Tag Archives: politics

Donald Trump – Don’t Insult Our Team at the World Cup At 3PM EDT on Friday, I’ll be watching the coverage via Fox of our great women’s soccer team playing the host team in Paris. It is only the quarterfinals of the World Cup and yet this may be the game of the entire match. Unfortunately the Idiot in Chief has been writing a lot of insulting tweets: President Donald Trump has invited the U.S. women’s soccer team to the White House, regardless of whether...

Back in April, I finished up an article for ConsumerSafety.Org called A Woman’s Right to Safe Healthcare Outcomes. The topics covered in this as given to me by ConsumerSafety.Org were Clinical Trials, Essure, and Maternal Mortality. All of the topics dealt with women’s healthcare. Of the three issues addressed, I found Maternal Mortality to be the most compelling. I told the story of a white upper middle class couple, Lauren Bloomstein a nurse and her...

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Kevin Drum Talking ’bout my generation Kevin Drum has a funny but also genuinely interesting post on how boomers are not really to blame for messing up America (he half tongue in cheek blames the silent generation). I don’t think the defensiveness is entirely an act. He does concede Now, if you want to blame boomers for welfare reform, sure. Bill Clinton was (barely) a boomer. If you want to blame...

Via Naked Capitalism: Place based economic conditions and the geography of the opioid overdose crisis By Shannon Monnat, Associate Professor, Syracuse University. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Over 400,000 people in the U.S. have died from opioid overdoses since 2000. However, there is widespread geographic variation in fatal opioid overdose rates, and the contributions of prescription opioids, heroin, and...

Trucking suggests transport slowing, but has not rolled over I have been paying particular attention to the monthly report of the American Trucking Association, to compare its performance with rail, which has been sagging since the beginning of this year. A few other people are relying on the Cass Freight Index, but since that includes international shipping and air transport, it does not exclusively measure the US economy. In April this index rose...

I’ve been on the beat of income inequality since I started blogging here.  My theory: We changed the way we make money from one of making it from producing (polishing rocks into tools) to one of making money from money.  When you can make money from moving money, you don’t need to compete.  Just buy back your stock, just collect rents, just get your tax cuts. The World Bank has a new report out on Inequality 2018.   I want to direct you to a chart that...

The North Korea Food Shortage Deepens Yeah, I know, the Iran situation is more in the headlines, but nobody knows anything and everybody is shooting off their mouths.  I shall comment on that one when things settle down a bit. Instead I shall provide info less widely reported coming out of nkecon  on the still-unreported-in-MSM story about the increasingly bad food situation in North Korea (DPRK). There are multiple reports.  Drought has hit the...

For party voting preference, which is more important, age or education? Looks like we have an answer For all the slicing and dicing that has been done in voting metrics for 2016 and 2018, one quandary has stood out. We know that higher educational attainment has strongly correlated with voting for Democrats, and we also know that there was a stark age difference in votes between Clinton and Trump in 2016: a majority of voters younger than 45 voted for...

A Bernie Sanders Narrative for Seniors What follows is some unsolicited advice for the Sanders campaign. Politico has an important piece on the downside of the extraordinary age bias in Sanders’ support.  Like a teeter totter, the large advantage Sanders enjoys among younger voters is counterbalanced by his dismal showing among the older crowd.  The article reviews voting breakdowns from the 2016 campaign and current poll results, and it shows that...

75 Years After The Longest Day Yes, I am watching “The Longest Day” on TMC.  Have not seen it for decades, but this 75th anniversary of D-Day seems to be the time to do it.  This will be a rambling post all over the place.  I note that according to the film, it was German Field Marshall Rommel who is depicted calling it “the longest day,” the day before it happened, seeing it coming. I have been there several times, first in Fall 1953 when I was young...