Reverie

One of the ads linked to a Russian-backed organization that was released by lawmakers last year. (US House of Representatives)

Yes, the Russians, and the Press and your government think we are as stupid as SNL does.

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." - Soren Kierkegaard

HealthDay reports US hospitals “are running short of the injectable opioids and anesthesia drugs that most surgery patients need during and after their procedures,” a new survey by the American Society of Anesthesiologists shows. More than 98 percent of anesthesiologists “said they regularly experience shortages of these drugs,” and while drug makers have moved to close the supply gap, “have been hampered by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) efforts to reduce availability of prescription opioids by cutting back on the raw materials used for the painkillers,” the article says.

The border between the U.S. and Canada is one of the world's longest borders and is unarmed.

In 2011, Raul Castro authorized 201 licensed types of non-state employment, though most of those occupations—including bicycle taxi driver, book binder, and floor polisher—are low-skill or narrowly defined. To put this limited allowance in perspective, the North American Industry Classification System lists 1,170 different industries in the U.S. and the Bureau of Labor Statistics records at least 867 distinct occupations. Even then, there are many types of employment that do not fit these designations, including rodeo clowns, futurists, and life coaches. Classifications are constantly emerging and evolving. However, Cuba has not since updated their list of permitted non-state occupations. Instead, in 2017, the Cuban government suspended license issuing for restaurants and “casa particulares”—local bed and breakfasts—citing tax evasion schemes.

On March 16, 2008, when, by guaranteeing $30 billion of Bear Stearns’ assets, the Federal Reserve crossed a last-resort lending Rubicon, extending its safety net to an investment bank for the very first time. On September 15, 2008, the Fed reversed course by letting Lehman Brothers — a much larger investment bank — go under.

The Fed is no slave to tradition or consistency.

Who is...Jose Altuve?

In May 2017 Bret Weinstein, a professor at Evergreen State College in Washington, was surrounded by about 50 left-wing students, who screamed curses at him outside of his classroom for refusing to participate in an event during which white people were asked to leave the campus for a day.

On May 24, 2017, Weinstein tweeted: "the police told me I am not safe on campus. They can not protect me."
Within a few months, left-wing students and the left-wing Evergreen administration made life so miserable for the lifelong liberal professor he left the university.

Forgetive: an archaic word meaning inventive or creative.

At first glance forgetive looks like a derivative of forget, to be pronounced with a hard g, accented on the second syllable, and meaning something like “forgetful.” It is, however, a coinage by Shakespeare, and appears in Henry IV, Part 2 (1596-99). Forgetive, obscure in its etymology and meaning, is usually interpreted as a derivation of the verb forge “to beat into shape, form by hammering” and meaning “creative, inventive.”

Let's bring this word back.

As Hayek explained in The Road to Serfdom—in his famous chapter Why the worst get on top—centralized government power attracts aggressive, domineering personalities. They are the most likely to gain power. And the more power they have, naturally the less subject they are to restraint. The greater the likelihood such a country will pursue aggressive policies.

The Los Angeles Times (5/1, Kaplan) reports that according to research from the National Vital Statistics System published Tuesday in JAMA, “overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids like illicit fentanyl have surpassed deaths involving prescription opioids” since 2016. Study co-author Emily Einstein, a health science policy analyst at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said, “We have been very focused on the threat of prescription opioid overdose deaths, and this paper shows us that we need to remain vigilant about the ever shifting nature of the crisis.” Another author, NIDA deputy director Dr. Wilson Compton, warned, “We’re seeing fentanyl being included in cocaine, we’re seeing it included in methamphetamine, we’re seeing it included in many classes of drugs sold on the street” in fake pills and powders.

 “The current-account deficit is the gap between total investment and total savings. If a country saves less money than it puts toward things like factories and equipment, it has to finance the difference with foreign borrowing.” Jason Furman wrote this in the NYT. Yet when Sony opens a store in Dallas,  when BMW builds a factory in South Carolina, when Spaniards buy shares of Apple on the NYSE, when Canadians purchase real estate in Michigan,  they contribute to total investment in the U.S. exceeding Americans’ savings (that is, to larger U.S. current-account deficits). Yet none of these foreign investments involves American borrowing. None increases Americans’ indebtedness.

Those dollars are simply dollars that have electronically crossed the borders, as do Alaskan dollars. But because they have a foreign origin they are accounted for differently.


​This Facebook thing could become interesting now that it involves Trump. I doubt it will go far because so many politicians are involved, several already beatified.
In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends.

According to a July 2012 MIT Technology Review article, when you installed the app, "it said it would grab information about my friends: their birth dates, locations, and 'likes.' "

The campaign boasted that more than a million people downloaded the app, which, given an average friend-list size of 190, means that as many as 190 million had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign — without their knowledge or consent.
At the time, that was thought to be very avant-guard and forward thinking. Oh, well.

Our deficit this year will be around 2 trillion dollars. Where we going to sell $2 trillion worth of US Treasuries in 2018? And it’s not just the on-budget deficit; it’s the off-budget deficit and the money that the Federal Reserve seems to indicate it is going to sell into the market. The world is buying less of our debt now. So who's going to be the buyer?

Golden oldie:
 http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/05/cardiff-man.html

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A British woman fighting with a Kurdish armed unit has died in Syria, her father has said.

Anna Campbell, 26, from Lewes, East Sussex, died on March 15 in Afrin while with the Kurdish Women's Protection Units, the YPJ.

It is feared she was killed by Turkish airstrikes.

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Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, now in its 20th edition, is a must-read for medical students and young internists. It has been called “the most recognized book in all of medicine.” According to the study, authors for Harrison’s received more than $11 million between 2009 and 2013 from makers of drugs and medical devices — not a penny of which was disclosed to readers. One author, a physician, during that period received nearly $870,000 in funding, including for research, according to ProPublica’s Dollars For Docs database of payments to doctors from drug companies.

This could be a very nasty problem, but these apparent risk of conflict are present in many elements of medical care and are not necessarily indications of corruption. For example, these textbooks seek out recognized experts to write the chapters and sections of their textbooks and many of these experts are innovators, they hold patents for developments that have made them famous. So they are going to, by definition, going to have patent income. 




Jose Altuve signed a $163.5 million, seven-year contract with the Astros.




Retail sales totaled $268.8b in November and was $268.2 in February. Pretty flat.  Maybe consumers are saving the tax cuts and paying down the large credit binge they went on over the past 6 months? Maybe after seeing their savings rate fall to a 10 yr low they are deciding to replenish bank accounts? What does this mean? Or is it too short a period to mean anything?

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was detained for questioning as part of an investigation into alleged illegal financing by ex-Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi of his 2007 election campaign.

FBI Crime Statistics show that all rifles combined — “assault rifles,” hunting rifles, all rifles — account for 250 firearms homicides per year. That is fewer than 2% of all homicides each year. By comparison, handguns account for nine times as many murders as all other firearms combined.

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Iran operates a Shiite foreign legion that over the years has trained 200,000 fighters in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. And one part of that foreign legion is the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. The militias of the PMF all but control northern Iraq, which Iran has transformed into a land bridge to supply its other proxy groups in Syria and Lebanon.

According to a report by the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, an American think tank, there are 67 unique PMF militias, approximately 40 of which are pro-Iran in some form or another. Estimates of the total size of all PMF groups vary from 100,000 to 140,000 fighters. Most of these are Shiite fighters, but not all—approximately 25,000 to 30,000 are Sunnis. Minorities like Yazidis, Kurds, and Turkmen also fight in PMF militias.



In 1995, several packages of deadly sarin gas were set off in the Tokyo subway system killing twelve people and injuring over 5,000. Sarin gas was invented by the Nazis and is one of the most lethal nerve gases known to man. The gas attack was instituted by the Aum Shinrikyo (which means Supreme Truth) cult. The Supreme Truth had thousands of followers all over Japan who believed in their doomsday prophecies. Because it claimed the personal assets of new cult members, the Supreme Truth had well over a billion dollars stashed away.(!) Shoko Asahara, a forty-year-old blind man, was the leader of the cult. Japanese authorities raided the Supreme Truth compounds across the country. At one camp at the base of Mt. Fuji, police found tons of the chemicals used to produce sarin gas. They also found plans to buy nuclear weapons from the Russians.
The Russians would never sell nukes to crazies though, right?
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AAAAaaaannnnnnnddddddd.....a graph (with comments):
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Source: Forest for the Trees, LLC