The journalist Steven Brill appeared on the program Fresh Air to talk about why the US health system. He said it is unsustainable and heading for a crash because there is no price control mechanism. He lays the blame squarely on the hospitals, drug companies who are allowed to price-gouge, and medical device manufacturers, all of whom rake in huge profits that enable them to pay their top executives high profits.
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The murderous attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that killed ten journalists and two police once again illustrates the danger of the idea that anything should be exempt from examination, satire, even ridicule. The murderers are purported to have said that they were avenging their prophet in retaliation for the various articles and cartoons that the magazine has published over recent years that lampooned prophet Mohammed.
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Yesterday I wrote about the case of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, a man well connected politically and socially, getting to agree to a sweetheart plea deal even though the crime that was alleged against him, (running what seemed like a sex slave ring that included underage girls to serve his influential set of friends) is a horrible crime. He was sentenced to just 18 months in prison (he was released after 13 months) and even then he was only required to report to the prison each night, providing us with yet another glaring example of our two-tiered justice system which throws the book at poor people for minor offenses but coddles the wealthy even when they commit major ones. He was also required to pay the legal costs and an undisclosed sum (reportedly around $150,000) to each of the defendants.
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After broaching the topic of whether something that we all tend to agree is wrong (blackmail) should be illegal, I came across a comment on Pharyngula that, in the wake of the Avicenna plagiarism case, challenges another a popular belief, this time that plagiarism is wrong. Here is what commenter chimera said:
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The Pew Research Center has surveyed the new Congress about the religious beliefs of its members and we find that nothing much has changed from the previous one.
More than nine-in-ten members of the House and Senate (92%) are Christian, and about 57% are Protestant, roughly the same as in the 113th Congress (90% and 56%, respectively).1 About three-in-ten members (31%) are Catholic, the same as in the previous Congress.
British newspapers are awash with the type of scandal that they revel in, a sex scandal involving the royal family. At issue is whether Prince Andrew, one of the many unemployed leeches in that corrupt and useless monarchy, and others had sex with underage girls that were provided for them by American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein himself seems to be a real creep who had an obsession with underage girls, threw lavish parties where he supplied them to his friends, and served some time in prison for it.
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It turns out that there is a personality quiz consisting of 40 questions that can be answered in about five minutes that supposedly gives you a score that measures this characteristic in you. The test compilers say that a score between 12 and 15 is average, that celebrities often score closer to 18, and narcissists score over 20.
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Ken Silverstein has a series of articles where he notes how people associated with the national security state are benefiting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the never-ending war on terror that we are engaged in. In the first, he looks at what former head of the CIA George Tenet and former head of the FBI Louis Freeh have been up to.
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I have written many times before about how the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) has become a menace and is being used by religious people to gain exemptions from following all manner of laws, the Hobby Lobby contraception case being one of the more egregious examples.
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As I have got older, I have become increasingly aware of how much luck plays in one’s life, both for good and bad. Looking back, I realize the many, many occasions when it was due to luck that things turned out well or badly for me and I have no reason to think that luck does not play a similar important role for other people.
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