3/ Here's footnote 4: pic.twitter.com/bqUx8dOToR

— Polixenes (@Polixenes13) 4. Dezember 2018

Santa do snot egzist he is my dad wiv a fols beerd

Hop e this hellps

I used to be afew. I'm still not many.

For most of human history there were no borders in any recognizable modern sense. When you see the famous map of "Rome at its greatest territorial extent c. 117AD," or a map of medieval Europe, etc., you're really looking at an anachronistic approximation.

— Jacob Maccabacharach (@jakebackpack) November 26, 2018

Anyway, I think an interesting way of looking at the establishment of contemporary style borders is through the lens Marx used to analyze the enclosure of the commons.

— Jacob Maccabacharach (@jakebackpack) November 26, 2018

I don't mind - the Buzzcocks

Reality's a dream
A game in which I seem to never find out just what I am
I don't know if I'm an actor or ham
A shaman or sham
But if you don't mind, I don't mind

I'm lost without a clue
So how can I undo the tangle of these webs I keep weaving?
I don't know if I should be believing
Deceptive perceiving
But if you don't mind, I don't mind

I used to bet that you didn't care
But gambling never got me anywhere
Each time I used to feel so sure
Something about you made me doubt you more

How can you convince me
When everything I see just makes me feel you're putting me down
And if it's true, this pathetic clown'll keep hanging around
That's if you don't mind, I don't mind

I used to bet that you didn't care
But gambling never got me anywhere
Each time I used to be so sure
Something about you made me doubt you more

I even think you hate me when you call me on the phone
And sometimes when we go out, then I wish, I'd stayed at home
And when I'm dreaming or just lying in my bed
I think you've got it in for me, is it all in my head, is it in my head?

How can you convince me
When everything I see
Just makes me feel you're putting me down
And if it's true this pathetic clown'll keep hanging around
That's if you don't mind, I don't mind, I don't mind

"Cute aggression" is a superficial display of aggression typically uttered in response to young children and young, attractive animals. It's also an example of what would be called 'dimorphous expression,' which is a name given to what happens when someone expresses one emotion while feeling another, i.e., "cute" + "aggression." "Cute aggression" is a documented psychological phenomenon, but a recent study from UC Riverside suggests -- and this is what's new -- that there may be a neurological basis for the phenomenon as well.

[...]

In short, the study seems to offer evidence to affirm something resembling the following: you see a cute animal. You see a cute baby. Your brain rewards you so much that you feel overwhelmed. You express the opposite of that emotion to bring yourself back into balance. This leaves you in a more effective place to take care of a small animal or child.

What's the hottest gift this holiday season? An L.O.L. Surprise doll? A Nintendo Switch? Fortnite llama swag?

No, you fool. It's a Robert Mueller devotional candle.  

Our epoch is strangely selective when it comes to distinguishing between what is plausibly historical and believable in the Bible, and what seems merely mythic or utopian. Fundamentalist Christians show their faith that God created the earth in six days (on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC according to Archbishop James Ussher in 1650) by building museums with dioramas showing humans cavorting alongside dinosaurs, While deeming this literal reading of Genesis to be historical, they ignore the Biblical narratives describing the centuries-long struggle between debtors and creditors. The economic laws of Moses and the Prophets, which Jesus announced his intention to revive and fulfill, are brushed aside as anachronistic artifacts, not the moral center of the Old and New Testaments, the Jewish and Christian bibles. The Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25) is the "good news" that Jesus - in his first reported sermon (Luke 4) - announced that he had come to proclaim.

I've must admit I've got sick of all the noise around Muller, to the point where I thought it resembled the FireDogLake mania about Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame affair, which fizzled out into the most nothing-burger ever.

But in the last week...

keep to the Fen Causeway

This question is an empirical one: Does tribalism feed a deep human hunger that liberalism does not? Liberals, I think, give up too easily on this point. Defenders of the old liberal order are tired and jaded, it's true--who can observe the iniquities and false promises of modernity without a loss of faith? But the contention that Enlightenment liberalism's mojo has natural limits, and that illiberalism's mojo is inexhaustible, seems to me at best debatable [...]

[...] "American [intellectuals] think they are atheists," this grim man said, "but they are not atheists. In Romania -- there you found men who believed in nothing."

Compared with these nihilists, American liberals look vapidly chipper. When they peer into the existential abyss, they assure themselves that it has a bottom, just out of sight, and when they toss a penny into it they think their wishes will be granted. The real nihilism is daily in evidence by the Trump administration, which will tell not only noble lies -- the alleged sin of the George W. Bush administration -- but indefensibly ignoble ones, and which swaggers past all moral lines, both in policy and in electoral politics.

To ve fair, the Brits can do a good riot when the mood strikes them.

A man has been sentenced to monthly viewings of Disney's Bambi due to his involvement in a large-scale deer poaching case.

David Berry Jr, of Brookline, Missouri, was ordered to watch the 1942 animated classic on or before 23 December, 2018, then once a month during his year-long incarceration, the Springfield News-Leader reported.

Here's how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, "buying" from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.

[...] The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain's industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.

On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they "bought" them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup.

After the British Raj took over in 1858, colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system. As the East India Company's monopoly broke down, Indian producers were allowed to export their goods directly to other countries. But Britain made sure that the payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in London.

Fortune: Higher Rents Correlate To Higher Homeless Rates, New Research Shows

CNBC: Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: Is curing patients a sustainable business model?

Bloomberg: Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions: Life expectancy gains have stalled. The grim silver lining? Lower pension costs.

I. B. M., Happy men, smiling all the way.
Oh what fun it is to sell our products night and day.
I. B. M., Watson men, partners of T. J.
In his service to mankind-that's why we are so gay.

The short version is that somebody put up their documents - hacked or leaked - and the picture have emerged of a US/UK/NATO funded organisation with ties to intelligence services that under the cloak of a charity has been "countering Russian propaganda" by propaganda of their own.

So far their accomplishments appear to be getting a volunteer into the Sanders campaign, stopping an appointment in Spain, writing all kinds of "Russians are coming" articles and dissing Corbyn on Twitter.

The most comprehensive write-up I have found is this: http://syriapropagandamedia.org/working-papers/briefing-note-on-the-integrity-initiative

Anyone noticed any traditional media coverage of it yet?

The Trump administration sold its 2017 tax-cut reconciliation bill as a plan to boost American growth and American incomes by reducing, corporate taxes, transferring $2 trillion--equivalent to 10%-points of a year's GDP--of wealth to the upper class, thus increase incentives to save, and boost the flow of funds into private investment in one year. In the year after the tax cut was passed the program was projected to boost investment relative to baseline by 4%-points of national product and so boost the rate of potential output growth and thus of American incomes relative to baseline by 0.4%-points per year not by demand-side stimulus boosting spending and reducing unemployment but by supply-side stimulus boosting investment in America and America's capital stock. The program was supposed to make the U.S. 1% richer after 5 years; 3% richer after 10 years; 5% richer after 15 years, and so on.

"half the cuts came from social insurance programs." In DeLong's world, taking from the poorest is the Lord's work because every meal that a poor mother doesn't eat, every utility bill she can't pay, turns directly into more fiber optic cable and server farms.

— JW Mason (@JWMason1) 18. Dezember 2018

GOOGLE, v. To deceive (Slg. 1916 T.S.D.C. II.), to hoodwink.

Waldfogel followed up with another paper in 2002, showing on the basis of a survey of both holiday gifts and items consumers purchase for themselves that consumers' own purchases generate between 10 and 18% more value, per dollar spent, than items received as gifts. These estimates, Waldfold argues, support economists' faith in consumer sovereignty, place some limit on the reach of the behaviouralist critique of economics, and, in addition, confirm the substantial deadweight loss of Christmas. A 2006 paper by Lerouge and Warlop compounds the argument by stating that many buying decisions require predictions of another person's product attitude but consumers are often inaccurate predictors, even for familiar others. They provide evidence that target familiarity can even hurt accuracy in the presence of attitude feedback.

Again in 1993, John L. Solow wrote an opposite take titled "Is it Really the Thought that Counts?: Toward a Rational Theory of Christmas". While acknowledging that as a social institution, the exchange of goods as gifts is difficult to reconcile with the theory of rational choice, Solow argued that when individuals' utilities depend on others' consumption of particular goods, gifts of goods can be preferable to gifts of money. Solow's is therefore an externality-based argument, according to which gift-giving can indeed be a Pareto-superior equilibrium of non-cooperative individual behaviour. Altruism - defined in economic sense in the work by Beker (1981) - does not suffice to explain Christmas gift-giving, because it implies that cash is still optimal. The explanation, Solow argues, is to be found in the concept of paternalism (or "paternalistic preferences", as in Pollak [1988]), i.e. the notion that the utility of one individual can depend on the quantities of goods consumed by other individuals.

Each region set its interest rate for ease of calculation in the local system of fractions - Mesopotamia's sexagesimal (60-based) system, the Greek decimal system or the Roman duodecimal (12-based) system. To Heichelheim this seeming decline in the official Bronze Age rate from the 20 percent (1/60th per month) in the 3rd and 2nd millennia to 10 percent on Egypt and classical Greece, to 1/12th in Rome reflected the rising security of credit [...]

Babylonia's mīšarum acts have suffered from much the same belittling as those of Urukagina levied by Samuel Kramer and, in a similar vein, Stephen Lieberman complains: "The need to repeat the enactment of identical provisions shows that the mīšarum provided relief, but did not eliminate the difficulties which made it necessary." True enough, but he follows up by leaping to the value judgment that "What seems to have been needed was reform which would have eliminated all need for such adjustments, but the economic and political situation may not have allowed any such overall solution.

No economy in history has found such a solution.

Happy Black History D362 Y3

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

DEAR LOBSTERS: THERE IS A BETTER WAY

On Reddit, you can find a forum for "ex-lobsters," former fans of Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson who have become disillusioned by him. Many of them still admire Peterson in certain ways, but have realized that he is not quite what they thought he was. The discussions are worth browsing, because they show how people can become entranced by the peddlers of bad ideas, and how they can change their minds and develop more sensible and healthy worldviews. I find them encouraging, because their testimonials reaffirm my conviction that if leftists can articulate a clear and compelling vision, one that gives people fulfillment and hope, we can create a more humane world.