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7:54 PMKNOWING YOUR ALLIES:
Sadr has been largely responsible for directing the wave of protests that have hit the Iraqi capital for the past two weeks. Demonstrations reached a boiling point over the weekend after Iraq's parliamentary ministers failed to hold a vote that would have approved new ministers who, unlike the current party-affiliated MPs, were technocrats.
The failure to vote sparked outrage among hundreds of thousands of Sadr's followers, who took to the streets in Baghdad and stormed the heavily fortified Green Zone, home to several central government buildings. Protesters briefly took over Iraqi Parliament and demanded an overhaul of the country's corrupt political system.
"While politicians played parliamentary games to preserve their lucrative patronage, thousands of supporters of the influential cleric Muqtada al-Sadr repeatedly took to the streets to demand change," according to a report from risk consultancy Soufan Group.
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7:51 PMTHE WoT, TRADE AND GOLF:
An Australian citizen believed to be a top recruiter for the Islamic State has been killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq, disrupting the militant group's ability to lure new fighters, the Australian government said on Thursday.
Attorney-General George Brandis said the United States had advised him that Prakash, who was linked to several Australia-based attack plans and calls for lone-wolf attacks against the United States, was killed in an airstrike in Mosul on April 29.
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7:46 PMTHE MOST DEPRESSING THING ABOUT REPLAYING 1992:
America is near full employment with 14 million jobs added since early 2010. Gas prices are cheap. Home prices are rising. The stock market is near record highs. And the economy has grown ... for seven years.
Is that a Clinton rather than a Bush will reap the Peace Dividend thanks to a billionaire Know-Nothing.
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7:04 PMBURIED ON THE CASH HEAP OF hISTORY::
The influx has pushed capacity to the limit, prompting hotels to sharply hike prices and raising questions about how Cuba will absorb additional visitors when scheduled U.S. commercial airline service starts later this year.
"With the increase in demand there have occurred problems with the confirmation of reservations and some irritation with delays at the airports, most of all in Havana," Minister Manuel Marrero said at the opening of an annual tourism fair.
Fidel is right, the UR's trade deal is an assault.
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6:49 PMHURRY ROBOTS:
Google's Self-Driving Minivan Could Bring Autonomy To the Rest of Us (Jack Stewart, 5/04/16, Wired)
Implementation of even the more rudimentary elements of Google's technology could save lives. Human error is the cause of over 9 in 10 crashes. Of those, inattention or distraction are responsible for 41 percent, and another third are caused by poor decisions. Any technology that can override those errors will make the roads safer.
Automatic emergency braking (AEB), sometimes called city braking, is already becoming widely available, and in the US will become near standard by 2022. The systems vary from one automaker to another, but the general idea is to have the car apply the brakes when it senses an impending collision.
Kid-hauling minivans aren't just worthy of extra safety technology, they demand it. A recent study from Virginia Tech shows that drivers increase their chances of getting into a crash by a factor of 10 if they're emotionally agitated. For a parent, trying to calm a screaming child in the backseat, active safety technology can be more useful than that rear seat DVD player.
Tesla has shown that a couple of radars, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors, plus a pile of software, can be combined to create an autonomous driving experience. The automaker's beloved Autopilot lets its cars follow road markings, maintain a set distance from the vehicle in front, and park itself. Those sensors are not revolutionary, but their integration, and software that takes the data from them and makes decisions, is.
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6:10 PMTHE BEST WE CAN HOPE FOR:
"Republicans find themselves in a deeply uncomfortable situation: they feel compelled to block a highly qualified nominee, offered as a compromise, because they want to let President Trump fill the Supreme Court vacancy," explains MSNBC's Steve Benen. "There are quite a few vulnerable GOP incumbents in the Senate right now, and this is a tough pitch for them to make to voters in an election year."
If the GOP-led Senate continues to stall Garland's nomination, they face two other options. If Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee, is elected, she could nominate a judge that Republicans dislike more than Garland.
Or Republican Senators could place their bets on Trump winning the White House. But with this bet comes another caveat: They must also hope that he appoints a nominee with strict conservative ideals. Because Trump is "not a reliable, consistent conservative," his nominee could be just as distasteful to conservatives as Mrs. Clinton's, if she were to be elected.
The Republican's sticky situation has not been lost on Mr. Obama, who revived his campaign for Garland's stalled nomination on Tuesday.
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4:10 PMTRUMP'S MESSAGE? "WHO NEEDS 'EM?":
Hispanics will soon surpass millennials as the group with the most spending power in the U.S., MarketWatch reported Monday. Morgan Stanley analysts found that income and population growth among Hispanics of all ages will push the group past millennials in terms of consumer spending in just four years. [...]
"The aging of the population and the rise of millennials will continue to impact the consumer landscape over the next five years," the report said. "However, the share of consumer wallet controlled by the Hispanic population will experience the fastest pace of growth, driven by the addition of 8.2 million people -- 52% of total U.S. population growth -- and above-average per capita income growth."
The Hispanic population in the U.S. hit 55.4 million in 2014, accounting for 17.4 percent of the country's total population, according to data from the Census Bureau. While fewer Hispanics are immigrating to the U.S. than in the past, their population is still projected to reach 106 million by 2050.
Hispanics are also one of the youngest groups of any racial or ethnic demographic with a median age of 29. Unlike other groups, nearly 60 percent of Hispanics in the U.S. are millennials or younger, the Pew Research Center said in April.
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4:04 PMPITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:
In its dairy market report for the week of April 25 to 29, the U.S. Department of Agriculture writes that "cheese vats across the country remain full in efforts to manage the plentiful milk supply....As stocks build, storage availability is becoming a concern." Phrases like "milk oversupply" and "substantial rises" are rife in the report, which notes that the United States has a total of 725.7 million pounds of "natural American cheese"--real cheese, not the processed cheese product, made in the U.S.A.--and total natural cheese stocks of a whopping 1.191 billion pounds.
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3:55 PMNO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:
No one in 2016 is really addressing the future as we are likely to experience it, and while that future has significant structural headwinds influenced by too much debt and an aging demographic, another heavy gust merits little attention on the political stump. I speak in this Outlook to information technology and the robotization of our future global economy. Virtually every industry in existence is likely to become less labor-intensive in future years as new technology is assimilated into existing business models. Transportation is a visible example as computer driven vehicles soon will displace many truckers and bus/taxi drivers. Millions of jobs will be lost over the next 10-15 years. But medicine, manufacturing and even service intensive jobs are at risk. Investment managers too! Not only blue collar but now white collar professionals are being threatened by technological change.
Nobel Prize winning economist Michael Spence wrote in 2014 that "should the digital revolution continue...The structure of the modern economy and the role of work itself may need to be rethought." The role of work? Sounds like code for fewer jobs to me. And if so, as author Andy Stern writes in Raising the Floor, a policymaker - a future President or Prime Minister - must recognize that existing government policies have "built a whole social infrastructure based on the concept of a job, and that concept does not work anymore." In other words, if income goes to technological robots whatever the form, instead of human beings, our culture will change and if so policies must adapt to those changes.
They were punishment:
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
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3:51 PMABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:
A surgical robot outperformed human surgeons in stitching the small intestines of pigs back together, researchers report.
Without any direct human interaction, the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) reconnected the intestines with sutures that proved more accurate, evenly spaced and durable than those created by human hands, the machine's developers said.
One of the quaint things about intellectuals is their naive belief that we grunts are all replaceable but they and their peer groups are not.
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3:44 PMALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:
Last Wednesday, the CBS chairman, Leslie Moonves, ducked into that night's taping of Stephen Colbert's "Late Show," and then joined Mr. Colbert in his office above the Ed Sullivan Theater. [...]
It was about whether they could pull off one of the most intriguing experiments in late-night television history; whether Mr. Colbert, who became a leading voice in American political satire by playing a fictional character on his Comedy Central show -- holding forth before a cable congregation of the converted -- could succeed as himself in the big broad tent of network television, whose commercial and corporate imperatives can be homogenizing.
His critique of liberalism was funny. His adoption of liberalism isn't.
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3:40 PMWHAT IF THE rIGHT GOT EVERYTHING IT EVER WANTED?:
This is how the map would look if Mr. Trump improved on his polling margin by five percentage points in each state.
He would win Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, but he would still lose the election.
It's America; you can't win running on isolationism, nativism, protectionism and anti-Semitism.
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3:25 PMOUR TRANSGENDER NOMINEES:
Donald Trump is an iconic System 1 candidate -- more clearly so than any party nominee in at least sixty years. Hillary Clinton is an iconic System 2 candidate -- as clearly so as any party nominee in the same period. That distinction may well end up defining the general election.
Let me explain. Psychologists, and most prominently Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, have distinguished between two ways of thinking -- fast and slow. Fast thinking is associated with the brain's System 1: It is intuitive, quick, and sometimes emotional. When you think that two plus two equals four, and when you immediately recognize a warm, smiling face, you are using System 1.
System 2 is deliberative and reflective. When you multiple 346 times 213, or struggle to fill out your tax forms, you are relying on System 2. If you are engaging in some kind of complex cost-benefit analysis, System 2 will be working hard.
What makes this fascinating that Democrats are typically the party of emotion, and therefore women, while the GOP is generally the party of thought, therefore of men. But Democrats have nominated the masculine candidate and Republicans the feminine. Of course, Republicans being more thoughtful will have an easier time voting for Hillary, whereas Democrats emotionalism will keep them tied to Hill.
