The USA almost fell to the last fascist decade in 1934.

This is Dr. Sten Ekberg sharing what foods to avoid and what foods to eat.

Two good reads today:

• low skilled easily replaceable employees must return to work immediately otherwise our society will collapse (a sarcastic retort)
• The point of economics as a discipline is to create a language and methodology for governing that hides political assumptions from the public.

We don't think of our bodies processing the various macro-nutients of the foods we eat as chemical reactions, but that's what happens at the microscopic level within our cells. Dr. Ken Barry makes this clear in almost 2 minutes in the video below.

This is an excellent discussion about the real markers of Heart Disease.

We are tired of their blah blah blah

Here is the link to the congressional text and summary of the bill.

Here is video from MSNBC where representative Pramila Jayapal discusses the bill.

Here is summary from the Congressional Research Service

This bill addresses provisions related to federal-aid highway, transit, highway safety, motor carrier, research, hazardous materials, and rail programs of the Department of Transportation (DOT).

Among other provisions, the bill

• extends FY2021 enacted levels through FY2022 for federal-aid highway, transit, and safety programs;
• reauthorizes for FY2023-FY2026 several surface transportation programs, including the federal-aid highway program, transit programs, highway safety, motor carrier safety, and rail programs;
• addresses climate change, including strategies to reduce the climate change impacts of the surface transportation system and a vulnerability assessment to identify opportunities to enhance the resilience of the surface transportation system and ensure the efficient use of federal resources;
• revises Buy America procurement requirements for highways, mass transit, and rail;
• establishes a rebuild rural bridges program to improve the safety and state of good repair of bridges in rural communities;
• implements new safety requirements across all transportation modes; and
• directs DOT to establish a pilot program to demonstrate a national motor vehicle per-mile user fee to restore and maintain the long-term solvency of the Highway Trust Fund and achieve and maintain a state of good repair in the surface transportation system.

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."