Twenty hour working days must be getting to our esteemed Majority Leader and the repubs certainly have not made things easier.
I wish the man my best!
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Twenty hour working days must be getting to our esteemed Majority Leader and the repubs certainly have not made things easier.
I wish the man my best!
By William Powell, Comment is free @ theguardian.com, 19 Dec., 2013
[....] Over the years, I have come to understand that the basic premise behind the Cookbook is profoundly flawed. The anger that motivated the writing of the Cookbook blinded me to the illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence. I had fallen for the same irrational pattern of thought that led to US military involvement in both Vietnam and Iraq. The irony is not lost on me.
To paraphrase Aristotle: it is easy to be angry. But to be angry with the right person, at the right time and to the right degree that is hard – that is the hallmark of a civilized person. Two years ago, I co-authored a book entitled Becoming an Emotionally Intelligent Teacher. Although written for educators, the book serves as an implicit refutation of the emotional immaturity of the Cookbook. The premise is that all learning takes place in a social context, and that teachers with a high degree of emotional intelligence construct relationships with students that enhance learning. I continue to work hard, in an Aristotelian sense, to be more civilized [....]
By Kirk Semple, New York Times, Dec. 18/19, 2013
[....] Now the second-largest foreign-born group in the city, Chinese are on the verge of overtaking immigrants from the Dominican Republic for the top spot.
The evolution of the Chinese diaspora is one of the stories of New York explored in a new report by the City Planning Department that provides a detailed statistical analysis of the city’s ever-shifting immigrant population, charting where the most recent arrivals have come from, where they have settled, the jobs they have taken and their effects on the economy.
Called The Newest New Yorkers, the 235-page report is the fifth edition of a study first released in 1992. It is intended as a reference for policy makers, planners and service providers, its authors said, “to help them gain perspective on a population that continues to reshape the city.”
Now numbering about 3.1 million — a record high — the city’s immigrant population, about 37 percent of the overall population of 8.2 million New Yorkers, is more kaleidoscopic than ever, in large part a result of the passage of 1965 immigration legislation that allowed more people to come from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. In a city that once had a population of predominantly European origin, there is now no dominant racial, ethnic or nationality group [.....]
By Catherine Rampell, New York Times, Dec. 14/15, 2013
[....] It turns out that the real bottleneck is at the post-med-school step: residencies, those supervised, intensive, hazing-like, on-the-job training programs that doctors are required to go through before they can practice on their own.
There has been little growth in residency slots; they totaled 113,000 in 2011-12, from 96,000 a decade earlier. Exactly why residencies have not increased faster is a subject of great debate in the health care industry.
Hospitals, doctors and med students usually give the same explanation: Congress is too stingy. After all Congress, through Medicare, subsidizes the vast majority of residency slots, at $10.1 billion annually, or an average of $112,642 per resident per year. Congress froze the number of subsidized positions in 1997, and hospitals argue that the best way to train more doctors is for Congress to open the spigot and fund more jobs.
Obviously Washington is not keen on doling out more money for anything right now, especially not for Medicare. But there’s a bigger problem with that argument: It’s not clear that hospitals actually need taxpayer money to pay for more residents, because those residents might actually be turning a profit for those hospitals right now. It’s hard to know, though, because hospital accounting is so opaque [....]
For further details on the Medicare program, see:
How Medicare Subsidizes Doctor Training
By Catherine Rampell, Economix blog @ nytimes.com, Dec. 17, 2013
My Economic View column on Sunday looked at medical residencies, the biggest bottleneck in the supply chain for doctors. Most of this “graduate medical education” training is subsidized by Medicare, for somewhat strange historical reasons sustained by both legislative inertia and the stakeholders who benefit from it. Here’s some detail about how the subsidies work [....]
By Gina Kolata, New York Times, Dec. 18/19, 2013
New guidelines suggest that people over 60 can have a higher blood pressure than previously recommended before starting treatment to lower it. The advice, criticized by some physicians, changes treatment goals that have been in place for more than 30 years [....]
Essentially, the committee determined that there was not strong evidence for the blood pressure targets that had been guiding treatment, and that there were risks associated with the medications used to bring pressures down.
The committee, composed of 17 academics, was tasked with updating guidelines last re-examined a decade ago. Their report was published online on Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Hypertension experts said they did not have a precise figure on how many Americans would be affected by the new guidelines. But Dr. William B. White, the president of the American Society of Hypertension, said it was “a huge number for sure.” [....]
“When I discuss this with my colleagues and friends in the community, most are pretty livid,” said Dr. George Bakris, the director of the hypertension center at the University of Chicago. “Is this the golden age of Sparta? What is going on?” [....]
Jay Rosen writes:
The Boston Globe, Dec. 15, 2013
Tamerlan, the eldest, started hearing the voice as a young man. It disturbed him. It frightened him, as the voice inside grew more insistent. It may in the end have directed him.
Dzhokhar, the youngest, was the child full of promise. But almost from the moment he left home, trouble and failure seemed to mark him, and risk to allure him. He was anything but a passive figure in the history the brothers would soon make.
A five-month Globe investigation offers new details and insights into the two young men accused in the greatest act of terrorism in Boston history and the deeply dysfunctional family that produced them [....]
Article continues with 8 "chapters" on Tamerlan and family by Sally Jacobs, David Filipov and Patricia Wen, folllowed by 7 "chapters" on Dzhokhar by Patricia Wen. Includes challenges to the general public and law enforcement narrative on their lives to date; these questions are outlined with bullet points at the beginning of "Chapter 1" on Tamerlan.
More than 50 people were detained in Turkey, many with government ties, in a corruption probe that could destabilize Prime Minister Erdogan's power base.
By Alexander Christie-Miller, Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 17, 2013
Istanbul - Turkish police today detained more than 50 people, including the sons of three cabinet ministers, in a corruption probe striking close to the heart of government.
Analysts say the detentions appear to be part of an attack on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration by a powerful Islamic network that was formerly its ally and which has considerable influence within the police and judiciary.
The raids in Istanbul and Ankara came after a yearlong surveillance operation focusing on alleged graft and bribery in the awarding of state contracts and designation of land for development, as well as gold smuggling, Turkish media reported [....]
It would seem the CIA has gone back into their archives, blown the dust off the Phoenix Program, and put it into play again as the “Drone War.” The similarities with the Drone War are readily evident to anyone old enough to know of the Phoenix Program.
'Pajama boy' is going viral, but perhaps not the way its creators, a political nonprofit with ties to President Obama, intended. Millennials may not be as ironic as the ad meisters think they are.
By Peter Grier, Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 18, 2013
Have you heard about “Pajama Boy”? He’s in an ad tweeted yesterday by a political nonprofit associated with President Obama, wearing what appears to be a plaid onesie while cradling a hot beverage and looking to one side through arched eyebrows.
The point of the ad is to promote Obamacare among young adults. “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance,” says the ad copy. [....] It includes a link to a website from the group, Organizing for Action, that includes information on how to talk to family members over the holidays about signing up for coverage under the Affordable Care Act [....]
By Mansour Mirovalev and Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, Dec. 17/18, 2013
SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan — For most of the year, Dr. Tamara Khidoyatova treats patients as a doctor at a hospital here in this picturesque, old Silk Road city. But for a few weeks every autumn, she is forced to pick cotton, for which she is paid little or nothing.
Throughout the fall, when the cotton harvest comes in, the government drafts about a million people, primarily public-sector employees and professionals, to work as cotton pickers, helping bring in the harvest for the world’s fifth-largest cotton exporting nation.
“You come to work, with all the makeup, wearing nice clothes, good shoes,” Dr. Khidoyatova, 61, said. “And the polyclinic director runs in and says, ‘I need 40 people in the field, the bus is outside, hurry, hurry!’ ”
That was just a day trip. But most people are given some notice, and then go away for a month at a time [....]
By Donald G. McNeil, Jr., New York Times, Dec. 16/17, 2013
A long-awaited study has confirmed the fears of Somali residents in Minneapolis that their children suffer from higher rates of a disabling form of autism compared with other children there.
The study — by the University of Minnesota, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the research and advocacy group Autism Speaks — found high rates of autism in two populations: About one Somali child in 32 and one white child in 36 in Minneapolis were on the autism spectrum. The national average is one child in 88, according to Coleen A. Boyle, who directs the C.D.C.’s Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.
But the Somali children were less likely than the whites to be “high-functioning” and more likely to have I.Q.s below 70 [....]
The results echoed those of a Swedish study published last year finding that children from immigrant families in Stockholm — many of them Somali — were more likely to have autism with intellectual disabilities [....]
BBC News, 17 Dec., 2013
Women in southern Nigeria have been protesting against alleged ritual killings and "forced marriages" to traditional deities, it's reported.
Such activities are believed to have cost 11 local women their lives in just two weeks, the Nigerian daily Punch reports. About 100 women rallied outside Enugu State government offices on 10 December, demanding an end to "the killing of women through fetish activities of chief priests and deities". Wearing black dresses and holding palm leaves, the protesters also demanded a ban on "forced marriages" to traditional gods as this violates several articles of the Nigerian constitution. Among the reported incidents is the chief priest of the deity Iyakpala Ugbaike allegedly forcing the daughter of a deceased man to marry him after claiming the same deity killed her father, Punch says.
In February 2013, Nigerian newspaper The Sun found ritual killings were spreading to parts of Nigeria previously unaffected by the practice [....]
Wind enthusiasts have been known to claim that the days of turbines killing raptors were limited to a few bad years at Altamont. But in A Struggle to Balance Wind Energy With Wildlife, the NY Times - which no longer has an environmental blog - writes:
.... a new federal rule was announced this month allowing wind farms to lawfully kill bald and golden eagles under 30-year permits.
So now it is perfectly legal for them to kill all the raptors and owls they supposedly weren't killing before. Except that they were:
By Ezra Klein, Wonk Blog @ Washingtonpost.com, Dec. 17, 2013
The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll asked respondents whether they trust Obama or the Republicans in Congress to do a better job "coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years." Forty-one percent said they trusted Obama. Forty-one percent said they trusted Republicans in Congress.
A year ago, when pollsters asked the same question, Obama won 50 to 35. That he's now tied not just with Republicans, but with congressional Republicans two months after they shut down the government, shows how much damage the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act has done to perceptions of his administration's competence.
Obama's agenda has suffered in other ways, too. Voters now trust Republicans, 48-40, to pick the right mix of spending cuts. As recently as October, Obama led on that question 47-36 [....]
By Steven Erlanger, New York Times, Dec. 15/16, 2013
[....] “We’ve seen several red lines put forward by the president, which went along and became pinkish as time grew, and eventually ended up completely white,” said Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former intelligence chief of Saudi Arabia. “When that kind of assurance comes from a leader of a country like the United States, we expect him to stand by it.” He added, “There is an issue of confidence.”
Mr. Obama has his problems, the prince said, but when a country has strong allies, “you should be able to give them the assurance that what you say is going to be what you do.” The prince no longer has any official position but has lately been providing the public expression of internal Saudi views with clear approval from the Saudi government [....]
By Zahira Torres and Yesenai Robles, The Denver Post, Dec. 14, 2013
[....] was a gifted debater and might have been bullied for his beliefs, according to students who knew him. [.....] Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson identified the gunman as Karl Pierson, an 18-year-old student. "He had very strong beliefs about gun laws and stuff," said junior Abbey Skoda, who was in a class with Pierson during her freshman year. "I also heard he was bullied a lot." [....]
Pierson also appears to mock Republicans on another Facebook post, writing "you republicans are so cute" and posting an image that reads: "The Republican Party: Health Care: Let 'em Die, Climate Change: Let 'em Die, Gun Violence: Let 'em Die, Women's Rights: Let 'em Die, More War: Let 'em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?" [....]
Also see:
Motive behind Arapahoe High School attack remains murky
By Jeremy P. Meyer, The Denver Post, Dec. 14, 2013
Friday, federal judge Clark Waddoups delivered a ruling that essentially decriminalizes polygamy in Utah. It's still illegal to have more than one marriage license, but Waddoups overturned the part of the law that made it a 3rd degree felony to cohabit with someone while legally married to another person. Attorney for the plaintiffs, the polygamist Brown family of Sister Wives fame, called this a victory for privacy in America. Monday, we're talking about the ruling and what it says about what makes a family. [Audible]
This week The Atlantic published its list of the most important graphs and charts of 2013. Notice that they're almost all macroeconomic stuff - QE, inequality, debt health costs, etc. Macro is eating the world. I tried to do something different, claiming that the Tea Party Republicans' near-success in causing a U.S. sovereign default was the most significant economic story of the year.
But actually, I think there might be another even more important chart, and I didn't pick it because I'm not sure yet how important it's going to be. It definitely has the potential to be much more important than any of the stories listed in The Atlantic. Here it is:
This is a picture of China's new "air defense zone", which is part of China's attempt to claim the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands currently held by Japan.
This is good news. They will have to submit emails and draft maps. There is a new constitutional amendment that outlaws districts to be drawn for political gain. I live in a district for the state upper chamber that snakes from downtown Ybor City to St. Pete to Ruskin to Samoset and is less then a quarter a mile wide in the section I live on it's way to pick up New Town in Sarasota. In the 2012 election I was surprised to be on the wrong side of the street for the district I used to be in. Ybor City and Downtown Tampa is 45 minutes away. My state senator lives in Tampa. I get political mail from 3 different state senators from the 2 districts on either side of my less then quarter mile strip and from some dude in Tampa. You can't tell me they needed my vote in Oneco for a minority democrat in Tampa. They don't need a 85% voter sink in down town Tampa for democrats. Democratic minority candidate will do just fine with out my vote up there. I would rather vote for a home town democrat like I used to.
The fight between voting-rights groups such as the League of Women Voters of Florida and the Legislature stems from 2010 constitutional amendments adopted by voters that specify lawmakers couldn't base their decisions when re-drawing congressional and legislative districts on the desire for political gain.
Last year, the Supreme Court tossed out the first version of the Florida Senate's own maps after concluding they unfairly advantaged Republicans. The Fair Districts challengers then sued to overturn the congressional maps. While Democrats made some inroads in both the Legislature and congressional delegations, they remained in the minority in both following the 2012 elections
The Michigan State Legislature first passed the measure last year, but Governor Rick Snyder (R) vetoed it, saying he does not "believe it is appropriate to tell a woman who becomes pregnant due to a rape that she needed to select elective insurance coverage."
But the anti-abortion group Right to Life of Michigan was able to collect more than 300,000 voter signatures on a petition this year to force a second vote on the measure. Having been passed by both chambers, the bill automatically becomes law now, even without Snyder's approval.
My underlined bold.
So, it only takes 300,000 signatures to invalidate my rights over my uterous?
Who knew?
Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan. But now, to their surprise, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning that their health insurance plans are being canceled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.They are part of an unusual informal health insurance system that has developed in New York in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce. That allowed them to avoid the sky-high rates in New York’s individual insurance market, historically among the most expensive in the country.
Somehow, this feels portentous.
Like the final throes of a decadent society.
The symbolism (and reality) reaches far beyond this one case.
I once met the creator of the "Twinkie defense," but this is beyond the beyond.