Observations

Why statistical measures of GDP don't accurately measure real well-being

"Declining standards of well-being are politically destabilizing, and lead naturally enough to sweeping support for regime change. In Egypt and Tunisia the regimes happened to be despotic, and the call for change came as a commitment to democracy, an end to corruption, and demands for civil liberties. But within democracies, declining standards of living can have the opposite effect. Open and institutionalized systems of regime change—voting—will absorb the discontent for a time, but if the decline lasts too long, or  can’t successfully be blamed on a particular party in power, pressure grows for stepping outside established parties for new, radical, revolutionary approaches."

Lenin predicted that fascism (rather than communism) could emerge in industrially developed countries with liberal democratic governments if their economies faltered badly enough. And that's what happened too, first in Italy, then in Spain and finally in Germany and which resulted in a world war.

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Did seminal American economist Paul Samuelson recant his unqualified praise for free-trade before he died?
“Change does not come easily in academic life. For the most part we will have to await the gravedigger’s shovel. Guys in their fifties rarely admit that what they have been teaching all their lives is balderdash.”
Asthma: The Geography of Wheezing 
Do people living in rural areas have healthier immune systems because they're dirtier environments? Maybe.
Oakland county (Michigan) Democratic Party operatives indicted for attempted election scam
"Two former Oakland County Democratic Party workers face felony charges from a six-month grand jury investigation into allegations of election fraud."

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Tom Friedman "explains it all" to the peons yet again. Upshot: No more wars & foreign aid because America is broke.

Michigan carpenters union planning to back Republican Rick Snyder in governor's race. Go figure?

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Political coup by lame duck Governor and a pissed-off MSC judge change the political alignment of Michigan's highest court

Accused Flint serial killer arraigned

"Crocodile Dundee" actor banned from foreign travel until he pays disputed taxes

Regaining your privacy from GPS tracking devices. Albeit illegally.

The idiocy of deindustrialization.
"Not content to re-enact the British cycle of deindustrialization and decline, the U.S. imports British pundits to lecture Americans on nineteenth-century free market ideology. Asking dogmatic British free marketers how to organize a successful economy in the twenty-first century is the equivalent of asking unreconstructed Japanese militarists how to run a successful foreign policy or asking Iranian mullahs how to create a world-class R&D sector."

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10 Signs The U.S. is Becoming a Third World Country - Activist Post

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Hoist on his own petard: David Frum fired by American Enterprise Institute - Brainiac blog

Back 2003 Frum called for a purge of those from center-right institutions who opposed the Iraq war for their lack of ideological purity. But now (symbolically of course) he is the one who is getting the "ice-pick-to-the-head" treatment. Heh.

Civilized people don't need no stinkin' state entity! - Free The Animal (Richard Nickoley)

Rich is a little too harsh sometimes, but he's really on the right track over all, IMO.

Neo-Liberal economics just don't add up. - Front Porch Republic (J.M. Wilson)

"In effect, free trade necessitates the creation of a huge state super-structure: continuous military intervention abroad and corporate welfare and the welfare state at home. But this arrangement cannot normalize itself, cannot set itself up as the permanent order for which it mistakenly takes itself. Rather, such complex military and financial forms keep the external forms of the nation in place while it eviscerates its once productive internal organs."