Monday Reads
Posted: November 4, 2013 Filed under: 2016 elections, Egypt, morning reads 41 CommentsGood Morning!
I thought I’d start the day with some uplifting reads! This one from Seattle is wonderful!
A large pod of orcas swam around a Washington state ferry in an impressive display as it happened to be carrying tribal artifacts to a new museum at the ancestral home of Chief Seattle, and some people think it was more than a coincidence.
Killer whales have been thrilling whale watchers this week in Puget Sound, according to the Orca Network, which tracks sightings.
But they were especially exciting Tuesday when nearly three-dozen orcas surrounded the ferry from Seattle as it approached the terminal on Bainbridge Island. On board were officials from The Burke Museum in Seattle who were moving ancient artifacts to the Suquamish Museum.
The artifacts were dug up nearly 60 years ago from the site of the Old Man House, the winter village for the Suquamish tribe and home of Chief Sealth, also known as Chief Seattle. The Burke, a natural history museum on the University of Washington campus, is known for Northwest Coast and Alaska Native art.
Also on board the state ferry was Suquamish Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman who happened to be returning from an unrelated event. As the ferry slowed near the terminal, it was surrounded by the orcas, Forsman said Wednesday.
“They were pretty happily splashing around, flipping their tails in the water,” he said. “We believe they were welcoming the artifacts home as they made their way back from Seattle, back to the reservation.”
The city of Heracleion sank into the ocean in the 6th or 7th centuray AD and has recently been uncovered. This blog writer has a round up of some pretty 
amazing pictures and stories. This city is known as the city of Cleopatra.
I can’t imagine how cool it must be to be an underwater archaeologist. If I’d have known this was a possibility when I was a teenager I would have had a different life. I started diving at about 14 and Egypt has always thrilled my imagination. I’ve written about this before but it seems that a lot more has been accomplished.
Thonis-Heracleion (the Egyptian and Greek names of the city) is a city lost between legend and reality. Before the foundation of Alexandria in 331 BC, the city knew glorious times as the obligatory port of entry to Egypt for all ships coming from the Greek world. It had also a religious importance because of the temple of Amun, which played an important role in rites associated with dynasty continuity. The city was founded probably around the 8th century BC, underwent diverse natural catastrophes, and finally sunk entirely into the depths of the Mediterranean in the 8th century AD.
Prior to its discovery in 2000 by the IEASM, no trace of Thonis-Heracleion had been found. Its name was almost razed from the memory of mankind, only preserved in ancient classic texts and rare inscriptions found on land by archaeologists. The Greek historian Herodotus (5th century BC) tells us of a great temple that was built where the famous hero Herakles first set foot on to Egypt. He also reports of Helen’s visit to Heracleion with her lover Paris before the Trojan War. More than four centuries after Herodotus’ visit to Egypt, the geographer Strabo observed that the city of Heracleion, which possessed the temple of Herakles, is located straight to the east of Canopus at the mouth of the Canopic branch of the River Nile.
The Senate vote on making discrimination against GLBT in the workplace is really going to show the split in the Republican party. The discussion is about as bad–if not worse–than it was around the ERA. Drag Queens in Christian Book Stores! Federally Subsidized Sex Change Operations! Dogs and Cats having sex in the street!!!!
The anticipated vote comes four months after the Supreme Court invalidated a federal ban on recognizing same-sex marriages, and nearly a year after some conservative leaders warned that losses in the 2012 elections exposed the party as being out of touch with much of the country on social issues.
With the bill apparently just one vote short of the threshold to prevent a filibuster, the Republican senators believed to be the most persuadable — Rob Portman of Ohio, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Dean Heller of Nevada — were keeping their positions private.
Political strategists and congressional aides who have been lobbying for the bill say they have received private assurances that there will be enough Republican votes to move the measure forward on Monday, but none of the senators who plan to support it want to say so publicly out of concern that they could become targets by groups opposing the measure.
In the House, the best chance for passage this year seems to be to tack the measure onto a larger piece of legislation like the National Defense Authorization Act and hope that conservatives do not revolt.
“If you’ve been told your entire career that Republican primary voters are hostile on these issues, and people have only just started to educate you otherwise,” said Jeff Cook-McCormac, a Republican lobbyist who has been pushing to get the bill enacted, “it takes a little while for that to sink in.”
While opposition appears less organized than in previous gay rights debates in Congress, senators of both parties said the emotion surrounding the issue had complicated efforts to break a Republican filibuster attempt.
One senator recalled having to explain to a colleague that the legislation would not require insurance companies to pay for sex-change operations. Another spoke of phone calls from constituents who were convinced that their children could be taught in school by men wearing dresses. And conservative groups like the Family Research Council are warning their supporters that the bill would force Christian bookstores to hire drag performers.
We continue to learn exactly how important appointments to the judicial branch are as we see women judges–appointed by Dubya–vote to place women in 
involuntary servitude to the state.
It’s been a day of body blows for reproductive rights. On Thursday night, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed a lower court’s decision to temporarily block a provision of the omnibus Texas abortion law that requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The appeals court found that it’s constitutionally OK for the requirement to trigger the closure of fully one-third of the reproductive health clinics in the state, because the Supreme Court has found that “the incidental effect of making it more difficult or more expensive to procure an abortion cannot be enough to invalidate it.” The ruling will be catastrophic, measured in access for women to a procedure they have the constitutional right to obtain. The decision was written by Judge Priscilla R. Owen, a George W. Bush appointee, and joined by two other judges who are women—oh how the right is crowing—and also Bush appointees.
Similar admitting privileges provisions have been struck down by courts in Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. Judges in each of those cases saw these abortion restrictions for what they are—unconstitutional burdens on the right to access—and blocked them.
On Friday, morning, it was the turn of another extremely conservative woman chosen for the bench by Bush, Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Brown handed down a similarly dramatic decisionholding that the provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires companies to provide health care coverage that includes contraception “trammels” the religious freedom of an Ohio-based food service company, Freshway Foods, through its two owners, who claimed that the mandate violated its Catholic faith. This is a company we are talking about, not its owners. But following headlong in the wake of the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded finding in Citizens United that corporations are people, too, Brown found that the mandate violates the company’s strongly held religious convictions. To make the company provide a health care plan—from an outside insurer—that offers contraceptive coverage is a “compel[led] affirmation of a repugnant belief,” Brown wrote. The argument that a for-profit secular company has a religious conscience—separate and apart from the religious beliefs of its owners—is a notion that vaults the concept of personhood from the silly (“corporations are people, my friend”) to the sublime (also they pray).
It’s hard to overstate how radical these two decisions are. So it should be especially dispiriting for the left that the other really big thing that happened Thursday was the filibuster by Senate Republicans of Patricia Ann Millett, Obama’s centrist nominee to fill a vacancy on the D.C. Circuit, despite her exemplary credentials. Millett is no radical—no lefty retort to Owen and Brown. She’s a partner at Akin Gump who worked in the solicitor general’s office for both Clinton and Bush and has represented the pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She’s a military wife. That didn’t stop Republicans from claiming that simply by putting up a judicial nominee of his choosing, President Obama was attempting the “pack the court.”
Please Mr. President!!!! Pack the Court with less theocrats!!!
Governor Chris Christie is “tired of you people!” “You people” would be teachers trying to do right by their students. He called schools “failure factories”.
New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, has a long history of teacher bashing – not just teachers union bashing, but teacher bashing. Even when he’s clearly in the lead, he can’t help himself: he has to take a swipe at teachers whenever he can. It’s almost pathological: even when he’s up by a sizable margin, Chris Christie just can’t turn down a chance to bash a teacher who gets too uppity – as he proved today”
Just think! He’s the one they all think is mainstream!!! Go read the interview with the teacher at the receiving end of his bullying.
Senator Charles Schumer has just endorsed Hillary Clinton for 2016. Wow! That’s getting things started a little early.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, used a speech to Iowa Democrats on Saturday night to endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, another indication of how quickly the party is coalescing behind the former secretary of state.
Speaking in the state that helped lift President Obama’s campaign and dashed Mrs. Clinton’s hopes in the 2008 caucuses, Mr. Schumer said the time was right that year for Mr. Obama.
“2016 is Hillary’s time,” Mr. Schumer declared at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson Jackson Dinner. “And our nation will be all the better for it.”
While Mr. Schumer’s support for his former Senate colleague was not surprising, his endorsement one year after the 2012 presidential election underscores how much the Democratic Party elders want Mrs. Clinton to enter the race.
With Mr. Obama’s popularity waning, many party officials also want to try to clear the field for the former first lady in 2016. Last week, it was revealed that every Democratic woman in the Senate had signed a letter supporting Mrs. Clinton, a former senator from New York. She has not yet indicated her 2016 plans.
An aide to Mr. Schumer said his endorsement in such a high-profile venue had not come at Mrs. Clinton’s request.
“Run, Hillary, run,” Mr. Schumer said. “If you run, you’ll win and we’ll all win. With a strong platform and with Hillary leading the charge, we will vanquish the Ted Cruz Tea Party Republicans in 2016.”
Whoa! So, that’s it for me this morning! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: Journey Back to White Male Privilege
Posted: November 1, 2013 Filed under: morning reads 31 Comments
Good Morning!
It’s amazing to me to read about the number of efforts afoot to try to disenfranchise so many different types of Americans. No where is this most apparent than the ongoing struggle to diminish the right to vote. It’s sad to watch the Supreme Court destroy much of the modern era’s momentum to expand the ability to participate in government.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, is leading to a new era of voter suppression that parallels the pre-1960s era—this time affecting not just African-Americans but also Hispanic-Americans, women, and students, among others.
The reasoning employed by Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby County—that Section 5 of the act was such a spectacular success that it is no longer necessary—was the equivalent of taking down speed cameras and traffic lights and removing speed limits from a dangerous intersection because they had combined to reduce accidents and traffic deaths.
In North Carolina, a post-Shelby County law not only includes one of the most restrictive and punitive vote-ID laws anywhere but also restricts early voting, eliminates same-day voting registration, ends pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and bans many provisional ballots. Whatever flimsy voter-fraud excuse exists for requiring voter ID disappears when it comes to these other obstacles to voting.
In Texas, the law could require voters to travel as much as 250 miles to obtain an acceptable voter ID—and it allows a concealed-weapon permit, but not a student ID, as proof of identity for voting. Moreover, the law and the regulations to implement it, we are now learning, will create huge impediments for women who have married or divorced and have voter IDs and driver’s licenses that reflect maiden or married names that do not exactly match. It raises similar problems for Mexican-Americans who use combinations of mothers’ and fathers’ names.
In a recent election on constitutional issues, a female Texas District Court judge, Sandra Watts, who has voted for 49 years in the state, was challenged in the same courthouse where she presides; to overcome the challenge, she will have to jump through hoops and possibly pay for a copy of her marriage license, an effective poll tax on women.
The Justice Department is challenging both laws, but through a much more cumbersome and rarely successful provision of the Voting Rights Act that is still in force. It cannot prevent these laws and others implemented by state and local jurisdictions, many of which will take effect below the radar and will not be challenged because of the expense and difficulty of litigation.
Cheer up! We have a new generation of suffragettes!’
12-year-old Madison Madison Kimrey, founder of NC Youth Rocks, gave a rousing speech at a recent NAACP event, taking on Governor Pat McCrory, and the state’s recent highly restrictive Voter I.D. laws. Being 12, her particular concern was the elimination of the state’s pre-registration for 16 and 17-year-olds through schools and the state’s DMV that enables them to automatically be added to the voting rolls when they turn 18.
She completely nails Gov. McCrory, who refused to meet with her, calling her “ridiculous” and a “liberal prop.” Her response: “I am not a prop. I am part of a new generation of sufragettes.”
Gov. McCrory also said, according to Kimrey: “He had not read that part of the bill.”
In the words of Alicia Keyes: “This girl is on fire.”
Check the video out at the link.
Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid is likely to file cloture in the coming hours on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, BuzzFeed has learned, which would set up a Monday evening vote on a motion to proceed to debate on the bill to ban LGBT discrimination in the workplace.
Reid is likely to file a cloture petition on the bill this evening, a Democratic leadership aide told BuzzFeed Thursday, which would set a vote on the motion to proceed on debate of ENDA for Monday evening.
If the motion to proceed, which requires 60 votes, is agreed to, the Senate would debate and eventually vote on the bill. The vote would be the first Senate vote on the legislation since 1996 and the first vote ever on the legislation with both sexual orientation and gender identity protections.
Advocates say that they have clear support from 59 senators, including all 55 Democrats in the Senate and four Republicans, with a handful of other Republican senators as potential yes votes.
The new normal is different, the new normal is not an employment-to-population ratio of 63%. It’s an employment to population ratio of 59%. Out of every 15 people who we would have expected to have a job in the America of 2007 doesn’t have a job in the America of today. There is no sign that this will change. We have now seen four years without appreciable recovery in the employment-to -population ratio to what we used to think of as normal. And labor-force participation rate is now falling much much faster than we can justify from the demography. In long-run historical perspective, we are back to a labor force share of the population that we had in the late 1970s, when American feminism was at most only half-completed. An awful lot of those who are unemployed are long-term unemployed. Employers look at them askance when they apply for jobs. An awful lot more of the employment shortfall is people who have simply dropped out of the labor force, and I don’t see what forces will push them to come back in. Thus we are likely to have a lot of slack in the American labor market–and a large shortfall of aggregate demand below potential supply–as far into the future as we can see.
If you are running a business, demand for your products will be low. But if you are ruining a business, it is also a fact that your margins are likely to be high. For businesses, these two effects more or less offset each other, and businesses wind up wight he operative cash flow they would have expected–and with lower borrowing costs because of low interest rates. This means the “new normal” is better for non-financial businesses than we thought we would see back in 2007. And the “new normal” is considerably worse for workers than the normal of 2007. On the labor side, it looks like jobs are going to be scarce for at least a decade to come. Few people will dare to ask for a raise. Few people will dare to quit.
In a rebuke to the White House, U.S. Senate Republicans blocked two of President Barack Obama’s nominations on the floor, reviving a threat from Democrats to change the rules for dealing with filibusters.
The Senate voted not to consider the nomination of Representative Mel Watt, a North Carolina Democrat, to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency following resistance from Republicans over his qualifications.
That opposition led to a 56-42 vote — four votes short of the 60 needed — to move the nomination to a final debate and floor vote on Obama’s nominee to replace Edward J. DeMarco, who has been acting director since 2009.
Less than an hour later, Republicans blocked Washington lawyer Patricia Millett, the first of Obama’s three nominations to vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered the nation’s second most influential because it hears appeals of federal regulatory cases.
The vote on her nomination was 55-38. Three Republican senators voted “present.”
Meanwhile, the impact of more strict abortion controls meant to restrict women’s right to access the constitutional act of conscience is coming home to roost all over the country.
On their last night in Dallas, the ramen noodles and microwave popcorn were finished. The money for the motel had run out too. So on a hot August night Jessica and Erick Davis and their three young kids slept in the Mazda rented for the trip.
It had only been a few hours since Jessica’s abortion. Because the procedure needed to be performed later in her pregnancy, it stretched over three days.
“I cried until I could fall asleep,” she said.
Earlier that month, at home in Oklahoma City, the Davises were told that the boy she was carrying had a severe brain malformation known as holoprosencephaly. It is rare, though possible, for such a fetus to survive to birth, but doctors told them that he would not reach his first birthday. “He would never walk, lift his head,” Jessica, 23, recalled in an interview.
“I could let my son go on and suffer,” she said. Or she could accept a word she didn’t like – abortion – “and do the best thing for my baby.”
“It took everything we had so that our son would not suffer”
The Davises’ ordeal was always going to be painful. But the grim path that led them to a night in the car was determined, nearly every step of the way, by a state that has scrambled to be the most “pro-life” in the nation. There are no exceptions for families like the Davises.
Oklahomans brag that theirs has become the reddest state. Republicans hold super majorities in both chambers and every single seat in the U.S. Congress. Republican Mary Fallin is governor. Every single Oklahoma county rejected Barack Obama–twice. The changed political landscape allowed Oklahoma to become a staging ground for the anti-choice movement’s strategy to undermine Roe v. Wade, one seemingly narrow restriction at a time.
“We are the guinea pigs,” said Ryan Kiesel, a former state lawmaker who is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma.
Since the consolidation of Republican control in 2010, the state legislature has passed at least sixteen laws relating to abortion, often with “no” votes in the single digits. It’s no coincidence that two of the cases involving women’s health currently hurtling towards the Supreme Court originated in Oklahoma.
“It’s sickened me about the state of Oklahoma, period,” Erick told MSNBC of his family’s experience. “I don’t even want to be in this state.”
So, welcome to the rightward march of the U.S. into the realm of fascist nightmares. Welcome to trying to get the world back to a place where white men get to decide everything.
What’s on you reading and blogging list today?
Try checking out the real Haunts for Halloween
Posted: October 31, 2013 Filed under: New Orleans | Tags: Coven, haunted houses, Holt cemetery New Orleans, Madame LaLaurie, New Orleans, real hauntings, the LaLaurie House 19 Comments
There are many really cool things about living in a very old city and in very old houses that I don’t know where to start. You pretty much know
that death, disaster, and the wicked part of human nature have not been sanitized for suburban pearl-clutchers or commercialized by the mercenary. You live next to churches built for victims of Yellow Plague and cemeteries where the rain can wash up bones. Living in New Orleans isn’t like living in a European City with their pits filled of tens of thousands of black plague victims and underground cities stacked with skeletons. But, being in the French Quarter on Halloween night sure beats handing out candy to future obese, diabetics decked out in WalMart’s worst.
I really love watching spooky shows and movies this time of year. One of my newest addictions is the FX TV show American Horror Story: Coven. It has some great American actresses in it and it’s filmed in New Orleans. It stars Jessica Lang, Kathy Bates, and Angela Bassett. The two latter actresses play real New Orleans people.
Delphyne posted a link to my Facebook about scary as hell places in the USA. New Orlean’s St. Louis Number One Cemetery–where Marie LaVeau is supposedly buried–always pops up on the list. Bassett plays LaVeau in Coven. Bates plays Madame LaLaurie whose house is considered so haunted that no one lives there for long.
Frankly, I’ve never found St. Louis One to be spooky or ooky. Holt Cemetery is far more full of those weird vibes that you can feel in cemeteries. Holt is the potter’s cemetery where many of New Orlean’s best Jazz musician’s were eventually buried. The graves are shallow and not the little above ground houses you think about when you think New Orleans cemeteries so if you go there after flooding or rain you are likely to find human bones about the place. There were lots of them scattered around after Katrina. They’re trying to redo the place to stop these kinds of events.
I lived across from the LaLaurie Mansion for five years and never ever experienced anything akin to a haunt or a wicked bad vibe. Kathy Bates plays Madam LaLaurie who is supposedly cursed by LaVeau to live forever and is buried alive to be found in modern times by Jessica Lange early in the series. The series very much uses the city as another character in the story. The rest–of course–is pure fiction and very much in the genre of making a spooky story based on the modern idea of spooky. But, I do have to say it’s a fun twist and I love watching it display New Orleans in all its spookery.
I thought I’d share with you the actual stories of the LaLaurie House–which has been considered haunted for well over a hundred years–since it figures prominently in the 
plot of Coven. Here’s the original news story on the house that exposed the horrific things that Madame LaLaurie did to her slaves. This is also something that is essential to the plot of Coven. Again, I I lived across from the house for five years and really never experienced anything. That can’t be said for my own house now or other places I’ve been. We will get to that later.
April 11, 1834
The conflagration at the house occupied by the woman Lalaurie in Hospital … is like discovering one of those atrocities the details of which seem to be too incredible for human belief.
We would shrink from the task of detailing the painful circumstances connected herewith, were it not that a sense of duty and the necessity of exposing and holding to the public indignation such a wretch as the perpetrator, renders it indispensable for us to do so.
The flames having spread with an alarming rapidity, and the horrible suspicion being entertained among the spectators that some of the inmates of the premises where it originated, where incarcerated therein, the doors were forced open for the purpose of liberating them. Previous however, to taking this liberty, (if liberty it can be called), several gentlemen impelled by their feelings of humanity demanded the keys which were refused them in a gross and insulting manner. Upon entering one of the apartments, the most appalling spectacle met their eyes. Seven slaves more or less horribly mutilated were seen suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other. Language is powerless and inadequate to give a proper conception of the horror which a scene like this must have inspired. We shall not attempt it, but leave it rather to the reader’s imagination to picture what it was.
These slaves were the property of the demon, in the shape of a woman whom we mentioned in the beginning of this article. They had been confined by her for several months in the situation from which they had thus providentially been rescued and had been merely kept in existence to prolong their suffering and to make them taste all that the most refined cruelty could inflict. But why dwell upon such aggravating and painful particulars! We feel confident that the community share with us our indignation, and that vengeance will fall heavily upon the guilty culprit. Without being superstitious, we cannot but regard the manner in which these atrocities have been brought to light as an especial interposition of heaven.
There are a series of later articles on the house’s haunted status that are also great reading. I love reading the articles in the vernacular of the day. This one is written in 1892 and describes the house’s reputation at the time.
In the Rue Royale stands this quaint, old-fashioned house about which so much has been written, and around which cluster so many wild and weird stories, that even in its philosophic day, few in the old faubourg care to pass the place after nightfall, or, doing so, shudder and hurry on with bated breath, as though midnight ghouls and ghosts hovered near, ready to exercise a mystic spell over all who dare invade its uncanny precincts.
“La maison est hantee,” that is what the Franco-Spanish residents of the “vieux carre” will shake their heads and tell you; and every one who lives in the rue Royale, whether descendants of the ancient habitue or member of that recent cosmopolitan element that has invaded the street, know the history of that old house, and repeats in guarded whispers, “The house is haunted” and will volunteer strange stories of how ghosts and spirits may be seen flitting mysteriously about the rooms after nightfall who the witches and hob-goblins hold high revel there, of the strange unearthly noises that proceed from the damp dungeon and attic, the mysterious, lambent lights that flit rapidly from window to window and then vanish, only to reappear with confused rapidity and the long, ghostly procession that winds up the stairway at midnight, and peers cautiously over the roof, where the figure of a little child may be seen upon moonlight nights haunting the latticed belvedere. And all this began long ago, when the great house was shut up for many years and broken windows and defaced galleries told the story of the uprising of an indignant populace and
laid the foundation for the wild and ghostly legends which succeeding years have woven about it. No house in the rue Royale has attracted so much widespread attention. Every stranger who visits New Orleans inquires for it, artists have painted it and travelers have written about it and several years ago Geo. W. Cable made it the subject of a special article in the Century Magazine. How much of that story is true, and how much the creation of Mr. Cable’s fancy the old Creole of New Orleans will tell you; but this fact remains, that the house has a history, a real true history that needs neither imagination nor art to make it one of the most interesting studies in New Orleans, both from a historical and romantic point of view.
The house is still on the Haunted Tours that are omnipresent in the Quarter. It was, in fact, owned briefly by Nicholas Cage. It is an imposing structure. My kids were anxious to take these tours but I have to admit I’ve never done it. I have been on many a street when guides were spinning the stories they spin at some point in time. I do know a lot of people that have lived in houses they will not return to and the majority of them are not on the tours so I kind’ve judge the entire thing based on that. In my experience, there’s an apartment sitting near Cabrini park at the edge of the Quarter that’s got far more hauntings. I’ve known folks that have lived there and nearly all of them have left within months of moving in the place.
I have had my share of really strange things that have happened since living in New Orleans and you can officially place me in the category of no longer skeptic about some kind of weird energies that exist that cannot be explained. Nearly all of my experiences have happened after really raging hurricanes which seem to have a habit of stirring up energy and the watery ground beneath the city. I’ve had experiences in my own home close after Katrina that I really can’t explain. The first one happened shortly after I got home when there was no electricity to speak of and no one else around. It was deadly quiet because there were also no birds about. I was lying in my bed and I had my curtains open wide. I no longer leave my curtains open on that side of the house now at night. Just call me extra cautious. I saw a glowing round, orangish face in the window over my desk. I really thought it was a person and since the neighborhood was mostly deserted, I was freaked out. I ran to the window and pounded on it. I broke the glass actually. It occurred to me the next day that there is no way any person could peer through my window. They would have to be standing on the shoulders of some one else to do that. There was no light to play tricks on me so I have no idea what it could’ve been. I was not drinking. I was not asleep. I was in the dark reading a journal article by small flashlight. If you can develop some plausible hypothesis let me know. Like I said, I never leave a curtain or window open on that side of the bedroom after dark any more.
My second experience in my house was not too long after that. I was walking towards the door to the laundry room by the same desk. A very solid thick glass, cheese crock that holds odds and ends lifted about 18 inches off my night stand, went across my chest in front of my eyes and dropped to the floor without breaking. My lama was in the house at the time and I ran to get him to show him the crock sitting on the floor. I have absolutely no explanation for that. It was midday. I was not drinking and I am very much a logical, data oriented person so I am not the kind of person that just sees spirits in everything. I know what I saw. I know there is absolutely no logical explanation for it.
The last time I really experienced something strange was last year after Hurricane Issac when I was sitting at a table at Buffa’s in the Quarter. I had gotten up to talk to a friend of mine. I felt a distinct tingly,freezing cold sensation in the shape of person walking through me on the left side of my body. It was like some one about 4 inches shorter than me walked straight through that half of my body. It was electric and cold and totally in the shape of a person. I distinctly remember the shape of a head and torso. It was not a linear shape. I didn’t feel it completely on that side. It felt like the imprint of a short-person. My friend Randy saw me turn pretty pale and could feel the temperature difference between my left and right hand. It was very odd.
Anyway, if you spend your Halloweens in the suburbs with kids and candy and fake costumes and fake tombstones bought at Walmart you are really missing out on things. I really love the Day of the Dead Celebrations that have gravitated here from Mexico. They’ve got the “spirit” of the day down pat. You really need to take the day to go to a real “haunted” location or cemetery and check out the energy then ride it to wherever it goes. Of course, New Orleans is probably the premier Halloween destination on my list. But, there are so many wonderful historical American cities with equally rich and real culture that I am sure you can get to one or the other. I’ve never been to Salem, Mass but I have to say I envy people within driving distance. Now, there’s a perfect Halloween destination!!!
Anyway, we have a lot of severe weather moving our way tonight. I’m going to be keeping the shade down on the window over my desk tonight for sure!!!
A little Night Humor
Posted: October 28, 2013 Filed under: open thread, The Media SUCKS 7 Comments
We frequently complain about the media’s coverage of politics here. Most of us also have websites and sources that we laugh at. Politico often brings out a number articles that cause us to groan, do frantic face palms, and complain. So,this is good.
What If POLITICO Had Covered the Civil War?Playbook, Emancipation Day Edition
….
WEST-WING MINDMELD: This shows a direct, decisive president, something that will improve Lincoln’s ability to get his agenda through Congress
FORMER GEN.-IN-CHIEF GEORGE MCCLELLAN, on MORNING JEHOSEPHAT: “Lincoln has flip-flopped once again on emancipation…. Washington politicians are doing an end run around the Constitution… I think we need less polarization and divisiveness during a civil war. A leader needs to stand up to extremists and reach out across the aisle. Lincoln has not led.” 1864 TEA LEAVES: “I am not ruling anything out, but I’m not ruling anything in.”
PLAY-BOOK FACTS OF LIFE: If the president can convince the public that he emancipated slaves simply to preserve the union, the story will blow over. If it emerges that he actually issued the proclamation because he believes involuntary bondage is an immoral affront to human dignity, we could be looking at months of hearings.
FLASHBACK: “I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” –Lincoln, IL-SEN debate, 1858
,,,
Yup. That would be about right.
Monday Reads
Posted: October 28, 2013 Filed under: morning reads 65 Comments
Good morning!
So, I had a rather uneventful weekend. I spent a lot of time grading stuff for my International Finance class and getting ready for my Security Analysis Class. I am still getting used to teaching MBAs and graduate students instead of undergrads. Plus, I teach Finance now with very little Economics so I feel mercenary. I tell myself that it keeps me in the kathouse and in red wine. But, it’s difficult at times because teaching economic literacy is more of a calling to me. Finance is much more utilitarian so I try to look at it as giving some one a life skill but it’s not quite the same. I used to be appalled that undergrad students could get through high school knowing so little and now I have learned that you can get an undergrad degree and come out with bad skills too. Color me jaded. At least I am not training predators. I am training people that are just trying to survive in a world of predators.
Anyway, I did watch a few things over the weekend that helped me cope with the ordeal of reading so many cut and pastes from the internet instead of original thoughts. AMC ran White Zombie. I had never seen that. I learned how little Lugosi made for the movie and was rather shocked. I guess he was worried about loosing his career to Boris Karloff at that point and was taking all offers. Then, I spent some time with Front Line which has a special place in our hearts here since Boomer’s brother is a cinematographer there. The topic also figures predominantly in my life and JJ’s since it dealt with antibiotic resistant bacteria.
I’ve battled a MRSA (antibiotic resistant staph infection) for several years. You may remember one of them put me in the hospital and doctors were worried about me losing my eye sight. Thankfully, there’s one last drug that works for me. But, it will lose its efficacy eventually. My doctors now trust me to rush to the pharmacy and get antibiotics when it gets out of hand. I have a topical lotion that seems to control anything that looks suspicious. I really try to not use the oral antibiotics unless it doesn’t respond to the topical and it looks like I’m in trouble. Trouble means it doesn’t go away and the entire site begins to swell like a balloon even when I drain it, clean it, and douse it with the topical stuff. At that point, waiting to see the doc even is dangerous. I imagine that one day that routine won’t work.
That seems to be the message of the episode and of some eecent articles with warnings from the CDC. There are some bacteria that no longer respond to anything and that list is growing. Dr. Arjun Srinivasan of the CDC says “We’ve Reached The End of Antibiotics, Period”.
For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about “The end of antibiotics, question ma?” Well, now I would say you can change the title to “The end of antibiotics, period.”
We’re here. We’re in the post-antibiotic era. There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t. …
…I wonder if you can reflect a little bit and describe how the MRSA phenomenon, this resistant bacteria, changed public awareness about the problem.
So methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, for a lot of people is the first time that they had really encountered one of these highly drug-resistant bacteria. …
Literally for decades it’s been something that’s been difficult to treat. There were, up until recently, limited treatment options for MRSA. There is really one antibiotic that was available to treat it.
Was it that bad? Did people die from it?
People did die from it. It caused very serious infections. … MRSA was something that if you asked any doctor or nurse about MRSA, they would tell you, “Oh, yes, it’s a very serious issue. We struggle with it in our patients, in our intensive care units,” but if you asked the average person outside of hospitals about MRSA, they probably would never have heard of it. That all changed maybe about a decade or so ago.
What changed?
We began seeing MRSA infections outside of health-care settings. …
We were seeing it in young people who were athletes, who were young football players who had serious infections, who died of these MRSA infections which had previously been limited to hospitals.
We saw outbreaks in schools. We saw outbreaks in health clubs. And what most of these people were getting was something very different from what we saw in hospitals.
I guess nearly every one in New Orleans that spent some time in the post-Katrina environment now harbors MRSA if you believe the Doctors who deal with
my outbreaks. I had read about Super Bugs some years ago but it wasn’t something I kept at the front of my mind. The biggest problem now is that it’s not really a good investment for pharmaceutical companies to do research in future antibiotics because they are only one shot drugs instead of drugs used perpetually. Therefore, there is a distinct need for the Federal Government to step in and fund the research. That, of course, is not really happening in this country of course. There is also this ghoulish term of “nightmare” bacteria that sounds like something from a horror movie. The man who was interviewed by Frontline and was a major researcher for antibiotics passed away last week. This adds to the story that sounds like a human disaster in the making.
We wanted to share the sad news that John Quinn, a veteran Gram-negative researcher featured in Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria, passed away last weekend. We knew him only briefly but in that short time he made an enormous contribution to our efforts to understand the importance of this subject and why major pharmaceutical companies have been pulling out of antibiotic development.
We knew companies had been abandoning antibiotic drug development and wanted to help viewers understand what that looked like from the inside. The story of Pfizer soon became an obvious example because the company had such a long history in developing antibiotics and had, until recently, been one of the stalwarts that remained involved in seeking a cure for Gram negatives.
But finding someone who was able to talk about the company and its decision to close down its antibiotic research efforts proved more difficult than we’d anticipated. Though we reached out to many researchers and scientists who had worked at Pfizer, they were all reluctant to speak on camera about the program.
That is until we found John Quinn. Quinn was a doctor by training and had been working in academia on Gram-negative resistance before it became a major public health concern. He watched first hand as resistance grew and doctors he worked with had few options to treat patients. “I’d seen [Gram-negative bacteria] kill patients,” Quinn told us. “I had, you know, seen the drugs that we were using cause kidney failure. So I was acutely aware — personally aware, professionally aware — of the need to make progress in this space.”
As usual, I’ve already found a response that really seems to misunderstand the problem by a writer in the National Review. It really isn’t the patent issue that 
thwarts the development of antibiotics by Big Pharma. It’s the fact that antibiotics should be used sparingly, rarely, and basically for one illness. The lack of ongoing cashflow to return to the original investment is the issue. Granting patent extensions isn’t going to solve this problem at all. It seems clearly to be an area that requires nationalization from an economic standpoint and the standpoint that it clearly will become a national health issue.
Before we get too upset with the evil pharmaceutical industry, remember that it can take billions to develop a new drug. And, we have restricted the patent time for the drugs they successfully develop to permit less expensive generics to be manufactured.
It seems to me that if we want new and better antibiotics–we should ensure that the financial risk taken has the potential to lead to a substantial financial gain by extending the patent life for new antibiotics an extra ten years from the time it receives formal approval. Then, maybe, drug companies will more energetically jump into the research for new antibiotics.
We could also have the NIH fund more research into antibiotics and make the results available to everyone. But that would mean making antibiotics a priority over other areas of research. I’m not sure the politics would permit such an explicit triage.
Is our political system so fraught with ideology that we can’t even deal with an oncoming plague? This is a typical economic problem of “the commons”. We’ve had an overuse and a large abuse of antibiotics. This is especially true in food production where antibiotics typically are used without cause in animals raised for food.
A big part of the trouble is that the gains from the overuse of antibiotics are private, whereas the losses are public. Problems such as these are rarely soluble without outside intervention. Ramanan Laxminarayan of Princeton University, who has been thinking for many years about how to deal with the question of resistance, suggests the answer is a mixture of incentives and scourges. Prize funds, or guaranteed-purchase arrangements for new drugs and the rapid-diagnostics systems that would allow them to be deployed appropriately, would help overcome the financial problem of antibiotics being cures, rather than just treatments. Stricter dispensing guidelines for doctors and pharmacists might help deal with the moral hazard of overtreatment.
A bit of realism would be good, too. Derrick Crook, a consultant microbiologist at Oxford, where Florey and Chain once worked, observes, “It is hard to massively restrict the use of antimicrobials when they are doing good. It is possible that the enormous use in Asia is a good thing for a short time in a given country.” That, combined with ignorance about precisely how much the unnecessary use of antibiotics contributes to increasing resistance, makes restriction highly controversial.
So, wow. I took a lot more time on this subject than I thought I would. Here’s some other links you may want to look at today!
Charles M Blow writes about Billionaires’ Row and Welfare Lines
Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires has added more than 200 names since 2012 and is now at 1,426. The United States once again leads the list, with 442 billionaires.
It’s a great time to be a rich person in America. The rich are raking it in during this recovery.
But in the shadow of their towering wealth exists a much less rosy recovery, where people are hurting and the pain grows.
This is the slowest post-recession jobs recovery since World War II. The unemployment rate is falling, but for the wrong reason: an increasing number of people may simply be giving up on finding a job. The labor force participation rate — the percentage of people over 16 who either have a job or are actively searching for one — fell in August to its lowest rate in 35 years.
David Gregory spends his Sunday Show concern-trolling Obama Care.
But David Gregory has never come across a Republican talking point that he didn’t love, embrace and swallow up whole to faithfully regurgitate to the masses. So he dutifully confronts Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida CEO Patrick Geraghty about the news that 300,000 Floridians have found their policies dropped because they fall below the minimum standards of coverage set by Obamacare. Problem was, Geraghty wasn’t going to playGregory’s gotcha game with people’s healthcare:
“We’re not cutting people,” Geraghty said. “We’re actually transitioning people. What we’ve been doing is informing folks that their plan doesn’t meet the test of the essential health benefits; therefore, they have a choice of many options that we make available through the exchange. And, in fact, with subsidy, many people will be getting better plans at a lesser cost. This really is a transition. In fact, the 300,000 figure is the entire year. So it’s really 40,000 people for January 1, and we’re walking them through that transition.”
Now, it’s absolutely true that there will be a fraction of people who find that their costs have gone up, the specific number and amount is still up for debate. And if they don’t qualify for subsidies, that will mean a higher out-of-pocket cost, at least in the short term. However, short-term partisan gains notwithstanding, the program will factor in long-term the inclusion of healthy, young people on the exchanges, which will help mitigate the ailing people who rushed for the initial coverage. Specifically, the re-insurance tax is being levied for the first three years is intended to help smooth that transition to allow for the long-term sustainability of the program.
More than 60 women took to driving cars to defy the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia.
Brushing off threats from the government, more than 60 Saudi women got behind the wheel on Saturday in a bold protest of the nation’s de facto ban on women driving.
Sara Hussein, a Saudi woman involved in the effort, drew parallels to the U.S. civil rights movement: “Think back in history — Rosa Parks was the only person who sat down on the bus, wasn’t she? And then it started to happen gradually. It does have to start with the few brave people who are willing to risk whatever there is to risk.”
Many women documented the act of civil disobedience on social media, even posting videos to YouTube. The most popular video, which has already been viewed nearly 100,000 times, was posted by May al-Sawyan, a 32-year-old economics researcher. She drove to the grocery store.
So, that’s it for me this morning! What’s on your reading and bloging list today
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments