... "In the past, the effort has been to get everybody into the same space," Whitman said. "This puts Britain in the slow lane, with no obligation to ever catch up."

Now "leaving the EU is an option," he said. "It's no longer an exclusive club in which membership lasts for life. Right now, I think even nations like the Netherlands might vote for an exit."

Whitman said the notion that Europeans share values and goals has suffered. "We're back to the idea of promoting our individual national superiorities," he said.

... "The European project was always bound to fail," Stratfor, the Texas-based international risk analysis consultancy, wrote on its website Tuesday.

Stratfor said the "project" of European unity "would inevitably encounter insurmountable levels of nationalist resistance" built up over centuries of war among "distinct groups of people with different histories, languages and cultures."

"That is the point at which we now find ourselves," the Stratfor analysis said.

... In a paper published Wednesday, Paul J.J. Welfens, president of the European Institute for International Economic Relations in Germany, blamed Germany's open-door refugee policy for hastening European disintegration and giving a boost to the British campaign to desert the union.

"If the EU continues to be destabilized, the next field of instability will be NATO," he wrote, referring to the military alliance that also includes Canada and the United States. "That would be highly dangerous."

Contrary to the last great crisis of European integration 40 years ago, the European decision making bodies work comparably well. European parliament, council, commission, central bank, and court are doing their work. ... One can not expect from the EU or a nation state to find a quick consensus. Germany is deeply divided about the refugee crisis too.

The flow of refugees is a completely new question for the EU... It requires time... It requires political pressure not fatalism.

The EU is also not breaking apart because it has not suffered permanent losses of confidence as asserted. In the debt crises the EU lost a lot of trust between 2011 and 2013 but gained it back in 2014. It had acted.

The refugee crisis led to another loss of confidence in 2015, especially in Germany. But that loss didn't go as deep. If the EU acts effectively again, experience tells us it will gain trust again.

... These [anti-EU] parties are elected not because of their anti-EU stance but because of national reasons. ... In Polen and Hungary the EU enjoys greater trust than in many western and southern EU countries, lately even more than in Germany.

... The German government has virtually no support from other governments in the refugee crisis. It seems isolated. The situation reminds us of the isolation of de Gaulle in 1965/66. But three years later France broke out of its isolation and returned to the German-French partnership and contributed to the most far-reaching decisions of the decade.

Yesterday, a Slovakian EU MP (who sits in the same faction as the AfD) argued in a German talk show that the EU is not a community of values but a community of treaties - that are breached time and again which, in his view, led to the unilateral actions of Austria and the Eastern Europeans. The rest of the participants tried to hold on the European community of values but it's true: the EU ceased to be a community of values when the big Eastern expansion happened. And now the 'magic' is gone. No longer do people kneel down when the word 'Europe' is brought up in political discussions. A collateral damage of overstretch and bumbling. So yes, the EU won't blow up but it won't be as close-knit as it was. It has simply become too big for that. And now that Turkey is trying to muscle in...

_{Schengen is toast!}

Eventually, our society (as any other society in history) is a dissipative structure. It means that it exist only because it is able to dissipate energy in order to stock information inside itself. And there is a positive feedback: more energy permits to implement more complexity; and more complexity needs, but it also permits a larger energy flow. This, I think, is a crucial point: at the very end, wealth is information stocked inside the socio-economic system in different forms (such livestock, infrastructures, agrarian facilities, machines, buildings, books, the web and so on). Human population is peculiar because it is a large part of the information stocked inside the society system [...]

The accumulation of information inside a system is possible only by an increment of entropy outside the same system. This is usual with all the dissipative structures, but our civilisation is unique in its dimension. Today about 97% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass is composed of humans and of their symbionts and we use about the 50% of the primary production (400 TW?), plus a little less than 20 TW we have from fossil fuels and other inorganic sources [...]

Today, both global pollution and massive immigration into the more industrialized countries evidence that our system is no more able to expel entropy out of itself. But if entropy is not discharged out of the system, it necessarily grows inside it. And when there is more energy, there is more entropy in a typical diminishing returns dynamic. Maybe, we can see here a negative feedback which has stopped the economic growth and that will possibly crash the global economy in some decades.

If this reasoning is correct, the political and the economic crisis, social disruption and, finally, failing states are nothing less than the visible aspect of the growing entropy inside our own meta-system. Eventually, global society is so large and complex which is articled in many correlated sub-systems and we are managing in order to concentrate entropy inside the less powerful ones: some yet problematic countries, lower classes and, especially, young. But these phenomena produce political shifts, riots and mass migrations to the core of the system. This means that also the elites have lost the capability to understand and/or control the internal dynamic of the global socio-economic system.

Modern Healthcare reviewed the bad debt reported by hospitals and health systems for the third quarter of the calendar year in 2013, 2014 and 2015. The 52 hospitals and health systems in the sample are ones with figures for all three years in Modern Healthcare's financial database. They include some of the nation's largest multihospital systems, such as Ascension Health, St. Louis, and Catholic Health Initiatives, Englewood, Colo.

I would quote the results if they were collected in one place. Based on this the only strong claim I would make is that increasing Medicaid eligibility is better than not doing so.
Also health care management might not know what words mean:

Verity saw bad debt drop 57% between 2013 and 2015, and unpaid deductibles are now the focus of collection efforts.

Unpaid deductibles aren't bad debt??? How does he know?

Recent studies have shown that there is a link between anxiety and intelligence and it is a positive one.

Scientists found that people who worry a lot do so because they experience "high levels of spontaneous activity" in the part of the brain that manages threat perception [...]

People with anxiety are sometimes responding to a threat that doesn't exist. But, the response means that their imagination is highly active. An active imagination keeps you safe from threats that other people might not pick up on.

The UK is guilt-struck about the depravity of Jimmy Savile, a serial paedophile, pederast and general all round rapist, yet whose activities were conducted barely out of the spotlight. Equally, Gary Glitter, a 70s pop star and paedophile is now reviled and hounded all around the world.

Yet, Jimmy Page was also a pederast, well known for his preference for 14 year old girls. Yet somehow escapes censure. I love Led Zeppelin with all my heart, but Page is a damaged and horrible person.

And there's Bill Wyman. A man who actually boasted of his teenage conquests in his autobiography, who wed a 15 year old girl when he was in his 50s. I think the thing that winds me up about him is that book, I read it much like a terrible car crash, you want to look away but you can't. He revealed himself to be proud and unrepentant, perhaps even unaware that repentance might be appropriate. A disgusting, loathsome excuse for a human being.

And now he has prostate cancer. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm a shitty person too, cos I thought it was a somewhat appropriate gift of the fates.

keep to the Fen Causeway

"Thanks. All of ours [kids] know how to shoot too. Even my 4-year-old gets jacked up to target shoot the .22."

That was Jamie Gilt, a well known social media gun fetishist, responding to a commenter on Facebook last Monday night, and bragging how she lets her 4-year-old son shoot and how excited he is by it. This is pretty common with Gilt, she often talks about how well trained she is and how well trained her kid is around guns. And because she's an attractive Florida country girl, and loves guns and posts a lot of pictures of herself posing with various hardware, along with support for Ted Cruz and various racist statements, she's got a large following of mostly Southern white male gun nuts who eat it right up. She runs the Facebook page Jamie Gilt For Gun Sense.

Yesterday afternoon a Putnam deputy sheriff saw a woman driving a crew cab pickup truck towing a horse trailer driving erratically. The woman was frantic and signaled the officer for help. Upon pulling over, the deputy discovered Gilt, shot through the torso. Seems she was on her way to a relative's house to pick up a horse with her aforementioned 4-year-old in the backseat. She had also, apparently, left her loaded .45 caliber handgun in the backseat. The "well-trained" child picked it up and shot her through the seat with it. No word on whether or not he was "jacked up" at the time.

God, as the man said, is an iron

quoted in full for those without FB privileges

keep to the Fen Causeway

For me the story is the picture heading the article:

I have waited 48 years - since that infamous summer of '68, when I was 25 - to see young progressives this engaged and enthused. Better yet, it is about something that actually has a chance of happening and would be excellent if/when it happens.

That is a LONG time to hold on and it has been a deep, dark night. May it not be a false dawn.


"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

But it's also true that much of the elite defense of globalization is basically dishonest: false claims of inevitability, scare tactics (protectionism causes depressions!), vastly exaggerated claims for the benefits of trade liberalization and the costs of protection, hand-waving away the large distributional effects that are what standard models actually predict. I hope, by the way, that I haven't done any of that; I think I've always been clear that the gains from globalization aren't all that (here's a back-of-the-envelope on the gains from hyperglobalization -- only part of which can be attributed to policy -- that is less than 5 percent of world GDP over a generation); and I think I've never assumed away the income distribution effects.

Furthermore, as Mark Kleiman sagely observes, the conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins -- but we now have an ideology utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one party, and with blocking power against anything but a minor move in that direction by the other.

So the elite case for ever-freer trade is largely a scam, which voters probably sense even if they don't know exactly what form it's taking.

Watch out, the authoritarians are coming!

That's been the alarm, after recent reports that scoring high in authoritarianism was the strongest predictor that someone would support Donald Trump. "Authoritarian" has some strongly negative connotations. So it's no wonder that anti-Trump pundits from Nicholas Frankovich to David Brooks have been quick to repeat this finding. What better way to equate Trump with Hitler?

But in our research, we find no evidence that Trump supporters are any more "authoritarian" (at least by common measures) than those who like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) or even Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Instead, Trump's supporters are distinctive in another way: They are true populists.

A very good analysis of what type of people are supporting which candidate. As Spock would say, "Fascinating".

keep to the Fen Causeway

Stonekettle station - Jim Wright - Brown shirts

n the 1920's a militia known as The Sturmabteilung, commonly called the SA or Brownshirts, was formed to provide "protection" for Nazi rallies. Their principle function was at first to keep protesters from disrupting Nazi political rallies, but the SA quickly expanded to intimidation through violence. The SA was composed of racists and anti-semites, thugs and brawlers, and nationalist fanatics determined to "take back" Germany for Germans and restore their country to its supposed former greatness. Elements of the SA disrupted the rallies and meetings of opposing political parties and predictably began a campaign of intimidation against elements of German society they deemed undesirable, such as immigrants, foreigners, gypsies, liberals, Leftists, unions, and in particular Jews. At first, they were unarmed, but very quickly the SA became the paramilitary branch of the Nazi party and their tactics evolved into open armed violence. In large part, Adolf Hitler was carried to power on the shoulders of the SA. Ultimately the SA gave birth to the Schutzstaffel, the infamous SS, which at Hitler's order turned on the SA and in a day of murder known as The Night of the Longs Knives purged it of any elements not fanatically loyal to the Reich.

Jump forward a century and remember the adage regarding those who forget history:

"Do you want to provide security protection to innocent people who are subject to harassment and assault by Far-left agitators? If so, you are welcome to join. That's the mission - to protect innocents who can't hire their own security guards."

That's the mission statement of The Lion's Guard, a militia currently forming to "protect" Donald Trump from "far-left agitators."

Lion's Guard said that their members would be unarmed, "but willing to forcefully protect people if need be. We are defensive, protective of innocents who are being beaten and harassed for their political views."

Except for that part were the only innocents beaten and harassed at Trump rallies are those who protest Trump's message. The ones Trump supporters have called leftists and possible members of ISIS and enemies of the United States. Except for that part where Trump himself has threatened to send his followers to disrupt the rallies of his opponents.

Just like the Stormtrumper who threatened me yesterday via email, these people seem to believe that the First Amendment applies ONLY to them and their candidate. More, they believe threats, intimidation, and violence are acceptable responses to anyone who opposes them.

For the last 80 years, people have looked at the Nazis and Adolf Hitler and the atrocities committed by that horrifying regime, they've boggled at how a democratic civilized country could devolve into murder and genocide and madness, and asked over and over "how could something like that happen?" When it was over, when the Third Reich was finally defeated at the cost of millions of lives and devastation on a scale that defies comprehension, even the Germans themselves had no answer. If you look at the films and interviews from that time, ordinary Germans are stunned, shocked, ashamed, repulsed, and sickened by what they had wrought. Many still are to this very day. And we still ask, how could this happen?

How?

Inch by inch. Piece by piece. Goon by goon. Thug by thug. Speech by speech. Rally by rally. Fear by fear. Hate by hate. Until one day, Germany woke up to find their country had been stolen by madmen who promised to make them great again in a thousand years of glory - but instead led them to ruin and disaster in an orgy of blood.

That's how.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Over and over.

The AJCongress -- a nearly century-old Jewish advocacy group whose operations have somewhat diminished in recent years -- on Thursday emailed out the results of poll about which presidential candidate its members think would be best for Israel. The email was titled "The Results Are In!"

At the top of the AJCongress list is Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, followed by a name that's trending online at the moment: "Donald Drumpf."

[...]

A couple hours after sending the email, the AJCongress issued a corrected version with a note saying, "The previous version of this email included an unfortunate and unintended spelling mistake. No offense was meant by it. We apologize for any confusion."