• GDP growth for 4th quarter a paltry 0.7 percent: The Commerce Department reported Friday that annualized growth in inflation- and seasonally-adjusted gross domestic product clocked in at 0.7 percent in the October-December period. Growth for all of 2015 was 2.4 percent, the same as in 2014. The rate in the last quarter of the year was affected by households reducing their spending, businesses cutting investment, weak global demand and a strong dollar which hurt exports. Many economists think 2016 could see even slower growth. Over the past six decades economic growth as measured by GDP has been falling. In the 1950s-’60s, the average rate was above 4 percent. In the 1970s-’80s, it fell to about 3 percent. In the past decade, the average rate been below 2 percent. Friday’s is the first of three reports on 4th quarter GDP growth. Two updates will be released in February and March, and each could contain substantial revisions because better data are available as time goes on.
What’s coming up on Sunday Kos …
- Ken Light’s 'What's Going On? 1969-74,’ by Susan Grigsby
- It's all about the vote, and all of us are complicit, by Egberto Willies
- What is it about political correctness that pisses off the right, by Mark E Andersen
- Planet nine from outer space, by DarkSyde
- Are anti-poverty programs really substitutes for reparations, by Vann R Newkirk II
- Do Janet Yellen and Bernie Sanders agree on more than what's the coolest hair color, by Ian Reifowitz
- How to really make America great again: Get rid of 'the dumbest idea in the world,’ by David Akadjian
- Bernie vs. Hillary: Idealist vs. pragmatist? Or revolution vs. establishment, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Why we need Black History Month more than ever, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Emails, little Eichmanns, lifeworlds, and right-wing trolls, by Chauncey DeVega
- The two certainties of health care reform, by Jon Perr
- Making many murderers, by Frank Vyan Walton
• Translators find advanced astronomical geometry in Babylonian clay tablets:
The medieval mathematicians of Oxford, toiling in torchlight in a land ravaged by plague, managed to invent a simple form of calculus that could be used to track the motion of heavenly bodies. But now a scholar studying ancient clay tablets suggests that the Babylonians got there first, and by at least 1,400 years.
The astronomers of Babylonia, scratching tiny marks in soft clay, used surprisingly sophisticated geometry to calculate the orbit of what they called the White Star — the planet Jupiter.
Glad these translators are so clever. If they’d said these tablets are just Zirat-Banit’s discarded grocery lists, how would we know?
• Co-Founder of Jefferson Airplane Paul Kantner dead at 74:
Paul Kantner, a founding member of Jefferson Airplane, one of the definitive San Francisco psychedelic groups of the 1960s, and the guiding spirit of its successor, Jefferson Starship, died. He was 74. [...]
Mr. Kantner died just weeks after it was announced that Jefferson Airplane would receive a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award next month.
• Immigrant women object to “disturbing” strip searches: Women detained in the Santa Ana City Jail in Orange County, California, are routinely forced to remove their clothing by officers "without reasonable suspicion, sometimes by members of the opposite gender, in view of other detainees, [and] in unsanitary conditions," their legal complaint says. One woman, Nicole Albrecht
tried to get the officers to read an Immigration Enforcement and Control (ICE) manual she'd brought back from court, stating that the jail could not make her strip unless it believed she was hiding contraband, like a weapon or drugs. But instead they'd pulled her arms behind her back, handcuffing them and leading her, still barefoot, to the booking cell downstairs.