As I was watching one of Neils splendid talks, I got very fascinated by what he describes as "The New Nice". When it comes to music, this little tune describes it well, I think.

https://open.spotify.com/track/55FuRfZVFYWC7RmsvayZ3e

Done by GenXer Aphex Twin, he basically turned his back on his own generation and made this soothing little tune it is. It got everything we Millies want in a tune; contemporary subtlety. 

But what else should be included in this "New Nice" doctrine?

https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/52099-a...gears-down

Quote:

Quote:WHAT’S HAPPENING?
Shortly before the Brexit vote, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that a British exit could cut U.K. GDP growth by 0.8 to 3.0% in 2017. In the following year, 2018, it projected that Brexit would cut rest-of-EU GDP by 0.2 to 0.5% and rest-of-world GDP by 0.0 to 0.2%.
 
No news there: Few imagined that Brexit would be a stimulant. What’s less widely known is that the global economy was slowing down well before it entered the Brexit sand trap.
 
According to the IMF, GDP growth shrank from 5.0% in 2010 to 3.1% last year. The World Bank reports that global GDP growth fell from 3.8% in 2010 to 2.4% last year. The brief re-acceleration in 2014 kindled momentary optimism and then disappeared. Emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) have fared the worst, with growth sliding almost every year, while advanced economies have been zig-zagging well below 2% growth for years now. (The IMF and World Bank global growth rates don’t match due to the different ways they weight national GDPs...



https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/52099-a...gears-down

Link

Quote:The 2016 election is about class. “For the first time in a generation, the working class is front and center in an election cycle,” one MarketWatch writer proclaimed. Commentators fret that Hillary Clinton has “lost” the working class and that Donald Trump has risen to prominence on the backs of “white trash.” (Never mind that Trump voters are, on average, wealthier than Clinton’s constituency.) Bernie Sanders even calls himself the working class candidate. This demonstrates just how fuzzy this category is — though Sanders advocates for the working class, he has spent his career in politics, not manual or wage labor. There are lots of other misconceptions about class in America, too. Here, we debunk five.

Myth No. 1: The working class is white and male.

Trump is often credited with engaging the working class. He “won with the working class voters the GOP forgot,” blared one Breitbart column. Meanwhile, “Hillary is losing white working Joes,” proclaimed the Toronto Star. Even Sanders argued that Democrats had allowed Republicans “to capture the votes of the majority of working people in this country.”

Of course, that’s true only if you ignore Asians, Latinos and African Americans. “Factor them into the population of ‘working people,’ ” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie writes, “and Democrats win that group, handily.”

This gets at something important: America has never housed some monolithic entity called the “working class.” As early as 1791, Alexander Hamilton argued that those best suited for factory work were women and children, which became the norm in textile mills until child labor laws were passed in the 20th century. Chinese workers built the Transcontinental Railroad; immigrants labored in the Ohio steel industry; whites and blacks toiled side by side in 20th-century Louisiana sawmills.

Today’s working class is even more diverse. A recent study found that more than half of all Hispanics and African Americans identify as working class. Additionally, about 50 percent of women see themselves as working class. Another report predicted that people of color will make up the majority of the American working class by 2032.

Myth No. 2: Most Americans don’t notice class differences.

When surveyed, the vast majority of Americans say they are either middle class or working class. Indeed, political scientist Charles Murray found that Americans have traditionally refused to call themselves rich or poor. This, he wrote in his book “Coming Apart,” “reflected a national conceit that had prevailed from the beginning of the nation: America didn’t have classes, or, to the extent that it did, Americans should act as if we didn’t.” The desire to erase class divisions goes all the way back to Benjamin Franklin, who believed that the North American continent would flatten classes into a “happy mediocrity.”

In truth, though, the United States has always been a stratified country. In Franklin’s time, people were sorted into three classes: “better,” “middling” and “meaner.” The people at the bottom were seen as coarse, vulgar, unfinished — composed of baser materials. Thomas Jefferson described the upper echelon of the Virginia planter class as pure-blood aristocrats; those who married beneath their station produced children who were “half-breeds.”

In the 19th century, Alabama lawyer and author Daniel Hundley defined class in ancestral terms, laying out seven different options. At the top, he placed an inherited aristocracy, descendants of royal Cavalier blood. At the bottom was “white trash,” heirs of the wretched poor dumped in the American colonies.

Today, record inequality divides the rich and the poor. Our country’s wealthy “1 percent” takes home 20 percent of all pretax income, double their 1980 share. For most middle-class and lower-income families, income has either stagnated or fallen. In short, Americans have not escaped class hierarchies, but reinvented them generation by generation.

Myth No. 3: Class mobility is uniquely American.

Since America’s founding, its politicians have promised a society unbound by class. Jefferson once said that America had “no paupers.” Facing down Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon claimed in 1959 that the United States was a “classless society.” Even President Obama described the idea that each generation should be wealthier than the one before as a “founding precept” of the American Dream.

Indeed, Americans are more optimistic about their chances of getting ahead than people in other places. But in reality, it’s harder to rise above your class in the United States than in just about any other developed country; economic mobility is much more possible in places like Japan, Germany and Australia. Socialist author Michael Harrington captured this devastating reality in his 1962 book “The Other America”: The poor were poor, he wrote, because “they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents.”

Myth No. 4: With talent and hard work, you can rise above your class.

It’s a tale as old as Horatio Alger: Anyone can make it in America, no matter their upbringing. As CNN put the notion , “Through hard work and perseverance, even the poorest people can make it to middle class or above.”

But actually, it’s hard to rise above your income level. In cities such as Atlanta, New York and Washington, a child raised in a poor family has a less than 10 percent chance of becoming wealthy in his or her lifetime. It’s not much better in other parts of the country.

There are lots of reasons for this. Our education-funding system perpetuates inequality. Children in poor families more frequently attend poorer schools and receive fewer enrichment opportunities. As a result, they’re less likely to attend college and earn a degree. Data shows that children from families with incomes of at least $120,000 score much better on the SATs than their peers from households earning $20,000 or less.

Sociologists have also found that parents’ wealth is one of the best predictors of a child’s economic success. Rich families are more likely to own property and to pass wealth on to their offspring. In America, land ownership is one of the best ways to preserve wealth — and share it with the next generation. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz said in his book “The Great Divide”: “America is no longer the land of opportunity that it (and others) like to think it is. . . . To a large extent, the American Dream is a myth.”

Myth No. 5: Class oppression isn’t as significant as racial oppression.

This is a common trope. As Sanders said at a debate this spring: “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor.” Other commentators have said that black middle-class families are worse off than poor white ones.

They’re dead wrong. Americans have a long history of making life harder for the poor, no matter their race. Jim Crow’s infamous poll tax divested poor whites as well as poor blacks of the right to vote. During the New Deal, Southern politicians (except Huey Long) refused to extend Social Security to farm laborers, discriminating against blacks and whites alike. Even our current tax policies penalize the poor. In 2009, the top 1 percent of earners paid 5.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the poorest 20 percent paid 10.9 percent.

Class power takes many forms. Its enduring force, its ability to project hatred toward the lower classes, was best summed up by two presidents 175 years apart. In 1790, then-Vice President John Adams argued that Americans not only scrambled to get ahead; they needed someone to disparage. “There must be one, indeed, who is the last and lowest of the human species,” he wrote. Lyndon Johnson came to the same conclusion in explaining the racism of poor whites: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Due to a repeated spamming attempts I have banned outllook.com addresses from registering.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenu...nnial-frey

Quote:Racial diversity will be the most defining and impactful characteristic of the millennial generation. Newly released 2015 Census data points to millennials’ role in transitioning America to the “majority minority” nation it is becoming.

Millennials between ages 18 and 34 are now synonymous with America’s young adults, fully occupying labor force and voting ages. They comprise 23 percent of the total population, 30 percent of the voting age population, and 38 percent of the primary working age population. Among racial minorities their numbers are even more imposing. Millennials make up 27 percent of the total minority population, 38 percent of voting age minorities, and a whopping 43 percent of primary working age minorities...



http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenu...nnial-frey

The GSS has at time asked people for their view on trade and in most years it asks people about their views on immigration.  From the 2014 GSS here’s how people view immigration based on their views on trade:




 
As you can see the more restrictive trade policies people favor the more likely they are to support immigration restrictions. Ignore disagree strongly the sample size is too small.   While amongst political commentators and intellectuals opposition to free trade is correlated with less restrictive immigration, the opposite is true among the general public.

Here is overall opinion on immigration in 2014




And here is overall opinion on trade:




Trumps view's on trade and immigration represent the views of a many of Americans but are unpopular with the political class.

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Seeing Obama with Justin Trudeau hammered home how different Canada seems than the US and Europe right now and it got me wondering if Canada isn’t significantly behind us.  Looking at expo 67 it looks like it was either 1T or very early 2T(like 64 or 65 in the US) and I’m not sure the Canadian 2T ended until the 90s; both the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party and the failed Québec independence referendum seem more like 2T events.


Video of Expo '67

I expect this topic to disgust us all. If you have any decency at all as a person it will disgust you. I have no desire to expose anything salacious. 

People, often children, are being abused badly. As one trafficker puts it, "You can sell a kilo of heroin once; you can sell a girl hundreds of times". There are heroes, there are villains, and there are victims. There could hardly be no more obvious separation between the three. There can be no "cultural" defense of this horror.

Sex trafficking is a modern form of slavery, but the methods of enslavement are much the same as with slavery on the old plantations.

People are hurting badly. They need to be delivered from the shame and pain that nobody deserves. Criminals in this racket deserve the fullest prosecution under the law. There can be no partisan bickering over this. Sex trafficking is a crime against humanity.

http://www.salon.com/2016/06/29/a_cultur...t_outcome/

Quote:The Brexit vote caught most elite observers by surprise and has spurred a flurry of talk of further possible defections from the EU. But one person who was not so surprised was Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, author most recently of “Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth.”

Although Turchin, like most other observers, had expected Brexit to fail narrowly, his attention was focused primarily on a strikingly different confluence of background trends at work, leading him to expect an ongoing increase in dis-integrative processes across Europe. So Turchin’s surprise was qualitatively different than that of others. “I didn’t expect that my prediction of the EU’s demise would be endorsed so quickly,” he tweeted after the vote, linking a blog post, “Will the European Union Survive its 60th Anniversary?” Turchin sees EU disintegration as almost a certainty in the near term, but believes there’s a chance to start over, on a sounder footing, if the right lessons are learned. And he believes it’s a vital enterprise, not just for Europe, but for all of us...



http://www.salon.com/2016/06/29/a_cultur...t_outcome/

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/30/12066826/gr...-laureates

Quote:This week, 109 Nobel laureates signed onto a sharply worded letter to Greenpeace urging the environmental group to rethink its longstanding opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The writers argue that the anti-GMO campaign is scientifically baseless and potentially harmful to poor people in the developing world.

Joel Achenbach broke the news in the Washington Post, and you can read the full letter here. The signatories include past winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics...


http://www.vox.com/2016/6/30/12066826/gr...-laureates