Long ago I used to be a rock critic. Then I was downsized, expired for oldness and not having the same tastes and attitudes as the more mentally limber.
However, I still get to vote in the annual Pazz & Jop Village Voice Critic’s Poll.
DD has posted previous Tea Party music ported to YouTube. However, this seems to take some kind of cake. Someone should immediately render an oil interpretation of the tableau, suitable for framing, postcards, and addition to the canon of American Gothic.
The comment at the top when I logged my view was fairly descriptive:
This is punk rock for old racists who have? been pissed off at the gov’t since they put an Irish catholic in the white house.
Sample lyric: “Sarah Palin, she won’t listen to their bunk/Sarah Palin’s coming south to hunt some skunk.”
If you’ve read DD stuff for the last few years you have maybe formed the conclusion that bioterror defense funding has been niche science welfare spending. And of virtually no benefit to the middle class or social good in the US.
“The Pentagon is scaling back one of its largest efforts to develop treatments for troops and civilians infected in a germ warfare attack after a $1 billion, five-year program fell short of its primary goal,” it reads.
“Even the heavy infusion of research cash and a unified effort by university labs and biotech companies from Boston to California were insufficient to break through limitations of genetic science, according to government officials and specialists in biological terrorism.”
Back in the old days of the war on terror — old days, I like that — great promises were made. Genetic technology would allow everything. The sky was the limit.
It was a hype job, a rush at the trough. Virtually nothing has come from bioterror research.
Anthrax vaccine work and a business war among the small company players in it for the entire piece of any pie involved in future formulations. A couple anti-botulism nostrums to stockpile. A ricin vaccine that has been in development for over a decade with taxpayer money propping up a company, Soligenix, that’s produced nothing.
What the Globe story shows is that the companies involved in bioterror defense are now rapidly scrambling to change the wording of their research descriptions. Soon they will all be rationalizing the need for continued funding by emphasizing their alleged capability to identify emerging disease and potential cocktails of deadly microorganisms — as if the latter actually exists somewhere out there.
It’s kind of like passing themselves off as souped-up high tech private sector mini-National Institutes of Health.
“Scientists initially set out to develop new medicines capable of attacking viruses that might be altered by terrorists to make them more deadly,” reports the Globe.
This was alway bullshit. In the last decade not a single terrorist has shown facility with germs in any kind of lab setting. Genetically altered viruses were and are fantasy for the purpose of this discussion.
“But after more than 50 research projects by more than 100 contractors — including biotech firms, pharmaceutical companies, and universities, including several in the Boston area — only two experimental medicines have shown promise,” reports the Globe. “And even those are far from being ready for limited clinical tests, according to project officials.”
The retooled Pentagon bioterror defense strategy still shows a great deal of delusional thinking. One cannot blame the institution too much.
The bioterror defense lobby is strong, always there with scare stories about how the pace of biotechnology is putting Pandora’s Boxes full of horrors within range of anyone puttering away in the garage or a cave.
The Globe:
The new focus of the program will be making a “cadre of investments that are able to take an unknown sample that may contain different agents, and be able to determine very quickly what is in there,’’ Rudolph said. “It is our intent to continue to grow this capability.’’
He added the ultimate goal will still be to someday develop therapeutic remedies that could treat someone infected with any number of deadly viruses — what the Pentagon called “one size fits all’’ or “one drug, many bugs.’’
Here’s a prediction you can take to the bank. No revolutionary advances in public health or the treatment of disease will come from any of this. That’s zero.
It’s still science welfare. And there will be no benefit to the middle class except for the relatively small number of jobs it sustains for the scientists and support staff involved in it.
“These are not going to be blockbuster drugs,’’ said one Pentagon official with candor.
It accurately limns the threat — or lack of one — posed by malevolent use of ricin.
A quick read shows the perceptive that there’s zero need for a ricin vaccine as the only at-risk people likely to benefit from it are those who are doing research on the ricin vaccine. And maybe the run-o-the-mill neo-Nazi survivalist kooks from the American fringe who are arrested every year for pounding castor seeds into a powder.
But the real challenge is the rise of China’s education system and the passion for learning that underlies it. We’re not going to become Confucians, but we can elevate education on our list of priorities without relinquishing creativity and independent thought.
That’s what we did in 1957 after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. These latest test results should be our 21st-century Sputnik.
Kristof knows because he’s been there. Like Tom Friedman.
The fancy and fine class, very often the opinion makers, are always in China. All truth can be found there. That’s just a fact.
Here’s Friedman from late last year:
“Well, folks, Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean tech.”
By making more melamine, exceptional coal burning and keeping the motor vehicles out of town when the world comes visiting.
I satirized it in this:
DD’s rule, perhaps a little like the ‘law’ about the appearance of ‘Hitler’ in any political argument:
The appearance of the word Sputnik or any reference to a Sputnik kind of moment in any argument signals the person who dropped it needs a pie in the face.
In other words, it means — at worst — the brain has stopped working. Or the person writing or saying it has run out time and needs to wind up with something hack and superficially gnomic-sounding.
The usage is intelligence insulting, among many things. It imagines the United States now is somehow, perhaps even only remotely, still the same place with the same powers the year after I was born.
That’s to laugh.
In 1957 the United States had much much stronger middle class. And it hadn’t deindustrialized. It was not an exhausted nation and not yet engaged in pointless and endless war in countries in which Americans have no interest or stake.
Yep, grade school education sure sucks in the US. So do many things in comparison to specifics taken from other locales.
Here’s a usage:
Watch out! The rocket has fired and the capsule separated! The Wall Street-engineered economic crash of 2008 was a Sputnik moment for the rest of the world.
File along with other great calls to resurgent achievement, gone until the next column runs:
The new ages of cyberwar have been coming for awhile — well over a decade. But they never arrive. Or they have in various ways, just not quite as billed and conflict remains pretty much as always. That is, one needs to make a computer program physically damaging.
Which is where Stuxnet has fit the bill.
Briefly, the received wisdoms, collected by the Times for a cracking good read, describes Stuxnet as actually causing Iran’s uranium centrifuges to tear themselves apart. That is, by taking over the controlling software and forcing an unbalanced operation while reporting that all was OK at the front desk.
The fly in the ointment, and apparently one weak link in Iran’s nuclear program, is the centrifuge in question, called the P-1, sold to Iran by Pakistan.
It’s a crap piece of highly-engineered kit required to work reliably under a great deal of physical stress. However, one doesn’t read this in the NY Times piece until we’re almost at the end of the story.
But the United States and its allies ran into the same problem the Iranians have grappled with: the P-1 is a balky, badly designed machine. When the Tennessee laboratory shipped some of its P-1’s to England, in hopes of working with the British on a program of general P-1 testing, they stumbled, according to nuclear experts.
“They failed hopelessly,??? one recalled, saying that the machines proved too crude and temperamental to spin properly.
The New York Times article reports as elegantly and with the same inarguable finality one might see or read from Alex Jones and his many exposes on conspiracy and international doings.
Weaving together the lore on Stuxnet, which has been building for months, it employs anonymous intelligence from unnamed sources. It tells of a plan — a collaboration of Israel and the US, to install their own P-1 centrifuge cascades so as to study the shortcomings of the Iranian production facilities. And eventually glomming onto the idea, a little serendipitously, that controller software could be subverted in an attack on them.
At which point, work went forward to put Stuxnet together and test it on an Israeli P-1 centrifuge cascade secretly installed at Dimona.
Now, here’s the thing: A named expert on Israel’s nuclear program told the times that “Israel succeeded — with great difficulty — in mastering the [P-1] centrifuge technology.”
So, reiterating, the P-1 is a crap centrifuge which needs a lot of work to sustain. It has a good failure rate all by itself. The United States could not make them work. But the Israelis, after a great deal of effort, did.
According to the New York Times story, the Iranians have had a great deal of P-1 centrifuge failure. Which might be expected after reading the material on the nature of the machine.
Circumstantially, the New York Times story, in sources and tone, attributes virtually all of it to Stuxnet.
Maybe it’s absolutely true. Or maybe only partially so. And perhaps the P-1 centrifuges have bedeviled the Iranian bomb program all along because they are rubbish, with or without state-operated malware added.
If some Iranian nuclear scientists could be persuaded to send material to WikiLeaks …
For current purposes it’s good to look at the story from the perspective that, as time goes on, it will grow in stature and mythic proportion. It will be cited time after time in every news story and paper on cyberwar ever written. And because of this it will have a continuing effect on secret military policy on the development of more malware cyberweapons, which will always be green-lighted, no matter how bad the ideas are.
I’ve argued before that there’s no deterrent to nations like the US or Israel tossing a cyberweapon at the world network. In this case, all the justifications are about stopping the Iran bomb program. But the art of virus-writing, even from its crudest days when done by kids, has always been loaded with justifications.
Ours will just be better. Or if not better just more secret and impossible to influence. Trust us. We’re responsible. And never bad international neighbors. Bad ideas with consequences unforeseen down the road never go to our heads.
If one believes all of the New York Times story there is also some good news in it. And it’s not necessarily the part about knocking out 1,000 centrifuges.
It’s that the development of Stuxnet, as reported, is beyond the capabilities of those who routinely write worms for criminal purposes. That coterie doesn’t have the resources to build something like a mock centrifuge facility and then test things on it.
However, since the history of malware distribution shows that whatever gets put on the world network gets to contribute its various bits and pieces to everyone else writing bad stuff.
The insulting spectacle of Tea Partiers self-validating by claiming common cause with Martin Luther King, Jr. is a regular event. Bizarre and inappropriate, the phenomenon reached its high water mark last year when Glenn Beck tried to cast himself as a modern day MLK.
That sure worked.
Anyway, now you can go on YouTube and easily find video in which miscellaneous Tea Party bigots drape themselves in MLK, just in time for the government-they-despise-so-much-instituted holiday. Like this marginal piece here.
Today, Ted Nugent has written a new WaTimes column celebrating the memory of MLK and going so far as to imagine, from his point of view, what the man might recommend were he alive today.
But Nugent has virtually nothing to say when he isn’t doing his usual shtick.
However, it’s more educating to sample from Ted’s actual daily thoughts from last year. Just to see how they might compare with the spirit of MLK.
And so, from this old DD post, random excerpts from Nugent’s appearance on the Alex Jones radio show on 7-9-10:
“[much deleted] while we crush the bad and the ugly of Barack Hussein Obama and his legions of pimps, whores and welfare brats.”
This, from an extended riff on the conspiracy mania — a joke in and of itself — that the Obama administration was going to take away the right to own guns:
“Sonia Sotomayor, you racist punk …”
“When and if these Mao Tse Tung fan-clubbers in the White House dare
continue down the road they are going and all hell breaks loose, I
am convinced that the majority of law enforcement and the majority
of military personnel will be on the side of we the people …”
After the last inflammatory bit flirting with the subject of armed revolt, Nugent hastily added a bit about going to the voting booth to enact a “turbo-charged awakening” of political change.
The next item is too flabbergasting. You can’t make up better satire.
The idea that candy can’t be made in America — too expensive (!) — so it must be done overseas, like in Pakistan — our best international pal in the whole wide world. So it can be made with lead because regulation doesn’t add to the bottom line there.
And the name of the candy. Well, just read …
The FDA announced that Candy Dynamics is recalling some of its Toxic Waste brand candy. Toxic Waste in Nuclear Sludge, made in Pakistan, has been found to contain elevated levels of lead that poses a threat of poisoning, especially for children. Toxic Waster is made by Candy Dynamics and under the Circle City Marketing and Distributing of Indianapolis, Specific Toxic Waste candies recalled include:
Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Cherry Chew Bar (UPC 0 89894 81430 6), Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Sour Apple Chew Bar (UPC 0 10684 81410 7), and Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Blue Raspberry Chew Bar (UPC 0 89894 81420 7). Each chew bar has a net weight of 0.7 ounces (20 grams).
To date no injuries or illness have been reported in connection with Toxic Waste candy. Toxic Waste tested with
dangerous lead levels of .24 parts per million. The FDA allowable lead content is .1 ppm. No other candy from Candy Dynamics or Toxic Waste brand is affected by the recall. Impact Candy requests that consumers not eat purchased candy and contact Eileen O’Neal, of Candy Dynamics at (317) 228-5012
Candy Dynamics specializes the production of extremely sour candy. Sour Candy Drums are designed to look like toxic waste oozing from a nuclear waste drum. Toxic waste comes in candy spray, soft chews, High Voltage and Short Circuit super sour gum. Other brands of very tart, luridly colored candy include Impact Confections, makers of Warheads. Often these kinds of candies are made in China or another Asian country. The concern with foreign made candy, particularly candy made in third world nations, is that the production standards may not be on par with FDA approved levels.
I am sometimes persuaded there’s absolutely no way to fix a country as scrambled and screwed up as the United States.
Circle City Marketing and Distributing doing business as Candy Dynamics, Indianapolis, IN, is issuing a voluntary recall of all Toxic Waste® brand Nuclear Sludge® Chew Bars, all flavors, Net wt. 0.7 oz (20 g) package. The product is imported from Pakistan.
A recent test performed by the California Department of Public Health has indicated that a lot (#8288A) of the cherry flavor of the above-listed product contains elevated levels of lead (0.24 parts per million; the U.S. FDA tolerance is 0.1 ppm) that potentially could cause health problems, particularly for infants, small children, and pregnant women.
The bad news is that Candy Dynamics won’t be destroyed by the scandal. They’ll just ride the storm out.
In a related matter, DD did postdoctoral work at the Penn State School of Medicine in Hershey, PA.
Yes, the famous Hershey. And — uh-huh– you could smell the chocolate in the air. And on many afternoons, you could smell peanuts being processed at the Reese’s/Hershey factory in the west part of town.
Between the medical school and Hershey chocolate, the middle class could earn a decent living in the place.
By now you know where this is going.
It was too expensive to make Hershey chocolate, the chocolate made in America, in America. So Hershey moved a lot of it overseas.
The next time you buy a package of Hershey’s candy kisses, take a good look at where they’re made before you put your money down.
Chances are, the answer is Mexico, not Hershey, Pennsylvania.
That’s because the iconic candy company closed its historic Hershey’s East plant in its namesake Pennsylvania town, idling some 600 Bakery Workers (BCTGM) members. There’s still another Hershey’s plant there, BCTGM researcher Matthew Clark, who tracks the candy company, told Press Associates.
“But the exodus from Hershey has been going on for a long time,” he adds.
Hershey’s departure from Hershey – a company town dominated by the candy firm and Hershey Park – is a symbol of the increasing trend of the outsourcing and offshoring of U.S. factory jobs. That trend has been increasing in the last decade, according to a new report, Outsourced: Sending America’s Jobs Overseas, published last month by Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
“They want to outsource, build plants in Mexico, shut down American factories and move stuff around,” Chocolate Workers Local 464 Business Manager Dennis Bomberger told a British newspaper, quoted in the report.
From Reuters, news that China is rounding up a new group of melamine manufacturers and salesman.
Years ago it was discovered China had become something of a melamine mill, the compound cheaply produced as an adulterant/substitute in animal feeds. The purpose was an old one — to push up protein determinations in feeds and foodstuffs without actually adding protein.
In the US, Chinese melamine production came to light when the compound was found contaminating pet foods, where it set off a chain reaction that resulted in kidney stones that killed animals.
Mao Li Jun ran a company, Xuzhou Anying, which claimed to have solved the problem of finding cheap protein for food stuffs. It advertised its solution, a white powder, on Alibaba. That white powder was melamine.
“[The] high price of protein feed it improves the cost and decreases the benefit, which results in the pasturage develope [sic] slowly,” he claimed. ‘ESB Biologic Protein Meal’ settles the tableau of the protein resource in China, it decreases the cost of feed and improves the integral benefit and boosts the pasturage integral development of China. So developing the item is very necessary in this form.'”
In the US, companies named ChemNutra and MenuFoods were principally responsible for distributing it into the pet food supply chain.
The melamine scandal destroyed ChemNutra. A criminal trial against the company, in news from 2009, is here.
The trial was considered to be a joke and its outcome — two misdemeanor convictions in a plea agreement — is discussed here.
MenuFoods was sued. News of the subsequent class action settlement — to the tune of $28 million — is here.
All things considered, just a standard last decade example of bad corporate behavior getting off fairly lightly. The melamine, after all, only killed pets.
In China, melamine was linked to adulteration of baby food milk products. And it did result in fatalities.
Chinese police have arrested 96 people for lacing milk powder with the toxic additive melamine, state news agency Xinhua said on Thursday, the same chemical that killed several babies in a milk powder scandal in 2008.
Last July, samples of milk powder found in northwest China’s Gansu and Qinghai provinces had levels of melamine up to 500 times the permitted limit, underscoring the lax enforcement of food safety in the country.
Among those arrested, 17 had been convicted, including two people sentenced to life in prison, Xinhua said, citing a statement from the State Council’s Food Safety Commission.
Thirty-eight people were awaiting trial, the report said, adding that Chinese authorities had seized 2,132 tons of melamine-tainted milk powder. The remaining 41 were “under investigation in police custody”. It did not elaborate further.
The latest crackdown identified “loopholes in the quality control system of dairy products”, Xinhua said, citing the statement.
The exposure of tainted milk products in poor and remote parts of China’s northwest has underscored the persistence of food safety problems that have alarmed consumers and sparked criminal scandals that led to executions and official sackings.
It should also be noted that China’s justice system gives life terms to farmers who ride toll roads with forged military license plates in order to avoid paying.
However, the Chinese government’s pursuit of the melamine criminals stands in stark contrast to the US government’s treatment of corporate businessmen who have been caught sickening people.
Mostly, nothing much happens to them. After they get scolded by Congressmen, it’s up to class action lawyers.
I’ve said that when Ted Nugent doesn’t use incivility and the threat of violence in his columns at the WaTimes he has nothing to say. Without these things he’s an empty fellow.
Which made his last column appear as sent in by a sleepwalker. Or mostly ghost-written by a frantic editor.
I say conservatives should turn up the rhetoric. When honestly identified, the hues and cries from the right are good for America, calls to get America back on track. Only those opposed to such an upgrade would find fault with such rhetoric.
——–
If liberals truly wanted to tone down the rhetoric, they could prove it by stopping the lying. But that won’t happen. Mr. Krugman and other liberals know that if it weren’t for a steady drumbeat of lies and deceit, the Democratic Party would cease to exist.
Let’s be honest. Those on the left don’t want to tone down political rhetoric. They only want to tone down conservative speech to make it more “fair.”
The Democrats are wrong on everything from energy to health care to taxes. What they despise is having their agenda exposed, dissected and ridiculed.
—–
And the conclusion:
In order to defeat liberals on the political-ideology battlefield, conservatives must be clear in purpose and then get after it by targeting (yes, I said targeting) and attacking Democratic nostrums that have weakened America. Expose, isolate and eliminate liberals and their fuzzy-headed policies …
Conservatives have liberals outnumbered and surrounded. Don’t play nice with liberal snakes. Don’t let them escape. Instead, do America a favor and crush liberalism.
Nugent is particularly irked by Paul Krugman, whose twice weekly column and blog must really push his buttons.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development …
As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not … Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.
Just for good measure, Nugent — again — from early last year at the WaTimes:
In the otherwise universally recognized perfection of the American experiment in self-government, where evil monsters like Che Guevara and Mao Zedong are routinely worshipped by the very imbeciles that these historical murderers would have slaughtered unhesitatingly, to a community-organizer-in-chief whose terminal rookie agenda is maniacally to spend our way out of debt and drop charges against clear and present criminal New Black Panther thugs threatening voters in Philadelphia, to black-robed idiots claiming Americans have no right to self-defense, where pimps, whores and welfare brats party hearty with the mindless fantasy that Fedzilla will wipe their butts eternally, ad nauseam – I am compelled to increase my crowbar swinging to new heights every day. I am the steel ballerina. Let’s dance.
It is not good enough simply to spotlight cockroaches: Ultimately, all caring people must always rally to the requisite stomping party. For us varmint hunters, these are truly the good old days of a target-rich environment with no bag limit. Let the stomping increase to a furious frenzy and cacophony of good over evil. May America create the splat heard round the world. My steel-toed boots are giddy with anticipatory delight. Stomp on into a voting booth near you.
If a business was run the way our bandit politicians have run our government, the owners of the business would be charged with any number of crimes. The same rules do not apply to the political punks who run our country and genuflect at the altar of inefficiency and graft. We need look no further than the robbing of the Social Security Trust Fund to know that dishonesty is the way of life in DC. I’m surprised Barney Frank hasn’t proposed a tribute for Bernie Madoff.
Notice how the left-wing bureaucrat punks in DC support throwing more good money after bad as the solution to our nation’s health care “crisis”? That’s standard operating procedure for left-wing numbnuts who believe Fedzilla is the answer to every problem in America.
These political robber barons will seemingly support anything that keeps feeding the bloated Fedzilla with our hard-earned tax dollars regardless that our dollars are outrageously wasted and that there is little to no accountability how our dollars are spent. The largest crisis America faces is not health care, the war on terror, or Nancy Pelosi’s crazy rants, but rather the lying, cheating punk politicians in DC who trample on our constitution …
Update addendum:
More of Nugent’s 2010 rant on not enough gun carrying US citizens is worth reprinting. This, coming at a time when there is obviously no gun control in the US. Politically, it has been a third rail, thank to the power of the NRA. And it is only the Loughner massacre in Tucson that makes it now possible to see minor current legislation to curb extended magazines moving forward.
Nugent:
Since the 1960s LSD-inspired goofiness of peace and love, I have always been convinced that the gun-control issue has been the tip of the culture-war spear. Why the peaceniks still deny the truth that more guns equal less crime, in spite of the tsunami of global evidence from every imaginable source, is one of mankind’s greatest mysteries …
More phenomenally stupid is the whole world’s denial of the plethora of statistics proven in John Lott’s book “More Guns, Less Crime,” in which the desirable condition of safer streets and communities with drastically reduced violent crime is accomplished most readily where more citizens not only have access to firearms but actually carry them daily on their persons.
From the ultrasafe streets of Switzerland, where every household has a real, honest-to-God full-auto-assault rifle and ammo on hand (and a proud national respect for their fellow citizens, mind you) to the multitude of jurisdictions across America where more concealed weapons per capita are issued, violent crime not only plummets, but personal-assault crimes such as rape, carjacking and armed robbery actually disappear in many instances.
And Nugent is not quite right about Switzerland, in a self-serving way. The reality is more complicated.
From Der Spiegel, three years ago:
It comes as a surprise to many to learn that the peaceful country has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world — lagging [only] behind the United States …
Able-bodied men have to serve in the military and are issued with assault rifles or pistols. They are allowed to keep their weapons and 50 rounds of ammunition at home during military service — which generally goes to the age of 30 or even longer — so that the army can be mobilized at short notice. Many men buy their weapons after they finish their military service, and the arms are often stored in unsecured closets, attics or cellars.
The new public mood is largely in response to a series of shootings involving army weapons. In a 2001 incident which sparked nationwide debate, 15 people died when a man opened fire with an army assault rifle in a regional parliament building in the small town of Zug, shooting 14 people and killing himself.
Around 300 people are killed in Switzerland each year in incidents — mostly suicides and family murders — involving army guns. According to a 25-country survey by the British-based non-governmental organization International Action Network on Small Arms, Switzerland’s total number of gun deaths, including accidents, in 2005 was 6.2 per 100,000 people — second only to the US rate of 9.42 per 100,000.
Gun advocacy in the US has rendered it impossible to research gun control law and statistics on the web. As anyone who tries to do it quickly finds out.
The US gun lobby has not only defeated all politicians but, in this matter, has also bested Google and all Internet search.
Note: The New York Times appears to be starting the move to put an unknown part of its content behind a wall. Readers may notice this if they access Paul Krugman’s opinion piece more than once from the same browser. At which point they are faced with a login prompt.
There is a (perhaps) temporary way around this.
It’s tied to your nytimes.com cookie for now. So if you run your browser in a program like Sandboxie, as DD does, you can simply exit when faced with the prompt and delete all contents in the virtual sandbox. That will destroy the cookie and, as far as the New York Times website is concerned, you’ll look like a new reader the next time you access the material.
Probably won’t work forever, though. And if that bit of information was too much to follow, never mind.
Anyway, imagine for simplicity that America and China are the only two countries in the world. And imagine that as consumer habits change, American spending falls by $400 billion while Chinese spending rises by $400 billion. Trade imbalance gone, right?
No, it’s not that easy. If US residents cut spending by $400 billion, most of that reduction — say 75 percent — will come in reduced spending on US-produced goods and services (even that Chinese pair of pajamas you buy at WalMart has a lot of US value-added in distribution and retailing.) So that’s $300 billion in reduced demand for US output. Meanwhile, a much smaller fraction — say 15 percent — of that extra Chinese spending will fall on US goods. So we’re talking about, say, a $240 billion net fall in spending on US goods and services; correspondingly, we’re talking about a $240 billion rise in demand for Chinese goods and services.
If that’s the end of the story, then the spending shift produces a depressed economy in America and major inflationary pressures in China.
What’s needed to make it come out right is something to make both American and Chinese consumers switch some of their spending toward American goods — something like a rise in the dollar value of the yuan, which makes Chinese goods relatively more expensive. So the redistribution of world spending and exchange rate adjustment are complements, not substitutes.
