A new study in The Lancet by a team of Yale epidemiologists finds that Medicare for All would save more than 68,000 lives annually as well as $450 billion in cost from r/science

What is not mentioned in the headline is the cost of Medicare For All.

task list hoarding and invisible burdens

I keep carrying around more stuff than I need as I move between work and school. Every object is basically an item on a todo list, and like a task list I always overestimate what I am going to accomplish because admitting what I am actually going to get done makes me anxious and sad. It's like I'm task hoarding.

It's like living in a crappy Jane Austen novel

I'm not sure there was a time when marriages were not transactional. Unbridled patriarchy probably contributes more to this than a bad economy.

In 2017, just over half of women in their early 40s with a high-school degree or less education are married, compared to three-quarters of women with a bachelor’s degree; in the 1970s, there was barely a difference. The marriage gap for men has changed less over the years, but there the trend lines have flipped too: Twenty-five percent of men with high-school degrees or less education have never married, compared to 23 percent of men with bachelor’s degrees and 14 percent of those with advanced degrees. Meanwhile, divorce rates have continued to rise among the less educated, while staying more or less steady for college graduates in recent decades.

Let us not fetishize our writing workflow, as if writing everything down will somehow forestall the loss and death that awaits us.

Why Kill Soleimani Now? - The Atlantic

Why Kill Soleimani Now? - The Atlantic: Two administrations sidestepped this debate when it came to Soleimani, not as much for legal or moral reasons as for strategic ones. The two sides of this conflict have opted for other forms of confrontation, from proxy fights to sabotage to cyberattacks to sanctions, but they didn’t kill each other’s generals. Now that barrier has been shattered, leaving the world to await Iran’s next move in a game with suddenly higher stakes. From the Iranian perspective, it doesn’t much matter whether the U.S. administration considers Soleimani’s death an assassination or not. He’s still a dead general.



Like the prohibition against killing kings in medieval Britain.  The unwritten rules of warfare.

Julia Roberts is like barbecue sauce.

"Barbecue sauce is like a beautiful woman. If it’s too sweet, it’s bound to be hiding something." 

Lyle Lovett

 I'm wondering if this is a reference to Julia Roberts.

Keep skating!

The second most inspiring thing about this amazing race is seeing Apollo Ohno jump up immediately after falling and lunge for the finish line.    He's not going to throw away a silver medal because of a minor setback.

The overhead fan light in my office is flickering.  The movies have taught me that someone is exercising their telekinetic powers--probably a troubled adolescent mutant.  If it's my 15-year-old daughter we are all in big trouble.

I am consuming Altoids like they are candy.

This article by Chris Hedges scares the everything out of me, and does not seem like partisan fear mongering.  I wonder if the Afghanistan Papers were indirectly responsible for our recent drone strike.

A war with Iran would see it use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, mines and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20% of the world’s oil supply. Oil prices would double, perhaps triple, devastating the global economy. The retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, as well as on American military installations in Iraq, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead. The Shiites in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would turn in fury on us and our dwindling allies. There would be an increase in terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would renew attacks on northern Israel. War with Iran would trigger a long and widening regional conflict that, by the time it was done, would terminate the American Empire and leave in its wake mounds of corpses and smoldering ruins. Let us hope for a miracle to pull us back from this Dr. Strangelove self-immolation.

https://riseuptimes.org/2020/01/05/chris-hedges-war-with-iran/?fbclid=IwAR0bNemuNxka5-4Z4aKOW0OrxrVi8RG46Sdu5QTdIEsKRbB0iGY_2H8YyZw

Laugh while you can Monkey Boy

Welcome to the text bin.

I've been using Blogger to dump quotes and text fragments for literally decades, and then I never revisit any of it or do anything with it.  But I'd like to continue in that fine tradition with a brand new blog.  I'll keep doing this until I can't write any more and Google is purchased by Apple and this all gets erased.

Speaking of erasure, I get all tied up in knots because I can't find some pictures from Europe from five years ago, but then I don't even bother to keep a journal.

I've added a line to see if this will publish to Facebook.