The quest to crystallize time Nature. I guess the crystal is bigger on the inside?
Pot For Pets: Owners Treat Sick Animals With Cannabis CBS
Goldman Sachs’ lessons from the ‘quant quake’ FT. This time it’s different?
Looking for Hidden Black Money? London Might be the Place to Start The Wire (J-LS).
Thank Goodness Nukes Are So Expensive and Complicated Wired
UN experts denounce ‘myth’ pesticides are necessary to feed the world Guardian (Furzy Mouse).
Second Warmest U.S. February on Record: Chalk It Up to Greenhouse Gases Weather Underground
Brexit
Brexit Bulletin: What the EU Really Wants Bloomberg. Besides Perfidious Albion’s nuts in a jar?
Britain faces €2bn EU bill for Chinese customs fraud FT. Ouch!
Brexit: Insurance giant AIG turns to Luxembourg as EU departure makes UK less attractive Independent
UPDATE 1-EU makes progress on Monte Paschi rescue plan–Vestager Reuters
The “Dutch Trump” Is Even More Toxic Than the Real Thing The Intercept
Syraqistan
Syria’s Civil War Is Almost Over … And Assad Has Won Counterpunch
US Marines Are Now Setting Up Outside Of ISIS’s Capital City Buzzfeed
Why Kurdish Oil Is a Wild Card for Markets: QuickTake Q&A Bloomberg
China?
Xi tells Liaoning officials to clean up their political act and stop faking data South China Morning Post
China’s mad steel inflation MacroBusiness
If Tillerson gets it wrong in Asia, the consequences could be catastrophic Asian Correspondent
India has highest bribery rate among 16 Asia Pacific countries: Transparency International Times of India. And competition was tough!
Vault 7
CIA faces huge problem over malware claims BBC
WikiLeaks, the CIA and your devices: what the documents reveal FT
CIA contractors likely source of latest WikiLeaks release: U.S. officials Reuters. Neoliberalism’s “market state” puts government functions up for sale. So it’s not surprising that people sell them.
CIA Leak: “Russian Election Hackers” May Work In Langley Moon of Alabama. Watch for the “atttribution problem” when CrowdStrike testifies at the upcoming Russki hearings. As I’ve said, “Internet evidence is not evidence.”
WikiLeaks strikes again. Here are 4 big questions about Vault 7. WaPo. “In cyberspace, we mainly have a reasonability problem, not an attribution problem.” Oh. OK.
CIA Did Not Have Multi-Factor Authentication Controls for All Users as Recently as August 2016 emptywheel
Oh, that traitorous WikiTrump Pepe Escobar, Asia Times (Re Silc).
Spicer says ‘massive difference’ between CIA WikiLeaks leak and Podesta email leak ABC
Top tip: Unplug your WD My Cloud boxen – now The Register. I have never understood why storing personal data in The Cloud is a good idea, despite Apple’s constant nudges for me to do so.
The FCC Helped Make the Internet Great: Now, It’s Walking Away Wharton School
GOP senators’ new bill would let ISPs sell your Web browsing data Ars Technica
New Cold War
Russia: The Conspiracy Trap NYRB. Excerpted by Greenwald yesterday. Important!
2016 Post Mortem
The Exhaustion of American Liberalism Shelby Steele, Wall Street Journal
Health Care
Trump goes into dealmaking mode, works behind the scenes on health bill WaPo
Rep. Kevin Brady: Health care relief USA Today
Five Ways The GOP Health Bill Would Reverse Course From The ACA KHN
Health and Access to Care during the First 2 Years of the ACA Medicaid Expansions NEJM
Column Fixing healthcare: Which single-payer system would be best for California? Los Angeles Times (Kokuanai).
Trump Transition
Meet the Hundreds of Officials Trump Has Quietly Installed Across the Government Propublica. Look! Over there! [insert favored gaslighting topic here]!
So Trump and Republicans are STILL More Popular than Clinton and Dems Ian Welsh. Who could have known that firing the Blame Cannons wouldn’t be a proven vote-getter?
US Bond Markets cannot bring down Trump Bill Mitchell
How Will National Security Institutions Survive Their War With Trump? The New Republic. Wonderfully clarifying to see liberals defending the intelligence community as “guarantors of the institutional order of the Republic.”
How Trump Undermines Intelligence Gathering Michael Hayden, NYT. Wonderfully clarifying to see torture- and illegal warrantless surveillance defender Hayden become a liberal icon.
Everyday people are furiously saving US federal data before it’s deleted—and you can, too Quartz
Trump SEC Pick Made Millions Representing Banks, Hedge Funds Bloomberg
Stuck between gangs and Trump, migrants halt in Mexico France24
Israel’s New Travel Ban: A Survival Kit for Activists Stopped at Israel’s Airport Haaretz
Guillotine Watch
The Expert’s Guide to Crying at Work Bloomberg. “Recent research from the Harvard Business School has found the secret to turning tears into workplace gold: make them evidence of your professional passion.” Will that work in an Amazon warehouse? Inquiring minds want to know!
Class Warfare
The Hamilton Hustle Matt Stoller, The Baffler. Excellent, even for the excellent Stoller.
Is It Better to Be Poor in Bangladesh or the Mississippi Delta? The Atlantic. Interview with Angus Deaton. Must read (and pay careful attention to Annie Lowrey’s questions).
‘Day Without a Woman’ Protests Held Across U.S. WSJ
How Should We Then Live? The Archdruid Report. More fun with Schopenhauer!
Sound waves boost older adults’ memory, deep sleep Science Daily. I guess falling asleep to a podcast is a smart move for me, then…
Sleeping Through the Night Is a Relatively New Invention New York Magazine
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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A link to add to the Vault 7 list is this piece Ilargi posted last evening: “How to Drain the Deep Swamp.”
It’s been good to know you: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39752-trump-cuts-regulations-as-oceanic-dead-zones-release-massive-amounts-of-methane https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/us/politics/scott-pruitt-environmental-protection-agency.html https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-hundreds-of-officials-trump-has-quietly-installed-across-government
Let’s not forget that global warming was identified as a potential problem in the late 19th century (not a typo), it’s impact was estimated and forecasted in the late 50s (CO2 measurements are on Mauna Loa since that period), and modeled in the late 80s.
By that time it was so clear we were heading to a cliff that a/ James Hansen made into congressional hearings in the US, and b/ IPCC was created as a world body to condense worldwide scientific activity into a summary for decision makers.
Today, 30 years later, Hansen’s forecast still stands, and non-words based activity is still close to zero.
Today, Boston and Miami are flooding without spring tides or storm surges. I don’t know when we will wake up and only have disaster looking back at us.
“We” are of course part of the problem — like the recent posting on “cool kit,” showing how even us aware NCers are deeply into “sophisticated consumption.” And hey, solar panels will save the day! And let us stop paying into the coffers of so aptly named, legal-monopoly “Power Companies!” Victory!
But of course there is a tiny set of people who are immune to consequences of the “policies” they have figured out how to drive to their own gain, people who really get their limbic-system titillation at YUUUGE scale. The elite very few who “we” rail about here, in wordspace, as we demonstrate our linguistic and polemical skills, picking up and examining little bits of the big picture. Judiciously examining the arrangement of the deck stairs on the Titanic, thinking maybe there is some way to change the orders to the unfortunate timoneer and steersmen who direct the leviathan toward its fateful encounter with Murphy’s Law. Hoping that Someone in Power will See The Madness and Make It Stop. Because “we” recognize so many bits of “The Problem,” and have cogitated over the various options and approaches to Making It Better.
From the AARP Bulletin, in an article entitled “Live Longer! 50 Proven Ways To Add Years To Your Life,” there;s this:
22. SAVE YOUR PENNIES. Monkey might not make you happier, but it will help you live longer. A 2016 study by Stanford researchers published in JAMA found that people whose income was in the top 1 percent lived nearly 15 years longer than those in the bottom 1 percent. The disparity could be attributed to healthier behaviors in the higher-income groups, including less smoking and lower obesity rates, researchers say. So there! So simple, eh? Or, 23. MOVE TO ONE OF THESE STATES. If you’re not wealthy, consider moving to California, New York or Vermont, where studies show that low-income people tend to live longest. Lima Linda, Calif. has the highest longevity thanks to vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists, who live eight to 10 years longer than the rest of us. Nevada, Indiana and Oklahoma have the lowest life expectancy (less than 78 years.)’
“We,” it seems to me, have some margins to play with, if we are rich enough, but as to the bigger picture? Oh look, Trumputin! Reminds me, got to gas up the truck this morning…
Eventually, cynicism loops back around to optimism. I feel that’s coming soon.
Given the economic, environmental and political trends, for some people, the optimism may not loop back around until they’re browsing the coffin selection at the funeral home.
” Monkey might not make you happier, but it will help you live longer.”
A reading of Journey To The West should convince anyone that both are the case.
Re. 22. …….
‘Every body’s got something to hide ‘cept for me and my …. money ….’
‘;]
Semos, help me !
Well, Nevada is a bit of a conundrum. It has a low life expectancy partly because it has the 3rd or 4th highest suicide rate in the US. (Lots of smoking in enclosed spaces (casinos) don’t help either.) But. On the plus side. It has no state income tax; so you get to keep more of your minimum wage.
Ty for the links. Very disheartening.
According to the ProPublica piece, some Trump appointees endorse conspiracy theories.
So how does their behavior differ from the that of the entire existing DC political establishment? I guess all completely unjustified moonbat conspiracies backed with with no evidence whatsoever are not created equal.
So yeah, we’re pretty well screwed either way. Nice knowing you too. And I really kinda liked civilization…
Thank you for the Hamilton piece by Matt Stoller. The timing for me is excellent. I am in the middle of reading THE WHISKEY REBELLION by David Liss. It is historical fiction but historical none the less. Although I know quite a bit about the rebellion itself, more than the average bear as Yogi would say, the political machinations during this period is mostly unexplored territory for me.
It is also my first trip to the Baffler site and I thank you for that too. I will have to return to it in the future.
The Baffler’s always been an excellent print journal, it’s where Thomas Frank made his bones. I highly recommend subscribing!
You may also want to check out some of the collections of articles over the years, especially _Commodify Your Dissent_
Also worth noting that the whole thing — latest issues and entire archive — is now online, which is a wonderful resource that didn’t exist in full until recently.
I know of few other publications — NC excepted — where lucid anger is such a pleasure to read. (Can only vouch for it as far back as issue 2, though).
Of course they still need subscribers to the beautifully produced print edition, despite putting new content online. I admit that my subscription lapsed because it’s hard to do without a credit card and because for a few years new issues would arrive anything up to years apart. But the new website works so well, and new content is published so often, that it looks like they got some well deserved money somewhere and so have probably sorted those distribution problems out.
This is a great piece and goes into much more detail than the Hamilton debunking that was linked here several months ago. Perhaps a copy could be sent to the clueless James Wolcott who seems to think regime change operations against popular sovereignty (even if represented by the dubious Trump) are a desired outcome. One suspects that the Resistance would be just fine with a Pence presidency and indeed it is being revealed that many of Trump’s poor staff choices–such as picking our dimwitted SC governor for UN ambassador–trace back to Pence. The “blob” has many tentacles and works behind the scenes, just like their hero Hamilton.
Another important reminder how the Evil F@cks at the top use Debt to enslave. Nothing changes. No wonder the Democratic Party elite love Hamilton.
The Whiskey Rebellion is an excellent book. I recommend David Liss’ other work as well.
Thanks for your recommendation. The Baffler article quotes William Hogeland who has written a non-fiction book also called The Whiskey Rebellion in case you’re interested. Haven’t read it yet but it’s in my queue to order from my local bookstore.
Serendipitously, at the same time I was reading Matt Stoller’s excellent piece on Hamilton, I became reacquainted with Jimmy Driftwood’s song “The Wilderness Road.” Even though it is 50+ years old, it seems such a perfect antidote to Hamilton’s autocracy that I wanted to share it with folks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EQNcVRl6UU.
Perhaps more relevant in 1790 than today, but inspirational nonetheless.
Gary Brecher and Mark Ames interviewed Hogeland in their War Nerd Radio podcast. He was a great guest and I also ordered one of his books, I suspect the others will follow shortly after.
The interview with Angus Deaton is very good.
And the last sentence is a reality-based description of policy so far under the new regime.
The swamp won’t be drained, but going forward will have to tithe.
Or this:
As he says, what is a robot? Nobody complains about having a washing machine or a dishwasher around, it frees time to read a book to the kids.
Or this:
And he [Sackler] got rich from inventing direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. His company is now Purdue Pharma, which was in some trouble until they came up with OxyContin. And they said, “Hey, let’s get an FDA approval for heroin!”
—-
But [the Nobel laureate in economics] George Stigler argued a long time ago that one of the worst things about regulation is that it gets captured by the people who are being regulated. My guess is that the FDA is acting pretty much in the interests of the pharmaceutical companies, not the other way around. Or at least that this is an equilibrium that they’re very happy about.
I don’t know which is worse, no sheriff at all, or a sheriff that’s really working for the bad guys.
Thank you. Cannabis, heroin, cocaine, DMT, etc., will always be dispensed by our betters (especially once it’s manufacture becomes felonious). https://theweek.com/articles/541564/how-american-opiate-epidemic-started-by-pharmaceutical-company http://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/ https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/products/drug-oxycontin
My Australian friends are always shocked and baffled when they see pharma ads on TV in the States.
“Um, wait”, they say, “I thought your doctor was the one who needs to decide whether you need these meds or not”.
Instead we get “The little purple pill. Ask your doctor if it’s right for you”
Given the epidemic, shouldn’t pharma ads be outlawed the way tobacco ads were?
(Oh, sorry, I was temporarily transported to a world where there is a notion of The Public Good. How un-American of me…we’ve got pharma billionaires to feed!).
Yes, but we get the not so subtle ads, where the product is not mentioned, just that you should go and ask your doctor if your are….
Thinking of quitting smoking, go see your doctor, as there’s a new way of doing it (Champix)
Don’t think oxycontin’s a big problem here (not that there isn’t a black market for it), no ice is the one that destroys people here in Oz
Get ready for “Citizens United 2” – whereby robots are now people.
‘When Robots Roamed the Earth’
It’s also worth noting that the ONLY Congress-critter to contact Deaton about all this was… wait for it… Keith Ellison. Yes, that’s right, the only Congressional representative who could be bothered to care about the plight of his white constituents was… a black Muslim.
Contradictions? Heightened!
Also worth noting that MN has the 6th lowest ‘age adjusted opioid overdose death rate’ in the country. Roughly 1/4th the rate in WV, or 1/3rd the rate of NH, OH, and KY. (the top 4 states) in 2015
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html
Interesting side note, CA has the 8th lowest rate but due to size still has about 1.3k more deaths than any other state.
The real eye-opener in the Lowry interview with Angus Deaton is that Obama was not as oblivious as many of his supporters would like to think:
To repeat: he “read it down to the footnotes”. So recapping, Obama was painstakingly aware of the AIDS-level opiate epidemic afflicting his subjects and decided to respond in the exact same way his predecessors (St Reagan) responded to the AIDS epidemic: with cold public indifference and policies that exacerbated the body count.
In sentencing, some courts count ignorance as a mitigating circumstance. Mr Obama holds no such claim.
Or alternatively, he hadn’t read a thing and was just BS’ing the professors which, imho, is just as likely as not. Probably briefed on their work 5 minutes before the meeting. Regardless, you are right that he didn’t care.
This.
Reading one of the footnotes is always a good trick to pretend you have read the whole paper. Provided you can be sure not to be quizzed further.
May very well be, but I’ll stick to my original indictment. Claiming to be intimately aware of Case/Deaton makes Obama even more guilty than if he had at least had the sense to plead ignorance.
Then again, who am I kidding? Genocide charges are for enemies of the Washington Consensus, not the Neoliberal Golden Child.
Your point is very much intact, whether it’s willful ignorance or actively chosen disdain matters fairly little.
If Obama was interested genuinely understanding society’s problems and getting to the bottom of them, he’d have told his inner-circle to get him some answers after Dems got a severe spanking in the 2010 midterms. Obama, despite his academic background, didn’t have the intellectual curiosity to ask any real questions. And no one around him saw any problem with this lack of curiosity.
For Dems, there’s never a problem of substance, it’s always about how to better craft the sales-pitch.
How did elites come to think that it’s appropriate to see the presidential role as that of a salesperson for a given set of status-quo policies?
I started to take umbrage at your classifying all Dems as only interested in the sales pitch, but then I realized that with few, if any, exceptions that is exactly the case. Not that the same doesn’t apply to the other major party as well. And most independents. Outside of personal interests that is the case with our ‘leadership’ class anymore, and not just in politics.
I don’t know if I was just naive for the first thirty or so years of my adult life, or if things really have changed so much. But then I remember that for a very bad President, Nixon actually was still better than the last two democrats. And that there is not a recent Republican who can hold a candle to LBJ, who was also not good, so who knows how the constraints have changed.
RabidGandhi
March 9, 2017 at 7:47 am
So recapping, Obama was painstakingly aware of the AIDS-level opiate epidemic afflicting his subjects and decided to respond in the exact same way his predecessors (St Reagan) responded to the AIDS epidemic: with cold public indifference and policies that exacerbated the body count.
=================================
EXACTLY RIGHT! I well remember Elizabeth Taylor upbraiding Reagan…..where were all the Hollywood stars upbraiding Obama? Meryl???? Meryl – where are you???? O right! It is the policy of this still great country to reward “merit” and ignore those who won’t help themselves….
What were the policies that exacerbated the body count? (Besides broad-based factors like manufacturing decline/weakening of unions/loss of employment, not having Medicare for All, etc.)
And what would the right approach be? (Besides obvious lift-all-boats solutions like providing jobs/basic income/Medicare for All, removing despair, etc.)
I don’t understand your question. You ask what would solve the problem, but then want the answer to exclude all of the most important solutions.
I fleshed out my thoughts a little more below, though I didn’t even get into things like if there’s any good way to limit the supplies of heroin, fentanyl, and other problem drugs, or if it’s even a realistic idea that those supplies can be limited.
The main thing is that I want to mitigate as much suffering as possible, right now, and it’s not clear when (if ever) sufficient lift-all-boats stuff will be come to pass, or even be sufficient given that physical pain is a driver of the problem, too.
I feel like there are more targeted things that can happen, such as directing surgeons to prescribe fewer opioids, as described here: http://nhpr.org/post/dartmouth-hitchcock-study-patients-do-just-fine-fewer-opioids-post-surgery#stream/0 — a study that both illustrates the problem (only 28% of opioid pills in the study’s research had been taken in the past), and hints that just prescribing less (none?) can achieve some harm reduction. But don’t know how skeptical I should be of approaches like that, and how much of the problem is based on physical pain treatment seeking.
Limit the profit on the production of those drugs by taxing them to cover externalities they create or limiting the length of patents, prosecuting doctors and pharmacists for over prescribing, prosecute government officials for corruption, the daughter of the exgovernor of West Virginia is CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Public shaming of doctors, pharmacists, pharmecutical company executives.
The DEA is responsible for setting production quotas of opioid medicines.
https://www.rt.com/usa/361622-dea-orders-opioid-production-cut/
Considering that marijuana and its derivative forms can provide all the pain relief and psychological satisfaction that users get from opioids, the “right approach” is blindingly obvious: end the war on drugs. As is the reason why the war on drugs was started by Nixon and Erlichmann in the first place and has been kept going by all the Reagans, Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, and Trumps who have afflicted us ever since.
The opiate epidemic is continuously referred to as “AIDS-level” genocide; but let’s be clear. AIDS still has no cure and it devastated a generation of LGBT people in this country. The opiate epidemic seemingly, per the conversations here and elsewhere, has a very simple solution: jobs.
Am I missing something here? Too simplistic? I’m not being sarcastic.
I’m trying to understand solutions, too. Long-term, jobs would be huge of course. But they will take time to develop, if they develop at all. So other solutions are needed in the short term, if for no other reason to help those that are currently suffering.
However, I don’t think that jobs completely address the people who become addicted because of the need to treat actual physical pain, as opposed to reacting to general despair. (I’m also unsure what the relative proportions are of those two populations, as well as the overlap.) I think marijuana might be the best answer for treating pain? But, unfortunately that seems unlikely with Sessions as AG (unless his stance on medical marijuana is different than I think; if so, I’d like to know).
That leaves what seems like maybe three subgroups of physical pain sufferers, and it feels like they might each need different solutions:
1) For those who will be in pain, or are in pain but aren’t taking opioids, are opioids ever a good idea, if all safer forms of painkillers aren’t providing enough relief? I honestly don’t know. And if both opioids and marijuana are non-starters, what is the solution, if there is one? (That last question certainly applies to the other two groups as well.)
2) For those currently taking opioids as prescribed to treat their pain, should they be taken off their prescriptions? Or continue to take as directed with monitoring for signs of approaching the reduced efficacy/increasing dosage/addiction nexus? Other stuff I’m completely not thinking about?
3) For those who have moved on to obtaining opioids outside of prescriptions, being able to treat overdoses seems like a major priority. Even better would be to prevent them, which probably means working hard to get them into early intervention treatment? Again, are there other factors I’m completely missing?
4) Getting the fuck out of Afghanistan !
.. or perhaps that should fall under 1b)
1a) should be to Air Afghanistan every Big pharma CEO to that country …and bomb hell out of them!
Option 4 would definitely help, since it’s Uncle Sugar who’s been propping up the poppy production there after the Taliban had pretty much completely eradicated it.
Just a wikipedia link, but not difficult to find other with the same stats –
One error there – they forgot to mention the CIA in that last sentence.
lyb …. yeah … The C linically I nsane A gency …
Absolutely right on the $money$ !!
tons of the stuff comes from Mexico, too. The book, _Dreamland_, explicitly describes the route from there to U.S. cities
“stuff” being street drugs.
The real, powerful, pharmaceuticals are grown in New Zealand, and Australia. Something like 95% of “legal” poppies are grown in that part of the world.
What is it with brits, or former brits and selling drugs?
“blame it on the brown people” Not very accurate these days. Most people get hooked on pills, then move onto “junk” when they can’t afford the pills and doctors anymore.
The whole subject of opium addiction is saddled with horrible doses of bad history and a lack of any morals by people selling themselves as paragons of virtue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
As with most history dealing with the queen, most fault has been removed from wikipedia. But, it’s a starting point.
“The Opium Wars were two wars in the mid-19th century involving Anglo-Chinese disputes over British trade in China and China’s sovereignty.”
That’s beautiful isn’t it? No mention of opium at all. So said the queen.
Occasional Delurker
March 9, 2017 at 10:29 am
I’ve been using opioids for ten years to control chronic pain. I don’t get high from them nor am I physically impaired by them as evidenced by my ability to drive a car, ride a motorcycle and climb tall ladders safely. Recent cognitive testing (I am getting on in years and have a family history of dementia) produced high normal results.
I ascribe my current non-abusive use of opioids to the fact that I am not desperately poor and that I have access to good doctors who strictly monitor my usage. I am also able to avail myself of counseling and physical therapy. My experience here in CA is that dispensation by pharmacies is also being monitored and controlled by both law enforcement and health insurance companies more strictly than in the past. Possibly a result of DEA busts of large pharmacy chains such as CVS and Walgreens in CA and elsewhere.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=dea+and+walgreens&*
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=dea+and+walgreens&*
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=dea+and+costo+pharmacy&*
Thing is, if I had to endure the physical pain I have experienced without medication for an extended period of time I probably would have ended myself years ago.
You are overthinking the issue. There isn’t a significant problem in the many countries that do not permit opiades outside of a hospital environment, including many countries with similar social and economic issues. Opiate drugs are excellent for treating acute pain (as I can vouch for, having recieved very powerful ones after suffering an accident). They are not appropriate for chronic pain problems due to their addictive properties. This has long been recognised in medical circles, it took a deliberate marketing strategy by pharm companies to muddy the waters about the previously clear distinction between acute and chronic pain. The problem is gross overprescribing of opiates, not the lack of alternatives.
Jobs AND single payer healthcare, sure. Jobs alone won’t help the people already disabled, unable to afford meds, and becoming addicted to heroin. Of course single payer would also have been a nice boon to the victims of the AIDS epidemic.
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that any participatory politics these days that aren’t centered on a bipartisan demand for single payer healthcare are wasting time and breath.
And single payer healthcare would help those with opiate addiction and/or AIDS, two birds one stone.
Sorry to burst your bubble but, in this case at least, “healthcare” is not the solution, it is the problem. From the article:
To come back to the link, Medicaid is prescribing OxyContin, or paying for it. Eberstadt had said this gave a whole new meaning to “dependency on the government.” These people are dependent and dying, they’re not the beneficiaries! If you follow where the money is coming from, the money is coming from Medicaid to the Sackler family, whose name is on every public building in the land!
That would be the same Medicaid that obamacare provided to “millions,” and is now being vigorously defended against repeal.
Opioids as “healthcare” is also why so many non-poor whites have been ensnared in the epidemic–they have “good” insurance.
The book, Dreamland, mentioned in the article, has a detailed account of how oxycontin achieved fda approval despite its tremendously addictive potential–basicly willful blindness and lack of scientific rigor–to become one of the most inappropriately prescribed drugs to achieve and retain “standard of care” status.
As for addiction treatment, please read this firsthand account of how seriously the medical “establishment” and the government regulators take that issue, which is to say not at all unless you can afford spa treatment in Malibu. Even though Medicaid does cover addiction treatment.
http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/dying-to-be-free-heroin-treatment/350-miles-for-medication
Last but not least, never forget the job security and profit potential all these manufactured drug addicts provide to any number of “law enforcement” entities from the surveillance state to private prisons.
For-profit “healthcare” benefits from creating addicts, not fixing them.
It seems to me like single payer, by getting rid of the “for-profit” motive, would handily address this aspect of the problem as well.
Healthcare isn’t the problem. That people in pain are getting prescriptions to alleviate it isn’t the problem. The problem, as you point out, is the profit motive leading to the (imo inevitable) corruption that makes it profitable and legal to try to hook your customers even if it ends up killing them.
Healthcare isn’t the problem.
It’s important to realize that the for-profit model on which the system has operated for quite awhile now has not only resulted in unsustainable costs. It has generated a “healthcare” delivery philosophy, including best practices and standards of care, organized around the principle that more, more expensive and for as long as you can string it out is better.
Charles Hugh Smith refers to it as “sickcare.”
Obviously an all-in, single-payer system is far better than the mishmash we have now. But changing who pays the bill will not make the country healthier. A reorganization of the way “healthcare” is delivered–many more, more highly paid, more accessible primary care professionals and fewer specialists; honest assessments of therapeutic efficacies; emphasis on the most widespread, chronic problems as opposed to the most sensational ones; and more efficient deployment of resources like expensive imaging equipment, just to name a few.
A single-payer system would provide the informational basis on which to make these necessary changes, and even tailor “healthcare” to specific problems by locality. But if it’s only about who pays, the current dismal outcomes are not likely to change. The country will just go broke faster.
We have a “single-payer” war machine in this country, and you see how far that’s gotten us.
An important point, worth remembering. Step one is to stop treating health care deliver like a market. But there would be a lot of changes to make after that, and if we remain within a capitalist system, eternal vigilance will be necessary. Reading what’s going on with the National Health Service in Britain is both hair-raising and stomach-churning.
See my earlier comment. Katniss is just wrong here. We have lousy health outcomes among lower middle and low income cohorts, far worse than in other countries, as a direct result of unequal access to health care.
Yves, I don’t see how my comment and your comment conflict.
Changing to single payer — if that’s ALL we do — won’t fix health outcomes completely. We still wouldn’t have enough primary care doctors, and they wouldn’t be distributed efficiently across the country. While removing insurance companies from the process (or reining them in so completely it is functionally the same) will do a lot of good in and of itself, we still have all sorts of built-in systems and biases and cultural reinforcements that would need at least some institutional or policy -driven pressures and incentives to change then.
I think it’s worth remembering that there are other things that will need to be addressed, as well.
In order to deliver more equal access to health care, we need to fix more than just the payment process. Do you not agree with that?
Wasn’t there some relatively recent study in Oregon where people who normally wouldn’t have been eligible, and had no other insurance, were given access to “healthcare” through Medicaid and then followed to see if their health improved–and it didn’t?
Don’t have time to research the specifics now, but if memory serves, the results were quite surprising and not at all what researchers expected.
This is simply not true. Public health experts around the world have found that there is a direct relationship between unequal access to healthcare and how poorly the US performs on many key health indicators, such as infant and child mortality. It also shows up the treatment of chronic ailments like diabetes.
Not to be flip, but I don’t think the government’s paying for every vioxx or oxycontin prescription the medical establishment can write, or every cardiac stent it can justify implanting makes the nation’s “health” any better.
This gets to the heart of the “responsibility” meme about addiction generally. If addiction cures were simply a matter of will power then the addicts are morally reprehensible, and deserve punishment. If addiction is a disease / health problem, then treatment, not punishment is the correct response.
I’d submit we have tried the “punish ’em sober” approach since Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller began the drug war (they were vying for the Republican presidential nomination by seeing who could be “toughest” on crime). The U.S. currently has an enormous prison population as a consequence of that drug war. EIther in absolute or per-capita numbers, the U.S. is the incarceration champ….
…So break out the big foam “We’re #1” finger?… Maybe not. Per capita the U.S. incarcerates 756 per 100,000 of its population. The world average: 150. The Canadians have identical demographics and only incarcerate 111 per 100,000.
Does it stop crime? U.S. and Canadian crime have differed only insignificantly for nearly a half century now. U.S. addiction rates remain high too–with 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. consumes 25% of the drugs. As it turns out, incarceration is seven times more expensive than rehab, and far less effective at producing good outcomes. Even the Kochs are on board with reducing this incarceration binge.
The word about this is getting out. California recently passed Proposition 47 by a surprisingly large margin, turning some felonies into misdemeanors, releasing prisoners incarcerated for low-level crime, some of it drug-related.
Unfortunately, even noble efforts like Prop 47 are vulnerable to sabotage. The idea was to use the savings from smaller prison budgets to fund diversion / rehab programs. Not only does unemployment remain high for living wage jobs, the prisons’ budgets have not diminished, so there’s no money, and now California is just turning loose a bunch of criminals who have nowhere else to go except back to the life that got them arrested in the first place.
This would be a perfect opportunity for public banking to provide a line of credit to start such diversion programs while prison budget savings in the future would repay such a loan. The “liberal” governor, Jerry Brown, line-item-vetoed even money for a study of public banking.
California does have an infrastructure bank, but its underwriting is so restrictive, it couldn’t fund that diversion program line of credit. The original Bay Bridge was built with public money (Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, used by FDR, terminated by Eisenhower). The earthquake upgrade just complete was underwritten by Goldman Sachs. The infrastructure bank couldn’t tak on that project.
…and people wonder why Trump, the guy who called our leaders “crooks,” got elected…
While jobs would help, I’d say it is a little too simple of a solution.
Hospitals hand this stuff out like candy – to people with jobs.
My wife went in one time and described her pain as a 2 on a scale of 1-10. They handed her opioids. When I asked if they weren’t extremely addictive, the response I got was “You must be thinking of oxycontin, this is oxycodone” or maybe it was the opposite, doesn’t really matter since they’re both very addictive.
I agree that jobs won’t be enough for this opium epidemic.
The problem is that people do not feel like their choices matter. That goes for black or white communities. In poor white America, they take drugs. In poor black America, there’s gangs AND drugs.
This requires a cultural change, which can’t simply be a matter of finding work for everyone involved. I’ve seen it in the inner city, where people simply don’t show up for work at perfectly good jobs. I’ve seen it in rural areas, where people… don’t show up for good jobs.
People need to see a future other than toiling for survival and a morality worth living for.
That’s a very different story than opium addiction.
The long tail will still be with the US for generations, if it were able to be stopped today. It’s not stopping. It’s getting worse.
I blame it on all of the wokeness. “i know all about that, therefore, it’s fixed. Assume fine”
There is nothing being done about it, other than a few lawsuits. Profits are still up. The legacy is a very long and very costly one.
“People need to see a future other than toiling for survival and a morality worth living for.”
After they kick heroin. Which, doesn’t happen quickly, IF it happens. Stocks and flows, folks. It’s still flowing and the stock of addicts is still increasing. See- History of China since the mid 1800’s.
This is just the beginning.
> The opiate epidemic is continuously referred to as “AIDS-level” genocide;
Actually, I’m careful not to use the word “genocide.” The death rate is AIDS-level.
I don’t think you’re missing anything; it’s just that simple is not the same as easy*
NOTE * And movements like ACT-UP IMNSHO deserve enormous credit, although for some reason their history seems to have been completely erased, even though it was tactically and strategically brilliant on so many levels.
Perhaps the ” Act Up” Movement should be resurrected, but it will need the exceptional passions and motivation as the those who fought the battles before. People were suffering and the politicians were smirking. These days remind me of the Reagans, not only AIDS but “Just Say No”.
Way too simplistic.
Is it is possible, given the pure venality of Est. Dems, that they were looking ahead to 2016 when they would enthrone their Queen, Hillary, and decided the demographic kill off of “poors” (deplorables) was “worth it” (as Madeline Albright also once concluded about Iraqi deaths)? Yesterday, a link showing increased deaths by opiates occurred where the ACA had enabled access. Another commentariat replied, “Whites can’t seem to handle having insurance” which was a funny way of saying that those in pain/economic/ physical from manual labor, get insurance, are given pain killers and then die from addiction. The FDA allowed the dosage of oxycontin to be increased during Obama’s term.
Of course, it could just simply have been Big Pharma’s money with no thought to the consequences.
Late last night, congress was repealing a 24 billion dollar levy tax on Big Pharma’s patented drugs. This tax was negotiated by Obama as part of the ACA. As a pay off for what?
slightly related to your comment, I have a friend with sex abuse issues who as a result has major problems with trust and is thereby marginalized in our society, and who wants and would benefit greatly from counseling so when medicaid expansion occurred I held out this one hope (I know, I know hope…) that this person could get the needed assistance so into the maw of the beast we went. Interviewed by a behavioral psych grad student running the suggested program, the person was accepted into a study that included care (note: study that included care, not, as you will see, the main purpose) Post acceptance, my friend is told A.)”there’s a pill” that must be taken in order to participate, B.) some people from the study will commit suicide, C.) if you can’t complete the program you are more likely to kill yourself, and D.) just the fact that you have gone through the interview process increases your risk, but if you won’t take the drug (the person in question , imo justifiably, won’t take a pill) we won’t be able to include you in the “study”. This crystallized my view of the medicaid expansion in neoliberal terms, i.e., the gov can pay the health complex through medicaid, they just need some poor persons boots on the ground in the hospital, collateral damage is just collateral damage, no one important cares if a marginalized poor kills themself if that person is unable to get right for the boss, so you lost some guinea pigs while testing your product, whatevs. From this perspective I’m in no way surprised that suicide is greater in medicaid expansion states, and it’s also why I expect the heartless republican neocons to continue medicaid expansion….money from gov mainlined into industry is a high they’ll never get over. The irony of course being that the dems are apoplectic that medicaid won’t be expanded….of course it will, it’s free money for the aristocrats, and culling for the poors…P.S. to the CTR crowd, no one with an operational brain cell expected trump to give us medicare for all (although a stroke of genius if he did, power lying in the street as it is) nor did that esteemed group with the operational cell think that hillary would have done so, either, LOL indeed…so funny. P.S.S. there was no care given as due to finances could not stay in the city where the hospital is, and out here in the country there’s no access, too far away, another win/win/win for the pharma bros/med complex/dupublicrat lobbying machine
Good lord, that is brutal. I wish that poor soul all the best.
I experienced a similar scenario back in the mid-1980s. No sex abuse issues, but major depression which was brought about by poverty and my inability to find a decent job, even though I had a college degree from a “good” school.
Any-hoo, I sought treatment. My po’ folks status got me into an outpatient program in a psych hospital, and gawd, was that place pushing lithium.
I refused to take it.
To this day, I owe my life and good health to a friend of a friend who was a VA hospital psychiatrist. We had a brief chat about what I was experiencing in that outpatient program, and he insisted that I was too young to need lithium, and it was too strong.
Oh, did I mention that I heard (through the grapevine) that said psych hospital was conducting a study on lithium?
Thanks for this. I have filed it away.
Good post-election analysis here, reviewing the “liberal crackup” and what comes next.
You don’t see this kind of erudition just anywhere in the media. Amazing this hasn’t been posted yet as a link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeGKcX-JHNE
There’s also an interview there about “regulating the use of words”. No lie. There is. Very PC. If they regulated words who’d be the enforcer? Lets’ say “redneck” is a regulated word. And if you by yourself in your bedroom with nobody home and you said, in a whisper, “redneck”. Maybe somebody would hear you through your TV. But you’d be smart enough to have NASCAR on with the sound turned up way high. That would certainly destroy any evidence, assuming that itself didn’t cast you into circumstantial suspicion. What if you also said “braud” referring to a woman. That might be regulated. That would be easy to deny if you were brought to trial you could say “I meant her backside was broad.” hahahahah. That would be certain exculpation although you might get the shlt beaten out of you by the word police. At least you’d die virtuous. Of course you might be broad yourself, in which case you’d be above reproach. It’s weird when you think of regulating words — you get into all sorts of paradoxes. If you got arrested for saying “redneck” you could say you were looking out the window and saw a cardinal on a fence and it had a red neck. Nobody could deny that. The word regulators would have to be very very assiduous. Assuming you can say that because “ass” is in it.
Ha! Just checked out the youtube. The Buckster! My first thought was is that dude still alive? Then I thought dang he looks young. Must be Jr, his kid. Then I saw the interview date – 1984. What an ominous, yet appropriate date!?
Then the subject matter. Liberalism! But they meant the FDR kind, not the robber baron kind. Oh well, the interview still sounded like it coulda been done a month ago. Maybe the bad guys changed, but you barely notice. I think the trick to timeless oratory is to use mostly adjectives and adverbs in your oratory. Then trying to sound really, really smart as the Buckster does so well certainly helps. It’s like a fountain of excess IQ points dibble out of his mouth and drip off his chin. hahaha.
they don’t analyze the news like that anymore. Now they get the Green Room make up treatment then get launched in your face like a circus dwarf out of a cannon. Even what they say is mostly made up, but they believe it evidently.
it comes out in sentence fragments, usually forceful stammers right at the camera or screams at the host or fellow guests. It isn’t even complete sentences! Nobody has time for complete sentences. Let alone complete thoughts — those are beyond the ability of the contemporary mind to formulate and simultaneously function.
The link is pretty funny, Tyrell looks like a frat guy whose temporarily sober enough to argue and Hitchens is like “I can mop these two Americun idiots like a floor but I’m too cultured to do that overtly, so I just have to suppress my condescending boredom and let them do it to themselves, as they surely will. Because they can’t help it.” hahahah
Some interesting things to be ferreted out from these links…Trump is still more popular than the Democrats (and Hillary), Alexander Hamilton, darling of all good Democrats, was very much in favor of plutocracy, and Keith Ellison, rejected as head of the DNC, was the only member of Congress concerned enough to reach out to Case & Deaton. It should be interesting to see what happens in 2018, when the Democratic Party gets pummeled again.
That’s okay. As deputy (or vice- or whatever they’re calling him) head of the DNC, Ellison is under the firm control of the party and won’t make that mistake again. Saw a “victory” photo of him with Perez — made me want to vomit.
The Democratic Party right now is in worse shape than the Whigs were in 1848 — and that party was pretty much finished six and arguably four years later. If the Democrats significantly underperform in 2018, I think they’re pretty much doomed. The GOP will just win the WH again after they inevitable run Booker/Cuban, re-tighten the gerrymander, and that’s that for American liberalism.
There are only a couple of times in American history where a party was worse off than the Democrats are right now. The GOP in 1936 and the GOP in 1964. Note that both times the GOP was saved from a coup de grace because of centrist pseudo-pragmatist stupidity. We’ll see if the reactionaries return the favor in 2018. Reactionaries aren’t as stupid as liberals, so they’re not going to intentionally throw them a life raft, but Trump (as with W. Bush) could still mess it up with a bungled war or recession.
I was thinking about the 1840’s and 1850’s the other day. Then, people felt compromises were not possible…their differences too far apart.
Enough thought the only way out was to part ways.
I don’t know about that…the Whigs were in worst shape, and for that matter, so were the Democrats, due to the fundamental contradictions posed by slavery. The political system was cracking up, and so was the country. I don’t think we’re even close to that level of discord, yet.
The big slavery-level issue of today is economic inequality and the disparity in power posed by it. The EU is cracking up before our eyes — and what’s worse, the ways in which the elites are trying to fill in the cracks only guarantee worse ones down the line. All of the Ryan-McConnell, Trump-Pence, and Obama-Clinton-Pelosi-Reid factions can’t stop our descent. They can slow it with well-timed stimulus packages and scientific advances, but the general trend is corporate domination and impoverishment of OECD nations.
If I had told you 15 years ago or even 10 years ago that Europe was going to collapse into herrenvolk authoritarianism, with France, Italy, the UK, Greece, and Hungary leading the charge, you’d probably call me out of line. If I told you that the liberal-conservative consensus would be the direct cause of this crack-up, you’d call me insane.
It’s a bit too soon to see how this shakes up in the United States. But I do know that the problem is only going to get worse whether the liberal establishment makes a huge roaring comeback in 2018/2020 or Trump finishes them off.
If you start looking at the flyover states as having been colonized by the metropolis, a lot falls into place.
I’m not sure how that translates to civil war, though, because a Civil War by definition happens between jurisdictions, territories. I suppose you could have California and Texas secede, because the compradors in each state want to be a full-fledged ruling class…
But the Whigs only went away because another party replaced them. Who is going to replace the Democrats? That party is like a dead squirrel in the road that no one is willing to sweep up.
The Whigs weren’t replaced by a new party all at once. What happened was that third party/independent candidates started to win elections around the margin, then they had a chunk taken out of them by the Free Soilers, then they got disemboweled by the American Party/Know Nothings, then the Republicans swept up the crumbs. Though note that their disintegration had a big assist by the Democratic Party, which was also structurally weak. We can see parallels then with now: a pro-capitalism party that drew its strength from the cities and Northeast was unable to form a coherent response to the big issues of the day (back then slavery, today economic inequality) and then suddenly collapsed in three cycles after the aftershocks of a Presidency that sowed the seeds of demise despite the superficial patina of victory (Obama’s policies of austerity and demographic neglect despite crushing the GOP in 2008 versus Fillmore setting the stage for a war with slave power in his attempts to compromise).
I can’t predict whether the party that succeeds the Democrats, if they don’t clean up their act, will be orthodox liberal, some kind of FDR-style Marxist/liberal mismash, or fully pinko. But the Democrats can’t go on the way they’re doing unless the Republicans simultaneously collapse.
I opened the WaPoo this morning to find the WikiLeaks/CIA situation described [below the fold] as follows:
The article goes on to explain the “number” of “cyberwarriors” at the agency, and emphasizes the “scale and structure of this operation.” Not much about invasion of citizens’ privacy.
And in a separate story about the possibility of your tv ratting you out, “‘no need to worry’ security analysist says; security measures are available.”
Clearly I need to turn to the WaPoo for assurance when my blood pressure rises.
Well Amazon sells smart TV’s so ………
> cyberwarriors
Really? That’s the word now? Wowsers.
Yup.
“Warriors” not “spies.”
Second sentence of the story, after introducing the guy, the Post says, “He is also a cyberwarrior for the CIA, an experienced hacker whose resume lists assignments at clandestine branches devoted to finding vulnerabilities in smartphones and penetrating the computer defenses of the Russian government.” [Emphasis added.]
Class Warfare – Neo-liberal California style, or How California’s pay-to-stay jails create a two-tiered justice system.
RE: Pot For Pets: Owners Treat Sick Animals With Cannabis CBS
Several weeks ago when my Max was ailing I asked the vet about this.
He said, “Well, I can’t tell you to try it. But that is what it’s sometimes used for…….”
So, we made a tent and tried it. A couple of times. Max wouldn’t eat, but he did breathe. I can’t say for sure it worked, but I can say I’d do it again.
Does it make police guard dogs or drug-sniffing dogs happier or mellower?
antifascism as a brand
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/09/dont-let-establishment-opportunists-ruin-resistance-movement
When it looks like the liberal toads are trying to co-opt antifascism, it would behoove antifascists to burn a few more limos and punch a few more Nazis. There’s no way in hell liberals could ever bring themselves to co-opt a direct rebuke on anticapitalism. When it’s cute like Brown Berets and Che shirts, sure. When it involves a millionaire getting his jaw shattered and his conference wrecked, no. I’d go as far as to say that it’s logically impossible for them to do so, much like a fascist embracing pacifism.
WD My Cloud is a physical hard drive that links one or more of your home computers via ethernet (wired) connection to your router. It’s home storage; it’s only connected to the internet indirectly, via whatever router you use. It doesn’t store personal data “in the cloud,” i.e., by sending it to servers outside your home. Western Digital just adopted the buzzword “cloud” because everyone else was using it. Like many home appliances connected to the Net, it apparently has vulnerabilities!
I think it’s both. Just bought the WD Passport 1Tb drive. It is a hard drive, but they also give you a subscription to something like 5Gb of cloud storage too you can use as an option. I didn’t use it, because I like knowing where my stuff is. In the case of the Passport drive, it’s connected via USB 3.0 to your computer USB port. Also comes with backup and encryption software. Small, cute and colorful too.
The vulnerability they are discussing is on the home device, which apparently can be accessed by the user remotely (say, if you want to check a file on your hard drive at home while you are traveling). I’ve never used it that way — in fact, I can’t even “log in” to the damned thing, but it does show up as an external drive on my regular PCs and I can move files on and off of it. I think what the Register is saying is that nasties get to the WD drive via internet, and then use it as a jumping off place to get into other PCs connected to it via the router. The affected firmware is version 2 — what does that mean for those of us who never updated and are still using version 1? Are we safe? Kidding, sort of. I have no idea.
The MyCloud device is an improperly secured Network Access Server running on Linux and administered by an Apache server with CGI scripts. While I would never have one of these things it’s mostly because backups over Ethernet takes too long. For most people the MyCloud security issue would matter if someone connected to their local network, perhaps from an unsecured WIFI server. Since very few people know how to expose their local services, by port forwarding, to the Internet that overall attack risk is fairly small.
As for the other option, of actually backing up some local stuff to the internet/cloud, someone would have to pay me a lot of money for me to allow them to try to paw through my stuff. I’d encrypt it all a few times first and only put up stuff that I didn’t care about in the first place.
Sleeping Through the Night Is a Relatively New Invention New York Magazine
“The first scholar to put consolidated sleep—today’s standard “one straight shot throughout the night”—under the microscope was historian Roger Ekirch. In his fascinating 2001 essay “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,” Ekirch revealed that across a wide range of nationalities and social classes in early modern Europe and North America, the standard pattern for nighttime sleep was to do it in two shifts of “segmented sleep.” These two sleeps—sometimes called first and second sleep, sometimes “dead sleep” and “morning sleep”—bridged an interval of “quiet wakefulness” that lasted an hour or more. (The interval itself was sometimes called “the watching.”)
=================================================================
One of the most wonderful benefits of being retired is that I get to sleep when I want. No more I HAVE to go to sleep because I HAVE to get up early – which always fails, and causes such consternation that I hardly got any sleep at all. No more I can’t take a nap because than I won’t be able to sleep at night…again, I sleep when I am….sleepy.
Remember, I am in CA so if my comment appears first, it meant that I got up at 2 or 3 or 4 AM. I had read an article years ago about how sleep in the middle ages was divided, so I don’t have to struggle with the idea that I am SUPPOSE to sleep a solid eight (or ?7? or ?9? or whatever the “experts” say). I go to bed when I want (sometimes that’s 7PM! sometimes its 11PM) and I get up when I wake up (2AM! 6AM! 9AM!).
I imagine many NC readers are familiar with the idea that school starts at a time convenient to the adults, but contrary to the waking patters of children. It just shows how many and varied our indoctrinated beliefs are, and based solely on the interests of the “market.”
Hear. Hear. I feel much less guilty now that I know I can fall asleep whenever I want. Also, work is bad for you!
I like my 8-9 hours per night. Life expectancy past the age of 50 is also a relatively new invention…
It has been pointed out here that people lived well past 50, in the old days.
The curve was skewed by so many people never reaching adulthood. Once there, it wasn’t what it is today, but it also wasn’t in the 40’s.
Two weeks ago, Naked Capitalism had an article about the Trump administration’s desire to delay the Labor Department’s fiduciary rule:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/02/fourth-federal-district-court-looks-likely-to-uphold-fiduciary-rule.html
I don’t know whether there has been additional information about this in NC since then. If there has already been information about this, I apologize for the redundancy. On March 2, the Labor Department published a proposed rule that would delay the implementation of the Fiduciary Rule by 60 days. Comments will be accepted through March 17:
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-03-02/pdf/2017-04096.pdf
More information is here (at the Amazon Web Services site — I’ve read about Amazon’s role as a government contractor):
https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2017-04096.pdf
Why are women protesting? He asked them to join him International Women’s Day in “honoring of the critical role of women here in America and around the world”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/donald-trump-sexism-tracker-every-offensive-comment-in-one-place/
Oink
The Shelby Steele piece (“The Exhaustion of American Liberalism”) can be reached through the WSJ paywall here. Just click through their popup and it redirects to WSJ.
It’s a short piece, but worth reading.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2017/03/06/the_exhaustion_of_american_liberalism_404255.html
Thanks. I used the RCP link, and I thought that would be enough.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/former-trump-security-adviser-flynn-admits-turkey-lobbying
“WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who was fired from his prominent White House job last month, has registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for $530,000 worth of lobbying work before Election Day that may have aided the Turkish government.
Paperwork filed Tuesday with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit said Flynn and his firm were voluntarily registering for lobbying from August through November that “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” It was filed by a lawyer on behalf of the former U.S. Army lieutenant general and intelligence chief.
After his firm’s work on behalf of a Turkish company was done, Flynn agreed not to lobby for five years after leaving government service and never to represent foreign governments.
Under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, U.S. citizens who lobby on behalf of foreign government or political entities must disclose their work to the Justice Department. Willfully failing to register is a felony, though the Justice Department rarely files criminal charges in such cases.”
================================================
some clarity
The Science Daily article “Sound waves boost older adults’ memory, deep sleep” was interesting.
The technology is available to anyone with a pair of ear buds right now. Its called Brainwave Entrainment and there are several excellent apps available from Banzai. I have no relationship to Banzai but I do use their products.
You don’t need the music or any “cover” sound but ocean waves or rain or some other “noise” can be pleasant.
Your brain normally has several brainwave forms working at any given time. They are identifiable by their frequency. Alpha, Beta, Delta, Theta and a few others are all working in various states of predominance at any given time in your brain.
If you listen to, for example, the binaural sound that generates a Theta wave (this is the one you would readily associate with a Buddhist Monk chant) your brain will sync to the frequency and produce the Theta wave as the predominate wave in your brain. This is the definition of meditation.
But now you don’t need to learn to meditate, your brain will go into that mode within three to five minutes of you relaxing and listening to the frequency.
You can use different waves, different combinations and sequences and achieve different results.
The benefits of meditation are well documented and yes it absolutely helps with memory, recall and just plain brainpower. Not to mention the benefit of a purposely calmed brain in our cacophonous world.
One thing that’s lost in the Stoller piece are Hamilton’s intentions during the country’s founding days; sure he wasn’t democracy’s avatar, but he did throw his efforts and energy towards support of the Constitution despite his misgivings via The Federalist Papers and countless backroom maneuverings. Plus, and I think this point is lost entirely, is Hamilton’s conscious effort to use money as cement to bind the infant Union together… the sectional interests of New England merchants, Southern plantation owners, and Western farmers would vary as the situations changed — but ALL had a vested interest in servicing the new federal debt. Hamilton seemed to act with a conscious mindset that the money would keep the disparate parts of the country together when loyalty and brotherhood failed to do so.
I’ve never seen the Hamilton play, so I can’t comment on that directly — but Hamilton strikes me as a pragmatist. Madison may have been the brains when it came to political theory (providing the rough overview for how to structure the government) but Hamilton’s Treasury helped bond those elements together into a functional whole by making sure the new government’s word carried weight home and abroad by transforming American debt into a sound investment.
Sure, he was far from perfect, but I don’t think it’s a mistake to hold the man up as an American hero. A self-made man who came from nothing and turned himself into one of the Republic’s most influential men. Albert Gallatin, installed by Jefferson to tear apart Hamilton’s Treasury (which Jefferson viewed as Hamilton’s open license for graft), reported that it was the most perfect administration in the government, so well-made as to be, “a sinecure for life” for whoever holds the position as Treasury Secretary. Even the French chameleon Tallyrand would comment on the absurdity of Hamilton working at his law office late into the night, refusing to enrich himself on the public purse as the main man of the Treasury. Even Hamilton’s widow would come to regret her husband’s decision to foresake his own army pension to avoid perceptions of conflict of interest on how to address the soldier’s pay issue.
He’s a complicated man, but I don’t like the assertion that people are idiots to view him favorably. He certainly had his shortcomings, but there’s also quite a bit in his story to like.
And how did that work out? It took a civil war and defeat of one part of the country to hold the union together. But as Stoller points out the money did hold the NY bankers to the southern slave owners. Perhaps making money the basis of your ideology and society is not the best idea. Someone tell the Democrats (and the GOP).
BTW your “people are complex” argument could also apply to Jefferson and Jackson–popular villains these days (and apparently in the play) for their slaveowner defending views. Perhaps the bottom line is that pop art, much less B’way musicals, shouldn’t substitute for a serious study of history.
Unrelated: what do you think was the earliest year the non-slaveholding states could’ve definitely beaten the South in a secession conflict? I have a rather logistical and structural view of warfare, especially warfare after the 1st industrial revolution, so I think that forcing the aristocracy’s hand before, oh, 1850 would’ve led to a Southern victory.
What an interesting question!
Carolinian —
As far as the national interest is concerned, I’d say it worked out pretty well. When the Civil War did come, the North was sufficiently industrialized (another Hamiltonian vision) to ultimately defeat the slave power.
As a separate point, I think one of the biggest ironies is that the crowning achievement of the Jefferson presidency, The Louisiana Purchase, was ONLY possible due to the wonders Hamilton achieved with the Treasury. If the finances of the US weren’t so sound, Jefferson never could’ve scraped the money together to pay France for their American holdings.
Deadl E Cheese —
It’s an impossible question to answer, but your timeframe is probably near the mark. If the Civil War starts any earlier, and the size of the Confederacy is simply too big for a conventional (Union) army to achieve a realistic victory. But that doesn’t mean that the South would’ve won either. The North could’ve still pushed the blockade strategy and choked off the Southern economy from foreign trade. An earlier Civil War could very easily have devolved into a protracted stalemate without either side being able to achieve a real victory.
…FYI, Jefferson’s slave mistress, Sally Hemings, was is late wife’s half-sister. (Ick!)
Biden’s can roll like that now , but not Jefferson?
It’s not uncommon for one party to a marriage to take up with the other’s sibling on death of the first spouse – shared looks, life experience and grieving and all that. In some premodern cultures if a woman was widowed, a surviving brother of her late husband was required to take her into his household. If the first spouse is/was unrelated, why would “Ick” attach to consorting with a similarly-unrelated sibling? Or were you referring to either a he-did-so-while-his-late-wife-was-still-alive or the obvious “slaveholder’s privilege” aspects?
The point is that this autocrat is being held up by elites as a model, and that they appear to be astonishingly, well Trumpian, in their willingness to ignore the history of his antidemocratic commitments. That the idealized image is as yet so undented is a fair gauge of the weakness of democratic interests at the top and their indifference to what should be embarrassing revelations of their mob-like fanboy/fangirlish ignorance of US history. So much fun is made of the credulous pleasure seeking of the masses. Well, there’s fun all around.
One thing that I think Stoller missed is that many people (myself included) have long thought that the hero worship of Jefferson (especially as the paragon of democracy) was highly problematic. The emphasis on Hamilton is in part a response to that. I wished Stoller hadn’t fallen back into the Hamilton-Jefferson trap. Both men possessed a multitude of positions and traits, some admirable and some not. Trying to draw direct comparisons to the present is difficult. What is troubling, as the article discusses, is the reason why the Democratic leaders admire Hamilton.
I’d support more duels in congress.
Mandate it. Call it term limits.
Most of the founding fathers would be in jail today, the rest would be institutionalized.
Archdrew: it would have been nice if on “womens day” he had pointed out the fact there is no “Friedrich”..only “lizzy” niet-zs-che…more people are reading my rambling here today then ever read his hardly distributed burps while he was writing them or even coherent…he did not “exist” until lizzy returned from paraguay broke and decided to work her dying brothers written rantings into phase 2 of her visions of a global german and germany…
nueva germania…
every drop of nietzsche is lizzy reworking her dying brothers scratchings…there is no fred
Which books did she revise? Did she revise “The Birth of Tragedy”?
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s meticulous translator and editor, goes into all this in copious footnotes in all his translations, which are accepted as the standard versions, and in his bios and studies of FN.
Yes, Elizabeth tampered with texts and tried to take over her famous brothers ‘nachloss’ but scholars and translators have been sorting it out ever since.
Thanks for the clarification. (BTW, it’s ‘Nachlass’, lit. ‘what remains behind’.)
Spicer says ‘massive difference’ between CIA WikiLeaks leak and Podesta email leak ABC
the link has gone to internet heaven or internet heck…but its no longer on this mortal coil….
EPA chief Scott Pruitt says carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to global warming [CNBC, auto-launch]
Alternative chemistry.
Here’s a reminder of the Senators who voted for the completely unqualified Pruitt to be the EPA Administrator:
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=115&session=1&vote=00071
Government of the Koch Brothers, by the Koch Brothers, and for the Koch Brothers. Note that fake Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota voted for Pruitt, and Democrat Joe Donnelly of Indiana tried to conceal his position by not voting.
Among the Republicans, only Susan Collins of Maine voted against him.
But is it “the” cause…Gotta understand the secret 12th edition of republispeak…just as when the Russians were told, nato would not expand “one” inch…
it would have been hard to balance a tank on half an inch so obviously nato was going to follow the letter of the understanding and not “just” expand “one” inch…dont want to stress those poor tanks…
Beam me up scottie…no intelligent life on this here one either…
And since measuring it with precision is too difficult, it is obvious we just need to stop measuring it…
but what comes after the deluge
The NYT engages in a little “tells me it’s rain” on the absurdity of ACA premiums. Oh, so it’s okay because everyone else has an employer absorbing the cost?
And that more of those with employer care are seeing their plans cut services and/or increase deductibles – which don’t count as a ‘premium’ increase but is a distinct cost increase. Nor does it notice that those with subsidies are also getting less and less for their and the governments money which is also a cost increase. And that that supposedly 3% is probably smaller than the number who were affected by premium increases the year before because with each increase more people decide they simply cannot afford even the supposedly cheap catastrophic insurance which would still bankrupt them if they had to use it.
Yeah, it is all meaningless complaining. Not that the Republicans are doing anything to actually address the problems.
Tech and the Fake Markets Tactic
A nice look at the evolutionary steps that eventually led to Uber and other ‘Fake markets’:
There’s an amusing tactic to get lower prices on Amazon I heard about recently: since so many sellers automate their mark-to-market pricing, you can make up a fictional sale price for the same product as a “competitor” and they will match it.
The idea of an interior space being bigger than its exterior was also a compelling theme in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, one of Werner Herzog’s many great movies.
I find this idea to be quite empowering.
It’s like walking into a medieval gothic cathedral.
Many of us would wonder at the height of the building inside, yet, we rarely notice the sky overhead when we are out in the open (we don’t say, whoa, it’s 1,000,000-story high!!!).
Post-Mortem #329,424: (I didn’t catch this the first time it went around)
Trump’s campaign messages received more favorably when delivered by a woman. Clinton’s messages received less favorably when delivered by a man.
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=8889
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/theater/he-said-she-said-gender-bending-the-presidential-debates.html?_r=2
https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/march/trump-clinton-debates-gender-reversal.html
The two NYU professors who designed the experiment were “unsettled” to discover that audience members actually found Trump’s style more endearing when it came from a woman
One female audience member even remarked that she found the male version of Clinton “very punchable” because he smiled so much.
Doesn’t surprise me a bit. The only thing Hillary had going for her was her gender.
I can’t express how.glad I am that she is still one of America’s least-popular politicians. For the countries she’s helped destroy and the lives she’s helped ruin, the least she deserves is to go to her grave despised and mocked.
I couldn’t find this on NYT or WaPo sites: Russia’s Largest Bank Confirms Hiring Podesta Group To Lobby For Ending Sanctions
On Pot for Pets: I have a 17 y.o. Burmese cat named Chester and he has bad pain from arthritic hips. As some of you may know, cats cannot metabolize pain killing drugs at all; they therefore have a tendency to concentrate in the cat’s system leading to extreme toxicity. But cats have endocannabinoid receptors in their brains, as do humans, so I can personally testify to CBD oil efficacy in cats.
When I put Chester on the CBD oil I noticed within 48 hours a huge difference in his state. He had been vocalizing loud and often – if any of you have oriental cats, you know just how loud that lower timbre cry can be – and he could not even sit down comfortably. After the oil he was a changed animal. Now he’s doing real well and is back to the old cat he used to be.
My husband is a biochemist and he knew about the cats receptors and okayed the CBD oil trial. I wouldn’t go back to pharmaceutical treatments for my particular animal for all of the tea in China.
Very interesting.
WebMD actually has a page on this very topic: http://pets.webmd.com/cats/guide/safe-cat-pain-medications
Opioids – they’re not just for Flyover-state Deplorables anymore! :)
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2017/03/07/spygate-americas-political-police-vs-donald-j-trump/
As the New York Times reported on January 12:
“In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.
“The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.
Forget about looking for a FISA court application to spy on Trump & Co.: it wasn’t necessary. Such archaic remnants of a free society as a warrant were blithely bypassed: “Seventeen different government agencies shouldn’t be rooting through Americans’ emails with family members, friends and colleagues, all without ever obtaining a warrant,” warned American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Patrick Toomey at the time the NSA rules were thrown out.
………..
It’s difficult to see how anyone could deny that the Surveillance State did a number on Trump. Two days after the loosened NSA rules went into effect, the Washington Post ran a story headlined “US Intercepts Capture Senior Russian Officials Celebrating Trump Win”:
……………..
So the FISA issue is, I believe, a false trail, a distraction away from what really happened. They didn’t need the FISA court. They didn’t need a warrant. They simply opened a “back door” that, contrary to reports, had not been closed by the “USA Freedom Act,” and – unleashed by the relaxation of the rules previously governing dissemination of NSA intercepts – simply went through it.
================================================
I hope this hasn’t been posted before – its new to me!
Trump and the repubs are caught in their own ideology that “spying good, constitutional rights only used by pansies” And of course, they’re own “if your not lying, you have nothing to fear” Yeah Mitch McConnell – why should republican caucus meeting be secret???
My first inclination is that the bast*rds should be hoist on their own petards.
But it is is just a long evolving dissolution of any rights of citizens, and more and more of it is not something to be ignored because it happens to unsavory people.
Yemen
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/09/women-and-children-in-yemeni-village-recall-horror-of-trumps-highly-successful-seal-raid/
Afghanistan
https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/839853583738802176
JUST IN: Head of U.S. military’s Central Command said new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will involve more U.S. forcese
Syria
https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/839885605597241352
U.S. Marines deploy as Syrian forces say they expect to reach Raqqa in a few weeks: http://reut.rs/2lHWbTS
Perhaps we can help Mexico rid of their gangs.
Boycott Mexican drugs.
For a couple of years, or more if necessary.
Buy American! USA USA USA
I dunno about that. First we need to get some honest hippies in the biz of growing pot. I recently checked on domestic Arizona grown “medical marijuana” and was shocked to see web store pricing at $250-$300 per oz. Everyone in America has turned into a greedy crook! You can’t buy American without getting screwed!
Wow. It’s $10/gram here in Toronto, so that’s abt $30/oz.
Source:
Sold! That’s what we paid for Columbian Red or Acapulco Gold back in college days and productivity has gone thru the roof since then. Then we could get marginally smokable domestic for $200/lb. This wasn’t the wild roadside stuff – it actually came from CA, I think, and it was cultivated from good Columbian seeds.
It was illegal, which is why it cost so much. We were told back then by our friendly neighborhood dealer.
1 oz. =~ 28 grams => $10/gr =~ $280/oz.
I’ll pass on the 3 grams ounces , thats some serious inflation you have up there
Around 28 grams in an ounce Bro, last time I looked
You got to love those demodogs and their helpers. I wonder if they had to pay onto hillabillie & big dogs foundation? from zh
http://tass.com/economy/934699
This is for Lambert, we use and abuse our Coverall shelter and it would serve your purpose too, I think. The 20′ by 20′ size is quite manageable and THERE IS NO FLAP if it’s correctly installed and it lasts for years (ours is 17 years old and going strong. Plus it’s a great place to stay in an earthquake. aloha Kije
I’m not too sure about the Ian Welsh article. Despite all the negative press, Trump may only be down another 2% in the approval ratings, but his score was already historically low. To drop much further he’ll need to begin to lose his base, and that’s likely to take longer than two months if it ever happens. Dems down by 16% seems more interesting to me: Mainstream Democrats still don’t have a clue how to attract voters.
“UN experts denounce ‘myth’ pesticides are necessary to feed the world”
Thanks for that one – very useful. I was looking for something like that.
Apparently the Guardian has its uses.
Mixed signals from Trump. He says he wants to restore Glass Steagall, but he also wants to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
http://www.todayonline.com/business/trump-meets-us-community-bankers-pledges-scale-back-regulations
Yesterday, several more Representatives co-sponsored H.R.790 – the Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2017, bringing the total to 37. Still only one Republican.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/790/cosponsors
My comment to Michael V. Hayden’s editorial in today’s NYTs:
Greg Gerner Wake Forest, NC 4 hours ago
Wake up, people. As the old line goes, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean you don’t have enemies.” To be clear, I HATE Trump, think he’s an unlettered, unread, uncouth buffoon totally unfit for office, a danger to our land in his own right. Stipulated. Despite this, last time I checked, he did win the 2016 US Presidential election. Funny how democracy works; while I don’t particularly care for the outcome in this case, I do respect the process, and so should you. So, when Trump has the temerity to suggest that our intelligence communities are out of control and have vested interests not 100% aligned with democratic values, don’t deny or discount the truth of his charges just because of your (and my) shared distaste for the President. Signing off now, as I have to go stand in front of my internet connected TV or talk on my phone (or type on this keyboard) so the intelligence community can further surveil me (and you) in flagrant violation to our (former) 4th Amendment rights. Good morning, Mr. Hayden!!
I have never understood why storing personal data in The Cloud is a good idea, despite Apple’s constant nudges for me to do so.
I’m not sure that’s really applicable to MyCloud, which isn’t really cloud-based but uses the buzzword “cloud” in the name (because marketing).
It’s basically a (very) primitive NAS/DLNA server with a poorly-secured web interface being sold to people who lack the expertise to properly secure such a device even if it provided the tools to do so. It’s the IT equivalent of selling a motorcycle to a five year-old.