My friend and former Dallas Morning News colleague Mike Hashimoto, the world’s only Japanese-American redneck, reflected recently on President Obama’s planned visit to Hiroshima, which happened earlier today. Excerpt:

Hiroshima was one of the pivotal events to end a war that needed ending. Without it, more Japanese would have died in a U.S. assault on the islands, as would have tens of thousands of Americans. People die in wars, and wishing it weren’t so doesn’t make it so.

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group … death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.”

The big new killers of middle-aged white folks? Alcoholic liver disease, overdoses of heroin and opioids, and suicides. So wrote Gina Kolata in The New York Times of a stunning study by the husband-wife team of Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case.

The Netherlands has rejected calls by Israel to declare the international campaign calling for the boycott of Israeli products, illegal. On Thursday the Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said that the Dutch government had told Tel Aviv that joining the campaign was an issue of free speech, to which the Dutch people are entitled. Press TV reports: Netherlands is the second country in the European Union to have announced its support for people’s right to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

In a stunning reversal for an organization that rests at the bedrock of the modern "neoliberal" (a term the IMF itself uses generously), aka capitalist system, overnight IMF authors Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri issued a research paper titled "Neoliberalism: Oversold?" whose theme is a stunning one: it accuses neoliberalism, and its immediate offshoot, globalization and "financial openness", for causing not only inequality, but also making capital markets unstable.

To wit:

By EconMatters

Central Banks Need to either go all the way with Policy Goals, or get out of financial asset purchases altogether. The current stop and start cycling sets the financial markets up for huge crash scenarios every ten years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSFjNvcwrnM

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