Long Game

Zoom out a little. Think of this latest skirmish, that ended tonight, as part of an endgame to a thirty years' fiscal war in American politics. Reagan began it, by betting that slashing taxes would spur growth; he was right and wrong. Growth really did happen in the 1980s; but he bequeathed a debt that is with us today, and that he tried only fitfully to fix on his watch. The early 1990s saw the country draw down that deficit, by continuing Reagan's tax hikes under Bush I and then Clinton, and thanks to a peace dividend. Clinton's eventual surplus was, alas, more mirage than reality, for it hadn't solved the long-term entitlement problem or the healthcare cost problem, and was inflated by the tech bubble. Bush II comes in and wreaks havoc. He doubles down on Reagan on taxes and declares that deficits don't matter, while adding one major new entitlement, two massively expensive wars and throws in a financial collapse as a goodbye present. The result of all this was a recession that helped metastasize the debt even further. This was what Obama inherited.

What then? I think the Grand Bargain is the final step

Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I'd had in the US. "It's more real," they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.

I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren't spitting, they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. "We Chinese think it's best just to get it out," a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it's disgusting that a westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.

"Last month I saw a kid shit in the produce aisle of our Chengdu Walmart," a young woman named Bridget told me.

If the effort succeeds — and, boy, is that a big if — the recently announced Biochronicity program could help us understand why cancer is so hard to beat, how stem cells self renew and why cells are programmed to die. In other words, it’ll be one of the biggest breakthroughs Darpa has ever had.

it’s clear that all life processes depend on some internal time keeping.

Darpa wants to find the master regulator, and then use that knowledge to develop “predictive models of molecular-timed events, cell-cycle progression, lifespan, aging, and cell death, response to stress, and useful treatment strategies and drug delivery.” The key word is predictive. Darpa is no longer content with biology as a descriptive enterprise, watching cells and enzymes do their thing. Now, it wants mathematical models and algorithms and theories to tell what they’ll do next.

1.  For nearly 100 years statism was on the advance in the US, and indeed in almost every country.

2.  In the US the period of growth of government started at least as far back as 1887 (the ICC) and continued until 1977, after which deregulation, free trade agreements, and MTR cuts kicked in.  In other countries one saw MTR cuts, deregulation and privatization.

3.  During the statism megatrend, the term ‘reform’ implicitly meant bigger government.  That’s how governments reacted to crises.  During the current (neoliberalism) megatrend, the tern ‘reform’ implicitly means less government.

The first category is “Scientific and Engineering Practices,” and includes such laudable concepts as ” Analyzing and interpreting data.”

The second category is “Crosscutting Concepts That Have Common Application Across Fields,” by which they mean things like “Scale, proportion, and quantity” or ” Stability and change.

Specifically, the two are discussing the situation in Bahrain, where the Saudis are backing a Sunni monarchy against a Shiite majority population that is considered a potential proxy of the Iranians.

The Saudis hope to reach an understanding that can contain the increasingly assertive Iranians, while Iran hopes that it can advance its position by forcing Saudi Arabia to accept it as a major stakeholder in the region’s security

When the euro came into existence it granted unlimited volumes of cheap capital to states that had no history of having access to moderately priced capital whatsoever.

North Korea has been sitting outside of the six-party format, and in many ways has been sending signals that it has no interest to come back into negotiations for well over a year.

one of the main reasons that North Korea looks to be restarting things now is they’re looking towards the future and they’re looking particularly towards next year which is their anniversary year for Kim Il Sung’s birth in the year they call Juche 100.

Newspapers and defense journals along the Pacific Rim and elsewhere are replete with foreign speculation on the future activities of a more internationally active and aggressive Chinese navy, to say nothing of more sober discussions of the constraints and limitations facing potential Chinese naval ambitions with a single carrier (for now) and no history or culture of carrier operations.

The attention on the Varyag is, in many ways, misplaced. China is historically a land power. Its biggest security challenges remain at home, across a vast territory that will continue to require large expenditures for manpower, equipment and transportation. China’s historical flirtation with a navy that travels far beyond its immediate neighborhood has been limited. Even the famous voyages of Zheng He could be called frivolous, rather than a serious attempt to dominate seas around the world or even the region.

Unlike neighboring Japan, China’s attempts to build up a navy to counter European influence proved ineffective, and the emergent Japanese navy defeated the Chinese fleet.

One regular offender is the cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer. It's a bulbous ring attached to the elegant double helix of the DNA strand. It latches on to the damaged parts of DNA and is replicated along with them, causing widespread damage. Once it gets started, it can grow until it takes over the system.

Photolyase floats around the body, looking for encroachment from the dark side. This enzyme powers itself up using blue light, and then shoots out an electron.

Although tea partier Mattos said she brings her grandchildren to see the manatees, she doesn’t see a point in the Save the Manatee Club. “If some of these environmental movements had been around in the days of the dinosaurs, we’d be living in Jurassic Park now,” she said. So, one is a fat, dull-witted, ponderous herd of creatures, and the other is the manatees. Got it.

This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly.

In a competitive marketplace, educators have incentives to serve each individual child to the best of their ability, because each child can easily be enrolled elsewhere if they fail to do so.

It’s easier just to feed children through the system on a uniform conveyor belt based on when they were born.

"A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush," according to Bob Fitrakis, columnist at http://www.freepress.org and co-counsel in the litigation and investigation.

SmarTech, a private company, had the ability in the 2004 election to add or subtract votes without anyone knowing they did so.