Digression -- an important economic fact
I commend to your attentionJeffrey A. Winters in The American Interest, with the essential truth about our present historical moment, that gets obscured in the deliberate distractions thrown up by politicians and journalists who would rather make us think and talk about something else. Pull quote:Despite polls consistently showing that large majorities favor
increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, policy has been moving for
decades in the opposite direction. Reduced taxes on the ultra-rich and
the corporations and banks they dominate have shifted fiscal burdens
downward even as they have strained the government â...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 30, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
A Speech For The Ages – 83 Years Ago This Christmas
By MIKE MAGEE
On the evening of December 29, 1940, with election to his 3rd term as President secured, FDR delivered these words as part of his sixteenth “Fireside Chat”: “There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness…No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.”
Millions of Americans, and millions of Britains were tuned in that evening, as President Roosevelt made clear where he stood while carefully avoiding over-stepping his authority in a nation still in the grips of a combative and isolationist opposition party.
That very evening, the Germans Luftwaffe, launched their largest yet raid ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 22, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Non-Health Churchill Democracy FDR Hitler Mike Magee Trump Source Type: blogs
Maybe giving too much credit
Health reporter Julie Rovner is perplexed thatRepublicans, who she maintains were once big supporters of public health, now seem to want to kill us all. Her examples of former Republican championship for public health are pretty narrow and a bit dubious. Funding for the NIH is mostly about biomedical research, not public health; and GW Bush ' s President ' s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, while certainly a good thing, was focused on Africa and probably as much about international relations as humanitarianism. But it ' s certainly true that the party has turned its back on these programs: The GOP-led House this y...
Source: Stayin' Alive - December 15, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
AI Could Have “Unimaginable Consequences” For Democratic Societies, Says Expert.
By MIKE MAGEE
His biography states, “He speaks to philosophical questions about the fears and possibilities of new technology and how we can be empowered to shape our future. His work to bridge cultures spans artificial intelligence, cognition, language, music, creativity, ethics, society, and policy.”
He embraces the title “cross-disciplinary,” and yet his PhD thesis at UC Berkeley in 1980 “was one of the first to spur the paradigm shift toward machine learning based natural language processing technologies.” Credited with inventing and building “the world’s first global-scale online language transla...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 14, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Tech AI Dr. De Kai Mike Magee Source Type: blogs
Lessons from historical drug prohibitions
New Zealand just rescinded its ban on tobacco smoking at the same time that Donald Trump just suggested the death penalty could cure the drug problem. What did New Zealand learn? And how has drug prohibition worked out in the past? In 1511, the governor of Mecca, Khair Beg, had a serious problem. A powerful
Read more…
Lessons from historical drug prohibitions originally appeared in KevinMD.com. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - December 1, 2023 Category: General Medicine Authors: L. Joseph Parker, MD Tags: Conditions Public Health & Policy Source Type: blogs
The Chaos Machine
That ' s the title of a book by Max Fisher. I ' m only halfway through it but I ' ve already seen plenty. Fisher documents with excruciating detail how so-called social media -- most notably Facebook, YouTube, the application formerly known as Twitter, and TikTok -- use mindless machine learning to hijack some of people ' s natural tendencies and drive them into cesspools of disinformation, extremism, and hatred. The companies that own that own these platforms know full well what is happening but they only care about money and they adamantly refuse to do anything about it. Facebook has literally caused mob viole...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 25, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Orange, Green, and Red – The Colors of Tribalism
BY MIKE MAGEE
As Thanksgiving Day approaches, let’s give thanks for the study of history, in part because it reminds us that Trumpian words like “vermin” have been used before and serve to alert the human race that we have entered danger zone
One President who understood the power of words more than many others was FDR. When he structured up “a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms and regulations…to provide support for farmers, the unemployed, youth and the elderly”, he memorably packaged the plan under the label, “The New Deal.”
Seizing alliteration in 1933, he further ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 20, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Declaration of Human Rights March of Dimes Mike Magee Thanksgiving Welfare Source Type: blogs
The Voice of Democracy is Young and Female.
By MIKE MAGEE
“Don’t call me a saint,” said founder of the early1930’s Catholic Workers Movement, Dorothy Day. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Oddly enough, says Jesuit writer, James Martin, “That quote is probably the biggest obstacle to her canonization…Given that quote, would Dorothy really want to be canonized?”
Today’s election results were a sliver of bright light in what has been a rather dark period. But it is at times like this that quiet heroes emerge. If courage has a face, this morning, as results across the land show a sweeping victory for Democrats, and specifically tho...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 10, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Abortion Democracy Dobbs Mike Magee Womens rights Source Type: blogs
The Voice of Democracy is Young and Female
By MIKE MAGEE
“Don’t call me a saint,” said founder of the early 1930’s Catholic Workers Movement, Dorothy Day. “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Oddly enough, says Jesuit writer, James Martin, “That quote is probably the biggest obstacle to her canonization…Given that quote, would Dorothy really want to be canonized?”
This week’s election results were a sliver of bright light in what has been a rather dark period. But it is at times like this that quiet heroes emerge. If courage has a face, this morning, as results across the land show a sweeping victory for Democrats, and specifi...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 10, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Abortion Democracy Dobbs Mike Magee Womens rights Source Type: blogs
Will the AMA Support A Move Toward Single Payer Health Care?
By MIKE MAGEE
The Politico headline in 2019 declared dramatically, “The Most Powerful Activist in America is Dying.” This week, 4 1/2 years later, their prophecy came true, as activist Ady Barkan succumbed at age 39 to ALS leaving behind his vibrant wife, English professor, Rachael King, and two small children, Carl,7, and Willow,3.
His journey, as one of the nation’s leading activists for a single-payer health care system began, not coincidentally, began with his diagnosis of A.L.S. in 2016, 4 months after the birth of his first child. His speech at the Democratic National Convention fully exposed his conditio...
Source: The Health Care Blog - November 8, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Ady Barkan AMA Mike Magee Single payer Source Type: blogs
Yes, people really believe this
Tom Sullivan at Digby ' s blog excerpts and discusses an interview by Chauncy DeVegawith Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute. If you want to read the entire interview, Sullivan gives a link, or you may be satisfied just with his discussion.What you don ' t get a strong sense of from the post, however, is some of the specific content of white Christian nationalism. As we ' ve been reading the Bible, we know that it ' s riddled with contradictions, manifest nonsense, and theology that is inconsistent with what fundamentalist Christians claim to believe. You may have heard that Speaker of the House Mike Joh...
Source: Stayin' Alive - November 6, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Bloody Religion
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”Steven Weinberg
In 2003, I started a web page that documented the horrors of the Iraq war. The title of the page was corrie.html, because one of the first entries was about Rachel Corrie. This was it.
On Sunday, 16th March 2003, a 23-year-old American peace activist, Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying homes in the Gaza Strip.
You can read here some of the emails that she ...
Source: DC's goodscience - October 15, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Colquhoun Tags: Palestine war Gaza Israel Source Type: blogs
Bloody Religion
Go to follow-up
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”Steven Weinberg
In 2003, I started a web page that documented the horrors of the Iraq war. The title of the page was corrie.html, because one of the first entries was about Rachel Corrie. This was it.
On Sunday, 16th March 2003, a 23-year-old American peace activist, Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying homes in the Gaza Strip.
You can read here some of th...
Source: DC's goodscience - October 15, 2023 Category: Science Authors: David Colquhoun Tags: Palestine war Gaza Israel Source Type: blogs
Out of Control Health Costs or a Broken Society
Flawed Accounting for the US Health Spending Problem
By Jeff Goldsmith
Source: OECD, Our World in Data
Late last year, I saw this chart which made my heart sink. It compared US life expectancy to its health spending since 1970 vs. other countries. As you can see, the US began peeling off from the rest of the civilized world in the mid-1980’s. Then US life expectancy began falling around 2015, even as health spending continued to rise. We lost two more full years of life expectancy to COVID. By  the end of 2022, the US had given up 26 years-worth of progress in life expectancy gains. Adding four more ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 9, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy COVID Drug Overdoses gun violence Hospitals Jeff Goldsmith Maternal mortality Mental Health Obesity Poverty Regional Economy Society Source Type: blogs
Out of Control Health Costs or a Broken Society
Flawed Accounting for the US Health Spending Problem
By Jeff Goldsmith
Source: OECD, Our World in Data
Late last year, I saw this chart which made my heart sink. It compared US life expectancy to its health spending since 1970 vs. other countries. As you can see, the US began peeling off from the rest of the civilized world in the mid-1980’s. Then US life expectancy began falling around 2015, even as health spending continued to rise. We lost two more full years of life expectancy to COVID. By the end of 2022, the US had given up 26 years-worth of progress in life expecta...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 9, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy COVID Drug Overdoses gun violence Hospitals Jeff Goldsmith Maternal mortality Mental Health Obesity Poverty Regional Economy Society Source Type: blogs
