big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
In all, 47.4 million Americans lived in poverty last year, or 7 million more than official poverty reports.
The official measure, created in 1955, does not factor in rising medical care, transportation, child care, housing, utilities or geographical variations in living costs.
Trillions of bacteria live in our mouth, skin, lungs and especially the gut. There are 10 times more microbes inside our body than there are our own human cells !
1000 species live inside humans, the vast majority recently discovered. One individual might carry at least 160 different species.
Duh. And that would be because…?
This is especially troubling because the economy is still such a long way from being healthy.
Lawrence Katz, the Harvard labor economist, estimates that 10.6 million jobs would need to materialize immediately to return the job market to its condition when the Great Recession began.
For it to get there four years from now, the economy would have to add 316,000 jobs a month. That pace would be faster than in any four-year stretch of the 1990s boom.
Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. That’s what most economists thought. That’s what everybody who didn’t have his head up his ass thought.
Mark Zandi – chief economist for Moody’s – has calculated which stimulus work.
One more time, Bush and Republicans behind the line. [click large]
- Every time you give a bank one cent of your money, you are simply short-changing yourself.
- There’s no reason to continue to pay your bank; it should be paying you.
- Move your money to find better rates.
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Treasury Secretary Paulson and other senior Bush financial regulators flouted the law. The Bush administration wanted to cover up the depth of the financial crisis that its policies had caused.
Economics Populist:
I have a hard time understanding Americans sometimes.
They seem to have unlimited ability for outrage against government workers collecting middle-class paychecks, but can’t seem to work up a protest against a massive amount of fraud and theft from people who don’t live next door to them.
Why is that?
We, and by that I mean working people, have been betrayed at every level, and the average American just cannot accept it. The deception is so broad, and so complete, that Americans have turned to blaming scapegoats instead. Because they can’t accept that fact, when all the evidence points toward it, they are easily used and manipulated.
Their crime is trusting people who are obviously lying to them.
The health care clash, like American politics, remains rooted in our mommy and daddy political parties.
Our political parties are ‘maternal’ and ‘paternal’?
See, the Democrat Party is the Mommy Party because it projects “warmth.” And the Republican Party is the Daddy Party because it leaves work early to have anonymous sex, drives home blind drunk, knocks over the neighbors’ mailboxes, yells at the kids for dressing like sluts and fags, kicks the dog, sexually harasses the undocumented Guatemalan housekeeper, and spends the rest of the night blogging on the Decline of Civility.
I’m exaggerating, of course. In reality, the Daddy Party just wants to keep us safe from immigrants and taxes and Mohammedanism and socialized medicine and gay sex and Hollywood and stuff like that.
Asymptomatic Depression
Hidden Epidemic and Huge Untapped Market
Simplifying diagnosis, screening, intervention and treatment
In recent years, antidepressant sales have skyrocketed beyond the pharmaceutical industry’s wildest dreams.
Yet despite widespread screening programs and aggressive marketing campaigns designed to raise mental health disease awareness, a significant percentage of the population remains undiagnosed and untreated. Estimates vary, but research suggests nearly a third of American adults have never been diagnosed with any mental disorder. Precisely this segment of the population must be targeted for intervention if pharmaceutical profits are to continue rising at their current rate.
One way to increase the prevalence of a disease is to broaden its diagnostic criteria. By providing physicians with an ever-growing laundry list of signs and symptoms to evaluate (insomnia or oversleeping, poor appetite or overeating, constant crying or inability to cry, apathy or hostility, fatigue or restlessness, and so on), the number of potential clients/patients is greatly expanded.
However, a major flaw in this strategy is that it focuses exclusively on those who complain of sickness, while completely overlooking those who feel well. The present article explores the novel hypothesis that patients who feel well are, in fact, patients who need treatment.
Charlie the Coyote and his Wyoming duet.
When I’m calling you uuu uuu, Will you answer true uuu uuu…
She’s a little bit countryyyyyy, I’m a little bit rocknrollllll…
Noooo-body knooows, the trouble I’ve seeeen…
“That note was sour, dawg”
How Reagan Ruined Conservatism
by Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times.
Pulitzer-prize winning Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote, “Increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth.”
You can’t demand that debate be rational strictly on the basis of the evidence, because that’s not how the public operates.
Which is to say, we’re stuck with us.
Public discourse has changed; information that does not fit one’s worldview is now discounted or rejected.
I think Plato made a somewhat similar argument. As did Francis Bacon, when he said that “the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.”
The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America:
America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented number of Americans living in dire straits and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.
The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50% of US children will use a food stamp to eat at some point in their childhood. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five US households didn’t have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24%, as the hunger rate among US citizens has now reached an all time high.
We also currently have over 50 million US citizens without healthcare. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32% increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60% of them, and over 75% of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have healthcare insurance. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.
A comprehensive, energized and well composed rant by David Degraf.
Users of acetaminophen aged under 50 were 61% more likely to develop hearing loss; those 50-59 were 32% more likely, and those aged 60 and older were 16% more likely. For aspirin, regular users under 50 were 33% more likely to have hearing loss.
Hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder in the US, afflicting over 36 million people. One third aged 40-49 years already suffer from hearing loss. The study tracked over 26,000 men every 2 years for 18 years.
This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled PageRank algorithm.
But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy.
Jason Kottke‘s snippet of a conversation that Google might have with itself:
A rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it ‘rokc’ and it’s still a rock. But put ‘little’ in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around.
“The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style.
“It is the behavior of these CEOs and directors that needs to be changed.”
Warren Buffett seeks oversight and penalties for those in charge.
“If their institutions and the country are harmed by their recklessness, they should pay a heavy price — one not reimbursable by the companies they’ve damaged nor by insurance.
CEOs and, in many cases, directors have long benefited from oversized financial carrots; some meaningful sticks now need to be part of their employment picture as well.”
Republican Trent Franks of Arizona reflecting on his belief that African Americans may have been better off under slavery:
“Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery.”
Our supposedly capitalist society is seething with anticapitalist energy, affection and joy, which is why most of us have survived the official bleakness. In other words, that’s not all there is to our system. Our society is more than and other than capitalist in a lot of ways.
Resistance to the status quo can be a pleasure and an adventure.
Don’t bow down. To capital. Or to cliché or oversimplification or defeatism. Try rising up instead. It’s more interesting.
The real Adam Smith did not believe in a magically benevolent market which operates for the benefit of all without checks and balances.
Capitalism has to grow up, become less naive, rely less on a blind faith in ‘the invisible hand’ and rely more on an understanding of human nature.
Quoted endlessly by Republicans as their granddaddy of unfettered markets, here’s what Adam Smith actually said:
“When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.”
The wave’s water column is around 2.5 miles from top to bottom. This mass of water is hurtling from Chile toward Hawaii at 446 mph. The wave is small when it’s mid-ocean, but it may rise 16 to 33 feet.
Update:
Jim Borg’s explanation for why, unlike 1960, Hilo Harbor on the Big Island got through with only minor sloshing. It’s not so much that the tsunami was smaller as it crossed the wide sea, although this is a factor. The key, it says here, was its lack of resonance with the harbor basin and its nearby marine topography, something that the 1960 wave column did have.
The building of the bridge on the River Kwai took a terrible toll on us, and the depiction of our sufferings in the film of the same name was a very sanitized version of events.
Alistair Urquhart. For 60 years, he has remained silent:
Sergeant Seiichi Okada, known to us Brits simply as Dr Death. Short and squat, he took the roll-calls and carried out all of the camp commandant’s orders.
Ruthless in the extreme, he loved tormenting us. He especially reveled in a sickening brand of water torture.
He had guards pin down his hapless victim before pouring gallons of water down the prisoner’s throat using a bucket and hose. The man’s stomach would swell up from the huge volumes of water.
Okada would then gleefully jump up and down on him. Sometimes guards tied barbed wire around the poor soul’s stomach. Most died; only a few survived.
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor
As Republicans stump spending cuts and since Bush took office January 2001, the nation hurts.
There’s $2.6 trillion in spending not paid for, more than $2.0 trillion in tax cuts. The new House PAYGO rule, effective immediately, stalls or stops any bill that would increase deficits.
