Tag Archives: politics

As taken from the comments section. EMichael’s commentary on temperature and its impact. Interesting. “Air conditioning has changed demographics, too. It’s hard to imagine the rise of cities like Dubai or Singapore without it. As residential units spread rapidly across America in the second half of the 20th century, the population in the “sun belt” – the warmer south of the country, from Florida to California – boomed from 28% of Americans to 40%. As...

There are no loud guns shots in the middle of the night. No screams for help or sounds of cars speeding away. No police sirens or flashing lights. It is pretty quiet when someone ODs on Opioids unless someone finds them before it is too late. As I wrote earlier; “From 2006 to 2015, pharmaceutical companies spent $880 million in lobbying state and federal legislatures and contributing to campaigns to prevent laws restricting Opioid prescriptions. Opioid...

(Dan here…Better late than never!) A thought for Sunday: the march of demographics and the 2018 midterms Below is a graph showing that the older the demographic (up until age 80), the bigger the turnout during midterm elections. The data behind this graph isn’t just from 2014, but from a series of midterm elections over time — in other words, it has been durable over time. My purpose in this post is show that, even if these percentages hold in this...

Jeffrey Sachs on Trump’s Trade Fallacies I heard on some news show an incredibly stupid statement from our President earlier today and in utter disbelief fired off this comment on some blog: Trump equates our trade deficit with us being ripped off. Let’s do this as a simple example. You walk into Best Buy and purchase a $1000 computer but do not have cash. So you put it on your credit card incurring a $1000 liability. Even though you now have the...

Saudi Crown Prince Tortures Fellow Princes A new report by Hugh Miles at Middle East Monitor, Is the “Saudi Elite Cannibalizing Itself?” by Juan Cole, reports the recent purge of supposedly corrupt princes and high officials was (and continues to be) much more horrendous than previously reported, which I fear does not surprise me. Apparently Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), whom I have previously posted about here, hired mercenaries to...

Janet Colbert of Stop The Organized Pill Pushers Blog: “The death rate from Opioids continues to escalate year over year due to Florida ignoring the opiate epidemic for so long. Since STOPPNow (Stop The Organized Pill Pushers) started posting, the death rate went from 7/day in Florida. to 14/day. To keep the pressure on the legislature, I (Janet Colbert) will keep the Stoppnow.com site updated when we have bills that will need support to become law.”...

China, not automation, is by far the biggest factor in the decline of prime age labor force participation Perhaps the biggest mystery in economic analysis in the last few years has been trying to find an explanation for the big decline in labor force participation since 1999.  A recent NBER working paper by Abraham and Kearney has posited the most comprehensive answer to date.  Since it was summarized in this Washington Post article, I’m just going to...

Many Conservatives concede that the Conservative movement has gone bad. But they still insist that those of us who have been arguing this for decades were wrong for decades roughly until Trump came along. They find the case of famous conservative Dinesh D’Souza distinctly inconvenient. Washington Post Op-ed columnist Max Boot wrote “@DineshDSouza is indicative of the downward trajectory of conservatism. He made his name with a well-regarded 1991 book...

Terry talking to his Brother Charly: “You shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me, just a little bit, so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money…I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.:” “On The Water Front” Trump; “I coulda had class. I coulda been a hero if I had rushed in there. I coulda been somebody instead of a bum, which I am.”...

Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate: We should all take a lesson from the Stoneman-Douglas students 1. Give Donald Trump Precisely 5 Percent of Your Mental Energy They have no interest in talking to him or even about him. They have internalized the lesson that he is a symptom of the problem but unworthy of credit or blame. I suspect that if the rest of us ignored the president half as ably as they have, we’d all have vastly more emotional energy for the...