. I am saddened that my country is being ripped apart by delusion paradigms disguised as responsible statesmanship. It’s a con game. Or as the old jazz song has it, “Nice work, if you can get it.”

The uber-wealthy use racism and xenophobia to divide the lower classes, and have been doing so for the last 2 centuries.

The costs of disaster related to Climate Change events has noticeably gone up since 1980

~hat-tip to Barry Ritholz

From the Washington Post

The preprint paper, which tracked more than 340,000 adults across 600 villages in rural Bangladesh, is by far the largest randomized study on the effectiveness of masks at limiting the spread of coronavirus infections.

Its authors say this provides conclusive, real-world evidence for what laboratory work and other research already strongly suggest: mask-wearing can have a significant impact on limiting the spread of symptomatic covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

“I think this should basically end any scientific debate about whether masks can be effective in combating covid at the population level,” Jason Abaluck, an economist at Yale who helped lead the study, said in an interview, calling it “a nail in the coffin” of the arguments against masks.

The researchers estimate that among a group of Bangladeshi adults in the study that were encouraged to wear masks, mask-wearing increased by 28.8 percentage points after the intervention. When tracked, this group saw a 9.3 percent reduction in symptomatic covid-19 seroprevalence, meaning the virus was confirmed by bloodwork, as well as a further 11.9 percent reduction in covid-19 symptoms.

...

“This is an incredibly challenging but important study to pull off,” said Megan L. Ranney, an emergency medicine physician and professor at Brown University who was not involved with this research. “Anti-mask people keep saying, ‘Where’s the randomized controlled trial?’ Well, here you go.”

“It’s not just modeling or looking back at studies,” said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, who also was not involved. “This is the gold standard of scientific knowledge.”

...

The sheer scale of the project, which began in November and concluded in April 2021, is notable. About 178,000 Bangladeshi villagers were in an intervention group and encouraged to use masks. An additional 163,000 were in a control group, where no interventions were made.

The project assessed the levels of mask-wearing and physical distancing through direct observations from plain-clothed staff in the community at mosques, markets and other gathering places.

“This is a project that cannot be done by a handful of people,” Abaluck said. “This is why there are hundreds of people involved in this project. That’s why the paper has … I don’t even know how many co-authors it has. Dozens of co-authors.”

Here is a link to the paper.

So an 28.8% increase in mask wearing is correlated to an 11.9% decrease in symptoms AND a 9.3% reduction in detecting the virus in the blood. Mathematically that means if 100 people who are not wearing mask get just 29 people to wear masks, There will be 9.3 people more people with no prevalence of the virus in the blood. Stated another way, a ratio of 9.3 to 29 is 0.32 less virus per each increase of one person who wears a mask, or 1 less person for every 3 more people who wear a mask. In a population of 100,000 that means 32,000 less cases of covid if all 100,000 people wore a freaking mask.

QED