Tag Archives: america

Heroic Passenger Recognizes Quantitative Economics as True Threat to America

by AdanPrimrose Posted on May 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Forget ethnic profiling. The real danger facing America these days is economists and their differential equations:

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive-skinned and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.

….The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over….He appeared laser-focused — perhaps too laser-focused — on the task at hand, those strange scribblings.

….Then, for unknown reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate….Finally the pilot came by, locking eyes on the real culprit behind the delay: that darkly-complected foreign man….The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed. He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or some other terrorist code. They were math. Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

It’s about goddam time, I say. Personally, I’d say that economists and their math have done a lot more damage to the world recently than terrorists and their bombs. We owe this flip-flop-wearing woman our thanks.

On a more serious note, can it really be true that no one recognized what decorated young Italian economist Guido Menzio was doing? Sure, maybe his seatmate didn’t recognize math. But neither the flight attendant nor the pilot recognized math-ish scribblings when they came back to take a look at things? “What might prevent an epidemic of paranoia?” Menzio wrote on Facebook. “It is hard not to recognize in this incident, the ethos of Donald Trump’s voting base.” And that’s quite true: Donald Trump is notoriously an idiot at math. I suppose his followers are too.

POSTSCRIPT: You know what’s missing from this story? The actual page of math Menzio was working on in the plane. Admit it: you want to see it too. You’re all such a bunch of nerds.

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Heroic Passenger Recognizes Quantitative Economics as True Threat to America

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Here’s How the White House Shapes Foreign Affairs Coverage

by DeniceQBJxtzjf Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the New York Times Magazine this week, David Samuels has a long profile of Ben Rhodes, the chief messaging guru for foreign affairs in the White House. Generally speaking, Rhodes seems like my kind of guy, but what’s most interesting about the profile isn’t really Rhodes himself, but his take on modern journalism. For example:

It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade….Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Or this on how to spin the news:

Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people….And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

….In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time. Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.

Or this:

Rhodes developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

….Barack Obama is not a standard-issue liberal Democrat. He openly shares Rhodes’s contempt for the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press. Yet one problem with the new script that Obama and Rhodes have written is that the Blob may have finally caught on.

The Blob “catching on” means that a lot of members of the foreign policy establishment have decided that maybe they don’t like Obama so much after all. He’s just too unwilling to send in the military when there’s a problem somewhere. At least, that seems like their big complaint to me.

Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read—not so much for what it says about Rhodes or Obama, but for what it says about the news business circa 2016. In a way, nothing has changed: presidents always try to shape the news, and they use whatever tools are at hand in their particular era. But in another way, everything has changed. It’s not just the tools that have changed this time, it’s the entire press corps.

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Here’s How the White House Shapes Foreign Affairs Coverage

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Pivoting to the Center for the General Election Is Easy!

by KandiLyons Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s a truism of American politics that candidates run to the left or right during primaries but then “pivot” toward the center for the general election. And the quality of the pivot is a topic of endless discussion. It has to be done smoothly and delicately. Voters won’t put up with a brazen flip-flop.

Or will they? Here is the Washington Post on Donald Trump’s pivot:

The New York real estate tycoon, who frequently boasted throughout the primary that he was financing his campaign, is setting up a national fundraising operation and taking a hands-off posture toward super PACs.

He is expressing openness to raising the minimum wage, a move he previously opposed, saying on CNN this week, “I mean, you have to have something that you can live on.”

And Trump is backing away from a tax plan he rolled out last fall that would give major cuts to the rich. “I am not necessarily a huge fan of that,” he told CNBC. “I am so much more into the middle class, who have just been absolutely forgotten in our country.”

Trump has been rewriting the rules for the past year, so maybe this rule is going by the wayside as well. It will be especially easy for Trump since (a) he doesn’t have an ideological fan base that cares much about his positions, and (b) the press will just shrug and say it’s Trump being Trump. Can you imagine what would happen if Hillary Clinton tried to pull a stunt like this?

Original article – 

Pivoting to the Center for the General Election Is Easy!

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Americans Aren’t Really Very Angry — Except Toward Uncle Sam

by ZoilaSandes65 Posted on May 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Are voters really angry this year? The Associated Press says no:

All that talk of an angry America?

An Associated Press-GfK poll finds that most Americans are happy with their friends and family, feel good about their finances and are more or less content at work. It’s government, particularly the federal government, that’s making them see red.

Hmmm. People are generally pretty happy with their finances and their personal lives, but they’re really pissed off at the federal government. We’ve seen this dynamic before. Here’s a long-term look at polling data from the Washington Post:

Anger toward the federal government has been on a steady upward trend ever since 2003 (though voters in 2016 are less angry than they were in 2014). And this trend is notably unaffected by economic conditions. Anger didn’t spike during the 2000 dotcom bust and it didn’t spike during the 2008 crash. So what’s going on? The obvious culprits are:

Fox News and the rest of the conservative outrage machine
The Iraq war, which explains why anger started to rise in 2003
The tea party, which explains the spike in 2010
The election of Barack Obama, which would explain a spike beginning around 2008 (there’s no data between 2004-2010)

Take your pick. Maybe it’s a combination of things. But the bottom line seems fairly simple: there’s voluminous data suggesting that, in general, Americans are fairly happy with their personal finances and fairly happy with their lives in general. As happy as they’ve ever been, anyway. But they’re pretty pissed off at the federal government. If there’s anything interesting to be said about voter anger, this is the puzzle to focus on.

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Americans Aren’t Really Very Angry — Except Toward Uncle Sam

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Everyone Is Getting Today’s Trump Tweet Totally Wrong

by TeodoroCoulombe Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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I think everyone is badly misinterpreting this tweet from Donald Trump:

This is not an awkward and embarrassing outreach to Hispanics. It’s not aimed at Hispanics at all. It’s aimed at white people. This is the kind of thing that Trump’s base—the white working class—views as a perfectly sincere appreciation of Mexican culture. It says, “Yes, I want a wall, and yes, I want to deport all the illegal immigrants in the country. But that doesn’t mean I hate Mexicans.” It’s basically an affirmation to Trump’s voters that they aren’t racists.

Plus it gets a ton of attention, and it also induces loads of mockery from overeducated PC liberals who don’t understand a compliment when they see one. It’s really a genius tweet.

Does everyone understand now? Trump is playing this game at a higher level than most of his critics.

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Everyone Is Getting Today’s Trump Tweet Totally Wrong

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Chart of the Day: Americans Are Pretty Upbeat About the Job Market

by DarleneDon Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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How do Americans feel about the economy? Here is Pew Research:

Americans are now more positive about the job opportunities available to them than they have been since the economic meltdown….Today’s more upbeat views rank among some of the best assessments of the job market in Pew Research Center surveys dating back 15 years.

There’s no significant partisan difference in views of the job market. However, older, poorer, and less-educated folks all report less optimism about employment than younger, richer, and better-educated respondents.

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Chart of the Day: Americans Are Pretty Upbeat About the Job Market

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Here’s Why OxyContin Is So Damn Addictive

by GrettaRupert Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Why has OxyContin become the poster child for opioid abuse? The LA Times has a long investigative piece today which suggests that a big part of the blame should be laid at the feet of Purdue Pharma, the makers of the drug. When OxyContin was launched, it was billed as a painkiller that would last 12 hours—longer than morphine and other opioids. That 12-hour dosing schedule was critical to its success. Without it, Oxy didn’t have much benefit. Unfortunately, it turned out that it wore off sooner for a lot of people:

Experts said that when there are gaps in the effect of a narcotic like OxyContin, patients can suffer body aches, nausea, anxiety and other symptoms of withdrawal. When the agony is relieved by the next dose, it creates a cycle of pain and euphoria that fosters addiction, they said.

OxyContin taken at 12-hour intervals could be “the perfect recipe for addiction,” said Theodore J. Cicero, a neuropharmacologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and a leading researcher on how opioids affect the brain.

Patients in whom the drug doesn’t last 12 hours can suffer both a return of their underlying pain and “the beginning stages of acute withdrawal,” Cicero said. “That becomes a very powerful motivator for people to take more drugs.”

But Purdue refused to accept shorter dosing schedules, since that would eliminate its strongest competitive advantage. Instead, they launched a blitz aimed at doctors, telling them to stick with the 12-hour dosing but to prescribe larger amounts. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t, and when it didn’t it increased the chances of addiction:

In the real world practice of medicine, some doctors turned away from OxyContin entirely. San Francisco public health clinics stopped dispensing the painkiller in 2005, based in part on feedback from patients who said it wore off after eight hours. The clinics switched to generic morphine, which has a similar duration and costs a lot less.

“What I had come to see was the lack of evidence that it was any better than morphine,” Dr. Mitchell Katz, then head of the San Francisco public health department, said in an interview.

The whole piece is worth a read. Purdue has known from the start that 12-hour dosing didn’t work for a significant number of patients, but they relentlessly focused their marketing in that direction anyway. Why? Because without it, Oxy wouldn’t be a moneymaker. As for the danger this posed, that was mostly suppressed by keeping documents under seal in court cases “in order to protect trade secrets.” Welcome to the American pharmaceutical industry.

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Here’s Why OxyContin Is So Damn Addictive

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Annals of the ‘Methane Age’: Gas from Fracked Wells No Longer ‘Unconventional’

by Myrna Posted on May 5, 2016

A new report shows how profoundly hydraulic fracturing has changed natural gas production in the United States. From:  Annals of the ‘Methane Age’: Gas from Fracked Wells No Longer ‘Unconventional’ ; ; ;

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Annals of the ‘Methane Age’: Gas from Fracked Wells No Longer ‘Unconventional’

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The Long, Hard Slog of Health Care Reform (Abridged Version)

by MarceliRister Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier today, in the course of linking to a Ryan Cooper post about Bernie Sanders, I mentioned that I thought Cooper was “very, very wrong about the history of health care reform too, but I’ll leave that for another time.” Well, why not now? Here is Cooper:

Democrats as a party were not “working their fingers to the bone” trying to get universal health care through this entire time i.e., since 1993. For two whole presidential elections the party’s nominees ran on measly little half-measures they barely mentioned….ObamaCare — a basically mediocre program that is still a big improvement on the status quo — reflects its political origins. It’s what milquetoast liberals had settled on as a reasonable compromise, so when George Bush handed them a great big majority on a silver platter, that’s what we got. It was Bush’s failed presidency, not 30 years of preemptively selling out to the medical industry, that got the job done.

That’s pretty brutal. But let’s go back a little further. Here’s a very brief history of health care reform over the past half century:

1962: JFK launches effort to provide health care for the elderly. It is relentlessly attacked as socialized medicine and Kennedy is unable to get it passed before he dies.

1965: Following a landslide victory, and with massive majorities in both the House and Senate, LBJ passes Medicare and Medicaid.

1971: Richard Nixon proposes a limited health care reform act. Three years later he proposes a more comprehensive plan similar in scope to Obamacare. Sen. Ted Kennedy holds out for single-payer and ends up getting nothing. “That was the best deal we were going to get,” Kennedy admitted later, calling his refusal to compromise his biggest regret in public life. “Nothing since has come close.”

1979: Jimmy Carter proposes a national health care plan. The Senate takes it up, but Carter is unable to broker a compromise with Kennedy, who wants something more ambitious.

1993: Bill Clinton tries to pass health care reform. He does not have a gigantic majority in Congress, and fails miserably. Two years later Newt Gingrich takes over the House.

1997: Clinton and Ted Kennedy pass a more modest children’s health care bill, SCHIP, with bipartisan support.

2009: Barack Obama gets a razor-thin Democratic majority for a few months and eventually passes Obamacare, which expands Medicaid for the poor and offers exchange-based private insurance for the near-poor.

This is what politics looks like. Every single Democratic president in my lifetime has tried to pass health care reform. Some of them partially succeeded and some failed entirely, but all of them tried. The two main things standing in the way of getting more have been (a) Republicans and (b) liberals who refused to compromise on single-payer.

Contra Cooper, George Bush did not hand Obama a “great big majority.” Democrats in 2009 had a big majority in the House and a zero-vote majority in the Senate. That’s the thinnest possible majority you can have, and this is the reason Obamacare is so limited. To pass, it had to satisfy the 40th most conservative senator, so that’s what it did.

There’s been a long and ultimately sterile argument over whether Obama could have gotten more. I think the evidence suggests he got as much as he could, but the truth is that we’ll never know for sure. And it doesn’t change the bigger picture anyway: thousands of Democrats—politicians, activists, think tankers, and more—have literally spent decades working their fingers to the bone creating plan after plan; selling these plans to the public; and trying dozens of different ways to somehow push health care reform through Congress. For most of that time it’s been a hard, grinding, thankless task, and we still don’t have what we ultimately want. But in the end, all of these hacks and wonks have made a difference and helped tens of millions of people. They deserve our respect, not a bit of casually tossed off disparagement just because they didn’t propose single-payer health care as their #1 priority every single year of their lives.

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The Long, Hard Slog of Health Care Reform (Abridged Version)

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Researchers Aim to Put Carbon Dioxide Back to Work

by Myrna Posted on May 2, 2016

Scientists are working on ways to recycle and reuse carbon dioxide, rather than storing it underground, to fight climate change. Visit site –  Researchers Aim to Put Carbon Dioxide Back to Work ; ; ;

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Researchers Aim to Put Carbon Dioxide Back to Work

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