“Proving them wrong”: After raising minimum wage, California has more fast-food jobs than ever Salon
Contradicts a hair cutter's assertion that a restaurant in her mall closed because California raised the fast food minimum wage to $20.
I've noted previously that Rubio's restaurants in California closed, not because of that minimum wage increase, but because private equity encumbered them so much their loan payments meant no such raise would be possible.
© by Mark Dempsey
For me, today’s “aha!” moment came when I finally understood that Americans vote for the guy (or gal) they like, not their policies. This explains a lot. It even explains why I’m frequently angry at public policy decisions (and I tend to focus on facts) while most people I meet are angry at other people (damn Trumpers! Stupid Democrats!). Tribal identity trumps facts all over the board.
One recent example: Kamala Harris is (at this point) pretty much a blank slate, yet the media’s boundless enthusiasm for her remains persistent, echoing a stage-managed convention that neglected to mention she couldn’t even win her own state when she was a presidential candidate in the previous election. The attention is on likeability, not actual policies, in most of the marketing campaigns the major parties now emit.
Donald Trump was likeable because he wasn't liked like conventional politicians. He was (pro wrestling term) a "heel," not a "face." That became likeable when people decided Washington D.C. was so corrupt throwing a disruptor like Trump into it was constructive. Sure, it's a tantrum, but understandable if it's not reasonable.
The problem with this dynamic is that public policy is important. It is the only way to solve systemic problems. And likeability, not facts, does not make for sensible policy. It makes for delusional thinking, especially if it’s successful.
© by Mark Dempsey
Historically, humanity has not treated truth-tellers kindly. Here are a few examples. The good news is we’re improving.
Pythagoras and Irrational Numbers
Here’s a graphic proof of Pythagorus’ famous theorem about triangles:
Pythagoras had a lot of other mathematical observations like the harmonic relationships between musical notes, even projecting that last relationship into the heavens as the “music of the spheres.” It was also his firm belief that all numbers were rational–expressable as a fraction.
His beliefs were as much religion as math, and that was reflected in his treatment of heretical Pythagorians. One of his followers–Hippias–observed that a triangle with sides measuring one for a and b would have a hypotenuse (c ) of the square root of two–a non-rational number. The Pythagoreans killed Hippias by throwing him over a cliff.
I’d suggest humanity has become a little less brutal than this when we disagree.
Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo
Kepler lived when the world believed Ptolemy's theory that the cosmos was geocentric–planets and the sun revolved around the earth in crystalline spheres, attuned to Pythagorean harmonies. He began to doubt this when a comet appeared to go through the crystalline spheres.
Copernicus published his hypothesis that the solar system centered on the sun after his death, and Galileo publicized it after he observed planetary motion (and moons) with his telescope. Kepler’s calculation that the planets moved in ellipses rather than circles or spheres laid to rest the ideas common in his time.
Galileo contradicted a Biblical passage with his gentle suggestion that (possibly) the solar system was heliocentric. For his trouble, he spent his later years under house arrest after he apologized for telling the truth. Heliocentric advocates were burned as heretics, however, so humanity has only made partial progress in treating truth-tellers, although it lionized Newton’s revision rationalizing the heliocentric model, based on Kepler’s calculations.
Max Planck
For those who think “those guys were ancient or medieval, we don’t ignore truth-tellers today!”... Not really. The early 20th century attempted to resolve problems in Newtonian physics, and no one more successfully than Max Planck. His hypothesis was the “quanta” of “quantum mechanics.” Essentially, energy comes in small packets, not continuously, as Newton thought. Planck famously tried to get his physics professor colleagues to adopt this new standard, without much success. His evaluation: “The truth never triumphs, its opponents simply die out. Science advances one funeral at a time.”
The truth is seldom as persuasive as "getting along and going along."
This video is Tucker Carlson interviewing some siblings qualified to comment about the US health crisis (50% of children have chronic disease, life expectancy is declining, etc.) One sibling was a physician, the other worked with the food giants to make sure ultraprocessed food was ubiquitous. Both quit to campaign for better, healthier food and metabolism.
One culprit in this crisis is the notion that profit excuses all behavior, no matter how bad. It's not bad enough that health insurers profit from denying coverage, now food companies press the credentialed guardians of our health system to insert disease into everyday life. They've been very successful, and, as the Deans assert in the interviews, they are the direct descendents of the tobacco companies. Addiction leads to profit!
Several groups of physicians have documented the food problem(s) for decades now: Dean Ornish is one. Here are some others: pcrm.org. Or try drmcdougall.com
The “whole foods, plant-based diet” is what they promote. They have documented many cases of (type 2) diabetes, heart disease, etc. that have reversed once patients’ diets change.
Update: I'm having second thoughts about the anti-vax excuses promoted, perhaps legitimately in this video. I'd bet they can be an illegitimate excuse to avoid useful vaccines.
To see the background of the current Myanmar play in the "Great Game," this video is really essential.
[Commenter]: Froghole August 12, 2024 at 9:52 am
I am afraid that I found the first half of this presentation to be less than satisfactory. I don’t have the time to go through it comprehensively, but would note:
The Burmese speaking population are not “Gurkha”, as seemed to be suggested at one point: they are likely an admixture of the original aboriginal population, Tibeto-Burman peoples, Yellow River peoples and other Austro-Asiatic elements.
The presence of the Islamic Rohingya in the Arakan long ante-dated British imperialism, and was attested in the mid-15th century. It seems that relatively more Indian migrants to Burma came from the Madras presidency than Bengal presidency, and Mr Kirk is surely correct to note that the intrusion of ‘kala’ (caste peoples) especially in the non-covenanted elements of the bureaucracy was a major spur to dacoity an the growth of Burmese nationalism. What he does not appear to mention is that stock British stratagems, such as the substitution of British Indian property systems (which were themselves highly complex) onto a country like Burma where much property was held in common, was disastrous. The virtual evisceration of the Burmese nobility also meant that the Raj was less insulated from unrest than in, say, Bengal – where the zamindari were lightning rods for much local disaffection.
The first Burmese war with the EIC (1824-26) was chiefly due to the consequences the Burmese invasion of the Arakan (1785), Manipur (1813) and Assam (1816). Fugitive Arakanese and Assamese launched raids from British India (without any state sanction), which provoked retaliation. Calcutta would not hand over the ring-leaders (who would have been liquidated). Bodawhpaya (king of Burma, 1782-1819) thought British rule needed to be extirpated from India, so launched an invasion of Bengal in 1823. That naturally provoked a reaction by Amherst (who had been warned by the home government not to increase the size of British territory – i.e., the costs to the EIC, after the manner of Wellesley and Hastings between 1798 and 1823). The war was certainly very expensive in men (most of whom died from disease) and money, and almost doubled the EIC debt, but it most certainly did not bankrupt Britain (since those debts were a charge to British Indian taxpayers) – as Mr Kirk appears to indicate – or the EIC, which lost its trading monopoly in 1834 largely for other reasons. The scale of the floating debt *might* have reinforced the determination of Fort William, the court of directors and board of control to resolve India’s debts with China through more aggressive means, starting in 1839.
Burma was not detached from India until 1937. Mr Kirk seems to suggest that it occurred in the late 19th century. The decision to include Burma in India was natural from an administrative perspective, when Burma was annexed in stages, but made ever less sense as time progressed owing to Burma’s rather different development under colonial rule. Drain theory has a long provenance (Naoroji and Dutt), but there was arguably a drain from Burma to India, insofar as Burmese taxpayers were underwriting the redemption of debts incurred by the EIC in advancing its rule across the Indian subcontinent through frequent warfare. The 1937 transfer had an ironic outcome. Prior to 1940 the full costs of the Indian Army were borne by Indian taxpayers; it was agreed in 1940 that its overseas deployments should be borne by taxpayers in Britain. The following year Japan conquered almost all of Burma, and the reconquest of Burma became largely a charge to the British taxpayer, and so accounted for a great part of the sterling balances which the UK owed to India after WW2. Had Burma remained within British India, Britain’s war debts would have been significantly lower, and the burden on independent India proportionately greater.
Churchill’s opposition to Burmese independence was all of a piece with his opposition to Indian independence, but it had more of an emotional edge because his father had been secretary of state for India at the time of the annexation of Upper Burma by Dufferin, and was therefore a major part of the reputation of his father which he tried to uphold (he was his father’s own biographer).
Tom Driberg’s role was, at best, marginal. There seems to have been an unwarranted amplification of the account provided in Francis Wheen’s 2001 biography (from which the salacious details may well have been drawn).
The account of Reginald Dorman-Smith’s restoration and his supercession by Hubert Rance seems somewhat about-face (Mr Kirk mentions Dorman-Smith at one point).
British rule was indeed oppressive for Burma, but mainly not for the reasons discussed. See here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/burmas-economy-in-the-twentieth-century/366FDAAD6B54D933CB6A1CF36C2F0122 for a relatively recent discussion. Burma is, of course, rich in raw materials, which is why British predation was more pronounced than in some other colonies, but the cost of that predation was not commensurate with the cost of retention relative to: (i) the strength of the Patriotic Burmese Forces (and their adjuncts) relative, for example, to the Malayan Communist Party (Malaya’s rubber earnings being key to the sterling area in the period c. 1945-55); and (ii) the costs of reconstruction.
Froghole amends his initial post:
Sorry, I should have mentioned that Bodawhpaya did not launch an invasion (Bodawhpaya being dead!), but his heir Bagdiyaw did so in substantial continuance of his grandfather’s policy of rolling back British rule from the land of the Buddha’s birth and witness. There were, of course, a number of other contributory factors. It was therefore widely perceived as a defensive war, or at least to some extent.
Not so subsequent wars with Burma. The 1852 war was all of a piece with Dalhousie’s controversial expansionist policy (his ‘doctrine of lapse’ being a major factor in the explosion of 1857), and the 1887 war was partly a mop up, and partly – as Mr Kirk rightly notes – a defence of British interests in upper Burma against France.
From John Ganz
"...assassinating Julius Caesar could never work: the world itself was changed; this one particular individual cold be done away with, but his type of rule was here to stay… The Hegelian repetition has occurred. 'Trumpism' isn’t confined to the person of Donald John any more than Caesarism was confined to the person of Gaius Julius. It’s the way things are now. Cynics who would gladly see democracy dead and buried like to say, 'politicians, they’re all the same.' They now have a point.
"I still believe Trump is the worse of the two options, the harder edge of this politics of despair that we must do our best to mitigate… perhaps removing Biden wouldn’t work either, just as assassinating Caesear didn’t. This is not an adventitious thing. It’s systemic. The revolution has already taken place."
Update: Chris Hedges interview confirms this.
