Tom Roche

This week Miles's panel takes the form of Jeremy Hardy, Angela Barnes, Sarah Kendall and Danny Finkelstein. The team discuss that leaky Brexit dinner, Diane Abbott's scrape with a Ferrari and the nationwide local elections. The kind of fun-packed week that might make Prince Philip reconsider and come back to the thick of the action. Producer: Richard Morris A BBC Studios Production

“It’s unbelievable that this many police officers came here to protect them,” Ashley Lloyd said. “They’re not protecting us.”

Lloyd, a Boston resident, expressed her frustration with the police after officers clashed with antiracist demonstrators over the weekend. A “free speech” rally in the city — which was tied to the “alt-right,” a conservative faction that espouses far-right ideologies grounded in white supremacy — turned out what police estimated to be between 50 and 75 people. Lloyd was among the estimated 40,000 counterprotesters who showed up. The numbers were overwhelmingly in favor of the antiracist demonstrations, but as the day progressed, counterprotesters still had reason to question if their city — and, in particular, its institutions — was behind them or the right-wing demonstrators.

As the far-right rally came to a close, however, the attendees needed to exit the city’s downtown area, which was swamped with antiracist demonstrators. The result was a tense face-off between some mostly peaceful counter-demonstrators and Boston Police Department officers in full riot gear on Boylston Street, where sporadic scuffles broke out. Set against the backdrop of racial tensions in Boston between law enforcement and people of color, some of the counterprotesters wondered whose side the police were on.

The BPD has a long-held reputation as a racially intolerant public institution. The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts found, in a study first published in October 2014, that the department stops black citizens disproportionately. The commonwealth’s Supreme Judicial Court cited that report when it ruled in September 2016 that black men running from Boston police have a right to do so and that the action of flight is not suspicious.

For the city’s black residents, the ruling did not come as a surprise. “[T]he black community has been screaming about this forever and no one cares,” Roxbury organizer Jamarhl Crawford said in a 2012 interview with the Boston Phoenix. And a July 2016 poll found that 32 percent of black Bostonians believe the city’s police treat minorities unfairly.

The distrust that black counterprotesters held for police was evident throughout Saturday. At one point, Boston hip-hop artist Oompa confronted a man wearing a Republican Party T-shirt. She later recalled telling the man that wearing the shirt was “violent,” and that his presence was a threat to her community. Police intervened and got between the two, but with their back to the Trump supporter. Oompa told police that the positioning meant officers saw her as a threat and were protecting the right-wing activist.

“Your back is to him, because you’re protecting him,” Oompa said to a white officer. “If your back was to me, it would mean you have my back. Your back ain’t to me.”

After the crowd dispersed, Oompa told The Intercept that the police behavior at the rally showed a double standard for different ideologies. She cited police behavior at demonstrations against white supremacy, Nazism, and fascism as evidence of different priorities. “The people who oppose those protests, they’re in such close proximity to us,” said Oompa. “There isn’t that same kind of protection.”

The rally, which was planned in July, originally featured a number of controversial right-wing figures as speakers. A prior event in May had a hard right-wing tilt and drew members of Proud Boys, a far-right men’s organization, and tea party Republicans. Far-right figures, such as Augustus Invictus and Proud Boys head Gavin McInnes, both of whom who have made anti-Semitic comments in the past, were expected to speak at last weekend’s revival, but dropped out of the rally.

Permits for the right-wing rally had been issued on July 13, according to the Boston Free Speech organization’s Facebook page. But after violence at a white nationalist gathering on Aug. 12 in Charlottesville, Virginia, left an antiracist protester dead, Boston city officials made clear they were not in favor of the event.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said that the city rejected the rally’s message. “We don’t want you in Boston,” Walsh said in a press conference following the Charlottesville violence. “We don’t want you on Boston Common. We don’t want you spewing the hate that we saw yesterday, and the loss of life.”

The demonstration went on nonetheless, and far-right rally-goers began to gather in the morning at the Parkman Bandstand in the west of the Common. Police barricades surrounded the rotunda, and another ring of barricades was set up around the perimeter of the building’s footprint.

The level of police protection struck Oompa as excessive. “They are not only on a platform with a barricade,” she said, “they have a secondary barricade and multiple police around to protect what’s happening there.”

The demonstration ended before 1 p.m., as attendees were escorted by police off the rotunda.

After removing them from the bandstand, police corralled the group into a utility building next to the Central Burying Ground on the southeast corner of the Common near the intersection of Boylston and Tremont streets. The rally-goers were then loaded into police prisoner transports for extraction.

Meanwhile, a large crowd had assembled on Boylston outside of the building’s exit.

Dozens of riot police arrived on the scene at approximately 1 p.m. from a staging area on Charles Street, to the east of the Common. By about 1:30, Boston, Massachusetts state, and other jurisdictions’ police had opened up an exit through which to extract the right-wing demonstrators. The route down Boylston to John F. Fitzgerald Surface Road, however, was blocked by protesters.

Rinaldo Del Gallo, a self-described progressive activist from Lenox, Massachusetts, and a scheduled speaker for the event, was in one of the transports. Facebook Live video from Mark Jackson, a Wakefield, Massachusetts, man, shows Del Gallo and a number of rally attendees in the back of the van sweating and discussing politics. “The temperature went up a lot and the fan wasn’t on” in the back of the vehicle, said Del Gallo. He added that requests for air went unheard and that the group in the transport were “asphyxiating.” (The police declined to comment on their tactics.)

Outside of the vehicles, the riot police began pushing the crowd back toward Tremont Street. A bottleneck formed and people were pushed toward the intersection by police swinging batons and using the clubs to shove protesters out of the way.

“Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” yelled demonstrators.

The police moved forward until they were faced with a standoff at the intersection. A group of demonstrators, mostly black men, stood in front of police with their hands raised. After a few tense minutes, the police moved forward again, hitting demonstrators and arresting them.

The back and forth of the police moving forward and engaging in standoffs with protesters continued for three blocks — along with the clashes. Counter-demonstrators, still mostly people of color, raised their hands, stood in the way, and continued to call for the police to make the rally-goers walk. Police repeatedly attacked protesters, and the crowd threw a few projectiles at them.

By about 2 p.m. the prisoner transports broke through the crowd and made their way down Essex and out of downtown.

Despite the skirmishes, the police quickly remarked that they had kept violence at bay. “From a security standpoint, it was by and large successful,” said James Kenneally, a media relations officer for the Boston Police Department, who added that 33 arrests had been made.

Police Commissioner William B. Evans agreed that the protests were largely peaceful in a press conference later that afternoon. While “99.9 percent” of the protesters were there for the right reason, Evans said, there were some people who wanted to cause trouble.

Evans added that the extraction went well. “There was a little bit of a confrontation,” he said. “I think you’ve seen that public order platoons came out. That was the plan, as you know, I was hoping we wouldn’t have to bring them out, but I thought they did a good job moving that crowd.”

However, Boston resident Ashley Lloyd said police were too aggressive with protesters. And the notion that the police were expending their resources to protect people with a hateful ideology while detaining counterprotesters was something that she, and others, found especially distasteful.

“There were a lot of people who weren’t doing much that were arrested today,” said Lloyd.

The “free speech” rally attendees, on the other hand, were pleased with the police protection. Organizer John Medlar posted on his Facebook page that the department “literally saved our lives” and that he couldn’t thank them enough. Del Gallo put the blame for the street clashes squarely on protesters for not clearing a path for the police. “To me, that’s a kind of violence,” he said.

Yet counterprotesters said they were exercising their right to speech and standing up for their city. Tony Massey said he was born and raised in Boston and came out to counterprotest to protect his community. “We have to be here,” said Massey. “This is our community.”

Lori Childs, a counterprotester from Rockland, Massachusetts, told The Intercept that pushing the rally-goers out of the city was a clear win and a “shot heard round the world.”

“Many revolutions have started in Boston,” she said.

For Lloyd and other black demonstrators, the police response was uncalled for and indicative of a disproportionate response. “Their actions today, to me, were unacceptable,” said Lloyd, “for us, as a community, unacceptable.” Lloyd stressed that she was not opposed to the police in general, but that their behavior in pushing and striking people demonstrating against the far-right crossed a line.

As far as Oompa was concerned, it was just more of the same. “For the police to … look at me like I’m the threat, it’s a constant narrative,” said Oompa. “And that shit ain’t going to change.”

Top photo: Riot police respond during a “free speech” rally that was met with thousands of counterprotesters on Aug. 19 in Boston.

The post Boston Police Protected Far-Right Rally-Goers, Clashed with Black Counterprotesters appeared first on The Intercept.

Tommy J Curry thought forcing a public discussion about race and violence was part of his job. It turned out that people didn’t want to hear it • Read the text version here

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I talk to veteran union critic Mike Antonucci about what’s next for unions, whether charter school teacher organizing is *a thing,* and whether he has any advice for teacher union heads Randi Weingarten and Lily Eskelsen Garcia…

Jennifer Berkshire: You’ve been predicting that it’s only a matter of time until the Supreme Court delivers a crushing blow vs. public sector unions. This interview has barely started and your powers of prediction are already being borne out. What happens next?

Mike Antonucci: Essentially agency fees [which require public employees who choose not to join a union to instead pay a fee to the union] will be banned regardless of what state you’re in. There’s no question it will be momentous change, but as long as there is collective bargaining it won’t be *the end of unions,* as some have claimed. I’ve used Florida or Nevada as the model for what public sector unions will all look like post-agency fee. Heck, before their recent problems, the Alabama Education Association was the dominant force in that state’s politics. So I don’t want to downplay it, but I think both sides are somewhat overstating the effect it will have externally. Internally there will have to be belt-tightening. That’s where we’ll see the real fireworks.

Berkshire: I want to dwell for a moment on the name of the gentleman at the heart of the case that now appears to be headed to the Supreme Court. It’s Janus, which is also the Roman god whose two faces look to the past and the future. This strikes me as a perfect metaphor for the state of unions right now: both stuck in the past, unable to adjust to the changing nature of work and workplaces, yet in many ways more necessary than ever.

Antonucci: The unions that we have now haven’t changed in any significant way since the late 70’s, and this is especially true of the public sector unions. They’re working in a world that no longer exists. I’ve written a lot about the lack of input from younger teachers and millennials in the teachers unions. The union is sincere about wanting to get more of those members into the leadership, and yet the paradox that I always see is that those teachers have different priorities, different ways of looking at things and different things that they want from the union. Some people are going to want to set up their own conditions of employment. They feel comfortable setting a value on their own labor and going to an employer and saying: *this is what I’m worth and this is what I want.* A lot of the economy works that way now. Other people are going to need representation of some sort, whether it’s a union or some other kind of agent. Some of them will bond together to make a larger group with unified interests so that they can negotiate as one to get what they want. All of those things will continue to be true into the future.

Berkshire: I’m going to offer up some Kimmy Schmidt-style relentless positivity here. Don’t unions also have an opportunity right now to play a positive role and speak on behalf of individuals and institutions that are under attack? I’m thinking, for example, about how unions in cities including Boston have been out front on behalf of immigrant and undocumented students.

Antonucci: There’s a fine line to walk here and I’ve seen this go back and forth. You want to be A) a professional association B) a collective bargaining representative and C) a social justice movement. The standard view is that we can be all three of those things. But not everyone wants the union to be all three of those things. A lot of them want the union to be one of those things at the expense of the other two and that’s where you run into trouble. So you can go out there and say *we are a social justice union. These are the issues we really care about and we’re going to go out there and push for them.* That gets you all your social justice people on board but you end up alienating members who are saying *look—I’m paying you money to represent me against the horrible school district I work for. I don’t want you out there marching for immigration when you should be in here protecting me.* Other people go the other direction. They want to know why the union is spending so much time fighting for reduced benefits, crumbs at the bargaining table, when we should be out there marching for various causes. I think maybe there’s a middle ground, but from where I sit I think it’s more divisive than the unions let on.

Berkshire: It seems like everyday there’s another story about charter teachers, like these teachers at a Sacramento network overseen by Michelle Rhee, who are unionizing for the very same reasons cited by these teachers in New Orleans, these teachers in Los Angeles and these teachers in Philly. But you have a grievance with this line of thought, so to speak, largely because you insist that there isn’t a trend.

Antonucci: It’s all a matter of context. I mentioned the other day that people get all hyped up about a DC charter school with about 30 teachers petitioning for a representation election, while a 955-teacher bargaining unit in Indiana decertified NEA and no one says a word. There are a few other factors at play as well. The obvious one is that as the union attitude toward charters grows increasingly hostile, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade charter teachers to join. As unions become weaker, they become less appealing for charter teachers to join. Finally, charter operators can greatly influence how unionized the sector becomes by moderating the size of individual networks. Unions would love to organize Walmart or McDonald’s workers, but can’t do it store by store. The bigger a charter school or network is, the more cost-effective it becomes for a union to organize it. Unionizing 30 teachers at a time is like trying to scoop out Lake Michigan with a bucket.

Teachers unions have to accept that charter schools are part of the landscape and if they don’t organize the teachers and help them get them to the same level as teachers in district schools, the whole thing is going to fall apart. As far as charter school advocates go, they’re always worried. I’ve had charter school people call me lots of times over the years and ask for my advice on how they keep the union out of their schools. My advice has always been the same and it’s not what they want to hear. You don’t keep the union out, your employees keep the union out because they’re happy. Happy people don’t say *we really need a union here.* They form unions because they’re unhappy and they need protection and the unions provide that. I don’t think the situation is any different than it was two years ago or five years ago. But the argument that the numbers have changed doesn’t stand up to the statistics that we have.

Berkshire: You describe your website as a *listening post monitoring public education and teachers unions.* Here’s your chance to put down your spy gear and offer up some advice for the unions you’ve been monitoring for so long. What would you tell Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, or Lily Eskelsen Garcia of the National Education Association, to do differently if you had the chance?

Antonucci: It’s really hard for me to answer that question. I look at what I do as descriptive rather than prescriptive. I feel comfortable describing what I see and interpreting it in a certain way but I’m very uncomfortable saying *seeing this situation, this is what should be done.* I think a lot of people do that without any real knowledge of the consequences or the unintended things that could happen. Having said all that, I think if there were one thing Randi and Lily need to do, it would literally be to turn over some of their power to some sort of assembly or group or larger board of directors that includes various organized groups, so that you have more like a parliament rather than just this hierarchical organization. I think what needs to happen is that there needs to be more of an input from various viewpoints, especially from places that are traditionally underrepresented: rural areas, brand new millennial teachers. But it needs to be formalized. Today what you have is people kind of informally getting together. Even the Badass Teachers Association is still an informal structure that a lot of people belong to. But what they really need is something that constitutes an opposition party or several opposition parties so that they have some real democracy going on. They have kind of a fetish for consensus. *If everyone agrees it must be good.* But everyone is agreeing who is sitting in the room. Maybe there are some people who haven’t been let in the room.

Berkshire: If I close my eyes and forget for a moment that you’re wearing a fedora and holding a magnifying glass, I could almost imagine that I was listening to, say, Karen Lewis speaking. The leaders of the social justice caucuses that have been popping up in various cities are basically saying the same thing about the unions needing to be more democratic and representative.

Antonucci: There are people behind the push for social justice unionism, and there’s real enthusiasm, but when it comes to transforming that huge governing structure, it just doesn’t happen. I’ve seen more change in the past five years then in the past 20 because a lot of these *dissidents,* if that’s what you want to call them, are more organized within the union than they’ve ever been. They’re not just a voice in the wilderness. They’re winning presidencies, getting control of boards of directors. The icon is Lewis in Chicago, but there’s also Alex Caputo-Pearl in Los Angeles, and Barbara Madeloni in Massachusetts. They’re not all on the same page together, but all of them are *anti-union-establishment* people. They’re not your traditional union officers. But unless they coalesce around a national agenda, that could just fade away.

Berkshire: I’m imagining you as a youngster, organizing your toys into a union, then systematically exposing said union’s flaws. Is that how it all started?

Antonucci: I actually started out as a military historian. This was back in the early 90’s. I wrote for publications having to do with military history, intelligence and diplomacy. I wasn’t making enough money so I started writing for anybody who had work for me. You probably understand that…I got work with a small political newsletter called Inside California that is now defunct. My primary job was tracking legislation as it worked its way through the California Assembly and the Senate. That was before the Internet, so I literally had to go down to the stacks in the legislative basement everyday and pick out stuff that I thought was interesting and write a column about it. I wrote about all kinds of things: recycling, property rights. The California Teachers Association was a big player in the capital in those days and when I started writing about them I got a lot more interest than in anything else I was doing. I didn’t know anything about unions at the time. I didn’t start out saying *I want to write about the unions and be critical of them or investigate them.* I could just have easily written about HMOs or Anheuser Busch. To use a cliche, market demand drove it.

Mike Antonucci is the director of the Education Intelligence Agency.

And while you’re here, check out the latest episode of the Have You Heard podcast on a not entirely unrelated topic: Buying Influence: Big Money and School Board Elections. 

A lunchtime conversation about James Foreman Jr.'s acclaimed new book on race and criminal justice, which traces the zero-tolerance approach to crime and drugs back to some unlikely origins. Speakers: James Forman, Jr., Khalil Gibran Muhammad. (Recorded: May 08, 2017)

As the Middle East continues to become more topical to American and European audiences, a need for textbooks to teach the history of the region has become urgent. Some such textbooks take a topical approach, others use a chronological narrative.…

When she was 30, Suzy Hansen left the US for Istanbul – and began to realise that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does • Read the text version here

There is a recurring theme in public discussions, seemingly embraced by everyone from Steve Bannon to columnists at the New York Times and Washington Post, that we should use protectionist measures to try to keep China from overtaking the U.S. as the world’s leading economic power. This effort is both incredibly wrongheaded and doomed to failure.

In terms of it being wrongheaded, the people doing the China bashing don’t even understand that they are being protectionist. Heather Long tells readers in the Washington Post:

“The real issue is that the Chinese are pirating American ideas and technologies. In the 1990s and early 2000s, people were worried about China illegally copying movies, music and books. The stakes are a lot higher now as the world's top economies compete on groundbreaking technologies in cloud computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and gene editing. Whoever controls these technologies will dominate global business — and more.”

Okay, great diatribe here, but let’s try some serious thinking instead. What exactly makes them “American ideas and technology?”

I know, we say so. But once an idea comes into the world or technology is developed, it is really there for the taking. We have rules on patent and copyright protection that say they are “American,” but why should China or anyone who believes in free markets give a damn?

Bannon, Long, and others want the United States to get tough with China (trade war!) to make it honor our protectionist rules on ideas and technology, but there is no obvious reason that most of us should go along with this crusade. Suppose we sit back and let China continue with its evil plans. In a few years, they will be flooding the world with low-cost cloud computing, robots, airplanes and who knows what else? The horror, the horror!

Read More ...

Before Trump's wall, there was Polk's war for the Mexican territory.

The FARC peace accord is a historic victory for Colombian society. But the struggle to build an urban left strong enough to take on the country's powerful right remains a daunting one. Today's guest is Forrest Hylton, the author of Evil Hour in Colombia. Check out a great article from Forrest here https://www.academia.edu/26907051/The_Experience_of_Defeat_The_Colombian_Left_and_the_Cold_War_that_Never_Ended And also Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia from our supporters at University of California Press http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520293939

Adam Smith traces Ernest Hemingway’s brutal, brilliant short story - from its birth in gangster-era Chicago, through its Hollywood afterlife as a noir classic, to its strange status as Ronald Reagan’s last movie.

Ernest Hemingway wrote his short story ‘The Killers’ in 1926. Two hitmen enter a small-town lunch-room. They have come to kill an ex-boxer who has double-crossed someone. The boxer is warned, but doesn’t run.

Hemingway captures the American man at a moral crossroads. Should he follow the code of the boxing ring, where a man proves himself, and go down fighting? Or should he grab the easy money and throw in his lot with the gangsters?

Hollywood loved it - and so Adam traces how a colourful cast of characters turned this short, sharp story into two very different movies.

The first, in 1946, is a black-and-white noir classic. It was the brainchild of Mark Hellinger, a producer who was all too friendly with real-life gangsters like Bugsy Siegel. It made the names of its new stars, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. But its main screenwriter - Hemingway’s friend and fellow boxing fan John Huston - went unsung.

The next, in 1964, was much gaudier. At the heart of this version is a truly bizarre scene. Ronald Reagan, his acting career on the slide, reluctantly agreed to play a violent crook who is pretending to be a legitimate businessman.

And yet this hinted at the pasts of the producers of this movie. They too had long-time links with the gang world, stretching right back to Al Capone’s Chicago.

It was meant for TV but was deemed too violent. Especially as it featured a scene queasily similar to the assassination of President Kennedy, which happened on the second day of shooting. And the sniper? Future President Ronald Reagan.

And so finally Adam explores how this failing actor ended up playing a role that catches the delicate moral line between playing by the rules and doing whatever it takes to get rich. Just as he was about to launch his career as a political megastar.

In this episode, Steven Nadler discusses Benedict de Spinoza's unique reason-centric conception of what it is to live a good life and be free.

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The headlines have never been worse. But an increasingly influential group of thinkers insists that humankind has never had it so good – and only our pessimism is holding us back • Read the text version here

For 10 years, Nasa has been flying over the ice caps to chart their retreat. This data is an invaluable record of climate change. But does anyone care? • Read the text version here

When it comes to critics of globalization with standing in the mainstream of the economics profession, few are better than Dani Rodrik. Nonetheless, when it comes to laying out the indictment of the path pursued over the last three decades in a Washington Post interview even he largely accepts the story that the basic story is that “globalization” has some specific direction attached to it.

The point here is that globalization, meaning the greater integration of economies across the world, could have been designed an infinite number of ways. The way it was designed was intended to redistribute income upward, with those at the top of the income distribution using their political power to make changes that enhanced their wealth and power. The upward redistribution was not an accidental outcome of a process of economic integration: it was the purpose of this process.

I will restate some of the points I have made thousands of times before. (See my book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer [it’s free]) To start, we didn’t have to make removing trade barriers in manufactured goods a central focus of trade deals. It would be every bit as much a step toward greater integration if we had focused on removing professional licensing barriers to make it as easy as possible for doctors, dentists, and other highly paid professional to train to U.S. standards and practice in the United States. This would have provided enormous gains to consumers in the form of lower costs for health care and other services while redistributing income downward, since these professionals are almost all in the top 5 percent and often top 1 percent of the income distribution.

Read More ...

• Emacs Lisp:
  • Command to mark single packages for upgrade
  • el-patch: Future-proof your Emacs Lisp customizations! (Reddit)
• Emacs development:
  • Response to the emacshorror.com post on make-temp-name
  • Continued work on possibly using a Gitlab private install for continuous integration testing
  • NEWS file:
    • The arguments LOCKNAME and MUSTBENEW of ‘write-region’ are propagated to file name handlers now
    • New face ‘header-line-highlight’
    • Show number of errors in compilation-mode mode-line
    • Allow async command output buffer to be shown only on output
    • dired-do-delete: Allow to delete dirs recursively without prompts
• Org Mode:
  • What are the best packages / plugins for org mode?
  • Which help forum? (Or, where do the cool kids hang?)
  • org-parser: parses org-files into structured datatypes (Reddit)
  • Generating a word cloud using GNU/Emacs and org-mode (2015)
  • org mode dot emacs
  • Hide :PROPERTIES: drawer
  • New iOS org mode app available
  • Realized that org mode is a rabbit hole
• Coding:
  • Fence Edit
  • ANN: highlight-function-calls-mode (Reddit)
  • Any good Emacs extensions for Java programming?
  • dotnet.el interact with .NET Core CLI
  • Magit:
    • Magit Tutorial – Bisect (Reddit)
    • Magit: Git in Emacs – Grumpy Gits SG 2016 (Reddit)
• Other:
  • Useful packages
  • Rcirc Menu
  • Am I misunderstanding eyebrowse?
  • checking publications with emacs (1:13)
  • demo-it recording
• New packages:
  • amx: Alternative M-x with extra features.
  • cfml-mode: Emacs mode for editing CFML files
  • cftag-mode: Emacs mode for editing tag-based CFML files
  • company-terraform: A company backend for terraform
  • dotnet: Interact with dotnet CLI tool
  • eg: Norton Guide reader
  • exotica-theme: A dark theme with vibrant colors
  • flycheck-popup-tip: Display Flycheck error messages using popup.el
  • hasky-stack: Interface to the Stack Haskell development tool
  • helm-lastpass: Helm interface of LastPass
  • highlight-function-calls: Highlight function/macro calls
  • himp: Automatically hide imports/documentation
  • jump-tree: Treat position history as a tree
  • kaleidoscope: Controlling Kaleidoscope-powered devices.
  • kaleidoscope-evil-state-flash: Flash keyboard LEDs when changing Evil state
  • lms: Squeezebox / Logitech Media Server frontend
  • neato-graph-bar: Neat-o graph bars CPU/memory etc.
  • ob-crystal: org-babel functions for Crystal evaluation
  • org2web: A static site generator based on org mode – renamed from org-webpage
  • outline-toc: Sidebar showing a “table of contents”.
  • pelican-mode: Minor mode for editing Pelican sites
  • rimero-theme: Theme with a dark background suitable for UI and terminal usage.
  • shrink-path: fish-style path
  • vc-msg: Show commit information of current line
  • windwow: simple workspace management
  • yasnippet-snippets: Collection of yasnippet snippets
  • zephir-mode: Major mode for editing Zephir code

Links from reddit.com/r/emacs, /r/orgmode, /r/spacemacs, Hacker News, planet.emacsen.org, YouTube, the changes to the Emacs NEWS file, and emacs-devel.

Past Emacs News round-ups

Carla Pestana’s new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017) is a rousing look at a transformative moment in Caribbean history. Pestana details the various political, economic, and religious factors that…

Following Venezuela’s vote for a new constitutional assembly this week, many are warning that the country could become a fully fledged dictatorship.

With Trump, Mexico is the symbol and source of so many things that are wrong with the United States. Oftentimes, these stories told about Mexico in the United States aren’t just wrong but serve to obscure the true source of our shared problems—which, more often than not, are both countries’ ruling classes. Today's guest is Christy Thornton, a professor of history and international studies at Rowan University, and soon to be fellow at the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Transformations at Harvard. Thanks to our sponsors at University of California Press.

The usually sensible Brad DeLong is very unhappy with those who oppose the agenda that has passed for globalization over the last three decades. He argues that people are foolish for believing that globalization has had a major impact on employment and the distribution of income in recent years. I'll take the side of Brad's "fools" in this matter.

First, Brad is well aware that the economy has operated well below full employment at least since the collapse of the housing bubble, I would argue this has been the case for almost all of the period since the collapse of the stock bubble in 2001. But he attributes this to a simple failure of the government to run full employment policies, rather than the large trade deficits we saw develop following the East Asian financial crisis in 1997.

While Brad is right, the government could maintain full employment by running much larger budget deficits, as he is well aware, that does not appear to be politically feasible. Even among Democrats, very few are willing to say that we should have larger budget deficits to bring the economy to full employment and some even insist on balanced budgets. There is no need to talk about Republican ideas on stimulus here.

It's also worth noting that the costs of being below full employment are disproportionately borne by disadvantaged groups in the labor market, especially African Americans and Hispanics.

Anyhow, if the political reality is that we will not have full employment fiscal policies, does it take a "fool" to argue that big trade deficits are a real problem? The cost of the shortfall in demand that we have seen over the last decade almost certainly exceeds $10 trillion by now and it is enduring, as we have seen lasting reductions in capacity, as Brad has written about himself. And millions have seen their lives and families disrupted by long periods of unemployment. Should we not worry about this damage from the demand shortfall created by trade deficits because there is in principle an economic fix, even though everyone knows it is not politically feasible?

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The daughter of the emperor Theodosius I, Galla Placidia successfully navigated the tumultuous politics of the late Roman Empire to rule as regent for her son Valentinian III. In Rome’s Christian Empress: Galla Placidia Rules at the Twilight of the …

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The system that runs the ride-sharing company Uber doesn’t just link up passengers and drivers based on price. It also has to connect the two based largely on where they are geographically. It is, says Nobel laureate Stanford economist Alvin E. “Al” Al Roth, a matching market.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Roth explains to interviewer David Edmonds some of the ins and outs of market matching, starting with a quick and surprisingly simple definition.

“A matching market is a market in which prices don’t so all the work,” Roth details, “So matching markets are markets in which you can’t just choose what you want even if you can afford it – you also have to be chosen.” But while the definition is simple, creating a model for these markets is a tad more complex, as Roth shows in offering a few more examples and contrasting them with commodity markets.

“Labor markets are matching markets. You can’t just decide to work for Google – you have to be hired. And Google can’t just decide that you’ll work for them – they have to make you an offer.” And like say university admission, matching markets require something to intervene, whether it be institutions or technology, to make this exchange succeed. In turn Roth himself helped engineer some high profile matches in areas where the term ‘market might not traditionally have been used: kidney donors with the sick, doctors with their first jobs, refugees with asylum, or students and teachers with schools. Or even the classic idea of ‘matchmaking’ – marriage.

Roth turned to game theory to help explain and understand these markets, and his work won he and Lloyd Shapley the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Roth has always had an eye on the real world implications as he pioneered market design, and as the Nobel Committee outlined:

Lloyd Shapley studied different matching methods theoretically and, beginning in the 1980s, Alvin Roth used Lloyd Shapley’s theoretical results to explain how markets function in practice. Through empirical studies and lab experiments, Alvin Roth demonstrated that stability was critical to successful matching methods.

Roth is currently president of the American Economics Association, and sits as the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University. He is also the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.

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For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

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The post Al Roth on Matching Markets appeared first on Social Science Space.

08-04-2017 (Photo: ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules Twitter: @BatchelorShow To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima (Asia/Pacific/Perspectives) by Charles Pellegrino. I have travelled with Pellegrino to Japan to visit survivors of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and to consult with officials and historians there. Among that community he is well respected and considered an important voice for the history of these events. Pellegrino combines intense forensic detail—some of it new to history—with unfathomable heartbreak. The author unflinchingly chronicles these most devastating events in Japan, the only times nuclear weapons have been used against human beings, and begs us to hold hands and to pray that it never happens again. A must read for anyone with a conscience. (James Cameron, director, producer, engineer, and explorer) By far the best book I have ever read on the subject. . . . No one I know has ever articulated more fully, more accurately, and more effectively the essential nature of the atomic bombings. A great book—a potential game-changer in the struggle to eliminate nuclear weapons. (Steven Leeper, Hiroshima Jogakuin University, former chair of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation) The book opens with imagery that leaves one speechless. Pellegrino is a poet at heart, a poet with a Japanese soul. (Francis Kakugawa, poet, Hiroshima family member) Drawing on his considerable scholarly skills as well as his poetic sensibility, Charles Pellegrino has greatly enlarged our understanding of the singular tragedy that was—and is—Hiroshima. The pages themselves seem to weep, drenched as they are in poignancy, passion, and a salutary measure of unbearable truth. (James Morrow, author of Shambling Towards Hiroshima and This Is the Way the World Ends) I just finished reading the book again. Each time I take the journey, the words leave a stronger impression—the most important piece of literature written about the hibakusha (the exposed) since John Hershey’s Hiroshima. (Paule Savinio, author of From Above) Charles Pellegrino’s writings have provided critical information, particularly on the first twenty-four hours after the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima. This information has added significantly [to our] knowledge and understanding about the medical and pathological events of the early period after the nuclear event. In turn, this information has allowed the development of a plan that could potentially save thousands of lives if another nuclear explosion, similar to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, occurs. Our military believes that this is inevitable. (Norman Ende, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Rutgers, New Jersey Medical School) Pellegrino fills this fascinating work with dark revelations, incredible imagery, and unforgettable characters. With a scientist's eye for detail, the author sets the record straight about what actually happened. So forget what you thought you knew about the August 1945 atomic bombings and their aftermath. This book is the definitive account. (Bill Schutt, American Museum of Natural History) During my forty years as a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, including thirty years of collaboration with Charlie Pellegrino, I have always found him to be a careful, thoughtful, imaginative, and honest researcher. I was involved in R&D on applications of fission and fusion nuclear energy [for] nuclear rockets, and Charlie and I collaborated on a next step: Interstellar probe designs based on anti-matter propulsion. (James Powell, Brookhaven National Laboratory) Let's hope this book touches the hearts of the many and that such extreme methods of societal control are finally eliminated. . . . A monumental work. (Roy Cullimore, founder and president, Droycon Bioconcepts) Charles Pellegrino's unique forensic archaeological approach . . . should be required reading for all those making decisions of war. Despite pas...

On Jacobin Radio, UCLA historian and coeditor of Catalyst Robert Brenner joins Suzi to discuss the state of the US economy, mainstream politics, and neoliberalism. How are today's political earthquakes connected to the economy, and what can we expect from changes in US economic policy? What do the proclaimed health of the unemployment rate and stock market mean for working people?

It’s not just a populist backlash – many economists who once swore by free trade have changed their minds, too. How had they got it so wrong? • Read the text version here