Contagion

T.B kills more people in three days than Ebola kills in a year. But T.B. is old news and its management is not theoretical, it is understood and uncomfortable for people and societies. When Kaci Hickox, a Doctors without Borders RN, was exposed to Ebola in West Africa, she returned to this country--with a fever--and defied all the efforts to shield the society from her risk for 21 days, with the active  support of the press.

When others returned from West Africa exposure, the sensitive Obama administration gave them cell phones--cell phones--so they could be secretly tracked, presumably so the politicians would know what areas to avoid. But there was no protection for the innocent citizen.

These are serious problems and they are not being met seriously. The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but an estimated 10% to 20% of those who were infected died. With about a third of the world population infected, this case-fatality ratio means 3% to 6% of the entire global population died.

The new Chinese bird flu, H7N9, is said to have a human mortality rate of 30 to 39 percent. 

Reverie

"Thinking is the source not of truth but of meaning. It flirts with doubt, perplexity and wonder, and because of this it is the permanent enemy not just of ideological dogmatism but of all forms of intellectual complacency and elitism." -- Finn Bowring
 









We humans  share more than half our genomes with flatworms; about 60 per cent with fruit flies and chickens; 80 per cent with cows; and 99 per cent with chimps. What this really means is not that we are similar beings but that the building blocks are similar, nothing more. This means that we are human, rather than another species, less because we carry different genes from those other species than because our cells read differently our remarkably similar genomes as we develop from zygote to adult. The alphabet is the same, the writing varies, but so does the reading.






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One question on a 2018 Gallup Poll asks whether the “effects of global warming have already begun.”  60 percent said “yes,” up substantially from 48 percent in 1997. When the question was presented in a slightly different way — ”Do you think global warming will pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime” — the answer was even more dramatic; 45 percent said “yes,” up from 25 percent in 1997.

There is no bipartisan consensus. By and large, Democrats accept global warming and urge tougher policies to stop it, while many Republicans are skeptics. In the March poll, Gallup found that 91 percent of Democrats worried “a great deal/fair amount” about global warming; the comparable Republican figure was only 33 percent. The gap has grown. In 2000, it was 78 percent to 64 percent. Moreover, fighting global warming doesn’t rate high on Americans’ priorities, Bowman and O’Neil note.
Here’s a list of 19 public priorities that Pew asked about in the January poll. Dealing with climate change ranked next to last. Fighting terrorism was first. The “other” category includes priorities that are opposed or considered not important.
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T.B kills more people in three days than Ebola kills in a year. But T.B. is old news and its management is not theoretical, it is understood and uncomfortable for people and societies.
When Kaci Hickox, a Doctors without Borders RN, was exposed to Ebola in West Africa, she returned to this country--with a fever--and defied all the efforts to shield the society from her risk for 21 days, with the active  support of the press.
Freedom!



The dollar value of international trade activities (exports + imports) represented more than 20% of the dollar value of state economic output (GDP) for almost one in three US states in 2017, and 31% or more for the six states.



One of the solutions to the apparent scourge of income inequality is to destroy the successful. The usual way is taxation but, if guys like Antifa get their way, there may be more direct solutions. Interestingly, research on raising incomes has been done and the results are in. Two economists, Tomas Hellebrandt and Paolo Mauro, studied this and concluded, in a 2015 paper published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, that global income inequality declined between 2003 and 2013 due to rapid economic growth in poor nations. Growth, not destruction, was the answer.



One of the scandals of the Clinton White House was the number of staffers who did not have security clearance. Many could not even chair their own committees. Now this:

President Donald Trump’s personal assistant, John McEntee, was escorted out of the White House on Monday, two senior administration officials said. The cause of the firing was an unspecified security issue, said a third White House official with knowledge of the situation.
Several White House officials have lost their jobs over the past month since White House Chief of Staff John Kelly imposed a stricter security-clearance policy. 
Mr. Kelly told reporters earlier this month that when he joined the White House as chief of staff this summer, he realized a large number of staffers still held interim clearances after more than seven months in the administration.
His review turned up “a couple spreadsheets worth of people” at the White House operating with interim security clearance after the first nine months of the Trump administration. He also found at least 35 officials who were inappropriately given top secret clearance. (wsj)
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Who is...Christopher Steele?



In response to the charge that the Japanese government was subsidizing its steel producers at that time, Friedman said:

Number one, it’s very dubious that it’s true, but suppose it were true. Then that would be a foolish thing for the Japanese to do from their own point of view, but why should we object to them giving us foreign aid? We’ve given them quite a bit.
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Suppose a college student you personally know wants to major in a low-paying, impractical major - like Fine Arts or Archaeology.  How would people in your social circle react if his parents, though willing to pay for college in general, refused to pay for their kid to pursue such a major?--Caplan, looking for trouble
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Prime Minister Theresa May said the U.K. would expel 23 Russian diplomats from the U.K., saying Moscow had showed complete disdain for the gravity of the use of a nerve agent on British soil. And they will be replaced by....?



 

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While the U.S. population is today 48 percent higher than it was in 1977 (when the current U.S. run of annual trade deficits began), real U.S. household and nonprofit net worth is today 255 percent higher than it was in 1977.



This is really getting ugly. Trump may indeed be the most benign of options.
A new book by  Isikoff and Corn suggests that the infamous relationship between former British spy Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS and the FBI  was forged not by Clinton but by Obama officials at the State Department in an opposition research program that included the compiling of an enemies list of Romney donors. One can only surmise what that information was for.



A lawsuit in Connecticut against a leading maker of AR-15 rifles is awaiting a pivotal court ruling over whether the gun industry can be held legally responsible for mass shootings. This goofy idea is said to be terrifying gun manufacturers; who should really be scared is McDonalds.
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All the talk about the problems of containing costs in medicine may be coming to a head. The myth of efficiency leading to decreased cost in a product that has an insatiable consumption may be coming to an end. The Hill (3/14, Hellmann) reports the Congressional Budget Office estimates that an updated Alexander-Murray legislation “would reduce premiums by 10 percent next year and by 20 percent in 2020 and 2021.” That is premiums, not expenditures. Soooooo......



AAaaawwwww....."Alicia Vikander, as the new Lara Croft, has leapt into the void of a franchise reboot, based on a video-game reboot, that generates no joy, makes negligible sense, and seals its own tomb with a climax of perfect absurdity" --Joe Morgenstern in the wsj.



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At the Heritage Auction, the James C. Seacrest Collection, assembled over decades by a Nebraska publisher and philanthropist, sold for a combined $918,196 and claimed nine of the auction’s 10 most expensive lots.
The Seacrest Collection’s Signed and Inscribed Copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s  The Great Gatsby sold for $162,500 - a house record for a 1925 first edition.



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John Skipper, the former president of ESPN, says his decision to step down after more than 20 years at the company was prompted by an extortion attempt by a person from whom he purchased cocaine. (wsj) You may want to read that again.

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An interesting distinction from Pipes: "Russia’s experience indicates that freedom cannot be legislated; it has to grow gradually, in close association with property and law.  For while acquisitiveness is natural, respect for the property – and the liberty – of others is not.  It has to be inculcated until it sinks such deep roots in the people’s consciousness that it is able to withstand all efforts to crush it."

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-daughter-of-time.html

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The Munich Pact was a vain attempt to forestall Germany’s imperial aims.
On September 30, 1938, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, French Premier Edouard Daladier, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, which sealed the fate of Czechoslovakia, virtually handing it over to Germany in the name of peace. Although the agreement was to give into Hitler’s hands only the Sudentenland, that part of Czechoslovakia where 3 million ethnic Germans lived, it also handed over to the Nazi war machine 66 percent of Czechoslovakia’s coal, 70 percent of its iron and steel, and 70 percent of its electrical power. Without those resources, the Czech nation was left vulnerable to complete German domination.
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As early as October 1938, Hitler made it clear that he intended to force the central Czechoslovakian government to give Slovakia its independence, which would make the “rump” Czech state “even more completely at our mercy,” remarked Hermann Goering. Slovakia indeed declared its “independence” (in fact, complete dependence on Germany) on March 14, 1939, with the threat of invasion squelching all debate within the Czech province.
Then, on March 15, 1939, during a meeting with Czech President Emil Hacha–a man considered weak, and possibly even senile–Hitler threatened a bombing raid against Prague, the Czech capital, unless he obtained from Hacha free passage for German troops into Czech borders. He got it. That same day, German troops poured into Bohemia and Moravia. The two provinces offered no resistance, and they were quickly made a protectorate of Germany. By evening, Hitler made a triumphant entry into Prague. (from History)
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AAAAaaaannnnnddddd....poll results:
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 Top Priority Less Important Priority Other
1. Fighting terrorism 73% 21% 6%
2. Improving schools 72 23 5
3. The economy 71 23 6
4. Cutting health costs 68 26 7
5. Strengthening Social Security 67 27 6
6. Strengthening Medicare 66 27 7
7. Protecting the environment 62 29 9
8. Creating jobs 62 30 8
9. Helping the poor 58 32 9
10. Reducing crime 56 33 12
11. Improving race relations 52 31 17
12. Improving transportation 49 39 13
13. Reducing drug addiction 49 38 12
14. Cutting the budget deficit 48 37 15
15. Immigration 47 35 18
16. Curbing special interests 47 32 22
17. Strengthening the military 46 32 23
18. Dealing with climate change 46 24 30
19. Dealing with global trade 38 44 17
Source: Pew Research Center THE WASHINGTON POST
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Cutting Edge Violence Debate

“Composer quits London for new life in Mexico because ‘it's safer' ...” was the  headline on a September, 2012 article by Anna Edwards in the UK's Daily Mail.

“Composer Michael Nyman is packing his bags and moving to Mexico,” reported Edwards. Nyman told a local newspaper that he was going to permanently move to La Roma, in Mexico City, after “becoming increasingly worried about the level of violence in London.”  In gun-free Britain.
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Nyman may have been wise. “London murder rate is HIGHER than New York's for the first time ever after TWELVE killings in just 19 days” was a headline April 2, 2018 in the Daily Mail.

The Times of London, similarly, reports that the British capital city has been hit with a surge in stabbings.

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In what sounds like a parody of the American gun debate, police in Lancashire, responding to increasing knife violence, joined the “Save a Life — Surrender Your Knife” campaign that offers “amnesty” to those who hand over their knives. Knife bins were located in locations around Lancashire between 2014 and 2016, and knives may now be surrendered at police stations with front counters.
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Researchers at West Middlesex University Hospital reported in 2005 that kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings, many committed impulsively, often prompted by drugs and alcohol. 

The researchers said there was no reason for long, pointed knives to be publicly available or possessed.

We should consult the experts.

Indeed, ten top UK chefs the researchers contacted said long, pointed knives have little practical value in the kitchen. In short, if busy chefs can get by with small-bladed knives, then there's no justification for those at home to be using long, pointed knives to slice vegetables for soup.

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(Just so you know I'm not making this up, much of this is from the Trib.)

What We Can and Cannot Measure

We are entering a period of the debate over metrics. What are we able to measure? Can we measure the important things? Or do we just grade circumstances using as criteria what we can measure --which may not be representative--and ignore the rest?

Brooks wrote recently on Stephen Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now: "The big problem with his rationalistic worldview is that while he charts the way individuals have benefited over the centuries, he spends barely any time on the quality of the relationships between individuals.

That is to say, Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres."

Quality. Social Trust. Tribalism. Neighborliness. These are big topics and it is difficult to measure them. Worse, exactly whose responsibilities are all these things? Worst, a lot of sociological evidence exists that suggests people are most fulfilled, trusting and bonding when under severe stress, like war.

In this new book, Pinker criticizes a 1962 response to C.P. Snow's case for the importance of science. The response is by literary critic F.R. Leavis.
Pinker writes:

Leavis scoffed at a value system in which "'standard of living' is the ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim." As an alternative, he suggested that "in coming to terms with great literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for--what ultimately for? What do men live by?--the questions work and tell at what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling." (Anyone whose "depth of thought and feeling" extends to a woman in a poor country who has lived to see her newborn because her standard of living has risen, and then multiplied that sympathy by a few hundred million, might wonder why "coming to terms with great literature" is morally superior to "raising the standard of living" as a criterion for "what at bottom we really believe"--or why the two should be seen as alternatives in the first place.)

Reverie

“The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”--Salena Zito 

On the making of law, from Tullock: "In general, the bills themselves are written by the civil service, by congressional assistants, or, in many cases, by special interests who offer “advice” sometimes in the form of completely worked out pieces of legislation."

Lawmakers.

In both Britain and the United States a criminal can sue the house owner for an injury he or she got whilst robbing the house - and a trasspaser can sue a houseowner for an injury got whilst (for example) climbing trees without permission - the law has become the enemy of private property and civil freedom.--a letter to the editor, from, obviously, a Brit

Chicago doubled cellphone fees to fund its Olympics bid. The Olympics rejected Chicago — but the tax remained. Now Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to raise it again.
Taxing is forever.

Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

Experts and their tyranny.

Traditionally, no one can be punished in a free society without being first convicted of a crime. But "civil forfeiture," which originally arouse in America to attack individual who were committing crimes but were beyond the reach of the law--specifically smugglers and pirates, solved the problem. It treated the property as the criminal. In 1996, John Bennis had a tryst with a prostitute and got arrested. The government took the car he was in--which must have been particularly galling to the car's owner, Mrs. Bennis. She sued and lost in the Supreme Court.

Civil forfeiture is the topic of the movie "Little Pink House," in which the state takes over a housing development because the proposed new owners will pay more taxes. People lost their homes because the state saw a better use for their property.

New York City's average subway worker makes $155,000 a year.

Exports account for 40% of Germany's GDP.

Numbers from the Congressional Budget Office show that in the past 10 years, 70 percent of real spending increases have gone to Social Security and Medicare. In fiscal 2017, the federal government spent $4 trillion. Of that, 40 percent — $1.5 trillion, or 8 percent of our gross domestic product — went to Social Security and Medicare. These two programs will consume $3 trillion in the next decade, and that doesn't include the interest charged on Uncle Sam's credit card.

Who is.....Teressa Bellissimo?

Charen: Trump justifies this crony capitalist move by reference to section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which grants the president the authority to impose tariffs in cases involving national security. This is transparent bad faith. We get two-thirds of our steel from domestic producers. Among the nations from whom we buy the rest, adversaries like China (2.2 percent) and Russia (8.7 percent) contribute trivial amounts. Our biggest suppliers are Canada, Brazil, South Korea and Mexico. Moreover, Trump has also suggested that the steel tariffs could be dropped in exchange for concessions in NAFTA negotiations, proving that the national security argument is disingenuous.

7% of Chicago's budget is from traffic tickets. Last year 10,000 people declared bankruptcy over traffic tickets.

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U.S. consumers racked up $92.2 billion in credit card debt during 2017, pushing outstanding balances past $1 trillion for the first time ever,” according to WalletHub’s latest Credit Card Debt Study, based on Federal Reserve data released in March. What’s more, nearly one in four Americans (21%) say they have more credit card debt than emergency savings, according to data released in 2018 by Bankrate.

About six in 10 Americans (61%) say they don’t even have enough savings to cover a $1,000 emergency like a visit to the ER or car repair, according to a Bankrate.com report released earlier this year. And data from 2017 from GoBankingRates.com found that 39% say they literally have nothing in their savings accounts. What’s more, the Bankrate data found that nearly one in five Americans who don’t have enough emergency savings (19%) would have to put that unexpected expense on a credit card and finance it over time, 12% would borrow from family or friends, and 5% would take out a personal loan.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-prince-of-darkness-on-elevator.html

The Prince of Darkness on the Elevator steeleydock.blogspot.com Many of our problems seem to stem from our willingness to avert our eyes from the essence, from the basics of the questions. Is the medica...

“If you go back to 1960 or thereabouts, corporate taxes were about 4 percent of G.D.P.,” Warren Buffett said. “I mean, they bounced around some. And now, they’re about 2 percent of G.D.P.”

By contrast, he said, while tax rates have fallen as a share of gross domestic product, health care costs have ballooned. About 50 years ago, he said, “health care was 5 percent of G.D.P., and now it’s about 17 percent.”

There has never been more personal wealth in America than there is

today (over $22 trillion in 1996). Yet most Americans are not wealthy.

Nearly one-half of our wealth is owned by 3.5 percent of our households.
Eighty percent of America's millionaires are first-generation rich.
(from The Millionaire Next Door)


Individuals, not nations, trade. Remind yourself of this truism and many fallacies melt away. I have no conflict of interest with Chinese or Canadian steelmakers or other foreign producers. On the contrary, we have a harmony of interests.--Richman



And a little bit of information: Wings, the unwanted byproduct of poultry’s choice cuts, began to appear on bar menus precisely because they were so cheap and readily available. Now, according to the NCC, they’re second in price only to the boneless, skinless meat of the breast.
Chicken wings are divided into three parts, two of which we consume as “wings” -- the “drummette,” a mini-drumstick that attaches the wing to the body, and the flat, two-boned middle segment. The wing tips, unpopular in the U.S., are usually shipped to Asia. Every four wings in your typical bucket, then, are equivalent to one fully grown chicken.

Buffalo wings: Named for their place of origin, Buffalo, New York, this is one of the few kinds of fried chicken that is not traditionally battered before frying. The Buffalo wing was invented in 1964 at Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York by Teressa Bellissimo.

A decade ago, seven years after the war in Afghanistan began on Oct. 7, 2001, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. objective was the creation of a strong central government. When he was asked whether Afghanistan had ever had one, he answered without hesitation: “No.”

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AAAAAaaaannnnnddddd......a graph:

Straw Dogs and Apes, A Review

My love for trashy movies requires a couple of things: First, the movie must not terrify me with its concept or its action, two, it must have enough entertainment and coherence that it is not damaging. (As the Jesuits used to ask: If good art is good for you, can bad art be bad for you?) And, three, it must have some redeeming diversion value; some fun, less worry.

This week I watched both "Straw Dogs" and "War for the Planet of the Apes." Both of these films were clearly created to raise the audience's self esteem: "If this can get funding, maybe I can."

There are spoilers here but since they are so obvious and you probably can guess what they are,  I suppose they aren't really spoilers.

"Straw Dogs" is a remake. Remakes imply a certain level of success either artistically or commercially on the part of the first film but there is no evidence that is the case here. The original starred Dustin Hoffman and a pouty and occasionally naked Susan George and was created by the violence -ridden Sam Peckenpah, whose depiction of  savagery was always called "a study." In it an abstract writer and his gorgeous wife take a house in a tough rural area where he is not accepted, she is eventually raped and the husband is criticized by the wife and the script (despite his not knowing about the rape) for not doing anything about it. Eventually he fights the bad guys in an effort to protect the house, not the wife ("I will not tolerate violence against this house"). This was called by critics as a property obsession and a "Fascist Manifesto." We were all expected to take solace in the fact that revenge was taken, albeit for the wrong reason. 

The remake is similar, with an unfortunate caricature played by James Woods, a lovely Kate Bosworth playing George's role and a number of good other actors. As in the original, everybody is guilty--or really stupid. It has been said in reviews that this educated--rural, working-unemployed, atheist-Christian dichotomy provides an insight into divided America. They are too kind.

"War for the Planet of the Apes" is a continuation of the Rousseau-meets-PETA "Apes" saga, again implying something to build on. Again this might be a stretch. The story opens with the kindly, reflective apes--led by the ape philosopher-king Caesar--successfully defending themselves with sticks against a disciplined American military unit armed with automatic weapons, artillery and armor, led, apparently really ineptly, by a mildly Kurtz-ly psychopathic Woody Harrelson. The good ape leader's family is killed and the ape encounters his dark side as he seeks revenge. (You can see where this will lead; he becomes more human. Oh, the irony. The Horror.) Three Hairy Amigos set out on a journey of retribution. They encounter a mute girl, played by an enchanting Amiah Miller, who is not stupefied by the movie but whose muteness actually raises a surprisingly interesting question in the story. They move on and encounter slavemasters. Caesar offers himself for others and is crucified, crazy Harrelson admits to sacrificing his only son to increasingly confusing symbolism, the apes all escape to watch the humans kill each other off --clearly too stupid and vicious to survive--and the apes all wander the desert and find their home just as Caesar, Moses-like, dies. 

This is actually an entertaining franchise if you can overlook the silliness and pretentions. The ape acting and reconstructed movements is quite something to see. The guy who plays Caesar is astonishing. And Miller was terrific. But the interesting original disturbing premise has become more and more childlike in word and deed.

History Rhyming

The Trump election demands constant evaluation. It will be analyzed for decades. What does this mean for the democracy? How could what appears to be a snit among a small segment of voters do something like this? And how could someone like Hillary Clinton, who was ready to assume the position (in all of "assume's" meanings,) be denied.

Curiously, the only reason Clinton has any national prominence at all is just one of those voters' snits. When her husband was running for president against the incumbent Bush, he had little national support. Indeed, success against an incumbent president was rare to impossible. Many thought that any candidate was a sacrifice and little more. Clinton had a tough primary and the "bimbo eruptions" prevented him from attaining any serious gravitas. But campaign was unsettled; there was a segment of the population that was furious the Washington establishment and at government spending. As a traditional Southern Democrat, Clinton could not take advantage of that.

But Perot could.

At the Republican National Convention in 1988, Bush had pledged to the delegates that he would resist any tax increases, giving his famous “read my lips” pledge. But in 1990, in an attempt to cope with a soaring budget deficit, Bush reneged on that pledge, earning him the enmity of his conservative supporters and the distrust of many voters who had backed him in 1988. Pat Buchanan led an insurgent campaign against Bush, capturing nearly 37 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary. Despite the challenge, Bush went on to win the Republican nomination, though his candidacy was wounded. But an incumbent had been aggressively opposed.

Dissatisfaction among the voters with the two candidates--and with politics and politicians in general--was obvious when Ross Perot--with no political experience--entered the race. Polls in May and June showed Perot leading both Clinton and Bush, but in July,  Perot unexpectedly dropped from the race. For whatever reason he reentered it, having been put on the ballot by petition in every state.

Perot spent $65 million of his own money in a light, almost diffident, campaign.  But he was strangely popular. He was not a politician; he was not a government guy. And that seemed to work in his favor. With his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (supported by both Bush and Clinton), his focus on eliminating the country’s budget deficit and national debt, and his nontraditional campaign where he focused on 30-minute infomercial-style advertisements and appeared on the stump to deliver speeches only rarely, he saw his support increase as election day neared.

His support was not enough to win. But is was enough to steal votes from Bush to allow Clinton to win. Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote to Bush’s 37.4 percent and Perot’s 18.9 percent—the highest percentage of any third-party candidate in a U.S. presidential election in 80 years. But there is no way those who voted for Perot would have voted for Clinton had Perot not been in the race. One might be able to argue that non-voters came out to vote for Perot and that Perot was a coincidental non-factor but that is hard to believe.

Essentially Hillary Clinton was vaulted into national power and prominence by an angry anti-politician backlash that allowed her husband to win an election no one expected him to win and he would never have won had Perot not been in the race. And years later, she was defeated by the exact same anti-political backlash that made the unlikely Trump the president.

Irony. And the Circle of Life. Or something.

Reverie

We haven't yet learned how to stay human when assembled in masses. -Lewis Thomas, physician and author

The Chick-fil-A  stores are closed on Sundays due to the founder’s religious beliefs. That turns out to be good business as well.
According to trade publication QSR, in 2016 the average Chick-fil-A brought in 73% more revenue in six days than the average McDonald’s did in seven days. Nor is it just McDonald’s. Chick-fil-A sales were triple the average Wendy’s sales, again with one less day per week to do it.Against vigorous competition, Chick-fil-A easily wins the revenue fight with one hand tied behind its back, so to speak.
One reason: Chick-fil-A seems to treat its staff well—not so much with higher wages, but opportunities for education and advancement.
But there’s something else, too:  Chick-fil-A workers know they’ll always have Sundays off. Does that give Chick-fil-A lower turnover and better-trained workers? 
There is a lot of assumptions here. Maybe people just like chicken more than hamburgers. Or maybe people like the "discrimination towards cows" ad campaign that some people so strangely protest.
But there is something going on.


An interesting suggestion (Bordeaux): "Democratic institutions are heavily concentrated in countries that also have strong protections for private property rights, openness to foreign commerce, and other features broadly consistent with capitalism. That’s why the observation that any two democracies are quite unlikely to go to war against each other might reflect the consequences of capitalism more than democracy."


Inflation-adjusted savings as a percentage of disposable income have been dropping since the 1970s. They bounced in the last recession but fell again after it ended. Now savings are near an all-time 2% low.
 

Omnishambles:

Chiefly British Informal. a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgment results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences. An interesting origin and evolution.

The first element of omnishambles, omni- “all,” is familiar in English in omnibus, omnipotent, omnivorous, and omniscient, derived from the Latin adjective omnis “all.” Shambles has a gorier history. In the 9th century the Old English noun scomol (spelled variously) simply meant “stool, footstool,” derived from Latin scamellum, scamillum “low stool.” By the 10th century the noun also meant “a counter or table for conducting business”; by the 14th century the word acquired the sense “table or counter for selling meat.” During the 16th century shambles came to mean “slaughterhouse; place of wholesale carnage.” Shambles in the sense “a mess, a ruin, scene of disorder” was originally an Americanism, first occurring in print in 1926.

The Edward Curtis collection of books has been republished in two distinct editions, a Limited and a Reference Edition. The Limited includes all twenty original volumes, 1,511 photographs and illustrations, 5,023 pages of text, and extensive transcriptions of Native languages and music. 75 were printed and 6 are available, at $33,500.00 each.
(An original recently sold for $2.88 million dollars at auction.)


"When the modern political community was being shaped at the end of the eighteenth century, its founders thought that the consequences of republican or representative institutions in government would be the reduction of political power in individual lives.
Nothing seems to have mattered more to such minds as Montesquieu, Turgot, and Burke in Europe and to Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin in the United States than the expansion of freedom in the day-to-day existence of human beings, irrespective of class, occupation, or belief.  Hence the elaborate, carefully contrived provisions of constitution or law whereby formal government would be checked, limited, and given root in the smallest possible assemblies of the people.  The kind of arbitrary power Burke so detested and referred to almost constantly in his attacks upon the British government in its relation to the American colonists and the people of India and Ireland, and upon the French government during the revolution, was foremost in the minds of all the architects of the political community, and they thought it could be eliminated, or reduced to insignificance, by ample use of legislative and judicial machinery."--Nisbet

With the Fed expected to hike interest rates four times this year, plus reduction of their $4.4 trillion balance sheet, rates are rising. In less than 12 months, short-year Treasury yields have more than doubled.

Used car prices for electric cars are up a lot.

 

Is it my imagination or does Stormy Daniels have her own news channel?

 

Protectionism is a scythe that slices through core conservative principles, including opposition to government industrial policy, and to government picking winners and losers, and to crony capitalism elevated to an ethic (“A few Americans first”). Big, bossy government does not get bigger or bossier than when it embraces protectionism — government dictating what goods Americans can choose, and in what quantities, and at what prices.--Will

Barron's reviewed a beer recently! What is happening?



For a thousand years the greatest share of labor in most societies has been supplied by adult women.  They produced and raised children.  They also produced much if not most of the good and services essential to human existence and comfort.  To do all this they typically worked from dawn to dusk, and even later once artificial light permitted it.

In the past 75 years, however, major changes have taken place in the pattern of women’s work in the United States.  Between 1900 and 1975 the workday of U.S. housewives was cut in half.--Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott’s book, The Americans: An Economic Record

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/02/kidnapped-women-among-native-americans.html
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Kidnapped Women Among the Native Americans steeleydock.blogspot.com Mrs. Kelly's adventures among the American Indian was read to me recently and these notes are the result of some comparative stories I co...

... if no private markets exist to encourage the recycling of the likes of cans and plastic bags, a good presumption is that the value of the resources consumed in the recycling of such items is greater than is the value of the recycled outputs.  And remember that one of the resources consumed in recycling is human time and effort – time and effort that, for most Americans, are too valuable to spend recycling low-value items.--Bordeaux



It appears that Obama has decided to continue the true nature of modern politics by developing an entertainment product for Netflix. Sort of backwards from what Trump did.



Throughout history, when valuations have been as high as they are today, returns have been in the low single digits or negative over the next decade. JPMorgan Asset Management’s Gabriela Santos says investors should be focused on emerging market equities, specifically Latin America



Toys R Us  is preparing to liquidate all of its U.S. stores and abandon efforts to restructure through the bankruptcy process.

 

The New York Times reports that HHS Secretary Alex Azar said physicians “and hospitals should tell patients how much their care would cost before patients received treatment.” Azar said, “You ought to have the right to know what a health care service will cost – and what it will really cost – before you get that service.” He warned that if the healthcare industry fails to make this change “voluntarily...the government may use its leverage to force them to disclose the information.”




AAAAaaaaannnnnnnndddddd......a graph:
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Image: realinvestmentadvice.com

Sunday/Racism in the OB Unit

There is an editorial in the NYT this weekend that's worth a thought. It centers upon the high rate of mortality among black pregnant women in the U.S. and more specifically in New York. Not surprisingly, it is someone's fault.

They report, "Black women here are 12 times as likely to die from childbirth-related causes as white women. They experience severe, life-threatening complications from pregnancy and childbirth in about 387 out of every 10,000 births, according to city data. That is triple the rate of white New Yorkers, and roughly comparable to complication rates in Sierra Leone." There are "shameful details of how we have failed to protect the lives of black women in pregnancy and childbirth."

The  three leading causes of childbirth-related death in New York City, however, are not shameful; they are hemorrhage, hypertension and blood clots. The Times theorizes that care for these problems vary and one filter of medical decision-making is race. And, like the old question of prematurity in unmarried black women which was found later to be typical of married wealthy black women as well, nothing is easy. ("Wealthier, more educated black women in New York City are also dying or almost dying in childbirth at a far higher rate than their white neighbors. One city study found that black college-educated women were more than twice as likely to experience severe complications from childbirth as white women without a high school diploma.") Soooo.... "some researchers and city officials believe that the higher rates of death and complications among black women are caused only partly by longstanding disparities in poverty, obesity and lack of access to top-rate health care. The dangers black women face in pregnancy and childbirth, they say, are compounded by racism, unconscious biases in health care and the long-term anxieties, regardless of economic status, that come with being an African-American woman."


While all of these elements may be true--and assumed correlation here does not guarantee causation--these are pretty soft generalities to damn a group--i.e. medical personnel--on and harder to come to some therapeutic conclusions. Nonetheless, the NYT does. First is the old information shibboleth: People will be better served if they have a good idea of the opinions of people on the subject, like the NYT. So mistrust really helps. Second, hospitals should be rated, like "restaurants" says the Times. "..'if the city’s Department of Health can rate restaurants, it can find a way to grade hospitals." Of course, this is always being tried. Historically the grading of hospitals and doctors has had one consistent result: The institutions and practitioners begin to avoid cases and problems where the risks are high and where inevitable bad results might reflect badly upon them.  Third, they suggest doula programs. I had to look it up. A doula, also known as a birth companion, birth coach or post-birth supporter, is a non-medical person who stays with and assists a woman before, during, or after childbirth, to provide emotional support and physical help if needed. Who could argue with that.


Disparities in health results are alarming--but they are opportunities, as well. Investigating the causes might help in our overall understanding of the very processes of our health. Of course, they may also reveal pathologies in the very health care system we rely on to provide that homogeneous care. But the assumption that bigotry is at work--which it may--is no better founded than the assumption that we all have the same health and wellness potential. This is science, not social action. And the process of science is long, hard and unassociated with banners.
 
There is a small town in Pennsylvania named Rosetto that has the longest life expectancy in the nation. The people who live there are of Italian descent, drink wine, smoke and are relatively lower middle income. People have tried to figure out their longevity for years. Diet? The water? The local grandmother's pasta formula? Should everyone who is old and/or sick move there?  Generally people think these people are all from a specific long-lived gene pool.

But it is probably not an unspoken conspiracy.

Ryan

On Ryan's Departure

Ryan's departure will not be mourned by Democrats or Trump loyalists. The Democrats caricatured Ryan as the goon throwing Granny in her wheelchair off a cliff. They actually ran TV ads with a Ryan lookalike. Barack Obama singled him out for scorn at a White House meeting, claiming later that he was unaware Ryan was in the front row.

When Donald Trump came along, Ryan found himself a sudden symbol of the reviled "Republican establishment." Though the anti-Ryan vitriol faded after Steve Bannon's defenestration, he continued to be viewed with suspicion by the talk radio crowd and other arms of Trump Inc.

This was his reward for attempting to drag his party, and the country, toward a grown-up reckoning with our debt. Nearly single-handedly, Paul Ryan had managed to put tackling entitlements on the national agenda. As chairman of the budget committee, he convinced his colleagues to endorse modest entitlement reform. As he kept trying to explain, making incremental reforms now — with no changes for current beneficiaries or those in their 50s — can prevent drastic shortfalls and extreme benefit cuts that will be necessary in just 16 years, when Social Security is depleted. The outlook is even worse for Medicare and Medicaid.

The budget and the tax bill combined will leave us with a federal budget deficit in excess of $1 trillion in 2020 and beyond. Congressional Budget Office Director Keith Hall said that federal debt "is projected to be on a steadily rising trajectory throughout the decade." Under Republican guidance, the federal deficit will be roughly double what it was in the final year of the Obama administration. That is the reality of Speaker Ryan's tenure in the age of Trump.

We are not behaving as responsible adults. Our greatest political challenge is out-of-control debt. Our greatest social challenges are declining families, increasing dependency and eroding social cohesion. The debt could have been addressed by government. The other trends continue to degrade our culture, our economy and our personal lives. And the ascension of Trumpian politics — slashing, mendacious, corrupt and polarizing — aggravates everything that was already going wrong.
Paul Ryan didn't belong in Trump world. So much the worse for us.

Speaker Ryan will leave before turning 50. When he does, someone might well say of him these words Mark Twain said about Speaker of the House Thomas B Reed, one of the most powerful and successful Speakers who left the House over a disagreement with President McKinley over his war with Spain (Reed was opposed): "He was transparently honest and honorable, there was no furtiveness about him, and whoever came to know him trusted him and was not disappointed."

(From Charen and Barone, mostly Charen)