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The big lie about immigration, promoted by the GOP and its right-wing propaganda outlets, is that under Biden the US has had “open borders.” LOL! Nowhere close. And the US hasn’t had open borders at least since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. The law remained in force until the passage of the Magnuson Act in 1943 So is immigration good or bad for America? In his new book, “The truth about immigration: Why successful societies welcome newcomers,” Zeke Hernandez argues that immigrants bring huge investment: “They are either magnets of investment from their home country or because immigrants disproportionately start businesses in the US. J. Daniel Kim, assistant professor of management at the Wharton School found that immigrants are 80% more likely to start firms than native-born individuals. This pattern does not affect the size of the business. Also, firms founded by immigrants create jobs at a higher rate than ones fo...

The Governor of Utah apologized for his participation in the illegal use of a Trump photo-op at a grave site Arlington National Cemetery for campaign purposes. Trump? Not so much. "Trump claimed that he didn’t know “anything about” the use of the images on his campaign social media. “We have a lot of people, we have TikTok people,” he said. “You know, we’re leading the internet.” "Pressed on it again, Trump suggested the parents of the deceased service members he had accompanied may have been responsible for distributing the videos and photos. “I don’t know what the rules and regulations are. I don’t know who did it,” Trump said. “It could have been them — it could have been the parents.” "This is not true. Informed his campaign published videos from the visit on TikTok, he said, “I really don’t know anything about it.”" Weird. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-arlington-cemetery-blame-gold-star-families-1235092314/

Wood is a form of natural carbon sequestration. Yesterday, I posted about how wood is making a comeback as a building material. I’ve since found this article announcing that the world’s largest building built (partly) of wood has been greenlit.   “Western Australia is set to become home to the world’s tallest timber building, a “revolutionary” 50-storey hybrid design reaching a height of 191.2 metres. Timber will make up 42% of South Perth’s C6 building, including the tower’s beams, floor panels, studs, joinery and linings.” How green is it? “The building’s developers claim that the 7,400 cubic metres of timber consumed by C6 could be regrown in just 59 minutes from one sustainably farmed forestry region.” To which my brother, a retired mechanical engineer replied: “ Why restrict the comparison to one unnamed region...compare it to the global forests...get it down to seconds?”  When I was in Boy Scouts, we used to build multi-story structures from wooden logs and rope. Wood is...

Don't take my word for it. Here's Josh Marshall over at TPM: "Officials purporting to defend their person on the ground by offering some “push back” on the Trump campaign attack, but doing so anonymously while trying to keep it from “escalating.” Escalating into what? You’ve already been run over, so that leaves the only obvious conclusion: The Army itself is trying to avoid being the target of MAGA attacks. This is untenable acquiescence to bullying. "Is that really going to be the end of the story? No consequences, no new measures to enjoin Trump from doing the same thing again at Arlington or another military cemetery, no price to pay for his thuggery. It’s a familiar pattern. "The erosion of any kind of strong, unified, national, countervailing force to Trump’s public bullying and nastiness only enables and emboldens the thuggery that is central to his appeal and that he has already notoriously used on Jan. 6 to try to retain power." Shame.   https://tal...

I attended 7 th  grade in a building that was built of brick and wood. In 8 th  grade, I was moved to the new junior high, a formed concrete building in the modern fortress architecture style. Now, it seems, what was old is new again. Wood is making a comeback, with a focus on a green building strategy called “embodied” carbon reduction. The goal is to lower the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the construction processes.   “Buildings account for more than one-third of the world’s carbon emissions each year. This year, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center held its first statewide embodied carbon reduction challenge, awarding Payette a grand prize in June for its design of the UMass research building. The competition spotlighted a variety of renovation and construction projects — from office space to conference centers to affordable housing — that aim to lower building emissions long before the last thermostat is installed and the lights first switch on.   ...

  JD Vance says teachers who do not have biological children “disorient and really disturb” him. Vance is a Roman Catholic. I wonder if he realizes that nuns, who do not have biological children, teach in parochial schools. He's disoriented and really disturbed, but I don't think that's the reason. He's just weird. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=597wsN4gV2Q

Here’s the Penn Wharton Budget Model breakdown for how much each candidate's economic proposals will affect the national debt: “We estimate that the Trump Campaign tax and spending proposals would increase primary deficits by $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years on a conventional basis and by $4.1 trillion on a dynamic basis that includes economic feedback effects. Households across all income groups benefit on a conventional basis.” “We estimate that the Harris Campaign tax and spending proposals would increase primary deficits by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years on a conventional basis and by $2.0 trillion on a dynamic basis that includes a reduction in economic activity. Lower and middle-income households generally benefit from increased transfers and credits on a conventional basis, while higher-income households are worse off.” So if you think the national debt matters, it will grow faster under the Trump plan. If you think federal taxes should be progressive, the Harris p...

The justification I’ve read for retaining the EC system is that it helps less populous states compete with more populous states. WTF?   I support a system of one person-one vote. I don’t support a system of one acre-one vote. The EC system means a vote in, say, Wyoming, counts more than a vote in California. How is that fair or even logical? Citizens vote, not real estate. “Dumping the Electoral College would have a variety of consequences, but it would immediately remove opportunities for disrupting elections via battleground states. A close election in Arizona or Pennsylvania would no longer provide leverage for upending the national result. “Any election system that does not rely on states as the puzzle pieces for deciding elections would remove opportunities like these. It could also seriously reduce disputes over recounts and suspicion about late-night ballot counts, long lines and malfunctioning voting machines because those local concerns would be swamped by the national vot...

The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic effect on the US economy that was mitigated by the rapid development and deployment of COVID vaccines. I was a subject in the Moderna Phase III clinical trial of their RNA vaccine, and eventually have had six injections.   The well-established benefit of COVID vaccination is that it will keep you out of the ED and the morgue. But what about “long COVID,” the post-acute sequelae of COVID infection that can last for weeks, months or years? Well, my wife (also vaccinated) and I did contract COVID in November 2023, but aside from mild symptoms, we had no long-term consequences. But we’re anecdotes, not data. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine brings the data:   “In a decomposition analysis, Al-Aly* and colleagues found that about 72% (95% CI 69.50-74.43) of the decrease in the cumulative risk of long COVID between the Omicron era and earlier eras could be attributed to vaccines and about 28% (95% CI 25.57-30.50) cou...

Timothy Snyder is a Yale historian who has written several histories of Ukraine and Eastern Europe, including "Bloodlands" and "Black Earth," both of which I've read. He is fluent in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and German. He has a substack blog, to which I subscribe. Here's an interesting post debunking the "history" invoked by Putin to justify the current Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine. https://snyder.substack.com/p/putins-legend

If the world is to decarbonize energy without a major economic collapse, nuclear power must be part of the picture. Solar and wind energy generation are growing world-wide, but both will always have to deal with the intermittency problem. Batteries and hydroelectric storage can address some of this, but alternative energy sources must be available for back-up on cloudy days and during still air. The only realistic alternative is nuclear. Despite the storied failures of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, light water reactors have had a remarkable history of safe operation. What about other forms of nuclear power generation? I mentioned molten salt reactors (MSRs) in a previous post. Their virtues include more efficient use of fissile materials, use of thorium, which is more abundant in the earth’s crust, and fuels that are difficult or impossible to weaponize. Considerable research into MSR technology took place in the ‘50s and ‘60s, nearly all of it in my hometown of Oak Ridge...

Years ago, I had a Facebook friend from my hometown who was a big enthusiast of molten salt nuclear reactor technology. He wasn’t a scientist or engineer, but his dad had worked on MSRs in the ‘60s, and he fetishized his dad’s memory. As some point, I mentioned that we had installed rooftop solar on our house, and he began attacking me. Rather than see MSRs and solar as two parallel paths towards decarbonization, he was convinced that solar was the enemy of MSR technology. Needless to say, his personal attacks ended our friendship. Nowadays, it looks like carbon capture/geoengineering is being vilified as the enemy of conservation/renewable energy on the path to reducing atmospheric CO2. This is both absurd and dangerous. Look, the world is in no danger of ending its addiction to fossil fuels any time soon. To do so would mean (1) the loss of wealth in industrialized economies and (2) that industrialized national economies would have to commit to long-term second-class status.  “. ...

We arrived at our house in Rumford two years ago today. The last couple of days in St. Louis we spent in a hotel, while the movers loaded the truck. We collected all the birds into two cages that fit into our cars and made a three-day drive from St. Louis to Rumford.  It was an depressing arrival. There had been torrential rain, and the street leading up to the house was flooded in about six inches of water. We hugged each other with relief when we got out of the car. We were told there would be a lock box on the door with the house keys, but that was missing. While we waited for the keys to be delivered, Linda realized she’d left her purse—with her credit cards, driver’s license, insurance cards and passport—at a rest stop at the west end of the Mass Turnpike. Through good fortune, we were able to find the kind soul who rescued Linda’s purse and drove back the next day to get it. During the four-day wait for the truck to arrive with the rest of our worldly belongings, we slept on ...

  Believe it or not, there are still some folks who think climate change is a hoax. How many are financially invested in that belief, I don’t know. I do know that folks who are currently in the business of making money in the insurance industry *do* believe that climate change is real. They’re no longer willing to insure residential and commercial buildings in risky areas. This threatens to trigger an insurance crisis with major economic consequences in the next 15 years: “In the U.S., the most likely major economic disruption from climate change over the next few years might well be a collapse of the housing market in flood-prone and wildfire-prone states. Billion-dollar weather disasters — which cause about 76% of all weather-related damages — have steadily increased in number and expense in recent years and would be even worse were it not for improved weather forecasts and better building codes. The recent increase in weather-disaster losses has brought on an insurance...

The existential crisis of our time is global warming. The planet is already in deep trouble, with polar ice melting, permafrost thawing, sea level rising, increased desertification and more violent storms. The hour is late. “ The quest for net zero needs to be fought on many fronts. You have your vanguard offense: simply reducing the carbon footprint of the things we already do. Then there’s the field medics: tactics like planting more trees and restoring peatlands – not to mention just protecting the ones we already have. But what if we could add another line of attack?” Deep Sky, a Canadian atmospheric carbon removal company, is building the world’s first plant to develop and apply commercialized carbon capture. The projected capacity is modest, ca. 3,000 tons of CO2/yr, enough to offset the carbon footprint of only 218 Americans. But it is hopeful beginning under bleak circumstances.  How will success be measured. Deep Sky promises complete transparency: “Carbon removal credits ...

I haven’t been 64 for years, but the Beatles song still resonates. I was 64 when I started on phased retirement.   According to a Nature Aging article*, we don’t age uniformly over time, but experience saltatory changes in our mid-40s and early 60s. I didn’t read the article. I have no reason to doubt the conclusions, other than it was based on only 108 volunteers (how representative of their age demographic—sex, race, etc—were they?).  There are plenty of age-related changes that deserve our attention: age-dependent sarcopenia, age-related increase in blood pressure. Age is a risk factor for cancer. Increased inflammation is so well associated with aging that it’s spawned the term “inflammaging.” Obviously, aging increases the probability of death. That’s nether surprising nor interesting. But what we geriatrics should care about is not lifespan but healthspan. How to stay as healthy, ambulatory, independent for as long as possible. *the senior author, Mike Snyder, was a post...

Back when we were grad students at UNC-Chapel Hill from 1977-82, my wife and I made several trips to the Outer Banks. One reason was her uncle and his family, who lived in Buxton, just north of Hatteras lighthouse. What struck me then was how many people lived in homes on the coast in spite of the flooding risk. Not only the storm surge from the Atlantic that washed over the barrier islands from the east, but after the storm passed, the water that collected in Pamlico Sound on the west washed back over the islands from the other side. Buxton was in a wide part of the Outer banks, but if you bought a house on the narrow bits, you were, well, deeply foolish. You didn’t have to be a PhD student to see that. And here we are, 45 years later: “ In North Carolina, climate change has caused the sea level to rise by about half a foot since 2000, and the level could rise by about another foot by 2050, said William Sweet, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ...

From TPM: “Trump just announced a “crime and safety” rally   for next Tuesday in Howell, Michigan, a town that has been heavily associated with the KKK   for decades. Indeed, just late last month White Supremacists marched in the town chanting “We Love Hitler. We love Trump.”   Some but not all of the reputation comes from the fact that a long time Grand Dragon of the Michigan Klan lived there and his farm was a sort of home base for the Klan.”   This is certainly intentional. This is the GOP candidate for President of the United States. Shame. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/you-should-know

Today is the 55th anniversary of the last day of the Woodstock festival (a Fibonacci anniversary). I was 14 at the time and living in East Tennessee, so needless to say, I wasn't there. Neither, it turns out, was Joni Mitchell, so we have that in common. I love this song. I just do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rsM6hAP1R8

  “Running the traps” is an old expression from the 1800s when hunters and fishermen would set traps for what they wanted to catch. For most of my faculty career, running the traps meant my daily survey of the published literature in my field. When I started as an assistant professor in 1987, there was no internet. Every afternoon around 3 PM, the journals that had been received that day would be laid out on a table in a special room in the Health Sciences Center library. Since the library was only in the next building, I’d walk over and leaf through the current issues of whatever journals were relevant. And for the first 20 years, my department had a small library of journals that was directly across the hall from my office.  Eventually, all the journals I was interested in went online and for most, I could sign up for notification when a new issue appears. Then, journals started posting manuscripts as soon as they were accepted.  Staying current with the literature is a...

Normally, a sentence that begins “Donald Trump says . . . “ is not worth finishing, and that's how a recent blog post over at jabberwocking.com begins. But finish it I did, and it turns out that DJT says he wants to eliminate all federal income taxes on Social Security. Currently, if SS is your only income, there are no federal taxes on it. If you make additional income above your SS distributions, you can be taxed at normal federal rates on up to 85% of your SS check. So why would Trump support this? Because (a) it’s a tax cut for the wealthy and (b) it depletes the SS and Medicare trust funds sooner, creating problems for non-wealthy retirees who depend on these programs. For the American right, that’s a feature, not a bug. https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-how-social-security-finances-are-affected-by-ending-the-tax-on-benefits/

  I like Bernie Sanders for many reasons, but this isn't one of them: "As a result of those challenges, Sanders wants to see more Democrats vocally get behind measures like . . . removing the cap on Social Security taxation so the wealthy pay a full share of their income into the program." This is a mistake. SS benefits are capped like taxes, so if you lift the cap on taxes and don't lift the cap on benefits, SS becomes welfare instead of insurance Look, SS is and has always been retirement insurance, not an investment. The wealthy don't need SS, so it makes sense to cap benefits. Indeed, up to 85% of SS benefits are subject to income tax if you make enough income beyond SS. If you don't cap taxes, SS ceases to be insurance and becomes welfare paid for by the wealthy. When that happens, it becomes--like welfare--a political football. FDR had it right. SS is paid for by the workers for the workers. It is funded separately from the general fund. Let's keep i...

Apparently, JD Vance thinks so.* Not to go all anecdotal here, but in 1981, I bought my first car, a brand-new Mazda GLC hatchback, for $5770. In 2024 dollars, that’s $20,000. It had no radio, no air conditioning and no passenger-side sun visor.  My most recent car purchase was a 2013 Honda Fit four-door, which I bought for $15,000. It has a radio and CD player, cruise control, air conditioning, front and side-door air bags and both driver- and passenger-side sun visors. So way more car for less money (real dollars).  Kevin Drum has a post with actual, you know, data. He plots the average cost of a new car as a percent of average household income and shows that the trendline has been flat for over 30 years.  JD Vance isn’t just weird, he’s unmoored from reality. While that makes him a good fit for the Trump ticket, he’s not the sort of Vice President America needs. *What Vance actually said was  "Thanks to Kamala Harris's spending policies, the average new car costs ...

About ten years ago, we had 22 solar panels installed on the roof of our St. Louis house. Half the cost was paid by Ameren, the electric utility, and we got a 30% tax rebate on the balance. But even with reversible metering, we hadn’t made back our cost when we sold the house two years ago. At that time, ours was among only about a half-dozen homes in our neighborhood with rooftop solar. Here in Rumford RI, there are at least twice as many. California seems like a state ideally situated to exploit rooftop solar, but the Democratic governor of CA is fighting on the side of utilities to curb distributed power generation in the state, which the utilities claim is eating into their profits. Of course, they don’t admit that. “ Consider California’s residential solar program (its “net-metering”), which the governor has all but dismantled. Believe it or not, in December 2022, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 5-0   to slash incentives for residents to place more sola...

So the latest from Trump and his spokestoads is that those pix and videos of huge Harris/Walz rallies are really just AI. And yet, poll after poll is showing Trump falling behind, both nationally and in swing states. Meanwhile, his meme stock Truth Social is still losing money bigly and the stock price is down over 50% in the past three months and falling. Guess that's AI, too. And since Cybertrucks are piling up on the lot, Elon had to resort to a grumpy old man interview on X. Sad.

It is a common trope that university faculty don’t understand or live in “the real world.” This always tickled me. The unemployment rate for college grads has always been lower than for those without a degree, I guess university faculty do know a thing or two about the real world, since they can train students who are prepared for it. Yes, I know about Bill Gates, but you have to get into Harvard before you can drop out from it.   Yesterday, I wrote about the imperative for colleges to evolve. One evolutionary success story is Northeastern University, in Boston. Once a commuter school that admitted most applicants, it eventually found itself losing market share. But then:   “In the space of one generation, Northeastern University has undergone a complete metamorphosis. The former commuter school that used to admit nearly everyone — 88 percent of applicants in 1990 — is now as hard to get into as Amherst or Bowdoin College. Demographic declines in college-age students and crush...

In my lifetime, I’ve seen plenty of changes. The business model for recorded music (LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, streaming), the business model for movies (theaters, Blockbuster, online), the business model for cameras (film SLRs, digital SLRs, mirrorless), the model for lecture presentations (live with chalkboard, live with overhead projector, live with Powerpoint, online recorded) all come to mind. It should hardly be surprising that the business model for higher ed is changing. The single biggest cost in higher ed has been salaries—faculty salaries, support staff, administration—and no amount of technology has yet compensated for that. Meanwhile, peak high school attendance is projected to be in 2025 and fewer high school grads are going directly to college. Tuition-dependent colleges and universities are struggling to stay in business, and one response is to cut the number of majors offered. From the Boston Globe link: “Many colleges like St. Cloud State already had started plowi...

I grew up in East Tennessee in the 1960s. Fish was something that came in breaded rectangles out of the freezer. Growing up Roman Catholic, it’s what was for dinner on Friday. I never cared for fish back then. We honeymooned in Charleston SC (“where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet to form the Atlantic Ocean”) and that’s when I first had shark. While we were in grad school in North Carolina, we occasionally enjoyed crab and rock shrimp. There was good seafood in St. Louis, but fresh fish meant trout and catfish. When we moved to New England, I was looking forward to more, and more varied, seafood in my diet. Soon after we moved, though, I was warned about mercury in seafood, so don’t eat it every day.  Now, I’ve learned via articles in The New Yorker and the Boston Globe how much of New England fish is sourced from Chinese fishing boats that (a) are overfishing and risking fisheries collapse in some parts of the world and (b) abuse the fishermen who are held in near-slavery condit...

My paternal grandparents immigrated from Ukraine. My maternal grandparents immigrated from what was then Austro-Hungary. I am who I am because of immigration. I trained seven PhD students during my career. Here are their ethnicities: #1: American #2: Mainland China #3: Spanish #4: Mainland China #5: Chinese (Taiwan) #6: Mainland China #7: Bosnian America is a magnet for talent around the world. My career benefitted from that. We are stronger because of immigration.

American colleges and universities are the envy of the world. There are those who sneer at the educated. They only expose their insecurity.  In JD Vance, Donald Trump has chosen a running mate who sees colleges and universities as “the enemy.” Ironic, because Vance is both a college grad and a graduate of the elite Yale law school. Your doctor? S/he is a college graduate. The bridge you drive over was designed by a college grad. The buildings you work in, the cars you drive, the planes you fly in? All designed by college grads.  You know what the Bolsheviks did? They attacked and killed the intelligencia. Those bodies in the Katyn forest massacre? The Polish intelligencia. Who did Mao sic the masses on during the Cultural Revolution? The intelligencia. This is how you know the despots. They destroy the educated in order to enslave the masses.   https://www.vondriskalab.org/blog/when-universities-are-the-enemy

  As I've commented previously, the word "liberal" has evolved into an epithet used by the GOP and their water-carriers in the right-wing press to denote anything they disagree with. It is often used interchangeably with "Marxist," "socialist" and "communist." Why do they do this? I believe it's because actual, you know, right-wing policies are unpopular in America, so they have to smear policies that are popular with liberals *and* conservatives to distract and divide voters. Here's the nut graf from a paywalled Boston Globe article quoting the right-wing New York Times about Tim Walz: "As The New York Times reported, he has “worked with his state’s Democratic-controlled Legislature to enact an ambitious agenda of liberal policies.” That includes free college tuition for low-income students, free meals for schoolchildren, legal recreational marijuana, and protections for transgender people. He is also considered a leader when it...

The US economy appears to be emerging from the recent recession (pace the Fed interest rate decisions). There’s a general consensus that that recession was largely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and consequent supply chain disruptions. What lessons might be learned on how to maximally blunt the impact of future pandemics while minimizing negative economic consequences? Here’s a  cross-sectional analysis including all 50 US states plus the District of Columbia to evaluate the impact of various interventions on excess COVID-19 deaths over a 2-year analysis period. “ Mask requirements and vaccine mandates were negatively associated with excess deaths, prohibitions on vaccine or mask mandates were positively associated with death rates, and activity limitations were mostly not associated with death rates. If all states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10% to 21% lower than the 1.18 million that...

Vance held his first rally since his VP nomination at the 2300 arena in Philadelphia. ca. 200 people attended. The Arena seats 2000. If JD Vance holds a rally and only 200 people show up, does it make a sound? https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-jd-vance-election-harris/?fbclid=IwY2xjawEgbKZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHbBKUvzv1WOeX4xgkeNByA1byXlJLOZdEYXbjAOCV4C-5Zz6DmZVwhnPxQ_aem_FWlQ3GOGpMf3KPAmVLR3NQ

Today is the 75 th   anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb.   I grew up in Oak Ridge, TN, a city that was founded in secret for the purpose of enriching uranium for atomic bombs. The Hiroshima bomb was a uranium fission atomic bomb.  The idea of immolating thousands of civilians was not novel at that point. See, e.g., the Dresden and Tokyo firebombings. Hiroshima was certainly a valid military target. One counterfactual argument is that, had the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not occurred, millions of deaths, Japanese and Americans, would have occurred before Japan surrendered. Another counterfactual argument is that Japan would have surrendered if only a demonstration bomb had been detonated, since the Soviet Union was on the point of invading from the west.  As an ardent consumer of history, I believe it is important to avoid “presentism,” the impulse to judge the behavior of people in the past by present standards. From my reading of the history, I have to...

The advent of CAR-T and CRISPR technologies are set to revolutionize cancer and genetic disease therapies, respectively. But with great hope comes great costs.   “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 100,000 people in the US have sickle cell disease, making it the most prevalent inherited blood disorder. Remarkably, the new gene therapies offer very promising early efficacy: exa-cel and lovo-cel demonstrated 93.5% and 88% efficacy, respectively, in reducing vaso-occlusive crises (VOCs)—episodes leading to severe pain and organ damage—in the first 12 months after administration, in patients with recent prior severe VOCs. It remains unknown how gene therapies will affect other long-term sequelae of sickle cell disease such as pulmonary hypertension; cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events; and bone health.   “While offering the possibility of tremendous benefit, these treatments also present new challenges for patients, payers, and r...

  Everybody knows that California is a “high-tax” state, right? Well, yes and no. Depends on where you are on the food chain.  If your household is the top 1%, then California tax rates are 2 nd  highest, while Texas and Florida are 43 rd  and 50 th , respectively. OTOH, if your household income is in the second quintile as a % of family income, things change:  “ California is about average, with a tax rate lower than either Texas or Florida. Texas has the ninth highest tax rate in the country if you're working class.” There are at least ten red states with tax rates higher than California for working class families. Why doesn’t the MSM publish this? Because their overlords are in the top 1%? Kevin Drum has the receipts: https://jabberwocking.com/41570-2/  

Today is the 75 th  anniversary of the Mann Gulch fire. Thirteen men died fighting the fire, or more accurately, trying to escape the fire as it blew out of control One of two survivors, Wagner Dodge, lived because he set a safety fire and then laid down in it as the main fire swept around him. The others refused to follow his example and all but one of them paid with their lives.   Norman Maclean wrote movingly of the events and people in his book “Young men and fire.” Canadian singer-songwriter James Keelaghan wrote this song about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN2DVFX8X0M

On 1 July, I retired from my 37-year faculty gig. Among other things, this meant shifting from private insurance to Medicare. I haven’t yet used my Medicare coverage, but my wife, who retired two years ago as a faculty at a different university, has had no difficulties with her transition to Medicare. So far.   The Medicare Conversion Factor (the  multiplier used to calculate payment rates for each service or procedure)  for 2025 will be the lowest since 1993. How did that happen? “First, CMS takes the current year CF and then removes the financial support that Congress allocated for 2024, which expires at the end of the year. For 2025, most of the reduction in the CF comes from the loss of this support. “Next, CMS adjusts the CF by an amount specified by Congress. Despite years of inflation, by law, the adjustment for 2025 is 0%, just as it has been every year since 2020. Unlike other fee schedules, there is no standard annual inflation adjustment for Medicare provi...

According to the New York Times, Trump agrees with himself to a debate on a different date, a different network and in a different format than previously agreed to. As of this post, It looks like neither Fox nor the Harris campaign were party to any such agreement.

  While I do check in from time to time at 538, it turns out that Truth Social stock prices are a better metric for Trump's popularity, at least where it matters: "The value of Trump’s stake in the corporate owner of Truth Social has dropped by $900 million since Vice President Kamala Harris entered the race for the White House on July 21. Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price has tumbled by about 23% since then, including another sharp drop on Thursday amid a broader market selloff. "The value of Trump’s dominant stake in the conservative social media company stood at just over $4 billion as of July 19, the final trading day before President Joe Biden exited the race and endorsed Harris. It has since dropped to about $3.1 billion." You have to keep in mind that Truth Social is a meme stock. It's never made money and has negative asset values. It exists primarily as a conduit for bribery money. Now, the betting is that he won't be president again, ...