Millennials in America are atrocious at math — and not great at reading, either

Perhaps our "run education as a business" approach isn't working so well? Between the testing assaults and endless homework we are creating a generation of burned out students. Schools (and parents) are wasting time with power-point, excel, word, a blizzard of stupid, poorly designed educational websites and tests. Businesses don't see students, they see marks for the market.

The parallels to our fucked up health care system are impossible to ignore.

Try some sample questions. They are painfully basic.

The World Is Running Out of Places to Store All of Its Oil

Source: Slate

The main cause here, again, is that oil production is still outstripping demand. But the problem is being exacerbated because the crude market has entered what's known as contango, which is when buyers are willing to pay more for oil delivered a few months from now (when supplies might finally drop and bring up prices) than they are for oil delivered today. Investors have responded by snapping up cheap crude now, putting it in storage, and locking in futures contracts that amount to guaranteed money. (Good news for them: There's even talk of the market hitting "super contango.&quot As a result of all this activity, the Journal reports that the cost of storage itself is rising, which is leading to the creation of the brand new trade in oil storage futures. Weird things are happening.

Read more: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/03/05/oil_market_update_the_world_is_running_out_of_places_to_store_all_of_its.html

History repeats itself. Arrogance and a presumption of entitlement that comes with wealth

and power is already causing serious problems.

It isn't enough that we are expected to give up our principals and throw our blind support behind an unchallenged heir apparent.

We have to put up with this other shit as well.

How can anyone believe this is "the best thing" for the Democratic Party?

If Third Way Democrats continue to the right with TPP, union bashing, privatization it's because

they don't care if Republicans win.

Let's face it - we know that representing historically liberal values like good wages and benefits for working families, environmental protections and strong regulation for industry gets out to vote.

But today all you hear from the Third Way is abstract bullshit like "inclusive capitalism" and "wealth envy".

Wow. Let's fire up the base.

When you hear mealy-mouthed PowerPoint jargon like "inclusive capitalism" it's just another way to say "trickle down" which is the idiotic idea that if you legislate exclusively for the rich and corporations, eventually some crumbs will fall to the floor for the little people to fight over. It also means Larry Summers is hiding in the broom closet, waiting to sweep another million jobs to Asia.

Be warned as Wasserman Shultz's DNC doubles down on conservative politics. Third Way Democrats are close enough to Republicans that it really, really doesn't matter to them who wins as long as their corporate interests are served.

The Third Way doesn't give a fuck which establishment McCandidate wins. Hillary or Jeb, they will continue to profit either way.

Will you?

Democrats Scrap Primary System, Appoint Hillary Clinton as Nominee

WASHINGTON -- Calling the primary system “biased and unreliable” the Democratic National Committee announced today that it is eliminating the old fashioned ballot based system used to nominate Democrats for the general presidential election.

Reached for comment, DNC’s Debbie Wasserman Shultz explained that primaries confuse voters who are generally unaccustomed to critical thinking and decision making. “Rather than bewilder people with so many choices on Election Day, we’ve narrowed down the field so voters can choose a winning candidate every time. It’s an enormous boost to people’s self-esteem knowing they have picked the best possible candidate.”

Indeed, the new process revealed by Wasserman Shultz appears to be a major simplification. Dollar bills of various denominations are collected from rank and file subjects and assembled into a large pile. During a sacred midnight ceremony, the Highest Lama, festooned in gilded robes, lights the pile on fire. As crackling orange flames leap high into the sky, a committee of Lesser Lamas studies the resultant smoke, paying close attention to its prevailing direction, inevitably pointing to the Northeast. The Highest Lama ruminates day and night as Lesser Lamas stoke the blaze with dollar bills. The ceremony continues until a reincarnate Clinton appears in a vision, a state known as the golden enlightenment.

From there, the candidate’s spiritual awakening begins with lessons from monks of Goldmanvishnu. During this time the candidate gives up all worldly principals in order to achieve a Zen state of maximal pragmatism known as The Third Way.

Wasserman Shultz is confident the new candidate will bring needed change. “America is Ready for Her Holiness to Complete Her Spiritual Ascension ™.”

For blue ink concerners, here's the link:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1277&pid=4381

No apologies from me, I can't imagine a more vomit inducing nominee for the Democratic Party

than Hillary Clinton.

What makes her so fucking horrible?

She is the very cold, gutless soul of the 1%. Carefully means testing the value of her words against the Wall Street pay scale.

All the while, notably absent without leave against the most pressing and polarizing problems the US has faced since the civil war:

Civil rights, constitutional checks and balances, racism, police state overreach, NSA, CIA, income disparity, oil lobby, the health care lobby, the banking lobby, the telco lobby, Israeli lobby, CEO lobby, off shoring to India, on and on and on.

She can't be bothered.

But... if you have $300,000 to throw her way and the proper number of teleprompters, she'll give you a carefully vetted speech on some motherhood and apple pie issue which is guaranteed not to make anyone on Wall Street uncomfortable.

And the scary fucking thing is - her silence, as the nation burns, is the very thing her giddy sycophants are telling us makes her so presidential.

We deserve better. Our children deserve better.

We are literally fucking ourselves.

IBM Offers To Move Laid Off Workers To India

Salt of the Earth Hillary Clinton wants $300,000 from you PLUS your vote

The savior of the middle class wants your vote. And she'll only charge you $300,000 to hear why (oh why) you should vote for her.

NSA director defends plan to maintain 'backdoors' into technology companies

Source: The Guardian

The National Security Agency director, Mike Rogers, on Monday sought to calm a chorus of doubts about the government’s plans to maintain built-in access to data held by US technology companies, saying such “backdoors” would not be harmful to privacy, would not fatally compromise encryption and would not ruin international markets for US technology products.
...
US technology companies have bridled at government pressure to introduce weaknesses in encryption systems in order to ensure government access to data streams, and technical experts have warned that there is no way to create a “backdoor” in an encryption system without summarily compromising it. An appearance by Obama at a cybersecurity conference at Stanford University last week to tout cooperation between the government and US tech companies was upstaged by an impassioned speech by Apple;s chief executive, Tim Cook, who warned of the “dire consequences” of sacrificing the right to online privacy.
...
The basic discomfort of the new partnership the government would like to see with technology companies once again burst into full view on Monday when Alex Stamos, the chief information security officer at Yahoo, challenged Rogers on his recommendation for built-in “defects-slash-backdoors, or golden master keys” to serve government purposes.

Stamos asked Rogers how companies such as Yahoo, with 1.3 billion users worldwide, would be expected to reply to parallel requests for backdoors from foreign governments, and told Rogers such backdoors would be like “drilling a hole through a windshield”.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/23/nsa-director-defends-backdoors-into-technology-companies

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan Wants U.S. Troops to Fight Boko Haram

Source: The Wall Street Journal

ABUJA, Nigeria—With his oil-powered economy faltering and just five weeks to go before he faces a close election, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan is appealing to the U.S. to send combat troops against his country’s most intractable problem: the Islamist insurgency Boko Haram.

The 57-year-old president of Africa’s largest democracy said in an interview that he has been asking the U.S. since early 2014 to send combat soldiers along with military advisers to Nigeria to battle Boko Haram. Citing intelligence reports, he said the militants were receiving “training and funds” from Islamic State, the jihadist group whose leadership is based in Iraq and Syria.

“Are they not fighting ISIS? Why can’t they come to Nigeria?” Mr. Jonathan said, in his first interview with Western media this year. “Look, they are our friends. If Nigeria has a problem, then I expect the U.S. to come and assist us.”

Read more: http://www.wsj.com/articles/nigerian-president-wants-u-s-troops-to-fight-boko-haram-1423850893