This Is What Happens When You Eat Overly Processed Food & Drive

Via The Journal/Sentinel of Milwaukee, WI.

Don't Want To Be Demented? Eat Fish, But Sadly, Leave The Porterhouse Behind

Well, I just bought two pounds of tribal caught whitefish filets the other day, so it looks like I won't be demented any time soon. Hey, shut up you guys.

Oily fish are rich in omega-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, which some studies suggest are positively related to cognitive function in later life.

Conversely, there is a suggestion from some studies that increased meat consumption may be related to cognitive decline.

Walter Cronkite, R.I.P.

Obit here. I remember him best, of course, for his JFK assassination reporting & his finally turning on the Viet Nam war.

Bailout? How Are You Doing?

A couple of big banks are doing well, thank you taxpayers very much. Lending money to home buyers, car buyers, parents wanting to send their kids to college? Not so much. This show just what is so wrong about the American economy. All of our money spent to "save" the economy only serves to save the very people who fucked it up to begin with. This also shows what a sham our justice system has become.

Both companies continue to rely on a range of federal rescue programs to raise money from investors, a key factor in their strong results.

Yeah, right.

From The Email

It's good to have smart people putting me on their email lists. First, the chart come from RLK, late of the city council. The commentary comes from da Mayor, &, IMO, our community's greatest loss since they knocked down the Knight Hotel.

The graph you sent out hits the nail on the head and explains in clear terms why the stimulus pack age has not worked and will not work (in terms of stimulating economic growth). The real issue is not unemployment, but unemployment and lost of wages. This current economic crises has its roots in the economic shifts that took place during the last thirty years. Let me explain:

It is clear that if one were to "run the numbers", by adding the officially unemployed persons to those who had unsuccessfully attempted to get a job in the last 12 months to those that only have part-time employment status (below 40 hours per week) , the true measure of unemployment is closer to 17%, not 9.10% as reported by the BLS in June. But there is an over-emphasis, in my opinion, by this current administration on unemployment.

The unemployment figures (whether you use BLS numbers or Real Unemployment as calculated above) only show a small picture in terms how we as a nation need to address the economic crisis That is because I do not think the problem is unemployment, but rather underemployment. Consider for moment the possibility that the real unemployment rate is close to 20%. What that means then is the real employment rate is 80%. So, while life is tough for the 20%, we still have a significant number of people working and doing well financially. Therefore, as a nation we should be doing o.k. economically. If that were the case, why isn't the economy, in terms of GDP, growing? Because the 80% are NOT doing well financially. In fact, a significant number of them are underemployed - working in menial jobs, for lousy wages and even worse benefits. The underemployed coupled with the unemployed means that a significant number of Americans (about 45% to 60% in my opinion) do not have enough money to keep the economy growing. This is a critical point to understand as the underemployment problem has been vexing America for over 30 years and it has been consistently swept under the carpet. The problem is not just lack of jobs, the bigger problem, in my opinion, is the 30 year loss in real income compared to cost of living for a majority of Americans. Your graph clearly show this.

Consider, for a moment that real wages, when figured for inflation, have not risen since 1979 for the bottom 60% of Americans. That is an astounding statistic. Simultaneously, wages for America's top 1% of have increased by a whopping 23% since 1979! Working class America addressed this loss of wages in three ways:

First, in the 1970's and 1980's we, as a nation, threw all of our working age women into the economy. That bumped-up household earnings, but did not increase individual earnings. Today, as compared to the early 1970's, most working age women MUST work.

Two, we went back to school and got trained for the service economy. The mass lay-offs in the early 1980's forced a whole slug of workers back to school to get an AA or BS degree. These degrees were a base-line requirement to work in America's burgeoning service-based economy. So, we increased our education, but this strategy provided only nominal increases for the great majority of Americans. Most American got better educated only to maintain their wages, not significantly increase them over past earnings. Put another way, I made $16.34 per hour at A.O. Smith assembling automobile sub-components in 1984 as a high school graduate. My son, 25 years later makes $17.00, with an AA degree in HVAC. So, in real dollars, not figured for inflation, my son makes 0.66 cents more an hour than I did 25 years ago and he is college educated!

Third, we took out home equity loans to supplement the loss in wages and increases in cost of living that we were facing. These loans should have been used solely for home improvement purposes, but were used instead to off-set day-to-day living expenses. A significant problem is that the housing bubble has burst and left a whole lot of people with loans that are now greater than the values of their homes, couple that will declining wages, increasing health care costs, and job insecurity and we have a problem that is not directly related to unemployment.

Please do not misunderstand me here Richard, unemployment is certainly a problem. I do not want to give the impression that it is unimportant. But, unemployment exasperates the underemployment problem, in my opinion, not the other way around. My concern is an over-focus on the unemployed while we continue to ignore the bigger problem which is underemployment, loss of wages and increased cost of living. If we really want to stimulate the economy, (growth in GDP) we need to get more dollars into the hands of working people. We can do that by reversing the trend of having only the top 30% of Americans realizing wage increases. There is plenty of money. It is just currently distributed in a fashion will not stimulate economic growth. Giving more money to the rich and hoping it will stimulate economic growth (the trickle down theory) has proven false. The rich have enough and they tie-up their money in investments that will not promote the same GDP growth as putting these dollars into the hands of working people.

I do not want to sound like a conservative here, but the republicans are on to something with providing tax breaks to stimulate the economy. Unfortunately, they have the wrong execution of the right idea, as they do often. Average working class Americans need more money. period. However, providing them with a measly $600 dollar tax rebate is nowhere near enough. Remember that the average American Household is carrying over $14,000 in credit card debt alone!

That is why the $600 dollar tax rebate we got last summer did not work, people used it to pay-down debt. So, Americans will need to have at least a $14,001 dollar tax rebate to begin spending. Well, the government can’t afford that kind of rebate. Furthermore, rebates are a one-shot deal, like a bonus, they do not build enough confidence in consumers to go out and make big, long-term purchases that require a long pay-back. Working people need to make a hell of a lot more money, they need to be a hell of a lot more secure in their jobs, and they need to be a hell of a lot more secure in their health care if we are to stimulate this economy.

Sorry about the length of this e-mail but the point here is people like me, who got hung-up in the lay-offs of the early 1980’s put our wives to work, we went back to school and took out home equity loans to improve our economic condition. Now that the housing bubble has popped, the economy is feeling the effects of a 30 year down-turn in workers wages all at once. Working people have no way currently to substantially improve their income. So, you are absolutely right; the current economic crisis does have historical roots.

Hope it didn't bore you.

Bobby Jindal, NRA Tool & GOP Rising Star

Here's the first paragraph of a story about another of Jindal's veto. It's unusual in that it actually states how the Governor of LA decides what to veto. Pretty pathetic & it ought to be criminal. My emphases.

At the request of the National Rifle Association, Gov. Bobby Jindal has vetoed a bill that would have made it a crime to illegally carry firearms within 1,000 feet of a sanctioned parade or demonstration.

Impeach John Roberts

There are a host of reasons why the Chief Justice of the U.S. Court should be impeached, but his constant deference to the powerful at the expense of the weak seems enough to me. The Bu$hCo Assministration did untold damage to this country & it will take decades to rectify it. With people like Roberts in powerful positions, however, it may take even longer. Roberts' condescending attitude towards those who are not powerful is sickening.

The question of sonar’s catastrophic effects on whales even reached the Supreme Court last November, in a case pitting the United States Navy against the Natural Resources Defense Council. The council, along with other environmental groups, had secured two landmark victories in the district and appellate courts of California, which ruled to heavily restrict the Navy’s use of sonar devices in its training exercises. The Supreme Court, however, in a 6-to-3 decision widely viewed as a setback for the environmental movement, overturned parts of the lower-court rulings, faulting them for, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, failing “properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive judgments,” thereby jeopardizing the safety of the fleet and sacrificing the public’s interest in military preparedness by “forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained antisubmarine force.” In his decision, Roberts went on to minimize, in a fairly dismissive tone, the issue of harm to marine life: “For the plaintiffs, the most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine animals that they study and observe.”

What an evil blowhard.  My emphases.

Sad Story

I just learned about this today. I hope that this man & his story will be taught in the high schools of America. Everywhere but Texas, I suppose.

Lloyd Gaines was moody that winter of 1939, acting not at all like a man who had just triumphed in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases in decades. And oddly, even though it was raining and the sidewalks of Chicago were clogged with slush, he felt a need to buy postage stamps one night.

The Dirty Fucking Hippies Knew This

& we said it over & over again. We were told by the serious journalists at the serious newspapers that we were just foolish hippies who needed a bath, oh, & those among us who blogged, well, we weren't professional, therefore we weren't to be taken seriously. Dick "Dick" Cheney is an evil son-of-a-bitch who ought to be in jail for a slew of criminal acts, including this one.

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

My emphases.