this week i

published what we believe new dhs rules might change about the health system.

released the twenty-first annual survey.  cynthia allowed this one (lower left) above the fold.

clarified ancient greek for corrupting the youth.  socrates was executed by the athenian republic for questioning the existence of god.

cann0t, for the life of me, figure out who would be against the preservation of the earth in its current, healthy bio-form.  the world's rich elderly?  do they not have children?  there's no one alive right now that benefits from the status quo more than from a world where our species takes drastic action.  hey, ceo!  your life and the life of your family will be richer, safer, better if you help us out than if you profit and ignore the problem a bit longer.  you and i are living on a climactic precipice.  your wealth won't be legal tender in the governments surviving ecological collapse.

drove to annapolis.  david bought legs for a table, i from an octopus.  how much to glue the chrome jaguar onto the hood of a honda crv?

coaxed my father out of the house, fifty percent success rate.

may never join my generation.

held the most common male baby name in nevada for the entirety of the second and third bush terms.

read..

(1) genetics of genus

the contribution of european-american men to the genetic make-up of today's african american population is about four times that of european-american women

(2) keynes' whiggish liberalism

'economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task,' he said, 'if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.'  economics must address the storm as well as the calm: it must account for both full employment and for chronic and persistent unemployment, the norm and the exception

economics would have achieved its true calling, he joked, if it achieved the status of dentistry

(3) who is democracy

economist dambisa moyo recommends increased eligibility requirements for political candidates, including a mandatory period of non-political work experience; government-backed voter education as a means of nudging citizens towards the 'right long-term policy choices'; and weighted voting, with three tiers of voter, 'unqualified', 'standard qualified' and 'highly qualified', as a means of boosting 'the influence of the best-imformed segment of the electorate'.  runciman is unpersuaded: epistocracy risks the creation of an arrogant, group-thinking 'monster'.  there is, he writes, much to be said for an untutored populace that frequently changes its mind: 'ignorance and foolishness don't oppress in the same way that knowledge and wisdom do, precisely because they are incompetent.'

(4) no such thing as the murder of a vietnamese civilian

hersh's first dispatch on my lai focused on the army's charge that calley had killed 109 civilians.  life and look magazines turned the piece down; robert silvers of the new york review of books offered to publish it, but only if hersh added an explicit critique of the vietnam war.  hersh wanted the story to speak for itself.  he finally gave it to the independent journalist david obst's dispatch news service.  thirty-six newspapers picked up the story, but the new york times wasn't among them; time, newsweek and the television networks ignored it.  self-censorship was pervasive.  the washington post was an exception: the post's editors rewrote it, adding pentagon denials, and put it on the front page

who will rid me of this troublesome priest

(5) hallucinogenics

the variability of patients' responses made them, under the new definition, the very opposite of 'quality' drugs; and there were no biomarkers that could be used to measure their efficacy

the claim is that their effectiveness depends not on a lifetime of daily maintenance, but on a handful of doses over a short period or even a single session: a major selling-point for prospective patients like slater, though much less attractive to big pharma

9/26

this week i

knocked on rosemarie's door opposite the two small white dogs.  wifi password her phone number, they should all be.  chicken parmigiana in unchanged in decades decor between entenmann's outlet and aquarium store, then physics homework in her dining room.  take the s and the h out of school, that's me.  submitted at ten, drove past medford vape shops, sighted l hearts b signs by eleven.  not the mutter museum but still nice.  three cabin tour by the bride on her wedding's eve, i chose the one with the electrical outlet.  mentos, diet coke, bonfire.  everyone felt good, we are all alive at the same time.  some told jokes, told spooky stories, asked about suburban dakota, wore tattoos.  we walked to the local maximum of the moonlit lake bridge, never has three hours past midnight been brighter.  i declined the special something circling those still awake, listened to the exchange of contented humans when silence doesn't descend into awkwardness.  asleep a few hours in my formal-wear, then last night's coffee, this morning's coffee, a self-assembled bacon egg bagel, back to bed.  at four p.m. the revelers held parliament on riverside earthen rows to watch oaths be sworn and a drone set free.  we ate barbecue, homemade hotsauce, i confess i like white ales.  ben shook my hand, bride kong has done well.  like leadbelly's lover, i drove out of the pines by nine for the home with the fairmount for sale sign.  six a.m. sunday, bed slid down the stairs, out the door, on my back to dodge sidewalk feces, too big to taco into a honda crv.  i can sleep after four cups of coffee, maybe not after pushing a queen mattress up a flight of stairs solo.  west toward wawa pennsylvania for chadd's ford brandywine museum because n.c. wyeth knew how to paint a pirate.  i circumvented delaware, re-fueled at the rest stop with the cashier with the grey eyes, the men in line ahead, behind me told her she was beautiful.  i delivered a desk chair, the one big black dog gently bit my wrist asking if i'll come along.  may we all be together for oh about a century.

9/19

this week i

harvested the fruit of the suburban backyard.  on earth's surface, humanity shares three of the four dimensions with everything that's ever lived.

am not surprised by the content of american politics now, maybe the volume.  41% of west virginia democrats preferred a white jailed felon to a black incumbent president as their candidate during 2012 primary.  trump hasn't murdered iraqis yet, bush still worse.  too many have lost their way.

ate dinner with liz, gayle, robert, in my father's home, a while since any had been there.  a good evening.

ate macarons at the embassy, new ambassador looks like joseph stiglitz.  long live the dead.

returned the dog.  one milestone on the road to old age: lost ability to open clamshell packaging.  on milestones, hit 'em up style old enough to vote.

lived my whole life thinking klondike and polar were synonyms.

quickly fell for baroness von sketch show.  also, rembrandt: the first artist who painted people that look like people.  who knew?

have an idea for a scholarship media network:  a consortium of university research professors and other highly-trained subject-matter experts committed to publishing a reaction to an event in the following morning's edition.  the academics and experts participating in this endeavor would be committed to newspaper-speed publication so that each daily edition serves as a complete diet of major events worldwide.  however, unlike other outlets, the reporter writing the story has been peer-reviewed him or herself, and stands out as a respected member of the community of scholars.  a newspaper written by the experts only quoted in other newspapers

think biden 2020 nobody's second choice in the primaries.  trump was second-favorite of every 2016 republican challenger's voters -- as candidates dropped out, their voters went to trump.  as biden's challengers drop out, their voters might accumulate into biden's strongest challenger.

read pankaj mishra the central language of justice.

du bois and other civil rights leaders echoed the argument of many anti-colonial activists that legal and political rights were impossible to achieve without economic security, and that a mere ban on discrimination would not address centuries of devastation.  they ran into vigorous opposition not only from white supremacists among southern democrats and conservative republicans, but also from their supposed allies: the truman administration and eleanor roosevelt, for example, who told du bois that he was embarrassing the united states before the soviet union.  none of them wanted the un to have any influence in the domestic arrangements of the us.  eventually, the naacp caved in to the defenders of white supremacy, and sidelined du bois.  abandoning its own broad definition of human rights, the naacp settled for the narrow aim of legal equality.  not surprisingly, deep inequalities in education, healthcare and housing persist to this day: the logic of a human rights movement born and nurtured under the american imperium

the thatcherite assumption that there is no alternative is no longer tenable

9/12

this week i

updated our publication on labor force experience of the medicaid population.

moved matthew's luggage across state lines, steve buscemi narrated the penitentiary tour.  if your truck is clean, you don't need a truck.

imagine tobacco company advertisements would look exactly like this, if tobacco companies were allowed to advertise in 2020.

borrowed dog for a week.  we always wonder why they let their mouths hang open, bet they think the same of us.

wonder how would the modern world be different if h.w. had been eaten and w. never born?  speaking of feasts, new backyard bird buffet.

would love a population map of the north pacific as an animation over time, colored by ethnicity.  russians brought european diseases to the aleuts.

listened to episode 126. 

milky way is a partial english translation of the word galaxy.  the word galaxy passed from greek to latin to french to english.  the connection between milky way and galaxy is a lot more apparent when you realize that the "lax" part of galaxy comes from the same root as lactose.  when the greeks observed the night sky, they noticed a light band that stretched across the sky.  it was milky-white in appearance.  so the greeks called it galaxias kyklos, literally the milky circle.  latin speakers then borrowed the term, but they modified it from milky circle to milky way.  it was "via lactea" in latin.  and english speakers simply took that latin term "via lactea" and they did a direct translation into english as milky way.

mean this in the most profound sense: i speak fluently in what is my deep down in-built native tongue with only one old friend.

9/5