This is Ha-Joon Chang, who is from the Confucius tradition, in that seeking the better question is a cultural tradition. I found this half-hour lecture somewhat refreshing

Mr. Chang brings up this human measurement of the economy called GDP, and equating economic "growth" with getting richer based upon the measurement models that calculate the GDP. For the uninformed, GDP is an abbreviation for "Gross Domestic Product", ie. an attempt to statistically measure the monetary value of all goods and services within a regional or national economy

You must always take internet commentary with suspicion, but here is one of the 116 comments to the youtube video stream that I found unique:

Globalization reduces citizens to serfs. It raises businessmen and politicians to lords and kings. It is in fact a return to feudalism, but under different names. Citizens lose their voice in the way their nations move in globalization. People become chattel and cattle. That is the problem.

Eat more fat, and Blood Cholesterol decreases.

The San Francisco mayor just got tied up with the current FBI corruption investigation of Mohammed Nuri.

[SOURCE: Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez | SF Examiner | 14 February 2020]

[SOURCE: Tim Redmond | 48hills.org | 14 February 2020]

Here is a discussion sponsored by Berkeley professor and ex Labor Secretary (during the Clinton Administration) Robert Reich.

The corporate stock buyback issue is discussed after timestamp 7:35. Corporations spending their profits to buy their own stock in order to limit the supply of stock, so that in the short term the stock price can get inflated and therefore increase the short term wealth of the CEO's and major investors who own the stock. Putting the profits into the employees, or even re-investing in the corporation's infrastructure -- which would spark up the economic production system -- did not happen.

Think about that. We are on the verge of a collapse more serious than the 1930's.

Sam Seder and Alex Pareene do the straight talk about how the DNC Corporate wing of the Democratic Party is ... (fill in with your favorite pejorative phrase) ...

Go Bernie !!!!!!!!!!!!!

At the 2:49 timestamp, "I wanna talk a little bit about why Bernie ..."

We are blessed to have such genuine people trying to represent the spirit of our country and constitution.

Officials are even more worried about a quieter, larger vaping epidemic: More than a million teenagers, many of whom might never have picked up a standard cigarette, are now addicted to nicotine and regularly sucking on the end of a battery — the long-term safety of which remains almost a total mystery. It took decades of research to prove the devastating health effects of cigarette smoking, which kills nearly half a million people each year. Widespread vaping is just a few years old and has already produced one public-health panic. It may not be the last. “The population effects of e-cigarette use may not be apparent until the middle of this century,” one group of researchers recently warned. And CDC scientist Brian A. King admits, “We’re certainly in the midst of a broad, population-based experiment, if you will, in terms of the long-term health effects of these products.” That’s science speak for We have no idea what’s going to happen.

A decade ago, teen smoking was in a 20-year decline. Then vaping arrived. In the past several years, high-school students have become so comfortable with the habit that they no longer feel the need to hide it from their parents, many of whom are now vaping too. You almost can’t walk down the street in any American city without seeing someone take a draw from a pen. A 2019 CDC report found that over a quarter of American high-school students had vaped in the past month. All told, an estimated 8 million adults and 5 million middle and high schoolers are now doing it.

Ever since e-cigarettes began to become popular, two assumptions have governed public thinking about them: that they pose little or no health risk, at least to adults, and that they could help smokers quit their demonstrably unhealthy habit. These beliefs gained legitimacy from a widely cited article on the health risks of e-cigarettes published in 2015 by Public Health England, a U.K. government agency; the review, which drew on 185 citations, concluded that vaping, which eliminates tar and many of the carcinogens in cigarettes, was “around 95 percent safer” than traditional smoking. That message — and, just as important, its scientific framing of risk by comparing e-cigarettes to regular ones — has permeated the public, policy, and political conversations about vaping for the past five years. People are using their lungs as a sewer to get high.

Those British findings are now dismissed as “ludicrous” by Jeffrey E. Gotts, a pulmonologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “The 95 percent, they just appear to have pulled that number out of thin air,” says Gotts, who was the lead author of a comprehensive article on the subject in The British Medical Journal last September that undermined nearly every scientific assumption about the health risks of vaping. Citing 193 research reports and reviews, Gotts and his colleagues concluded there is “insufficient” evidence to say the most basic thing about vaping — that it is safe. Well-conducted studies, the researchers said, “show measurable adverse biologic effects on organ and cellular health in humans, in animals, and in vitro.”

[SOURCE: Stephen S. Hall | New York Magazine | 4 February 2020]

Okay. Kobe Bryant is/was a great basketball player. Dying in a helicopter with his daughter and 7 other people is both sad and tragic. I too was saddened by these events. The new virus coming out of China (remember the "SARS" virus) is ringing all over the media right now. Okay. Is this the influenza epidemic back right after World War One? Or just the playbook of distraction?

Coincidentally, the President is being impeached because he manipulated the transmissions of foreign aid authorized by congress because he wanted a foreign government to state publicly that a domestic political opponent (Biden) was being investigated on charges of corruption. The President also involved his attorney with rogue persons who had surveillance an employee of the US foreign services in the State department, with intent to possibly "rough up" or do harm. One political party is completely unwilling to allow witnesses to the trial of the President that is being held in the United States Senate.

An impeachment trial in the Senate has only occurred twice before the one against Herr Trump. So why is it being downplayed? How the hell does a helicopter crash? Was it unexpected turbulence? Am I wrong for being suspicious?

According to the Washington Post:

As investigators worked Monday to determine what caused the fatal helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and eight others, audio recordings of air traffic controllers revealed that the pilot of the luxury chopper was given clearance to fly in worse than normal weather without relying on instruments to guide him.

[SOURCE: Washington Post |  | 27 January 2020]