By the end of this episode, you’re going to feel 10% less crazy about the world. Ian makes his case and then sits down with a man who’s worked everywhere from Moscow to Mumbai, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Tom Pickering. And on Puppet Regime the SPACE FORCE saga continues as Captain Trump and crew find themselves marooned in a strange new land.
By the end of this episode, you're going to feel 10% less crazy about the world. Ian makes his case and then sits down with a man who’s worked everywhere from Moscow to Mumbai, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Tom Pickering. And on Puppet Regime the SPACE FORCE saga continues as Captain Trump and crew find themselves marooned in a strange new land.
“We need to make this move because we’re in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country,” Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang says, arguing for a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for every American. “It helps give tens of millions of Americans a real path forward… it would improve people’s health, nutrition, it would elevate graduation rates, it would improve people’s mental health,” he adds. https://cnn.it/2WVzwl9
"We need to make this move because we're in the midst of the greatest economic and technological transformation in the history of our country," Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang says, arguing for a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for every American. "It helps give tens of millions of Americans a real path forward… it would improve people's health, nutrition, it would elevate graduation rates, it would improve people's mental health," he adds. https://cnn.it/2WVzwl9
It could take 10 million years to recover from what we are doing to the planet, scientists warn
Rob Waugh, Yahoo News UK April 8, 2019
It could take our planet a long time to get better (Getty)
There is only one event in the history of our planet which has brought about global change more rapidly than today’s human-driven extinctions – the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Scientists studied fossils from just after the cataclysmic impact in order to understand how quickly our planet can recover from disaster (and why there seems to be a limit to it).
Scientists say that the 10 million years it took our planet to recover from the mass extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago could have important parallels now.
The researchers say that there appears to be a ‘speed limit’ on how fast the planet can recover from such events – capped at about 10 million years.
The researchers looked at the link between recovery and evolution because of earlier research that found recovery took millions of years despite many areas being habitable soon after Earth’s most recent mass extinction.
The team tracked recovery over time using fossils from a type of plankton called, foraminifera, or forams.
They found that a certain amount of ecological complexity seems to be required before life can really kick back into gear.
The speed limit is related to the time it takes to build up a new inventory of traits that can produce new species at a rate comparable to before the extinction event.
Lead author Christopher Lowery, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) said, ‘The implication should be that these same processes would be active in all other extinctions.
‘I think this is the likely explanation for the speed limit of recovery for everything.’
Take it from an economist, Medicare for All is the most sensible way to fix health care
Gerald Friedman, USA Today April 8, 2019
There is an instinct among political pundits to confuse caution for practicality — an assumption that those who advocate for incremental change are being reasonable, while those pushing for bold reforms aren’t. This is seen most starkly in the debate around health care reform, despite the fact that the “practical” pushers of limited reform fail to address the real problems in our health care system.
Where we disagree is the solution. The favorite new “reasonable” plan is “Medicare for America,” a bill from Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Rosa DeLauro that has won the support of big names like Texas presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke and the Center for American Progress, the left-of-center think tank where the plan originated as “Medicare Extra for All.” It has been extolled in opinion pieces for some of America’s largest newspapers as a “realistic” plan to fix what’s broken in our health care system.
On the other side, if punditry is to be believed, there are the Medicare for All “hard-liners” who believe in expanding a significantly improved Medicare system to every American, with coverage that includes dental, vision and long-term care. This is portrayed as radical or even unreasonable.
Time to get real. As an economist who has spent decades studying our health care system, I can tell you that Medicare for All advocates are the only ones who are being reasonable, because theirs is the only plan that will control health care costs while finally achieving universal coverage.
Insurance companies are middle men
The problem with incremental plans, whether they are public options, buy-ins to Medicare or Medicaid, or pumping more money into subsidies in the Affordable Care Act’s individual marketplace, is that they preserve the private health insurance system weighing down our health care.
This may be why pundits and centrist politicians view those plans as “reasonable,” but it means that they are leaving the main reason for our system’s dysfunction in place: the multipayer, for-profit financing model.
Commercial insurance companies are nothing more than middle men. They add no value to our system, but they do drive up costs with their bloated claims departments, marketing and advertising budgets and executive salaries. We pay for all of these things before a single dollar is spent on the delivery of care.
They also create extra costs for providers who need large administrative staffs to deal with billing systems, accounting for as much as $100,000 per physician.
Any plans short of Medicare for All leaves these costs in place. In other words, they leave hundreds of billions of dollars a year in savings on the table.
Medicare for All attacks costs
The waste goes beyond administrative savings. While pharmaceutical companies and hospital groups are consolidating and forming regional monopolies, our fragmented, multipayer system leaves no one insurance plan with a large enough share of the market to negotiate effectively. That allows these companies to essentially set their own inflated prices and bilk the public for hundreds of billions of dollars.
Is it any wonder that they oppose Medicare for All?
If we’re talking about which health care reform plans are serious about attacking cost, providing universal coverage and making sure everyone has access to health care, Medicare for All is the only reasonable answer. No other plan does this effectively, which is why I suspect that the Center for American Progress has not come out with spending estimates. Basic economic tenets tell us that their plan will not reduce health care spending as effectively.
Is Medicare for All bold? Absolutely. Is it reasonable? You bet. It is time to accept that Medicare for All is the practical alternative.
Gerald Friedman, a health care and labor economist, is an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the director of The Hopbrook Institute.
Trump’s ‘pattern of cognitive decline’ alarms psychiatrists
Jerry Adler April 6, 2019
Donald Trump with a map marking New York City and Germany. Background: Fred Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP (3), Getty Images)
Call him “Patient 1”: An individual in Washington, D.C., who presents with symptoms of mental decline, including a bizarre inability to remember where his own father was born.
Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine, has some insights to share, which we will get to in a moment.
On Tuesday, at a meeting with the secretary-general of NATO, President Trump launched into an impromptu riff on one of his favorite topics, the reluctance of America’s wealthy European allies to pay more toward their own defense. Then, in what might have been a clumsy effort to show no hard feelings, he expressed his love for Germany, the ancestral home of the Trump (or, originally, Drumpf) family:
“My father is German, right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany.”
Trump’s father, Frederick, was born in 1905 in the Bronx, approximately 4,000 miles from Germany, as the accompanying map shows. Trump’s grandfather was born in Germany, but was living in the United States with his wife when Frederick was born.
Frederick Trump’s birth certificate from the state of New York, borough of the Bronx.
Of all Trump’s many misstatements, exaggerations, empty boasts and slips of the tongue, this one — which Trump has made at least twice before — stands out for its sheer inexplicability. Ordinarily, when Trump says something ridiculous, it’s for an obvious purpose. He has been on an unhinged rant recently about windmills, whose function in the electrical grid he misunderstands and whose sound he says causes cancer. That is an assertion for which the White House was unable to provide any support, because he unquestionably made it up. But at least it’s consistent with his general disdain for environmentalism, and explainable by his self-interest in fighting to stop an offshore wind farm that he believes will ruin the views from one of his golf resortsin Scotland. And it is, strictly speaking, unfalsifiable; the carcinogenic effect of windmill noise, like a lot of other nonsensical beliefs, hasn’t been scientifically studied, so all you can say is that there’s no evidence for it.
But there’s a New York birth certificate that contradicts Trump’s claim about his father, and no obvious advantage for him to make up a story about it. To the contrary, Trump early in his career disguised his German ancestry, claiming his family was actually from Sweden, a lie that apparently was intended to make it easier to do business in a city with the largest Jewish population in the world. And in his first memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” he wrote that his father’s “classic Horatio Alger” story began with his birth “in New Jersey in 1905.” The Bronx is only just across the Hudson River from New Jersey, but it is in a whole different state.
Trump is disdainful of psychiatry, but one can imagine Freudian explanations for this peculiar assertion, or at least I can. Mistakes, Sigmund Freud theorized, are often the key to hidden feelings and memories. Is it just a coincidence that Trump, who got his start in national politics by peddling a conspiracy theory about his predecessor’s family and birthplace, and who constantly measures himself against him, repeatedly makes the same bizarre gaffe about where his own father was born? Is it resentment toward his overbearing father, who made a fortune building apartment houses in the outer boroughs, and reportedly never quite trusted his son’s foray into glamorous Manhattan real estate? Someone I know who worked closely with Trump in the early 1990’s, when his casino empire was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, recalls him saying dolefully at the time, “I should have listened to my father and stuck with Brooklyn. My father is going to say, ‘I told you so.’”
Of course, I’m no psychiatrist. But that holds the advantage that I am not bound by the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule,” which forbids members to offer opinions at a distance on the mental health of public figures. The provision was added to the profession’s code of ethics after a number of psychiatrists publicly speculated on the fitness and stability of 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. He, of course, never became president, but Trump’s ascendance has prompted a number of prominent psychiatrists to declare an overriding emergency. Organized as the World Mental Health Coalition, they held a conference in Washington last month on “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership.”
“We are talking about the profound danger of the mentally unstable individual who holds the highest office in this country, and most powerful single office in the entire world,” said one of the speakers, Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist.
“He is rapidly declining,” Lee, the group’s president, said of Trump in an interview. “His rallies have been increasingly less coherent, with greater signs of paranoid responses, increasing attraction to violence, increasing espousal of conspiracy theories. A few weeks ago, there was the ‘Tim Apple’ episode, and the other day he referred to Venezuela as a company, while recently he confused his father’s birthplace with his grandfather’s.
“His mistakes are growing more and more bizarre,” Lee said. “If we match the pattern of his deterioration against pathology, what disease states look like, we can say he is not well.
“Continually we have been seeing that his erratic thoughts and behavior are more consistent with mental pathology than strategy. Now we are seeing a pattern of cognitive decline.”
Shortly after Trump took office, Lee edited a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” a collection of essays by mental health professionals, which recently appeared in a second edition. “What we said then was that he was worse than he appeared in public and would grow more dangerous over time. That his mental pathology would spread into his administration and the population.” She referenced a phenomenon called “shared psychosis,” in which delusions spread from one family member to his or her relatives.
“In terms of the presidency,” she said, “the nation is the family. That is what we’re seeing now. One of the first things you lose is the ability to recognize that something is not right and to get help. An increasing proportion of the population is unable to recognize that something is not right. What you do in such a situation is contain the person, remove them from access to weapons and do an urgent evaluation. Then you manage the person in the least restrictive manner according to the results of the evaluation.”
Lee said her organization was “in the process of forming an expert panel that can test fitness for duty” by presidential candidates, pointing out that military officers in control of nuclear weapons undergo regular psychological evaluations. The exam she has in mind tests for such things as the ability to consider the consequences of decisions, to follow a logical train of thought, and to understand and explain back a story or scenario.
I think that would be a good thing to do for Trump, and for any of his would-be successors.
But if I were administering the test, I’d start with one simple question:
“We were running partners and now we’re life partners.” After being blinded in a shooting, this man turned to a running group to get his life back on track. What he didn’t know was that he would find love.
White House makes a health care promise it can’t keep
By Steve Benen April 1, 2019
A doctor measures the blood pressure of a patient. Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty
In the debate over health care policy, Donald Trump and his team have already left a long trail of broken promises, but the White House nevertheless continues to make commitments it will never be able to keep.
Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday that if the Trump administration succeeds in striking down the entirety of the Affordable Care Act in court, he can guarantee every person who has health coverage because of the Obama-era health law will not lose their coverage.
On “This Week,” ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Mulvaney whether he could provide such a guarantee for the millions of people who enrolled through HealthCare.gov, including those with pre-existing conditions and the people under the age of 26 enrolled under their parents’ plans.
“Yes and here’s why,” Mulvaney said Sunday. “Let’s talk about pre-existing conditions, because it gets a lot of the attention and rightly so. Every single plan that this White House has ever put forward since Donald Trump was elected, covered pre-existing conditions.”
The list of problems with this isn’t short. If the president’s scheme succeeds and the courts tear down the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, millions of families will lose their coverage. It’s an unambiguous fact. To hear the acting White House chief of staff tell it, none of those people should worry, however, because those Americans would maintain coverage in a post-ACA landscape.
No one should take this seriously – because there is no Plan B. Mulvaney boasted, for example, “Every single plan that this White House has ever put forward since Donald Trump was elected, covered pre-existing conditions.” That might be reassuring if (a) the White House had ever put forward a health care plan of its own; and (b) the White House hadn’t endorsed a variety of proposals from congressional Republicans that would’ve gutted protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions.
But stepping to look at all of this in the larger context, the root of the problem remains unchanged: GOP policymakers have spent a decade trying to craft an alternative to “Obamacare,” and they’ve failed repeatedly.
Trump and his Republican brethren seem to think this time will be different. They’re wrong – and it’s important to understand why.
On the surface, GOP officials are offering familiar rhetoric, repeated periodically since 2009, that the party’s blueprint is well on its way and will be available sometime soon. “There is a plan,” Kellyanne Conway told Fox News yesterday, adding that the Republican blueprint is “manifold.”
Reality, however, keeps getting in the way. As the Washington Postreported over the weekend, not only do Republicans not have a plan, “there are no plans to make such a plan.”
What about the Senate working group the president pointed to the other day? It now appears the group may not actually exist. Capitol Hill is looking to the White House to lead, the White House is looking to Capitol Hill to lead, and the result is a comedy of errors.
Stepping back, however, there’s a larger point that’s often overlooked. It’s easy to ridicule Republicans over their broken promises, bogus boasts, and imaginary plans, but the fact remains that there is no compelling GOP alternative to the Affordable Care Act because it’s an unobtainable goal.
Bloomberg News had a good report last week that noted in passing, “The problem for GOP lawmakers is the paucity of free-market policy ideas for health care that are politically popular.”
It’s an important detail. For 10 years, Republicans have tried to come up with a health care plan – which voters would actually like – that would bring coverage to millions and protect Americans with pre-existing conditions, without extensive regulation of private insurers, spending a lot of money, raising taxes, or increasing the deficit.
They’ve failed, not simply as a matter of governance, but also as a matter of logic. GOP officials are effectively trying to create a square circle. It can’t be done. It won’t be done.
Republicans are constrained in ways Democrats are not. When Dems began work on the Affordable Care Act, they set out to solve a problem. When GOP policymakers tried to address the same challenge, they set out to solve a problem in an ideologically satisfying way that honored conservative principles about taxes, regulation, and the size of government.
Those self-imposed limits necessarily made their task impossible. After a decade of Republican effort, nothing has happened because nothing can happen.
If GOP officials were sincere about coming up with a model that might meet muster, it would look an awful lot like the Affordable Care Act – which, despite a decade of hysteria, is already the centrist model based entirely on bipartisan principles.
Postscript: There are some reports this morning that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah)) is in “preliminary discussions” about coming up with an ACA replacement plan for his party. Since Romney helped create the first-ever statewide coverage plan, that might seem like a sensible strategy.
The trouble, however, is that Romney’s model served as the basis for “Obamacare,” which Republicans have convinced themselves is unacceptable.
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Business Leaders for Medicare for All
March 30, 2019
Watch Business Leaders for Medicare for All Chairman Richard Master, CEO of a $200 million a year company, explain why Medicare for All is such a good deal for American business.
