These weren’t your everyday Americans who came out to support Bernie Sanders on Tuesday.

The self-described democratic socialist kicked off his long-shot run for the White House in his adopted hometown of Burlington, a lakeside city full of characters who might not have passed the pre-selection process for Hillary Clinton’s tour of round tables.

And while Sanders, the state’s independent US Senator, may be way behind in national presidential polls, in Burlington, he’s a local hero.

In the afternoon, a “people’s assembly” of hundreds of Sanders supporters gathered in City Hall Park, where dreadlocked guitarists played in the morning and patrons browsed at the nearby Hempest, which advertises itself as the largest organic hemp product store in the world.

—Jonathan Topaz
It’s Not Your Everyday Americans at Bernie Sanders’ Kickoff Rally

Note: I get the impression that Topaz actually likes Sanders a lot. And at least he’s covering him. I think this style is just God mandated in the Village.

The latest entrant in the Mistakes Were Made sweepstakes regarding C-Plus Augustus‘ blundering in Iraq is journalistic giant — and stenographer to the powerful — Bob Woodward, who stopped by Fox News Sunday this weekend because he is a big-time Beltway ‘ho who doesn’t care what kind of riff-raff leaves the money on the dresser these days. Anyway, Bob wants to assure us that the leadership of the late Avignon Presidency were babes in the woods.

Woodward: “I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.” …

The fact remains that a lot of people inside and outside government — in fact, most of the actual military and diplomatic experts in the field — told the neocon fantasts in the administration exactly what was going to happen if it decided to “kick over the hornet’s nest” in Iraq. These people were ignored (The Future of Iraq project at State), marginalized (Hans Blix), or actively destroyed (Eric Shinseki). There was a reason for this. The reason was that the people who were talking to Bob Woodward wanted to deceive the nation to get what they wanted.

On 7 October 2002, C-Plus Augustus gave a speech in Cincinnati. In that speech, he laid out his fanciful case for war in some detail. Because Bob seems to be floundering a bit in the swamps of history these days, let’s lend him a hand, “The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program… Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.”

Uh, no. The great body of evidence “indicated” no such thing. This was simply the story they fed to Judith Miller, who then returned the serve to them so Dick Cheney could nail the putaway in front of a gullible Tim Russert on TV. Bob seems to believe that a campaign of deception and trimming is not a “lie.” I had nuns who would have beheaded him with a window pole for that kind of “purpose of evasion.”

—Charlie Pierce
Jive Talking: Bob Woodward’s Credibility Finally Hits The Ocean Floor

A favorite tactic of the credit-card industry is to offer customers zero-interest rate loans on transferred balances. Now you might think that banks were competing hard to drive down the excessive cost of borrowing incurred by many credit card holders for whom borrowing via their credit card is their best way of obtaining unsecured credit. But you would be wrong. Credit-card issuers offer the zero-interest loans because, (a) they typically charge a 3 or 4 percent service charge off the top, and (b) then include a $35 penalty for a late payment, and then (c), under the fine print of the loan agreement, terminate the promotional rate on the transferred balance, increasing the interest rate on the transferred balance to some exorbitant level in the range of 20 to 30 percent. Most customers, especially if they haven’t tried a balance-transfer before, will not even read the fine print to know that a single late payment will result in a penalty and loss of the promotional rate. But even if they are aware of the fine print, they will almost certainly underestimate the likelihood that they will sooner or later miss an installment-payment deadline. I don’t know whether any studies have looked into the profitability of promotional rates for credit card issuers, but I suspect, given how widespread such offers are, that they are very profitable for credit-card issuers. Information asymmetry strikes again.

—David Glasner
Is Finance Parasitic?

Our [capitalist] friend, up to this time so purse-proud, suddenly assumes the modest demeanor of his own workman, and exclaims: “Have I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labor of superintendence and of overlooking the spinner? And does not this labor, too, create value?” His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles. Meanwhile, after a hearty laugh, he re-assumes his usual mien.

—Karl Marx
“Have I Myself Not Worked?”

Every year sees a craze for some new solution to the teaching enigma, an endless series of flamboyant arcana. The worst extravagances of privatdozent experimental psychology are gravely seized upon; the uplift pours in its ineffable principles and discoveries; mathematical formulae are marked out for every emergency; there is no sure-cure so idiotic that some superintendent of schools will not swallow it. The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child.

—HL Mencken
“The Educational Process” in A Mencken Chrestomathy — Originally in The New York Evening Mail, 23 January 1918

On March 1st, 1954 eight months to the day before the Japanese premiere of Godzilla, the United States set off its first hydrogen bomb. It happened in the Marshall Islands — tiny islands that have been passed back and forth between sundry European powers for hundreds of years — until the Japanese took them over after Word War I. During World War II, they changed hands once again when relentless American bombing raids decimated the population, ravished the countryside, and forced the Japanese to relinquish control. From that point on, the US military took to using the Marshall Islands as a nuclear proving ground. All told, 67 nuclear devices were detonated there — including the first H-bomb. In 1956, the year that Godzilla was exported to American movie screens, the atomic energy commission declared the place by far the most contaminated place in the world. And it was practically at Japan’s backdoor.

The scientists responsible for the world’s first H-bomb weren’t 100% certain that it would explode correctly. Best case scenario, it would explode with a force a thousand times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Worst case scenario, nothing at all. Setting aside the irony of what constituted “best case” and “worst case” in this situation, the upshot was that the Japanese public was told to stay away from the island in question, but weren’t given an explanation why.

The crew of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru — that’s “Lucky Dragon Number Five” to you — figured that they were being extra clever by heading out to troll for tuna. “There’s no competition!” they congratulated each other. Then there was a flash in the sky, like a second sun. The light was so bright, it could be seen as far away as Okinawa. The Lucky Dragon was so far from the blast, they didn’t hear its accompanying thunder for another eight minutes. It was clear to them that they’d made a mistake. But the consequences were now impossible to outrun. They pulled in their nets, stowed their catch, and returned to the mainland as quickly as possible. They were sick. The radio operator, a fellow named Aikichi Kuboyama, would die from radiation sickness. And let’s be clear: Kuboyama received a lethal dose of radiation on March 1st, then spent nearly seven months slowly dying — eventually passing from this world on September 23rd. With his dying breath, he begged, “Please make sure that I am the last victim of the nuclear bomb.”

The Japanese press noted that as the first person killed by the H-bomb, he was Japanese — just like the only humans killed by A-bombs.

—David Kalat
From Commentary on Godzilla

Body cameras are already in use in some police departments across the country, and those departments have not changed their stated or actual missions. Body cameras won’t solve police brutality. They will be used to justify how police already serve their own interests. After all, body cameras don’t address the real problem, which is police themselves.

—Anonymous CopwatchNYC Activist
Body Camera Guidelines No Panacea

I think that people overestimate the value of money in politics. I think that there is a threshold effect; that is to say, you need a minimum amount to be competitive. And I think up to a certain point, in any given race, there’s enormous value to each additional dollar that is raised, because it will be spent efficiently in increased votes. But I do think that there is a point at which it levels off and at which point each additional dollar doesn’t really help very much, if at all. I think that there’s also a downward point at which you have too much money, and you actually start alienating potential voters by running too many ads, doing too much stuff that just alienates, irritates them, so you actually end up being worse off…

I think campaign consultants basically know this, but there’s an enormous bias in the system. That results from the fact that basically campaign consultants make their money, by running as many ads as you can possibly raise the money to run. I’m not sure how many contributors really understand how the system operates.

See, what happens is, these consultants, they own the advertising companies that buy the advertising time and so they get a commission of like 15 percent on every dollar of advertising that a campaign buys. The more advertising that they buy, the more money that goes into their pockets. So it’s in their interests to keep buying more and more advertising, long past the point at which diminishing returns have set in. I’m not sure very many contributors understand this; and also I think candidates are just sort of conditioned to believe that more is always better. Advertising is something you can do pretty easily these days. You can cut an ad today and have it on the air tonight. It’s something you can always do right up to the very last minute that you think might help and probably won’t hurt. So there’s always tremendous pressure inside the system to keep doing more and as long as there’s somebody out there willing to write the check, there really isn’t any way of stopping it.

—Bruce Bartlett
Utter Insanity and Stupidity

Politicians do get angry. They even sometimes get angry in public. They are, after all, human, in some cases anyway.

But politicians mostly only take their masks off when cornered: stuck in a televised argument with an expert irritant, called to speak in a legislative chamber just as that nagging case of intermittent explosive disorder kicks in, surprised by a ropeline question on the campaign trail, etc.

But if you think that Barack Obama, one of the coolest cucumbers ever to occupy the White House, sat down for a scheduled interview in front of a professional softballer like ex-Times and current Yahoo pundit Matt Bai — a setup that’s the presidential media equivalent of a spa treatment — and just suddenly “lost it” in a discussion about the TPP, you’ve been had.

Almost without a doubt, Obama’s remarks were carefully scripted. And it’s likely all of these “whispers” suddenly circulating on the Hill about a percolating genuine personal feud between Obama and Warren also came from a focus-group-aided strategy meeting somewhere.

Even Bai approvingly described Obama’s move as an effort to triangulate the “professional left.” These tactics make a lot of sense politically, and within the Beltway, chiding the “unrealistic” progressives of the Warren ilk is considered almost a rite of passage for politicians on the blue side who want to prove they’re “serious about governing.”

Triangulating — beating up on the ideologues within your own party in order to shore up your centrist cred and reassure your money sources — is an especially brilliant solution for Democrats targeting national office. Those politicians need virtual monopolies on union and minority votes, but also need just enough centrists and white southerners to stay viable. To keep those latter votes, you need to make a few very conspicuous moves from time to time.

That’s surely what happened here with the TPP, a monster deal with the potential to reshape not just our trade profile but our domestic financial regulatory structure. Along with a Democratic Party that would love one last chance to prove itself to Wall Street heading into 2016, Obama badly wants this deal passed, perhaps as a way to steer his legacy in a more bipartisan direction before he rides off into the sunset.

So he picked just the right moment and just the right words to goad the press into painting him as someone who’s just so angry at Elizabeth Warren’s failure to understand how the real world looks from behind the Oval Office desk, he just couldn’t keep his feelings reined in. He tried to retain his usual Björn Borglike exterior, but the oven-mitt questioning of Matt Bai just beat it out of him!

—Matt Taibbi
The Democratic Party Would Triangulate Its Own Mother

Sad to say, some of America’s most important political leaders believe that one who learns how to be useful economically will have learned how to be an educated person. A headline, early in 1994, announced: Clinton Tells Educators Youths Are Not Getting Practical Skills for Jobs.The story quotes the President as saying, “In the nineteenth century, at most, young Americans needed a high school education to make their way… It was good enough if they could read well and understand basic numbers. In the twenty-first century, our people will have to keep learning all their lives.” Of course, in the nineteenth century it was also desirable for people to continue learning all their lives. In fact, there was far more technological change in the nineteenth century than is likely to occur in the twenty-first. The nineteenth century gave us telegraphy, photography, the rotary press, the telephone, the typewriter, the phonograph, the transatlantic cable, the electric light, movies, the locomotive, rockets, the steamboat, the X-ray, the revolver, the computer, and the stethoscope, not to mention canned food, the penny press, the modern magazine, the advertising agency, the modern bureaucracy, and, for God’s sake, even the safety pin. But let us suppose the President did not learn about this in Arkansas schools and was advancing the standard-brand argument that with continuing, rapid technological change the job market will require people who are adaptable to change, who can learn new concepts easily, and who can discard unusable assumptions without trauma. This is a very difficult task for the schools, and one that John Dewey held to be of the utmost importance. The President’s solution is to provide the young with more practical vocational skills, which appears to be, not surprisingly, the same solution offered to California educators by Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Education Secretary Richard Riley. Of course, this is exactly the wrong solution, since the making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies. The President’s speech and the advice of his colleagues demonstrate that they themselves have difficulty discarding outmoded assumptions, including their belief that if something is not working — for example, training people for jobs — then what is needed is more of it.

—Neil Postman
The End of Education