Tag Archives: politics

A bit of a rewrite on this commentary to make it clear and precise in what it is saying. What is occurring is the Insurance Companies and their CEOs are profiting off of our illness. Insurance Policy pricing keeps going up along with the healthcare insurance deductibles. Unless one can afford the insurance premiums, people rely on higher deductibles. The other issue is such profit taking by executives can leave a company at risk when the economy...

One of these things is not like the others. Fentanyl is killing about 70,000 Americans a year. The others are known to be useful in treating opioid dependency yet (in 2014 sorry will Google more) only half of private opioid use disorder treatment programs offered pharmaceuticals and less tha one third of patients actually received the drugs “The proportion of opioid treatment admissions with treatment plans that included receiving medications fell...

US mother sentenced to two years in prison for giving daughter abortion pills, Backwoods and Out Houses USA, The Guardian This is not horrific. It is what happens to people when there is no way out. The horrific part is the state which forces people to take any means possible. ~~~~~~~~ Jessica Burgess, a Nebraska mother accused of helping her teenage daughter use pills to end her pregnancy, was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison....

“So a Democratic Senator is indicted on serious charges, and no Democrats attacking the Justice Department, no Democrats attacking the prosecutors, no Democrats calling for an investigation of the prosecution, and no Democrats calling to defund the Justice Department,” wrote former Republican representative from Illinois and now anti-Trump activist Joe Walsh.  “Weird, huh?” AB: More on this in the second half of Prof. Heather’s commentary . . ....

The Big Picture of the housing market, and its almost complete bifurcation, in 3 easy graphs  – by New Deal democrat I want to spend some time commenting on the broader issue of why the public perceives inflation is still rampant, even though almost all official measures show it rapidly decelerating, and even completely absent on a YoY basis currently by a few measures. A big part of that has to do with housing, and since I’ve discussed several...

The myth of markets How is it that a market created by Madison Avenue becomes prescient? Omniscient? It doesn’t. It isn’t; never was. Like capitalism, the primacy of private healthcare and the myth of markets are a big lie.The planet is dying from our burning of fossil fuels, yet we hear ‘news readers’ demand that alternative energy needs to be competitive with fossil fuels. Like hell, it does. Markets may, probably do, have a place in an economy,...

Hah got your attention there. The connection is Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr pionere of Cinematic nudity, Marine drone technology and the anti jamming anti interference technology on which WiFi is based. Notable for the first Hollywood full frontal nudity scene and the concept of an un jammable, uninterceptable, radio controlled torpedo. Lamarr was born in Austria and married a guy who owned a company which made torpedoes. Post WWI when...

Based on a recent article in New York Review of Books, I read the novel “Independent People” by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. The book was originally published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935. Laxness won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1955, in part on the strength of this book. Like Moby-Dick, I approached this novel as an obligation. I put it down once, after a few pages, in exasperation with its rambling faux-Norse folklore beginnings,...

Have to ask the question as to whether these early showings are predictors of what is to come in 2024 election. I do not recall this type of election wins in 2016. In any case, if Dems win big, it will be another stolen election! Last night, people voted in elections in two different states. “Those results tell us way more about the state of our democracy and the political strength of the pro-democracy forces in this country than all of today’s...

Initial jobless claims: unresolved seasonality obscures cautionary YoY comparisons  – by New Deal democrat For the last few weeks, I have been highlighting that there is likely some unresolved post-pandemic seasonality in the initial claims numbers. That certainly looked like the case this week, as a sharp decline mirrored a similar sharp decline 52 weeks ago. To wit: initial claims declined -20,000 to 201,000, the lowest number since...