I understand what an Existential Crisis is.

(A) central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that they are individuals— independently acting and responsible, conscious beings (“existence”)— rather than what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, or other preconceived categories the individuals fit (“essence”). The actual life of the individuals is what constitutes what could be called their “true essence” instead of there being an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define them. Thus, human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life.

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

This is not it.

Hope Hicks Left the White House. Now She Must Decide Whether to Talk to Congress.
By Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
May 23, 2019

Like few others in the White House, Ms. Hicks was witness to some of the president’s angriest moments and most pointed directives about the investigations into the Trump campaign and its contacts with Russians in 2016. Her dilemma now is how to respond to House Democrats, who have grown frustrated and increasingly aggressive in the face of a sweeping decision by the Trump administration, and the Trump Organization, to oppose such subpoenas.

Ms. Hicks was instructed by the House Judiciary Committee to turn over documents by June 4 and to appear in person on June 19. She and another former West Wing aide, Annie Donaldson, who was the chief of staff to Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel at the time, were subpoenaed to testify.

Mr. McGahn also received a subpoena, and declined to appear. He said that he viewed the White House as his client, and that after the White House instructed him not to comply, he had to follow his client’s wishes.
…
Witnesses have generally followed the White House lead, in part because of institutional concerns about areas that could be viewed as covered by executive privilege. But if Ms. Hicks does not cooperate, she would potentially be in legal jeopardy with the House.

The likeliest possibility would be a compromise, where she would submit to an interview as long as certain topics are off limits. More recently, Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached a deal with the Senate Intelligence Committee to come in for a limited interview, after he balked at a subpoena.

Ms. Hicks declined to comment, as did her lawyer.
…
Ms. Hicks was mentioned on 28 pages in the (Mueller) report. Three of those are related to possible conspiracy between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, and the rest to the obstruction investigation. They paint a picture of an adviser who was more of a witness to the president’s frustrations with the investigations into his campaign and his own conduct, rather than someone who was an active participant in any discussions of what to do about them.

Ms. Hicks comes across in her interviews with the F.B.I. as trying to alert Mr. Trump to the possible news media reaction he might face to any new information about what took place in the campaign.

For instance, she is described telling Mr. Trump that emails existed related to Mr. Kushner and a meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer that took place in June 2016 at Trump Tower. The report describes Ms. Hicks looking at the emails at Mr. Kushner’s lawyer’s office, and being “shocked by the emails because they looked ‘really bad.’”

“The next day, Hicks spoke privately with the president to mention her concern about the emails, which she understood were soon going to be shared with Congress,” the report says.

“The next day, Hicks spoke privately with the president to mention her concern about the emails, which she understood were soon going to be shared with Congress,” the report says.

Mr. Trump, Ms. Hicks told investigators, “seemed upset because too many people knew about the emails and he told Hicks that just one lawyer should deal with the matter. The president indicated that he did not think the emails would leak, but said they would leak if everyone had access to them.”

At other points, the report described her recollections of a statement she issued shortly after Election Day in 2016, in which she said there was never contact between the campaign and foreign entities, and a conversation she had with the president after he had fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director.

Ms. Hicks was also there when the president learned of Mr. Mueller’s appointment as special prosecutor by Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general.

“Hicks saw the president shortly after Sessions departed and described the president as being extremely upset by the special counsel’s appointment,” the report says, adding “that she had only seen the president like that one other time, when the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape came out during the campaign.”

Existential? I think not. What it does indicate is that Maggie Haberman has no idea at all what the word means.

Haberman was born to a Jewish family on October 30, 1973, in New York City, the daughter of Clyde Haberman, who became a longtime journalist for The New York Times, and Nancy Haberman (née Spies), a media communications executive at Rubenstein Associates. At the firm, a “publicity powerhouse” whose eponymous founder has been called “the dean of damage control” by Rudy Giuliani, Haberman’s mother has done work for a client list of influential New Yorkers including Donald Trump. A singer, in 3rd grade Haberman played the title role in a performance of the musical Annie at the P.S 75 Emily Dickinson School. She is a 1991 graduate of Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an independent preparatory school in New York City, followed by Sarah Lawrence College, a private liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York, where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1995.

I did not suspect Sarah Lawrence would be so lax in its instruction. Perhaps an introduction to Philosophy was not among her degree requirements or electives.

World’s rivers ‘awash with dangerous levels of antibiotics’

Largest global study finds the drugs in two-thirds of test sites in 72 countries

Hundreds of rivers around the world from the Thames to the Tigris are awash with dangerously high levels of antibiotics, the largest global study on the subject has found.

Antibiotic pollution is one of the key routes by which bacteria are able develop resistance to the life-saving medicines, rendering them ineffective for human use. “A lot of the resistance genes we see in human pathogens originated from environmental bacteria,” said Prof William Gaze, a microbial ecologist at the University of Exeter who studies antimicrobial resistance but was not involved in the study.

The rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a global health emergency that could kill 10 million people by 2050, the UN said last month.

Right-wing figures warn of looming ‘civil war’ over abortion laws

One pastor said: ‘A civil war is coming to America, only this time, it will be abortion, rather than slavery, that divides the nation’

Victoria Gagliardo-SilverNew York

As the abortion rights debate continues, some prominent right-wing American Christians have shared an ominous warning: that conflict over abortion access may lead to a new civil war.

With restrictive abortion bills passing around the US – like the Alabama abortion ban and foetal heartbeat bills, which restrict elective abortion at the about six weeks into pregnancy – America seems divided on a woman’s right to choose.

Both lawmakers and influential Christians sources have reinforced this narrative. Charisma magazine, a spiritual Christian magazine, ran six or so articles on the potential of an imminent, abortion related civil war in America.

Far-right League becomes Italy’s largest party in EU elections

It’s called bronzer

Between Sanders and Warren the good ideas just keep coming.

Senator Sanders and Representative Lee Propose to Make Wall Street Pay
Written by Dean Baker, Center For Economics and Policy Research
21 May 2019

This week Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Barbara Lee are introducing bills in the Senate and House for a financial transaction tax (FTT). Their proposed tax is similar to, albeit somewhat higher than, the FTT proposed by Senator Brian Schatz earlier this year. The Sanders-Lee proposal would impose a 0.5 percent tax on stock transactions, with lower rates on transfers of other financial assets. Senator Schatz’s bill would impose a 0.1 percent tax on trades of all financial assets.

At this point, it is not worth highlighting the differences between the bills. Both would raise far more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade, almost entirely at the expense of the financial industry and hedge fund-types. In the case of the Schatz tax, the Congressional Budget Office estimated revenue of almost $80 billion a year, a bit less than 2.0 percent of the budget. The Sanders-Lee tax would likely raise in the neighborhood of $120–$150 billion a year, in the neighborhood of 3.0 percent of the federal budget.

While the financial industry will make great efforts to convince people that this money is coming out of the middle-class’ 401(k)s and workers’ pensions, that’s not likely to be true. This can be seen with some simple arithmetic.

Take a person with $100,000 with a 401(k). Suppose 20 percent of it turns over each year, meaning that the manager of the account sells $20,000 worth of stock and replaces it with $20,000 worth of different stocks. In this case, if we assume the entire 0.5 percent specified in the Sanders-Lee bill is passed on to investors, then this person will pay $100 a year in tax on their 401(k).

While no one wants to pay more in taxes, this hardly seems like a horrible burden. After all, the financial industry typically charges fees on 401(k)s in excess of 1.0 percent annually ($1,000 a year, in this case), and often as much as 1.5 percent or even 2.0 percent.

The actual financial transaction tax burden to this 401(k) holder will be considerably less than this $100 for two reasons. First, not all of the tax will be passed on to investors. The industry will have to bear part of the burden in lower fees. If they can pass on 90 percent, the burden on this 401(k) holder falls to $90 on their $100,000 in assets. If the industry can only pass on 80 percent, then the burden falls to $80, or 0.08 percent of the value of the holder’s 401(k).

Even this amount overstates the actual impact. One outcome of the tax is that stocks will be traded less frequently. That is an intended result. There is considerable research on how the cost of trades affects the volume of trading. Most of the research finds it to be roughly proportional, meaning that a 10 percent increase in the cost of trading results in a 10 percent decline in the volume of trading.
…
For most of us, trades will just be a wash. This was the great insight of Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, who died earlier this year. Bogle argued that since most people are not going to gain by trading they should save their money and just buy a low-cost index fund. Many people do follow this advice (Vanguard has over $4 trillion in assets). But for those who don’t follow Bogle’s advice, a financial transaction tax will help to eliminate lots of wasteful trading. .

To be clear, there is value to having a liquid market where people can sell stock or other financial assets when they need to. But we had highly liquid financial markets two decades ago when trading volume was roughly half its current levels. In other words, we don’t have to worry that FTTs along the lines proposed by these two bills will prevent the financial markets from functioning.

There will be some traders who do lose from these bills. The losers are the high-frequency traders who can trade billions or even tens of billions of dollars in a single day, relying on beating the market by a fraction of second to get small profits on each trade.

A small tax taking away the bulk of these traders’ profits hardly seems like a bad thing, since these traders are some of the richest people in the country. Furthermore, their profits from high-frequency trading come at the expense of other investors who are half a second slower in completing a trade. Their loss is everyone else’s gain.

In short, an FTT is one of those rare taxes in which everything goes pretty much the right way. Ordinary investors will be largely unharmed by the tax. It reduces the resources devoted to wasteful trades in the financial industry. It whacks some of the richest people in the country who now profit at the expense of ordinary investors. And, it raises lots of money for the government.

What’s not to like?

What’s not to like indeed?