What a Great Country America Is

[Rach3]

I'm rendered speechless.From The New Yorker today:

"Oh, the reality television we’ve seen! In the past couple of decades, we’ve had a show where complete strangers wed, in order to see whether they can grit their teeth and stay together (“Married at First Sight”); a show in which people try to survive in the wild without any possessions, including clothes (“Naked and Afraid”); a show where contestants agreed to eat live bugs, get buried alive, and chug donkey semen for a cash prize (“Fear Factor”); and even a show where, for a staggering fifteen seasons, aspiring businesspeople were pitted against each other by the future President of the United States, all for the dubious honor of working at his real-estate organization (“The Apprentice”). One would think that the American reality-TV audience, of which I count myself a hardened member, should by now be inured to the horrors presented onscreen.

And yet, sometimes life surprises you. “milf Manor,” a dating show whose first episode aired on TLC on Sunday, might be a new low for reality TV, perhaps even a rock bottom.

The premise of “milf Manor” follows that of other horned-up, vacation-resort-based dating series such as “Love Island” or “Bachelor in Paradise.” In the première, we are introduced to eight women, who are going to be sequestered for several weeks in a Mexican beachside villa. (The word “manor,” with its highborn European connotations, was clearly chosen for its alliterative qualities. Nobody does tequila shots in a “manor.”) Once on-site, the women are tasked with finding love, or the semblance of it (sex), with eight men to choose from. “milf Manor” ’s hook, or the thing that sets it apart from its dating-show predecessors, is evident in the show’s name. The women are not the usual crew of twentysomething bachelorettes but, instead, hot-to-trot peri- or post-menopausal foxes, who are looking for youngsters to canoodle with.

“I have an extremely high libido,” a fifty-nine-year-old woman named April says. Another woman, also named April, who is forty-three, wants to date a younger man because “a lot of guys that are older they are, like, in papa mode, and I want to get a chance to do me a little.” Kelle, who is fifty, has realized that she “can teach younger men a lot of things,” the specifics of which she might not be able to “say on TV.” (She also has an alter ego named “Disco Mommy” who “loves house music.”)

All of this is only slightly less outlandish than the spoof reality show “milf Island,” featured on NBC’s “30 Rock,” back in 2008. (The show’s tagline: “Twenty milfs, fifty eighth-grade boys, no rules.”) But, ten minutes into the first episode of “milf Manor,” an additional twist is revealed. When the women meet the men for the first time, they’re shocked to discover that these men are not just any old young bucks but actually their very own sons. It’s unclear to me why these mother-son pairs weren’t suspicious when they were asked to go, at the exact same time, on an all-expenses-paid vacation to Mexico, but never mind. More important is the fact that “milf Manor” is not just a May-December dating show but a May-December dating show haunted by the spectre of incest.

This is certainly a disturbing choice in and of itself, but even worse is how coyly the show plays with its own gross premise. All the contestants know that it’s creepy, but no one says it outright, and the low-simmering primal-scene taboo that the series relies on for its shock value is transmuted into tepid sex-comedy-style high jinks. The coupling-up rites of a dating show are given a cheap boost by the supposed hilarity of the sons’ embarrassment at their moms’ brazen sexuality, and the moms’ discomfort with their baby boys’ horniness. “Honestly, older women are very hot, and I know I’ve got the swag and the game for them,” Joey, a twenty-year-old, says, to which his mom, Kelle, replies, “This is, like, news to me!” They both laugh awkwardly. Meanwhile, Joey stops Kelle when she tries to seduce Ryan, the thirty-year-old son of another milf, Shannan, six hours into the retreat. “Mom! You’ve gotta be joking,” Joey sputters, as Kelle complains that he’s “rooster-blocking” her. Kelle, in fact, emerges as a she-devil whom the other women need to watch out for, both as a romantic rival and as a threat to mother-son closeness. She’s “definitely going for all of the attention,” a milf named Charlene complains. “She’s going to bring drama to . . . the relationship I have between Jose and myself,” Pola, another milf, fumes, when the buxom Kelle flirts with her twenty-eight-year-old boy. Sons and lovers!

This heady Freudian stew reaches peak distillation during a game in which the women compete for the privilege of sleeping in one of the suites that has a hot tub. As the guys stand in line, shirtless, each blindfolded mom approaches, teetering on stiletto heels, and paws at the men’s bare, muscled torsos to identify which belongs to her son. The intermingling of the erotic and the maternal in this scene, with its winking sanctioned trespass, seemed downright pornographic. And, though I watched until the bitter end, I could sympathize with a friend who told me, “I felt so ashamed I was watching that I turned it off after thirty minutes.”

Unfortunately, “milf Manor” is not the first dating show to flirt with incest. This past September, Netflix gave us “Dated and Related,” in which the contestants are pairs of siblings who go on dates side by side and even share a bed together at night. One might say that “Dated and Related” walked so that “milf Manor” could run. But, unlike that earlier show, which had scant pretensions to any kind of statement, “milf Manor” purports to have a political bent; there’s some high-minded talk in the first episode about the “double standard” that intergenerational relationships still suffer from, where older men who date younger women are looked upon more approvingly than older women who step out with younger men. At the villa, Jose reads from a message sent by the production, which explains that participants will take part in a “dating experiment that will level the playing field.” And yet the gendered stereotypes to which the show adheres, especially when it comes to what counts as an attractive older woman, are as constrictive as any corset. “I already feel like I’m the woman who is going to get the least attention,” Charlene, who is forty-six and seemingly the least tucked and aerobicized of all the ladies, says. “I’m, like, the biggest girl here.” Charlene must have been “very hot when she was younger, more in shape,” one fellow-milf opines, but now she “doesn’t know how to glam herself up.”

Sporting extremely worked-out bodies and apparent cosmetic interventions, the milfs fulfill the cultural edict that demands that women retain a skinny, high-femme youthfulness if it kills them. This is a standard that the women themselves are keenly aware of, and woe betide the milf who doesn’t fit the bill. Kelle “has invested a lot of time into her body and her sex appeal, and I know that young men want that,” Charlene says, her eyes wide. “What do I have to offer?” Being deemed unfuckable is, in the world of “milf Manor,” tantamount to death. ♦

[barney]

It sounds vile. But it's so hard to shock these days that it does take a bit of extra effort.

[Belle]

This is my point and has been exactly my point for ages; better democratic societies get better leaders. Right now the western world isn't all that flash; descending into decadence, victimhood and morbid entitlement, just for starters.

Infantilize the people and you get Jacinda Ardern and Covid hysteria; promote and fetishize violence and you get Donald Trump; advocate an anything-goes way of life and you get Boris Johnson....meanwhile, Israel has its own share of troubles with leadership now thanks to that nation's divided approach to Palestine and the willingness to accept corruption because that's the only hard-ball leader willing to take on its surrounding mortal enemies. Don't even start me on that ridiculous and shallow ski instructor who runs Canada.

Divide and conquer; the present hallmark of American life. When you want a puppet President there's nothing like an old man for the job.

Find yourself at war against a bitter enemy, and facing an existential threat? Winston Churchill.

When we lived out of Australia, over a decade ago, we were able to 'look' back home and see what was going on via the internet. From that distance we saw a second rate nation with an A Grade regard for itself. The best we could say was, "oh well, our family is there and it's probably worse elsewhere"!!

One of my late father's friends used to say "the world is getting fuller and fuller of people I like less and less" and I'm afraid spouse and myself share this pessimistic view.

[Rach3]

The US Senate spent a good part of its day worrying over Taylor Swift concerts tickets.

[Belle]

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” (Dr. Thomas Sowell)

[Rach3]

Why Seattle Schools are suing Google :

https://www.postalley.org/2023/02/09/wh ... ng-google/

[Rach3]

From Axios today on the debt ceiling clown show:


"No one — not even House speaker Kevin McCarthy — knows how the drama will end this time around. But the main off-ramps are clear:

The Republicans in Congress put forward a vote to raise the debt ceiling, which passes easily. They may or may not get something in return.

A handful of Republicans in Congress defy their leadership to vote to raise the debt ceiling, giving the Democrats a majority.

The debt ceiling law remains in place, and Treasury stops making some payments (think: Congressional salaries or Social Security checks) while simultaneously ensuring that Treasury bond principal and coupon payments continue to be paid in full out of tax revenues.

The debt ceiling law remains in place, but Treasury ultimately goes ahead and borrows more money anyway, arguing that failure to do so would be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.

The debt ceiling law remains in place, but Treasury mints a trillion-dollar platinum coin that is used to fund new spending, including debt service on the national debt.

The debt ceiling law remains in place, Treasury runs out of money, the government defaults on its debt, chaos reigns, and the economy falls into a lake that burns with fire and sulfur.

The bottom line: The worst-case scenario is possible. But it would represent a major failure of both leadership and imagination."

BUT:

"The way that debt-ceiling fights work is that politicians spend a lot of time saying why they don't want to raise the ceiling, and then are much quieter when they actually vote to raise it.

Why it matters: The result is that the public ends up convinced that the debt ceiling is a good thing, and that raising it is bad.

That public opinion then ends up hardening political stances, especially on the Republican side of the aisle, making it harder to raise the ceiling at all.

The bottom line: When only 38% of adult Americans think that Congress should raise the debt ceiling, it's not surprising that it's hard to make that happen.

Should raise : US adult citizens, 38 %, Dems 60%, Independents 32%, GOP 20%. Survey of 1500 US citizens,Jan.21-24,2023 by The Economist."

PT Barnum proven correct - again. Like hitting one's head against a wall because it feels so good when you stop.

[Rach3]

The Forces Tearing Us Apart Are Not Quite What They Seem
Thomas Edsall,NYT Feb.22,2023

https://tinyurl.com/2s3fbh4m (entire free article - excerpts here )

….A toxic combination of racial resentment and the sharp regional disparity in economic growth between urban and rural America is driving the class upheaval in American partisanship, with the Republican Party dominant in working-class House districts and the Democratic Party winning a decisive majority of upscale House seats.

Studies from across the left-right spectrum reveal these and other patterns: a nation politically divided by levels of diversity; the emergence of an ideologically consistent liberal Democratic Party matching the consistent conservatism of the Republican Party, for the first time in recent history; and a striking discrepancy in the median household income of white-majority House districts held by Democrats and Republicans.

In examining these trends, political analysts have cited a growing educational divide, with better-educated — and thus more affluent — white voters moving in a liberal Democratic direction while white voters without college have moved toward the right….

Podhorzer does not dispute the existence of this trend but argues strenuously that limiting the analysis to education levels masks the true driving force: racial tolerance and racial resentment. “This factor, racial resentment,” he writes in the education polarization essay, “does a much, much better job of explaining our current political divisions than education polarization.”

In support of his argument, Podhorzer provides data showing that from 2000 to 2020, the Democratic margin among white people with and without college degrees who score high on racial resentment scales has fallen from minus 26 percent to minus 62 percent for racially resentful non-college white people and from minus 14 percent to minus 53 percent among racially resentful college-educated white people.

In other words, in contradiction to the education divide thesis, non-college white people who are not racially resentful have become more Democratic, while college-educated white people who are racially resentful have become more Republican…..

Podhorzer makes the case that “the unequal distribution of recovery after the economy crashed in 2008 has been profoundly overlooked,” interacting with and compounding divisions based on racial attitudes:Educational attainment was among the important characteristics associated with those increasingly prosperous places. Add to that mix, first, the election of a Black president, which sparked a backlash movement of grievance in those places left behind in the recovery, and, second, the election of a racist president, Donald Trump — who stoked those grievances. We are suffering from a polarization which provides an even more comprehensive explanation than the urban-rural divide…..

The changing composition of both Democratic and Republican electorates and the demographics of the districts they represent is one of the reasons that governing has become so difficult. One result of the changing composition of the parties has been a shift in focus to social and cultural issues. These are issues that government is often not well equipped to address but that propel political competition and escalate partisan hostility…..

Perhaps most important, however, is that there now is no economic cohesion holding either party together. Instead, both have conflicting wings. For the Republicans, it’s a pro-business elite combined with a working-class, largely white, often racially resentful base; for the Democrats, it’s a party dependent on the support of disproportionately low-income minorities, combined with a largely white, college-educated elite.

One might question why all these cultural and social issues have come so much to the fore and what it might take for the dam to give.

(Rach3: Why ? The answer is in the article, the 2008 GOP reaction to Obama, "legitimized" by Trump in 2016.)

[maestrob]

I read Edsall's latest missive yesterday but didn't have time to post it. Thanks for doing so. He's a brilliant analyst, and one of the reasons why that chill in my spine is still residing there comfortably (without a single rent payment!) today.

[Rach3]

From "Men Yell At Me" today:


American children are not okay. Sexual violence against teen girls is on the rise, while their mental well-being has plunged. There are new reports of children being exploited for labor and dying while working factory jobs. Many children who went to school before the shutdown haven’t returned and remain unaccounted for.

Red states are taking up bills that would make it easier for children to get jobs. They are banning books from classrooms and making it harder for trans kids to receive gender-affirming care or to compete in sports that align with their gender identity. Groups like Moms for Liberty claim they are fighting to protect children but only succeed in banning books about Black and LGBTQ people and making it harder to be a queer kid in America. Reproductive rights are under attack and lawmakers say they are doing it to save the babies. But without access to safe, legal abortion, women who are victims of domestic violence or who are poor will be forced to have children they cannot protect. A similar burden is falling on teen girls.

Meanwhile, the childcare tax credit has ended and child hunger is on the rise. And an average of seven children die each day from gun violence.

Americans use our children to justify any political action while doing nothing to help them.

For decades, politicians and pundits have ginned up fears over children’s safety to wage war against the imagined threat of the moment: rock and roll, movies, video games, TikTok. Child safety was used to justify the Comstock laws; now it’s used as an excuse for book bans. Her sentencing of child sex offenders was used as a reason to cast doubt on Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown during her confirmation hearings. (All accusations were spurious, of course.) As historian Gillian Frank explained to me in an interview last year, “We saw this in the anti-busing movements and the anti-integration movements. We saw this in the anti-abortion movements of the past. We saw this in … the anti-pornography movements of the late ’50s, early ’60s [and] in Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center”

There has never been an easy time to be a child in America.

In Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, historian Steven Minsk observes, “There has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of American children were well cared for and their experiences idyllic. Nor has childhood ever been an age of innocence, at least not for most children. Childhood has never been insulated from the pressures and the demands of the surrounding society, and each generation of children has had to wrestle with the social, political, and economic restraints of its own historical period.”

Minsk details how our concept of childhood is a particularly modern one, invented during the Enlightenment, which brought new ideas about individuality and personhood. Those ideas changed perceptions of children. That, combined with advances in medical technology, meant that there were simply more children. Concurrently, industrialization brought families out of the farms and into the cities, where children’s labor meant long, brutal hours in factories. Some historians argue that children working on farms meant self-sufficiency and independence, while others assert that it was still dangerous and abusive and lonely. But the plight of children in factories, combined with the rise of the middle class — and with it, the bored housewife who needed a cause — meant that Britain and America began passing child labor laws.

It’s interesting to read about protests against those laws. No child should be forced to crawl through tunnels in a coal mine. But hungry families often had little choice. Laws protecting kids as separate beings from their parents were seen as an attack on those families.

Separating the child from the parent has always been a fraught enterprise. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Guardian about children who died at the hands of abusive parents who’d used lax homeschooling laws to hide them from mandatory reporters. The stories pitted concerned teachers and social workers against parents’-rights groups who believe they should be able to do whatever they want with their children. Bad actors are seen as an individual problem.

Americans use our children to justify any political action while doing nothing to help them.

We want to believe that most parents are good. Most parents want the best for their children. But at least 1 in 7 children is a victim of abuse, and most of that violence happens in the home. When my kids were in preschool they learned about “stranger danger,” but never how to protect themselves from the people most likely to hurt them — a friend, a relative, a pastor.

The biggest lie parents tell themselves is that the danger is on the outside. The truth is that most danger comes from inside the home.

Skinamarink, an independent horror film that came out in 2022, depicts the fear and danger of a home where children are in peril. Doors and windows disappear. The children cannot escape. The house, it seems, is devouring the children. I had to turn it off. It’s an abuse story — children unable to leave the very place people assume they should be safest.

History isn’t linear. The modern struggles of parents like Moms for Liberty to raise ideologically pure children is reminiscent of the Puritans’ strict religious and moral education. An ideology is the most brutal on its deathbed. And conservative groups understand that in order to survive they have to control the future.

But trying to protect children from the evils of the world does not work. All those children raised in the religious right of the 1980s and ‘90s are less religious than almost any generation in American history.

Minsk points out that, very often, Puritan children kidnapped by Native American tribes would refuse to return. He wonders whether the comparative freedom and the lack of punitive religious education were a motivator. He quotes a captive who noted that while Native American children had chores and tasks, there was very little corporal punishment and children were allowed to play and do their jobs in a leisurely manner. Meanwhile, Native children taken by settlers seemed always to want to return home.

Whenever the image of the child is invoked in political conversations, it’s important to pay attention to which child is the one allegedly at risk. It’s so rarely the trans kid denied the chance to play sports or the gender-affirming care that reduces the risk of depression and self-harm. It’s so rarely the Black boy perceived and shot by the police who is allowed the assumption of youthful innocence. It’s not the migrant child cleaning the floor of the slaughterhouse who is the focus of moral panic and outrage.

The pandemic has been brutal on our children. Brutal in ways we have yet to discover. And I know of no other way of getting through this than making room, giving all children a soft place to rest.

(Men Yell at Me is an independent newsletter written by Lyz Lenz, an author and journalist living in Iowa. And is edited by Serena Golden. Subscribe for weekly essays, opinions, and original journalism. Paid subscriptions support this newsletter and allow it to continue.)

[Rach3]

Let them eat cake:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/business ... index.html

[maestrob]

Let them eat cake:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/business ... index.html

Hmmm...

It's an eggsistential crisis maybe?

[barney]

Brian! Groan!

I can safely say my cost of eggs has not risen. My backyard chooks provide me the two eggs a day upon which I breakfast, and I am very grateful. We just lost two, for unidentified reasons, but the three left are all laying most days.

[Rach3]

Brian! Groan!

I can safely say my cost of eggs has not risen. My backyard chooks provide me the two eggs a day upon which I breakfast, and I am very grateful. We just lost two, for unidentified reasons, but the three left are all laying most days.

Sorry to hear of your dead chooks , but glad you don't lay any eggs on CMG.

[Rach3]

Deja vu all over again, with help from the Trump GOP.Where are your accounts tonight ?


"(Bloomberg) March 11 -- On Monday, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. warned a gathering of bankers in Washington about a $620 billion risk lurking in the US financial system.


By Friday, two banks had succumbed to it.

Whether US regulators saw the dangers brewing early enough and took enough action before this week’s collapse of Silvergate Capital Corp. and much larger SVB Financial Group is now teed up for a national debate.

SVB’s abrupt demise — the biggest in more than a decade — has left legions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the lurch and livid. In Washington, politicians are drawing up sides, with Biden administration officials expressing “full confidence” in regulators, even as some watchdogs race to review blueprints for handling past crises.

To his credit, FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg’s speech this week wasn’t the first time he expressed concern that banks’ balance sheets were freighted with low-interest bonds that had lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value amid the Federal Reserve’s rapid rate hikes. That heightens the risk a bank might fail if withdrawals force it to sell those assets and realize losses.

But despite his concern, the toppling of two California lenders in the midst of a single workweek marked a stark contrast with the years after the 2008 financial crisis, when regulators including the FDIC tidily seized hundreds of failing banks, typically rolling up to their headquarters just after US trading closed on Fridays.

Even in the darkest moments of that era, authorities managed to intervene at Bear Stearns Cos and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. while markets were shut for the weekend.

‘Blind Spot’

In this case, watchdogs let cryptocurrency-friendly Silvergate limp into another workweek after it warned March 1 that mounting losses may undermine its viability. The bank ultimately said Wednesday it would shut down.

That same day, SVB signaled it needed to shore up its balance sheet, throwing fuel onto fears of a broader crisis. A deposit run and the bank’s seizure followed. The KBW Bank Index of 24 big lenders suffered its worst week in three years, tumbling 16%.

“With Silvergate there was a little bit of a regulatory blind spot,” said Keith Noreika, who served as acting comptroller of the currency in 2017. “Because they wound it down mid-week, everyone got a little spooked, thinking this is going to happen to others with similar funding mismatches.”

Representatives for the FDIC and Fed declined to comment.

The drama is already spurring arguments in Washington over the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul enacted after the 2008 crisis — as well as its partial rollback under President Donald Trump.Trump eased oversight of small and regional lenders when he signed a far-reaching measure designed to lower their costs of complying with regulations. A measure in May 2018 lifted the threshold for being considered systemically important — a label imposing requirements including annual stress testing — to $250 billion in assets, up from $50 billion.SVB had just crested $50 billion at the time. By early 2022, it swelled to $220 billion, ultimately ranking as the 16th-largest US bank.

Fast Growth

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, where SVB had branches, said the easier rules played a role in SVB’s downfall. “President Trump and congressional Republicans’ decision to roll back Dodd-Frank’s ‘too big to fail’ rules for banks like SVB — reducing both oversight and capital requirements — contributed to a costly collapse,” she said in a statement.

The lender achieved much of its meteoric growth by mopping up deposits from red-hot tech startups during the pandemic and plowing the money into debt securities in what turned out to be final stretch of rock-bottom rates.

As those ventures later burned through funding and drained their accounts, SVB racked up a $1.8 billion after-tax loss for the first quarter, setting off panic.

‘Real Stress Test’

“This is a real stress test for Dodd-Frank,” said Betsy Duke, a former Fed governor who later chaired Wells Fargo & Co.’s board. “How will the FDIC resolve the bank under Dodd-Frank requirements? Investors and depositors will be watching everything they do carefully and assessing their own risk of losing access to their funds.”

One thing that might help: SVB was required to have a “living will,” offering regulators a map for winding down operations.

“The confidential resolution plan is going to describe the potential buyers for the bank, the franchise components, the parts of the bank that are important to continue,” said Alexandra Barrage, a former senior FDIC official now at law firm Davis Wright Tremaine. “Hopefully that resolution plan will aid the FDIC.”

The issues that upended both Silvergate and SVB, including their unusual concentration of deposits from certain types of clients, were “a perfect storm,” she said. That may limit how many other firms face trouble.

One complication is that the Fed has less room to help banks with liquidity, because it’s in the midst of trying to suck cash out of the financial system to fight inflation.

Another is that a generation of bankers and regulators at the helm weren’t in charge during the last period of steep interest-rate increases, raising the prospect they won’t anticipate developments as easily as their predecessors.

Indeed, even bank failures have been rare for a time. SVB’s was the first since 2020.

“We’re seeing the effects of decades of cheap money. Now we have rapidly rising rates,” said Noreika. “Banks haven’t had to worry about that in a long time.”

[Rach3]

I did a lot of stupid things when I was in college ( and before, and since), but nothing close to what these 2 entitled a--h---s did , encouraged I suspect by the " anti-woke" movement:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/double-amput ... 55740.html

[barney]

Oh but that's ok Steve, because they were wealthy, not black, not sponging off the state - only their parents. People like that are entitled to a little innocent fun.(sarcasm alert, btw)

[maestrob]

I did a lot of stupid things when I was in college ( and before, and since), but nothing close to what these 2 entitled a--h---s did , encouraged I suspect by the " anti-woke" movement:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/double-amput ... 55740.html

Oh, but Daddy apologized for him. The idiot couldn't even issue his own statement of contrition!

[barney]

An a**h*le now, and one for life, no doubt.

[Belle]

Another take on the failure of SVB which I'm more inclined to believe than that already posted:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/1 ... ur-elites/

[jserraglio]

Sorry to disappoint some here, but the cause of these bank runs ain’t got much to do with wokery. Banks are paying in the neighborhood of 1%, whereas low risk treasuries yield around 4%. In the current inflationary environment, you’d be foolish to keep most of your money there, or so money managers tell us. More and more, folks realize this and have begun to resist lending banks their money effectively interest free.

[Rach3]

Sorry to disappoint some here, but the cause of these bank runs ain’t got much to do with wokery. Banks are paying in the neighborhood of 1%, whereas low risk treasuries yield around 4%. In the current inflationary environment, you’d be foolish to keep most of your money there, or so money managers tell us. More and more, folks realize this and have begun to resist lending banks their money effectively interest free.

Correct. Along with incompetent management , incompetent regulators , me-first depositor withdrawal greed ( many being GOP donors ), lack of confidence in the Fed and Congress,and financial press hype.Also the fact the banking system is not designed to act as the freely-transferrable,daily money market funds of low-overhead brokerage houses , but as a longer term source of funds and more operational infrastructure for longer term loans the economy needs which requires banks to invest in longer term securities and thus cant respond as quickly to rate hikes such as the recent unexpectedly rapid actions of the Fed. " Wokery" is a ridiculous explanation ; maybe ivermectin would stop depositor bank "runs" ?

[jserraglio]

" Wokery" is a ridiculous explanation ; maybe ivermectin would stop depositor bank "runs" ?

Well, as a matter of fact, our resident R.W.C. stalker (Ron’s Woke Craze) did tout ivermectin during the last pandemic.

[Rach3]

Americans should also keep in mind that while banks may have been stingy on rates they pay, most money market funds don’t make loans and “banks” operated by Wall Street and similar make loans only to corporate America , if at all ( Schwab says its bank assets are just Government securities not loans) , and that it is the regional banks and small community banks that originate most of the car loans, home mortgage loans, student loans,small business loans and need people and facilities to provide that service.

[maestrob]

My prediction is that the Fed will eventually have to go on a buying spree (again!) and promise to purchase old low-interest government securities at par value.

At least those held by banks as collateral, but not for the likes of you & me.

[Rach3]

WSJ today:

It’s safe to say many people eat Oreos the same way. They twist them apart, then consume the cookie as two separate creme-covered wafers.Yet more than a century after the Oreo’s inception, many connoisseurs haven’t solved a frustrating problem: how to twist it so both wafers end up with filling on them.

Michelle Deignan, vice president of Oreo in the U.S., said there’s no secret method. That, it seems, made it a worthy challenge for some scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I’ve always been annoyed that I have to twist them apart and then push creme from one side onto the other,” said Crystal Owens, a Ph.D. candidate in MIT’s mechanical engineering department.She led a group of researchers on a quest to figure out if there was a trick to getting the creme to glom onto both halves.


Usually, Ms. Owens studies materials that could be used as ink for 3-D printing, squishing them between two counter-rotating metal plates in a device known as a rheometer to study how the fluids deform and respond to torsion, or twisting forces.

One day during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2021, she said, “we just kind of realized that this is a perfect analogy for what happens when you try to twist open an Oreo.”

So she and her colleagues set out to discover if there was a solution to the cookie conundrum.

In a recent study, they glued Oreos of various flavors to the rheometer, then twisted them at different speeds. Materials with similar mechanical properties to Oreo creme—toothpaste, yogurt, ice cream—split down the middle when subjected to enough torsion, Ms. Owens said.

After putting more than 1,000 Oreos to the test, the researchers discovered that the fickle filling stuck to just one wafer about 80% of the time.


Crystal Owens in an MIT lab with a 3D-printed Oreo and equipment for her team’s experiments.
And the speed of the twisting didn’t matter. Even at the rheometer’s slowest twisting speed, which took about five minutes to separate the halves, the creme stayed on one side. At the maximum speed—about 100 times faster than a person can twist—the creme flew off both halves, Ms. Owens said.

“We also tested the cookies by hand—twisting, peeling, pressing, sliding and doing other basic motions to get an Oreo apart,” she said. “There was no combination of anything that we could do by hand or in the rheometer that changed anything in our results.”

That suggests the creme is stronger than it is sticky, so is more likely to stay together than adhere to the wafer.

She and her colleagues published their findings last April in the peer-reviewed journal Physics of Fluids. In their paper, they shared suggestions on how Oreo, which is owned by one of the world’s largest snacks companies, Mondelēz International, could tweak production to address the issue.

One idea was to flip the wafers so that the more textured outside surface, which contains the word Oreo, would face inward, said Max Fan, an undergraduate in MIT’s department of mechanical engineering and co-author of the study.

Another was to attach both wafers simultaneously to a blob of creme. Ms. Owens and her colleagues think that the wafer to which the filling is applied first has a tighter bond to the creme.

The company declined to share specifics on the Oreo manufacturing process, but Ms. Deignan said that Oreo “loved this data-informed creativity.”


Thomas Schlathölter, a physicist at the Netherland’s University of Groningen who wasn’t involved in the study, had his university students try to replicate the MIT team’s results with Dutch Oreos. They twisted by hand, which may have affected the outcome, he said.

“To my surprise, many students observed a pretty even splitting of the filling,” Dr. Schlathölter said. “European Oreos seem to be different.” He thinks the difference is in the creme formula.

MIT’s Ms. Owens said she suspects the manufacturing process is different in Europe, not the recipe. Oreo’s Ms. Deignan had no explanation for the differing results.



Oreos are sold in more than 100 countries, and social media is filled with opinions about how best to eat them. One YouTube video with more than 13 million views, called “you’re eating Oreos WRONG”, shows a woman skewering the creme with a fork and drowning it in milk. Others involve using straws as pipettes to get the creme soggy.

Ms. Owens said she is looking to apply the same study concept to other snack foods, such as macarons, ice cream sandwiches and Nutter Butter cookies.

The Oreo research, she said, was a fun, easy way to make her regular physics and engineering work more accessible to the general public. She and Mr. Fan developed a simpler rheometer to test the cookies, which they dubbed an “Oreometer,” that people can 3D-print at home. It uses rubber bands and pennies to twist apart the cookie.

“For me this all started as a personal question,” Ms. Owens said. “But I guess everyone else was also thinking like, ‘Oh, let’s understand my Oreos better.’ ”

[Rach3]

“ But, I guess everyone else was also thinking….”

Well, no actually.

[maestrob]

In Memphis, Car Seizures Are a Lucrative and Punishing Police Tactic

Vehicle seizures have been used to combat street racing and other crimes, but critics say that even people not convicted of a crime have been left for months without their cars.

By Jessica Jaglois and Mike Baker
March 23, 2023

MEMPHIS — As he drove to work on a summer afternoon in Memphis last year, Ralph Jones saw a woman on the sidewalk flagging him down. Thinking she was in distress or needed a ride, Mr. Jones said, he pulled over.

After a brief conversation in which she tried to lure him to a nearby motel, Mr. Jones said, he drove away but was soon stopped by the police and yanked from his truck. The 70-year-old welder said that with just 86 cents in his pocket, he had neither the intent nor the money to solicit a prostitute, as the officers were claiming.

His protests were to no avail. Mr. Jones was cited, and his truck, along with the expensive tools inside, was seized. The charges were eventually dropped, but the truck and his work equipment remained corralled in a city impound lot for six weeks, when prosecutors finally agreed to return it in exchange for a $750 payment.

“It’s nothing but a racket,” Mr. Jones said.

Police departments around the country have long used asset forfeiture laws to seize property believed to be associated with criminal activity, a tactic intended to deprive lawbreakers of ill-gotten gains, deter future crimes and, along the way, provide a lucrative revenue source for police departments.

But it became a favored law-enforcement tactic in Memphis, where the elite street crime unit involved in the death of Tyre Nichols on Jan. 7, known as the Scorpion unit, was among several law enforcement teams in the city making widespread use of vehicle seizures.


When Ralph Jones, 70, was cited in Memphis last year, his truck, along with the welding tools inside, was seized.Credit...Brandon Dill for The New York Times

Like Mr. Jones, some of the people affected by the seizures had not been convicted of any crime, and defense lawyers said they disproportionately affected low-income residents, and people of color.

Over the past decade, civil rights advocates in several states have successfully pushed to make it harder for the police to seize property, but Tennessee continues to have some of the most aggressive seizure laws in the country.

While some states now require a criminal conviction before forfeiting property, Tennessee’s process can be much looser, requiring only that the government show, in a civil process, that the property was more likely than not to have been connected to certain types of criminal activity — a less rigorous burden of proof. Tennessee allows local law enforcement agencies to keep the bulk of the proceeds of the assets they seize.

And the process for getting property back in the state can be prohibitive for those who have little money or the ability to hire a lawyer: Those who fail to file a claim and post a $350 bond within 30 days automatically forfeit their property.


“Tennessee’s forfeiture laws are among the nation’s worst,” said Lisa Knepper, a senior director of strategic research at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that has called for changes in state and federal forfeiture laws.

In Memphis, some of the more than 700 vehicles seized last year were taken from people who were ultimately found guilty of serious criminal charges. But other residents reported in interviews that they were compelled to pay large fees to recover their vehicles even when they had not been convicted of any crime.

In 2021, Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis came forward with the city’s plan to combat growing incidents of reckless driving and drag racing with vehicle seizures,. This happened at around the same time that the city was launching the Scorpion unit — an acronym for the department’s Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.

No longer would police officers be merely issuing citations to reckless drivers who endangered others, she said, seeming to acknowledge that such seizures might not ultimately stand up in court.

“When we identify individuals that are reckless driving to a point where they put other lives in danger, we want to take your car, too,” she said. “Take the car. Even if the case gets dropped in court. We witnessed it. You did it. You might be inconvenienced for three days without your car. That’s enough.”

Mayor Jim Strickland was also a strong supporter of the seizure policy and even proposed destroying cars used by drag racers and other reckless drivers. “I don’t care if they serve a day in jail,” he said last year. “Let me get their cars, and then once a month we’ll line them all up, maybe at the old fairgrounds, Liberty Park, and just smash them.”

Police officers said it was on suspicion of reckless driving that they first pulled over Mr. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died after a long and brutal beating by Scorpion officers. Five officers have been charged with murder in the case. Chief Davis subsequently said that she had seen nothing to support the reckless driving allegation. Nichols’s car was taken to the city’s impound lot.

The Scorpion unit was touted for its record of seizing drugs, cash and cars. In just the first few months of its operations, the city reported that the elite unit had seized some 270 vehicles.

Many of the vehicle seizures have revolved around drugs. In those instances, according to several defense lawyers, the agency often seized a vehicle based on a claim that it was being used in a drug-dealing operation — a common basis for such seizures in many cities, intended to deprive drug dealers of their profits and the ability to continue their work.

But even some of those not convicted of a crime said they spent weeks without a car while trying to navigate a complicated court process.

Filing a claim in court requires posting a $350 bond. Sometimes, defense lawyers said, the authorities managing the case may offer to release the car without requiring a court hearing if a person pays a fee that can amount to thousands of dollars.

Shawn Douglas Jr. lost his car in the fall after being stopped at a Memphis gas station by officers who reported finding two clear baggies containing marijuana inside a backpack.

Mr. Douglas was soon in handcuffs, arrested on suspicion of a felony drug infraction, an allegation he denied. His car was sent to impound.

In an interview, Mr. Douglas said one of the arresting officers commented to him about his 2015 Dodge Charger: “He said, ‘That would be a great police vehicle. When we take those vehicles we hope people don’t come get them back so we can do drug busts out of them.’”

Months later, Mr. Douglas’s criminal charges had been dropped, but his car was still in police custody. He was only able to recover it after paying $925, records show; crews towed it out to a dusty lot and handed it over to him, its battery dead. Mr. Douglas had to struggle with battery cables to get it started.

“It cost a lot of money,” Mr. Douglas said. “It puts you back on everything and creates more stress. When you can’t pay bills, you can’t do anything.”

Neither the police department nor the district attorney’s office responded to questions about the forfeiture cases of Mr. Douglas and others interviewed for this article, and the police chief only briefly addressed the city’s forfeiture policy.

In Memphis, as in many cities, revenues from such impound and forfeiture fees are returned to support policing activities, becoming a regular source of revenue.

Memphis has not disclosed how much money it generated for the hundreds of vehicles that were forfeited. The city did report seizing some $1.7 million in cash last year, winning forfeiture of nearly $1.3 million.

This income is most often being generated from the city’s poorest residents, defense lawyers said.

“It’s unfair to a lot of the poorer citizens in Memphis,” said Arthur Horne, who has represented such clients. “It’s a huge tax.”

Vehicle seizures have never been a priority in the city’s overall crime-fighting strategy, Chief Davis said in a brief interview, adding that any money gained from forfeitures was not essential to police operations.

“We haven’t put a high level of priority on asset forfeiture here in Memphis,” she said. “We put more of a priority on violent crime, reducing violent crime.”

“It’s not like we’re out trying seize vehicles. We have a budget to support the police department.”

Seven states do not give forfeiture revenues to law enforcement. A few states, such as New Mexico, Maine and North Carolina, do not permit civil proceedings and allow forfeiture only after criminal convictions.

A bill pending in Congress proposes a series of new rules that would raise the standards for the government to win forfeiture, give access to lawyers for people trying to recover their property and end profit incentives by sending revenues to the Treasury Department’s general fund.

John Flynn, the president of the National District Attorneys Association, said efforts seeking to limit forfeitures have at times brought together lawmakers on the left and the libertarian right. But he said such efforts could go too far, undermining a law-enforcement tool that he said provides a deterrent to wrongdoers and turns over illegal criminal profits to those trying to fight crime.

“From a prosecutor’s standpoint, any money or vehicles or property gained through illegal conduct should be forfeited,” Mr. Flynn said.

He said safeguards allowed people to present evidence that their property was not acquired through illegal means.

In Memphis, at the city’s crowded impound lot north of town, cars towed in from around the city for various reasons mix with recovered stolen vehicles and cars seized by the police. Tow trucks buzz in regularly, and a fine coat of dust from a nearby limestone supply company settles over everything.

A dozen shoppers were on hand one recent morning looking at a GMC Denali that was up for auction. It looked to be in mint condition on the passenger side, but 20 or so bullet holes dotted the driver’s side door.

Further down the lot, Kyle Lyons was standing next to a pile of belongings that he had retrieved from his 2010 BMW, which had been seized in July by police officers who said they had found heroin in the vehicle. Mr. Lyons, who said he had struggled with addiction, was hoping to get back thousands of dollars worth of Craftsman tools that had been taken along with the car — equipment he needed to work.

Once his car was gone, he said, he had lost nearly everything else.

“Everything I use to make money with was gone,” Mr. Lyons said. “I couldn’t work, couldn’t go out and buy no more. I was homeless for four months.”

He has left Memphis and moved home to Kentucky. His car is still impounded.

Mike Baker is the Seattle bureau chief, reporting primarily from the Northwest and Alaska.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/23/us/m ... iture.html

[maestrob]

A Water System So Broken That One Pipe Leaks 5 Million Gallons a Day

As a water shortage ballooned into a crisis in Jackson, Miss., the leak grew bigger and bigger, gouging out a swimming pool-size crater in the earth.

By Sarah Fowler
Sarah Fowler is reporting on the water crisis in Jackson, Miss., in the state where she was born and raised, as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

March 22, 2023

On an abandoned golf course, overgrown with shrubs and saw grass, you can hear the rushing water from 100 yards away.

Near Hole 4, past the little bridge and crumbling cart paths, what looks to be a waterfall comes into view, pouring down through the brush and into the creek below. Except the torrent of water gushing up through the mud isn’t from a spring-fed stream or a bubbling brook.

It is spewing from a broken city water line.

As residents had to boil their tap water and businesses closed because their faucets were dry, the break at the old Colonial Country Club squandered an estimated five million gallons of drinking water a day in a city that had none to spare.

It is enough water to serve the daily needs of 50,000 people, or a third of the city residents who rely on the beleaguered water utility.

No one knows for sure when the leak reached its current size. But newly appointed water officials say the city discovered the broken mainline pipe in 2016 and left it to gush, even as the water gouged out a swimming pool-size crater in the earth and city residents were forced to endure one drinking water crisis after another.

Jackson’s water system has been flirting with collapse for decades thanks to a combination of mismanagement, crumbling infrastructure and a series of ill-fated decisions that cost the utility money that it did not have. In 2022, the Justice Department reached an agreement with the city requiring it to bring in an outside manager to run the water department.

Residents of the city have been forced to endure chronic boil water notices that traverse the city like rolling blackouts. Many have learned to hoard bottled water against the next round of boil notices. Intermittent bouts of low water pressure can make faucets unusable for thousands of people at a time.

“The size of the leak is probably not uncommon,” said Jordan Hillman, chief operating officer of JXN Water, the management company formed last year to lead Jackson’s effort to stabilize its water service. “The time it took to respond to it is very uncommon. Most places would see this as an immediate threat because that’s a ticking time bomb. As it eats the ground out away from it, you’re eventually going to have a catastrophic failure.”

It is unclear why the city and water department did not repair the leak sooner. Melissa Faith Payne, a city spokesperson, did not immediately respond to questions on Wednesday regarding the broken line. Tony Yarber, the former mayor of Jackson, and Kishia Powell, the former public works director — both in leadership positions in 2016 — could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.


The size of the Colonial Country Club leak and the fact that it went unaddressed for so long hints at the monumental task that city and state leaders face as they work to find a lasting solution. Under the direction of a newly appointed water czar, Ted Henifin, a two-person team has scoured the city searching for leaks or closed water valves, which also can affect water pressure. Often, they have turned the valves back on themselves. Leaks generally require more time and resources to address. One of the leaks is spewing water 30 feet in the air like a geyser and losing the city as much as one million gallons a day, Ms. Hillman said.

The broken pipe under the golf course is one of two main lines that move water from the OB Curtis Water Plant to smaller transmission lines that eventually connect to thousands of customers across the city. The 48-inch pipe is critical to south Jackson, a part of the city that has suffered the most from outages and boil water notices.

Luke Guarisco, who owns the land where the golf course once operated, said he reported the leak several years ago when he noticed a broken pipe pushing water into the creek along the back of his property line. Guarisco said he lived out of state and wasn’t aware of the giant hole that has since been created by the leak.

Leaks are common in water systems. However, in Jackson, the city’s problems with leaks are so extensive, its systems so antiquated, its chronic staffing problems so overwhelming, that many leaks, seemingly of any size, have gone undetected or unaddressed.

One of the water plants that serves Jackson was built in 1914, the other in the late 1980s. Water lines under the city can be more than 100 years old, and no one knows when or where a piece of pipe or equipment will fail. A combination of Jackson’s aging infrastructure and recent freezes may have exacerbated the current leaks.

The system faced near-total shutdown in March 2021 when residents went weeks without water. In August 2022, another crisis unfolded at OB Curtis, and Mississippi declared a state of emergency for the capital city as water was, once again, deemed unsafe to drink.

Mr. Henifin, a retired manager for a wastewater company out of Virginia that serves 1.8 million people, who has spent 40 years in public service, was working with a national nonprofit on a “small, part-time basis” to address water equity in Jackson. In July, he was working from home in Virginia, one day a week. By November, he was living part time in Mississippi, appointed by the Justice Department to manage the federal takeover of the water system. He officially moved to the state in January.

In the months since, he has talked with state and local leaders about how to create a sustainable water system. But he is seeking solutions in a state where Black city leaders and white state leaders often spar over what is and is not in the best interest of Jackson.

Outside the country club on Tuesday afternoon, construction crews were preparing to begin repairs, which are expected to take a couple of weeks. Residents should see reduced water pressure for only a few hours and water should remain safe to drink, Ms. Hillman said.

Curious neighbors could see stacks of new pipe and hear the sound of trees being cut.

Oscar Mckenzie saw crews working on the leak and assumed they were there to fix another water issue. A water main broke several years ago, he said, and flooded the streets.

Like so many Jackson residents, Mr. Mckenzie doesn’t drink the water that comes out of the tap. He worries what it might do to his four children. When they shower, the water makes their backs itch, he said.

Several houses down, Emmetta Jones passes by the new barricades on her regular walk escorting her son to his school bus stop. Her water pressure is steady, she said, but brown water occasionally comes out of her tap.

Like her neighbor, she doesn’t drink the water. She hasn’t in years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/us/j ... risis.html

[Rach3]

I'm sure the Bezoses,Musks, Gateses,Zuckerbergs .et. al. of the World would just say " Suck it up ",and " Without our genius and hard work, you'd have no job at all" , but I had to empathize a bit with this view from "Men Yell At Me":

"The bosses are mad right now. Very mad. You see, something changed during 2020. With the looming threat of disease, forced into our homes to pet our dogs and face down our own mortality, Americans decided that maybe dying for work wasn’t what we wanted to do.

Given a small glimpse at work and life balance, workers have been demanding to be able to keep working from home, better wages, and boundaries on their work time. In sum, a lot of people have decided they don’t want to die at their desks and that maybe there are more important things in life than being a manager. And that maybe we can just have happy lives walking our dogs, finger painting with our kids, and seeing friends, and if that means we don’t earn six figures that’s okay because we could die at any moment. And our workplaces will actually hasten that death.

This is what is making the bosses so angry. Because no one wants to work anymore.

One boss was so mad he put it in the paper of record that he was mad. Steven Rattner, the CEO of Willett Advisors, wrote in the New York Times:

The question lurking in the minds of many with whom I’ve spoken (as well as my own): Has America gone soft?

A recent Wall Street Journal report noted that in a Qualtrics survey of more than 3,000 workers and managers, 38 percent said the importance of work to them had diminished during Covid and 25 percent said it had increased. (The rest said that it had not changed.)

That’s right, Steven. Perhaps we don’t want to absolutely kill ourselves for companies who will fire our asses at the slightest inconvenience. In 2020, I was working two jobs for my company (without additional compensation), I was working 10-12 hour days, while parenting two children as a single mother, launching a book, and then navigating repairs after a natural disaster. That summer, I lost a significant about of weight due to stress and developed chronic back pain that I am still dealing with. All to be fired at the end of the year.

I have a very good friend who has a very important job, so I won’t out her here. But she’s spent the past three years working 2.5 jobs for her large employer at the executive level without much extra compensation. It’s hurt her health, her personal life, and her mental well-being, and it’s basically brought her to the point of a near breakdown before they finally gave her the promotion they’d been dangling in front of her for 18 months.

I have heard this story from so many friends at so many levels of the capitalist system. Maybe we just want to work, get some healthcare, and be happy.

So, you bet your shiny heinie no one wants to work anymore, Steven.

Steven goes on to yearn for a simpler time when people would wake up, go to the office, come home, go to bed. Day in and day out.

This is also a way of him revealing that he clearly didn’t have to deal with childcare for his four children. Steven, tell me you aren’t the primary caretaker without telling me you are the primary caretaker.

He then goes on to cast skepticism over the notion of a shorter work week. Saying that less input equals less output. I don’t think he’s right. Study after study has proven that shorter work weeks are better for workers and more productive. However, I don’t care if he’s right or wrong. Why should people care?

If 2020 taught us anything it’s that companies will murder people to justify making a chicken nugget. And I am not very shocked that the net effect of this realization would be people saying, “You know what, I don’t want to spend my one wild and precious life whiling away in the cubicle mines.”

[barney]

It's a pretty confrontational way of putting it, Steve, but she's absolutely right. And it's certainly worse in the US where the minimum wage is $7 an hour ($21 in Australia), many workers get only a week's holiday a year (minimum 4 weeks a year in Oz plus the 10 days of public holidays) and there is (as I understand it) no Australian-style Fair Work Commission to keep an eye on unscrupulous employers and employees. But Australian workers do the same amount of unpaid overtime and face the same pressures.

[maestrob]

It's a pretty confrontational way of putting it, Steve, but she's absolutely right. And it's certainly worse in the US where the minimum wage is $7 an hour ($21 in Australia), many workers get only a week's holiday a year (minimum 4 weeks a year in Oz plus the 10 days of public holidays) and there is (as I understand it) no Australian-style Fair Work Commission to keep an eye on unscrupulous employers and employees. But Australian workers do the same amount of unpaid overtime and face the same pressures.

There is something deeply wrong with most corporate structures. American workers are constantly being brutalized and their very survival threatened by lower mid-level managers, leading to negative health outcomes and even deaths on the job. It all comes from the very top, which manifests a mad workaholic culture.

This is capitalism at its worst.

Do see my post about doctors, many of whom are now forced to work for large corporations because it is no longer economically possible to open an independent practice in many areas.

And the Right is talking about RAISING the retirement age? Many people are so burned out by age 62 that they cannot work full-time and must collect disability payments to survive. No wonder Social Security is paying out more than it's taking in!

[barney]

Can you give me a link to the doctors post Brian? Was it recent? I must have missed it - I do bypass many threads for time reasons.

[maestrob]

Can you give me a link to the doctors post Brian? Was it recent? I must have missed it - I do bypass many threads for time reasons.

Funny, I can't find it now. Sorry. The post is an article on how doctors in America are now mostly working for corporations, rather than in private practice. This subjects them to enormous amounts of time-consuming paperwork and management duties that they were not trained for in medical school (no creative writing classes!), resulting in early burnout no matter how dedicated they are.

[maestrob]

Can you give me a link to the doctors post Brian? Was it recent? I must have missed it - I do bypass many threads for time reasons.

OK, found it!

https://www.classicalmusicguide.com/vie ... rs#p533233

[barney]

Thnks Brian. Now you repost it, I realise I did read it at the time, but will look again. It did sound a bit familiar.

[Rach3]

From AxiosAm today:

"Rarely does one poll stare so deeply into the soul of a nation and tell its story.

But a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll exposes generational and political divides that echo loudly and transformatively across our culture, politics and governance.

Why it matters: Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, the pollster on earlier editions of this survey, told The Journal that the combined toll of political division, COVID and the lowest economic confidence in decades appear to be having "a startling effect on our core values."

"Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans," The Wall Street Journal's Aaron Zitner writes (subscription).

"Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58%."

The findings: NORC at the University of Chicago polled 1,019 adults this month by web and phone (margin of error: ±4%).

Asked to describe the state of the nation's economy, 1% (not a typo) chose "excellent."

56% said a four-year college degree is "not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt."

33% said they have very little or no confidence in public schools.

Look at the tectonic shifts from a Journal/NBC poll 25 years ago, in 1998:

Patriotism is very important: Dropped from 70% to 38%.
Religion is very important: Dropped from 62% to 39%.
Having children is very important: Dropped from 59% to 30%.
Community involvement is very important: Dropped from 47% to 27%.
Money is very important: Rose from 31% to 43%.

The bottom line: The poll quantifies a generational and political divide that shows a rot at the very soul of our nation.

Full WSJ Poll ( no paywall ):

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/docu ... stream=top

[maestrob]

Yes, I saw that in the WSJ yesterday. Thanks for posting.

The chill in my spine has grown even longer roots. Still no rent checks.

[maestrob]

Police Relied on Hidden Technology and Put the Wrong Person in Jail

Randal Reid spent nearly a week in confinement, falsely accused of stealing purses in a state he said he had never even visited.

Free article with photos at the link below:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/tech ... =url-share

[Belle]

Spectacular own goal from the Democrats and the increasingly decadent American Left. It's worth noting that history records one of the fatal characteristics of declining democratic civilizations is a descent into decadence!!

Don't stop your enemies when they're making a mistake!! And this is meant to be a Democracy. Trump is foolish, probably corrupt and certainly infantile - not really any different from the corrupt legacy media!!

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/3 ... ald-trump/

[Belle]

I didn't write this; I 'borrowed' it from somebody else and it's hard to disagree with. What truly horrible people the hard Left have become (in the USA and elsewhere) and we can only feel empathy for the genuine, conservative working classes who've been ignored - even abused - over and over, in favour of the self-appointed elites and their smug, ideological obsessions and accompanying trinkets. I once had a high regard for the USA but that has been completely lost in the last 15 years.

The USA reached banana republic territory some time leading up to November 3, 2020. Indeed we may trace it back to November 4, 2008, when Obama was elected. Coming from Chicago, a city where the politics of Sudan, Nicaragua or South Africa would go unnoticed, Obama was noted for his shakedown activity (apparently his preferred method of fund raising was telling Korean corner shop owners that he’d put out word that they were anti-black if they didn’t cough up), and the entire city administration was paid for by graft and corruption from top to bottom. Nothing improved when he got into power.

The best hope for the USA would be for a Trump-DeSantis ticket to win. Trump proved himself unable to sort out “the Deep State”, though he managed to do great things with regard to China, North Korea, Russia and Germany, and even mirabile dictu the Middle East, the Abraham Accords being worthy of the recall and re-awarding of every Nobel Peace prize in history.Trump’s ability to deal with gangsters on the world stage would be a great thing, while DeSantis could take on the FBI, DoJ, Pentagon, and facilitate the passing of laws against trans activism, BLM, child mutilation, and ensuring parental control over education at school board and city level, and perhaps even a great Augean Stables investigation of congress with Pelosi (and many, many others) being prosecuted for insider trading, corruption and subverting the constitution (First, Sixth, Fourteenth Amendments for starters).

[diegobueno]

Belle, is this supposed to be a joke? None of it is even close to being true.

[Belle]

Belle, is this supposed to be a joke? None of it is even close to being true.

OK, to be honest I don't know about the Obama thing with shop-owners but the rest of it is truth. You know, you like you have YOUR TRUTH and that THE truth is no longer an absolute.

You see sir, anybody can play word games with the truth since you opened that Pandora's Box. And I see those comments as 'THE truth". It all rings TRUE to me and is certainly my perception of the last 15 years in the USA. Shocking indictment or not. The hard Left has played free and vicious not only with THE truth but with its opponents, so that today it's prepared to prosecute Trump. In reality, it will all play into the hands of the GOP and the millions who voted for him last time. Or for those who prefer DeSantis it gets the Trump issue out of the way. Either way, it's an own goal.

The Left just isn't very bright. Who knew??!!

[diegobueno]

The reason there are two truths these days is because your dear Rupert Murdoch created his own media outlets to spread “alternate facts”, and people like you lap it up. Doesn’t make it true. It just makes you duped.

[Belle]

The reason there are two truths these days is because your dear Rupert Murdoch created his own media outlets to spread “alternate facts”, and people like you lap it up. Doesn’t make it true. It just makes you duped.

Not only hypocritical but absolutely priceless!!

Time will tell which of us has been really 'duped'; you through your corrupt legacy media or me through my observation and reading of the facts on the ground. Since everything the Left does is transmitted through a loud hailer it's hard to disguise the full extent of their perfidy.

It's pointless discussing this with you because you're so ideologically captured and filled with resentment. Sad as that all is.

[jserraglio]

Rupert Murdoch had to admit under oath in a recent court deposition in the civil suit Dominion brought against Fox News that the hosts at Fox News, namely Hannity, Pirro, Dobbs, Bartiromo, et al, knowingly endorsed (his word, not mine) the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them but didn’t, court documents released on Monday showed.

“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”

Corrupt + legacy + media. Murdoch’s Fox is only one of those three things. Corrupt.

[Belle]

Nurse!! He's out of bed again!!!!

[jserraglio]

Nurse!! He's out of bed again!!!!

Mistress, not to embarrass you in public, but isn't that your Ad Homs showing?

[Rach3]

A view from an American living in Italy:

https://www.postalley.org/2023/04/12/vi ... f-america/

[maestrob]

A view from an American living in Italy:

https://www.postalley.org/2023/04/12/vi ... f-america/

Fascinating speculation. Thanks.

I still can't imagine red states giving up all the benefits that we in blue states finance: food stamps, social security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc. They've dug themselves into a hole with $7.25 minimum wage. How would people live without our tax dollars?