John Oliver exposes the Sacklers-again

The Sackler family, the owners of the Purdue Pharma that aggressively marketed the painkiller Oxycontin resulting in an explosive growth in drug addiction, has been dragged into the spotlight and are now the target of multiple lawsuits by states. As a result these highly secretive people, who only allow their names to be public when they put it on buildings as part of their ‘philanthropy’, have been forced to give legal depositions. But their lawyers have aggressively worked to have their video depositions sealed
[Read more…]

Good News! Health care stocks fall

I have long held that the only economic measure that matters in the US is the stock market. While other measures such as unemployment and wage rates, income and wealth inequality, health and education measures, housing and rental prices and the like may have much greater significance for the vast majority of people, the oligarchy only cares about the value of their stock portfolio. As long as the stock market rises at a healthy clip, champagne corks will be popping even as climate change threatens to destroy the world.
[Read more…]

The media and Democratic establishment attacks on Bernie are taking a familiar form

To the consternation of the Democratic party establishment and the mainstream media, Bernie Sanders is once again proving that he has strong support, both in terms of getting large numbers of volunteers signed up and in small donations. The party establishment hates him because he is not part of the neoliberal wing that encompasses the Clintons, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, plus many of the other contenders for the party’s presidential nomination. Sanders and Warren are the two people who are taking direct aim at the control by the oligarchy of pretty much all the major institutions of American political and economic life.
[Read more…]

Game of Thrones mania

Unless you are living under a rock, you are likely to have been bombarded with stories about the final season of this series that seems to have grabbed the passionate devotion of so many people. Hearing that it has large amounts of gruesome and gratuitous violence, I steered clear of this show and have not seen a single episode and feel like cartoonist Stephen Pastis.

The Pacific Ocean is big. Like, really, really big

Because of the way that flat maps are drawn with the Atlantic Ocean in the middle and the Pacific Ocean split and placed at the left and right extremes, it is easy to not realize how big the latter ocean is. Google maps now shows maps on a spherical basis and if you zoom out, you get a view of how the ocean covers pretty much half the globe. You see the Americas on the right edge, Asia on the left edge, and only Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea form the major land masses.

[Read more…]

“A Message from the Future”

Naomi Klein introduces a powerful seven-minute video daring us to imagine how the Green New Deal can take us to a future much better than the one we are currently on a path towards.

TODAY, THE INTERCEPT launches “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” a seven-minute film narrated by the congresswoman and illustrated by Molly Crabapple. Set a couple of decades from now, it’s a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves?

I have been ‘under the weather’ and ‘one degree under’

The lack of posting today is due to the fact that I have not been feeling well. It is nothing serious but it struck me that there few ways to describe how one feels when one does not have a full-blown flu or cough or cold but have just mild symptoms of one or more, which was my case. The word ‘blah’ is close in spirit but not very elegant.

The old-fashioned phrase ‘under the weather’ sort of captures the feeling but not quite since it can be used to denote having the flu as well. While thinking about this while trying to sleep, suddenly the phrase ‘one degree under’ popped into my mind. I think I heard it when I was a boy in England and it was used in TV ads to promote the use of ‘tonics’ which I think must have been some kind of energy drink to deal with this low feeling. These tonics were quite popular in those days but one does not see them advertised as much in the US. Maybe they are still popular in the UK.

‘One degree under’ captures the idea of not feeling quite normal but nothing serious. Maybe a scale could be developed of varying degrees under to signify the level of seriousness. One puzzle is why it is ‘under’ since mild flu symptoms would lead to a small rise in temperature. I don’t know if the phrase ‘one degree over’ could be made popular.

Yo Yo Ma gets political

The world famous cellist is noted for his genial personality and his untiring efforts to use music to promote understanding between the peoples of the world. He has not been overtly political but he just brought his Bach Project to the sister cities of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, playing at the border. There were also performances on the Mexican side. He also spoke decrying the building of a border wall.

Bernie rocks the audience at Fox News town hall

Bernie Sanders spoke at a town hall sponsored by Fox News. More than 2.5 million viewers watched the event, the largest audience for any of the town halls held so far. You would think that the audience at an event sponsored by the cable news channel that is a fervent supporter of Trump and held in an area that voted strongly for Trump would be unsympathetic to Sanders’s message but it turns out that they responded well.
[Read more…]