This week, I have been mostly reading, and what I have been mostly reading is:

• Killing Bin Laden: Seymour Hersh's Explosive Revelations Are Worth Taking Seriously - Michael Brull at New Matilda: … Because it's Seymour Fucking Hersh. There are just some authorities for whom the appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy. Also, does anybody at this point think that Obama would hestitate for a second before cheerfully ordering a hit on a defenseless elderly cripple under house arrest? It was probably a deeply-held ambition long before bin Laden emerged as a possible target. There'll be some innocent old guy in a nursing home in Jalalabad or somewhere who's only alive and eating custard pudding today because bin Laden pushed him out of the frame. Also:
• The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful - Trevor Timm in Columbia Journalism Review: "It has been rich watching journalists fall over each other to see who can more vehemently criticize Hersh’s use of anonymous sources, despite the fact that using anonymous sources is a tried-and-true Washington ritual that receives almost no criticism in day-to-day reporting. Banal sound bites are regularly printed on the front pages without names attached, and entire press conferences are held every day with “senior government officials” who refuse to be named."
• Pyne Ignores The Elephant In The Lecture Hall: Reactions To The Higher Ed Budget - Max Chalmers, New Matilda
• David Graeber and the Bureaucratic Utopia of Drone Warfare - Cora Currier (who must be heartily sick of jokes about being the hipper culinary equivalent of Dora the Explorer) at the Intercept: 'We might think of police as principally protecting us from violent crime, solving murders and muggings and rapes, but they are mainly occupied in enforcing disputes over property and non-violent behaviors. “Bureaucrats with guns,” as Graeber puts it.'
• Those who half make reformism dig only their own graves - James Meadway at openDemocracy.net: "The dense, corrupt networks of power and privilege at the centre of British political life will not allow space for anything less than a thoroughgoing commitment to neoliberal values. Miliband was duly hung out to dry. It is necessary to either accept those values, or make a clean break." Does anybody have Neil Kinnock's phone number?
• The Jeb Bush Adviser Who Should Scare You - David Corn at MoJo: "Wolfowitz and all his senior-level colleagues in the Bush-Cheney administration got Iraq wrong. They each were guilty of wishful thinking and arrogantly believed they knew better than area experts in various government agencies. But within this crew, as a ferocious advocate of a wacky and paranoid conspiracy theory, Wolfowitz went further in denying reality." Also:
• Fraternity of Failure - Paul Krugman at the NYT: "Jeb Bush wants to stop talking about past controversies. And you can see why. He has a lot to stop talking about." And:
• Errors and Lies - Krugman again: "The campaign of lies that took us into Iraq was recent enough that it’s still important to hold the guilty individuals accountable. Never mind Jeb Bush’s verbal stumbles. Think, instead, about his foreign-policy team, led by people who were directly involved in concocting a false case for war."
• "Whiteness," Criminality and the Double Standards of Deviance/Social Control - Truthout's abridged version of Nancy A. Heitzeg's article: "White criminality is increasingly defined and controlled via the medical model. This is made possible by the white racial frame, which constructs 'whiteness' as normative and white deviance as individual aberration or mental illness. Conversely, the white racial frame constructs Blackness as synonymous with criminality. […] The result is double standards of definition and control which medicalize whiteness and criminalize Blackness. This differential framing of whiteness and Blackness provides the foundation for the expansion of both the medical and prison industrial complexes, which are characterized by real racial differences despite comparable patterns of deviance across racial lines."
• Would graduating more college students reduce wage inequality? - Marshall Steinbaum at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "The key to reducing inequality is more jobs and a higher demand for labor. In the absence of more jobs, heroic assumptions about educational improvement are likely to deliver only modest economic benefits." See also:
• The One Where Larry Summers Demolished the Robots and Skills Arguments - Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute: Quoth Summers, "What we need is more demand and that goes to short run cyclical policy, more generally to how we operate macroeconomic policy, and the enormous importance of having tighter labor markets, so that firms have an incentive to reach for worker, rather than workers having to reach for firms."
• The Laffer hypothesis in Australia - John Quiggin: Apparently, the IPA invited Arthur Laffer to Australia. In 2015. Not 1985. Oh to be present at the meeting of minds between an aged court astrologer and the whey-faced adolescents of the IPA. "One thing we've always wondered, this 'napkin': so this was some sort of early smartphone or tablet? Like a Blackberry?"
• Forget What We Know Now: We Knew Then the Iraq War Was a Joke - Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, plus Paul Krugman at the NYT, plus plenty of other people in the reality-based community.
• The student debt boom (cont.) - LBO News from Doug Henwood: "Since the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, households have been borrowing very cautiously (how much it’s their decision, their lenders’ decision, or a combination of the two, isn’t fully clear). The glaring exception is student debt."
• Money, Inflation, and Models - Paul Kruman, NYT: "This is actually wonderful: economic theory used to make a prediction about events far outside usual experience, with the theory’s predictions very much at odds with the conventional wisdom of practical men — and the theory was right. True, basically nobody has changed his mind — the people who predicted runaway inflation remain utterly convinced that they know how the world works. But you can’t have everything."
• New Labour’s Economic Illiteracy Exacts a Terrible Price: “I’m afraid there is no money.” - Bill Black at NEP: "The single most insane post-crisis New Labour policy has been the fervent embrace of economically illiterate and self-destructive austerity. This means that the people New Labour appointed to senior financial leadership positions like Byrne had to be – or pretend to be – unfit for their jobs. In either case – true or feigned ignorance that is causing devastating harm to the public – the official has to be unfit – intellectually or morally (or both)."
• Life in a windowless box: the vertical slums of Melbourne - Ralph Horne and Megan Nethercote in the Conversation: "Developers in Melbourne can build at four times the densities allowed in New York, Tokyo or Hong Kong. Moreover, inner city developers are generally under no obligation to contribute to essential public infrastructure, such as affordable housing and community facilities, through density bonus systems. The findings are nothing short of damning, not least for a city that prizes itself, year on year, as the “world’s most liveable city”."
• Consuming wealth without spending a dime - Frances Wooley for a Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: "If I was poor, it would be tough having an old, unreliable car. The unexpected, yet inevitable, major repairs would be a financial nightmare. $750 to repair the clutch. $200 to fix the axel seal. If the car broke broke down, and I couldn't get to work, I might lose my job. But because I'm financially secure, I can afford a cheap car. I can self-insure against financial risks: unexpected repair costs, taxi fares, rental cars, and so on. I can afford to get my car towed. If it was beyond repair, I could get another car tomorrow." And in recent months I have been repeating to my cats "Don't get sick. Don't get sick…"
• I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me - "Edward Schlosser", Vox: "I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to "offensive" texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students' ire and sealed his fate."
• How US students get a university degree for free in Germany - Franz Strasser, BBC News, Germany: "'It's not unattractive for us when knowledge and know-how come to us from other countries and result in jobs when these students have a business idea and stay in Berlin to create their start-up,' says Steffen Krach, Berlin's Secretary of Science."
• Platforms All the Way Down - John Herrman at the Awl: "Platform conflict, private or public, sensible or capricious, explicit or implied, will determine the manners in which we read and watch and communicate and produce online. A type of co-dependency that would be familiar in any advanced industry becomes incomprehensible at such scale and seemingly boundless acceleration—a billion users as unsure about what they’re seeing as where they’re seeing it from."
• 'Harro prease': Will SBS's 'Scott McIntyre Standard' Apply To This Journalist's Comment? - Max Chalmers at New Matilda: The capricious politics of context collapse.
• Cheney Thought al Qaeda was Bluffing - Jon Schwartz at the Intercept: "So it’s not just that Cheney is cartoonishly evil, it’s that he’s monstrously incompetent; in fact, his monstrous incompetence is a large part of why he’s so cartoonishly evil. He was overwhelmingly powerful, but with no understanding of reality, and so blundered around the world strewing destruction wherever he went."
• Restoring the Public’s Trust in Economists - Mark Thoma at the Fiscal Times: A good overview of the "mathiness" debate. "What is mathiness? Berkeley’s Brad DeLong defines it as “restricting your microfoundations in advance to guarantee a particular political result and hiding what you are doing in a blizzard of irrelevant and ungrounded algebra.”"