Tag Archives: politics

“About 90 minutes before the Michigan Supreme Court ruled Monday the cuts in payments to healthcare givers of badly injured motorists don’t apply to those injured before June 2019, one of those survivors died in a Farmington Hills hospital following a two-year struggle to maintain his quality of life and health. Sixty-four year old Brian Woodward spent the past 24 months of his life being shuffled between three nursing facilities and 22 hospital...

“About 90 minutes before the Michigan Supreme Court ruled Monday the cuts in payments to healthcare givers of badly injured motorists don’t apply to those injured before June 2019, one of those survivors died in a Farmington Hills hospital following a two-year struggle to maintain his quality of life and health. Sixty-four year old Brian Woodward spent the past 24 months of his life being shuffled between three nursing facilities and 22 hospital...

I’m a molecular biologist who also has an undergrad degree in microbiology. Those facts and the additional facts that (a) I was in the Moderna phase III trial and (b) my medical school is one of ten NIH designated vaccine testing and evaluation units made me an avid student of the unfolding COVID-19 story. Given everything we know over centuries of experience, the null hypothesis is that any pandemic has a natural origin. But since the COVID-19...

I guess one could get by on this salary if one were frugal, could find low-cost housing, maybe used public transportation, ate cheaply, etc. There is not much room for anything else. And yet people still manage to do it. As EPI details, Nineteen percent of workers (9.76 million workers) in 20 states are paid less than $15 per hour, compared with 13% of workers in the 30 states. “Workers are 46% more likely to make below $15 an hour in states...

The Fed’s Target Is Workers, Project Syndicate, James K. Galbraith, January 2022 A year and a half later and the Fed is still trying to slay the dragon. They stab it with their steely knives, But they just can’t kill the beast. So it seems, the Feds losing battle is with Labor, direct Labor is the smallest portion of manufacturing. Without labor there is no product, just bets on the outcome of the economy. ~~~~~~~~ By announcing forthcoming...

I suspect that at the end of July, just about every expert globally will be looking for reasons why July’s climate will potentially be the hottest month experienced since we started to keep records. The U.S. has broken more than 2,000 high temperature records in the past month. The United States is long overdue in taking action to minimize the harm we as citizens exact upon our America. I guess we are not proud enough of this country to do...

For those old enough to remember the 1960s, the denials of the oil companies these days have a certain ring. Back then smokers were dying and the tobacco companies lying. Then Bogie, Ty, Errol, Clark, and Coop. Finally, it was all too much. Hollywood was good at dying. But, the real thing? Reality hits. Big Tobacco was real good at lying and hiring Senators who wail about livelihoods, theirs and others, being dependent. It was the lying what did it,...

I came across this article on Steve Hutkins’ “Save the Post Office.” There has been a political effort to redefine the USPS into more of a business model and something it was never meant to be. Right now, the USPS is beginning to reimage its model and existence as led by Postmaster Louis Dejoy. There is much wrong with this effort. Both Mark Jamison and Steve Hutkins have been defining the issues with Dejoy’s plan in their articles at Save the Post...

My parents died as paupers, so there wasn’t anything for me and my four siblings to “inherit” upon their deaths. No matter. I figure I got my inheritance on the front end, because my folks paid for my college education: tuition, room and board. Even correcting for inflation, tuition* at the University of Tennessee was cheap: ca. $160/quarter for a full load. I was fortunate that my parents had the money; even though I also carried a work-study job...

In a previous post, I made the point that even if all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions ceased tomorrow, the half-lives of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, together with climate change-driven gas emissions from melting permafrost and methane clathrates doom us to decades more of warming. The only ways to avert this are (1) carbon capture to actively remove gases from the air and/or (2) geoengineering on a planetary scale.It has been...