Reverie

 "I am just going outside and may be some time" Lawrence Oates, leaving his tent to die on Scott's return from his doomed South Pole expedition. 

The Washington Post (8/9, Zezima) reports that “one in 12 doctors has received money from” pharmaceutical “companies marketing prescription opiod[s],” according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. Researchers discovered that 68,177 physicians “received more than $46 million from the opioid sellers between 2013 and 2015.” The study, which used “publicly available data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,” found that physicians “were paid the most for the promotion of fentanyl.”

Who is....Jamie Dimon?

Fossils of Patagotitan mayorum were discovered in Patogonia in 2014. It was in life  nearly 70 tons, heavier than 10 adult African elephants and 122-foot-long.   Patagotitan, which lived about 100 million years ago during the late Cretaceous Period, is considered a titanosaur, a diverse lineage of plant-eating, long-necked dinosaurs with long tails that walked on four legs.
Titanosaurs varied greatly in size, with the smallest species weighing as much as an adult elephant and the largest ones weighing more than 60 tons. The discovery of Patagotitan gave scientists a clearer picture of how titanosaurs evolved in terms of their body mass.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said he wouldn't personally buy any long-term government debt. "I'm not going to call it a bubble, but I personally wouldn't be buying a 10-year sovereign debt anywhere in the world," he told CNBC on Tuesday. "My view is the Fed is doing the right things, raising rates, telling people we're going to start reducing the balance sheet," Dimon added.


Anyone remember Milo Minderbinder? The White House is actively considering a bold plan to turn over a big chunk of the U.S. war in Afghanistan to private contractors in an effort to turn the tide in a stalemated war, according to the former head of a security firm pushing the project.


It will be interesting to see how Pope Francis, who has been pretty critical of the developed West, handles the Venezuela disaster.

Chelsea Manning appears in the September issue of Vogue magazine, looking gorgeous and glowing in a red swimsuit on the beach with the wind in her hair and a smile on her face.

In a tweet Thursday sharing the photo shot by Annie Leibovitz, the transgender activist wrote, “Guess this is what freedom looks like.” 

It sure is. And maybe treason.

The former Army intelligence analyst was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking more than 700,000 classified government documents to WikiLeaks. She was released back in May following seven years in prison, after former President Barack Obama commuted her sentence. (from Yahoo)

Sleep deprivation results in increased risk of obesity, depression, heart attacks and strokes - causing experts to dub it the 'modern ill'. However, the most worrying consequences are rooted in the brain and new research suggests the effects are far more destructive than previously thought. Research suggests that being awake for 18 hours results in the same cognitive impairment people get from being drunk.  

So naps are good?

Emma Sulkowicz dragged a blue mattress around Columbia University's campus in 2014 to dramatize her plight as a rape victim. This is quite a story and worth reading up on. Motives and rewards in this culture have become very strange.

For perfect (and near perfect scores) on the math SAT test, high school boys outnumber high school girls by a ratio of 2-to-1. And that’s despite the fact that high school girls would seem to be better prepared than boys to do well on the math SAT test: girls take more high school math classes than boys, they take more AP and honors math classes than boys, they have higher GPAs than boys overall, and are more likely than boys to graduate in the top 10% of their high school classes .

African American men have the highest incidence of prostate cancer in the United States and are more than twice as likely to die from the disease as Caucasians, according to the National Cancer Institute. 
Is that illegal?

In rural Iowa, Democrat Phil Miller won a state legislative seat by 10 points Tuesday in a district Trump carried by 20 points. The Dems think this is very significant.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/sunday-sermon-8413.html

Sunday Sermon 8/4/13 steeleydock.blogspot.com Today's gospel is a classic in tone and message. Christ is first asked to help adjudicate an inheritance and Christ asks, "Man, who has a...

U.S. companies hold more than $2.6 trillion in foreign profits offshore.


Just when you thought that everything to worry about was pretty much revealed:  Researchers stored malware in synthetic DNA and demonstrated how that code can compromise a computer analyzing the DNA after it has been run through a gene-sequencing machine.

In 2009, more votes were cast for American Idol than Barack Obama for president: 97 million for American Idol and, on Election Day, 70 million for Obama. Yes, the age group is different, but....

Aristotle distinguished human and animal sounds: Animal sounds are of pleasure or pain, human sounds of right and wrong. Thus, he concluded that language was the distinguishing element in humanity. This is in distinction from "communication." If true, does interaction on devices qualify as language and satisfy our basic defining "language" need? Or are we withdrawing from something that has defined us?

The New York Times  reports that an increasing number of physicians and medical programs around the country are “teaching [patients] how to cook.” Some “are building teaching kitchens or creating food pantries” within their practices, others “are prescribing culinary education programs,” and several “medical schools have even introduced culinary curriculums (sic),” the article says.

A good quote about modern liberalism, its ability to correct itself and the recent Google firing:
"The core of the problem is that identity liberalism construes disagreement as heresy, and viciously punishes heretics.
And it is therefore impossible for identity liberalism, and the institutions that embrace it, to self-correct, because all criticism is treated as evil. The critic finds himself, like Damore, defending not his thesis (which may or may not be wrong), but his moral worth."

According to Credit Suisse, 2,800 U.S. brick-and-mortar retail stores closed up shop in Q1 2017, a record full-year pace. Commercial real estate firm CoStar reports that U.S. retailers must eliminate 1 million square feet of brick-and-mortar space just to grow their sales per square foot back to where it was a decade ago.

Between 1940 and 1960, LA’s population more than doubled from 3.2 million to 7.8 million; in the same period, output from the film studios halved.

CMS is set to enforce the health law's readmission rule by penalizing 2,573 hospitals for having too many Medicare patients readmitted within 30 days, according to federal data released Wednesday cited in a Kaiser Health News report. 

This I suppose implies that readmissions are, by nature, preventable which, of course, is untrue. Which is to say the hospitals are being fined for being a hospital.

The size of underground economies differs across countries. In Greece it has been estimated to be as big as 30% of GDP, in Spain 25%, in Italy 20%, and in the United States, about 7%.

In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry-stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War. It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, "MDZhB", that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it's been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it's joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues. Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as "dinghy" or "farming specialist". And that's it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz. It's so enigmatic, it's as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as "the Buzzer." It joins two similar mystery stations, "the Pip" and the "Squeaky Wheel." As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to.(BBC)

AAAAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd......a bar graph: