Seniors Still Need Print Media

An email arrived a few minutes ago.  It was from a co-worker and contained a forwarded joke:


I was visiting my son last night when I asked if I could borrow a newspaper.

"This is the 21st century," he said. "I don't waste money on newspapers. Here, you can borrow my iPad."

I can tell you this, that damn fly never knew what hit him.


I was mildly amused.  But how about this?

“Grandma,” my nephew said to my mother, who handed him a Ladies Home Journal to amuse him, “this is broke… the pictures don’t get bigger when I try to stretch them.”

But score one for granny because newspapers have many functions beyond crossword puzzles and swatting flies.  They’re great for cleaning windows and laying out cookies, too!  Most importantly, they’re impervious to electromagnet pulses, which could be a big deal some day.  An enemy E.M.P. blast could easily melt the microprocessors inside iPads and computers and phones – and nearly every household appliance made in the last 30 years.  The ever-shrinking micro components inside all new devices -- and the infrastructure on which most of them rely -- are all extremely vulnerable.  Well-placed interference could cause the complete collapse of all communication systems – including the press.

Disruptive medicine technology

Medicine, like education, is a convoluted industry that seems more interested in bilking people out of their earnings than one in which public service is the goal.

The monstrosity we now call health care is so enormous that it's eating the US government's budget -- feeding off the gigantic teat of the wage earners in this country.

Medicine, as a model, is now ripe for an infusion of technology, the likes of which created a subeconomy out of a music player. we can do for diagnostic medicine what Apple and Steve Jobs did for portable computing.

Four years ago the President told us that we were embarking on a jorney to digitize health care records in a way that would streamline the industry and the patient experience.

That didn't happen. i recently visited a walk-in clinic that was in my health care insurance "network" and stepped up to the counter, where I was asked, "Who sent you?"

"Nobody. Me." How else was I supposed to answer that question? I'd never been asked that when visiting a medical facility. I had an issue and decided to take myself in for an expert diagnosis and treatment. How else do people find themselves in a doctor's office?

Then I remembered when I had worked for a turkey processing plant and how they had medical staff onsite that dealt with work injuries and other issues that would otherwise hit the plant's productivity. When their was an injury that required medical treatment, the worker was sent to the plant physician -- usually a private doctor under contract with the plant for just such occasions.

So the majority of the patience entering this clinic were workers of a plant who had a business relationhip with the facility; it was common for plant medical personnel to send a worker in for treatment.

But the look and feel of the clinic, as well as the way I was handled, felt like something I would expect from one in a third-world country. I was surrounded by people who were obviously poor, didn't speak the language or were dressed in work attire. This was not the clientele of any doctor's office I had ever visited before.

My next thought was that my company had obviously made a deal with the lowest grade health care provider they could possibly find -- a way to save some money on their health care costs.

This is only my most recent encounter with today's medical industry. I'm thinking this is probably the tip of the iceberg nightmare faced by the broader population.

What has happened to medicine? In 1958, all the medical expenses for the birth of my parents' first child cost about two weeks of Dad's salary, without insurance. In today's dollars, let's call that $2,500. IA friend recently had a baby and their out-of-pocket expenses alone were more than $10,000, and their insurance company paid the lion's share of the costs.

To answer the question above, regarding what's happened to medicine, insurance. That's right, insurance is the reason this has become such a huge profit center of our very culture.

Over time, preditory business interests have taken over the entire medical establishment to the point where they have the resources to write legislation to enrich themselves and ensure market advantages while holding the American people hostage.

It was a slow process that began with a simple promise. You pay an insurance company a little out of your paycheck every month, and they'll pay your medical bills. If you required treatment catastrophic injury or disease, the insurance company would pay the bills.

Fast forward to today. You not only have to pay skyrocketing premiums, but you also have to pay huge annual (or per illness) deductibles and growing amounts for copays at every turn.

Insurance companies have effectively removed market forces out of the health care market and have successfuly driven up the prices of everything having to do with the practice of medicine.

Technology and science can solve these problems. We can essentially knock the legs out from under the insurance companies and handle 95% of our own medical needs through self care.

The technology now exists that will allow us to monitor our health and detect abnormalities that were once only in the wheelhouse of big hospitals. And this can be done far more efficiently and with a granularity of data that has never been possible before.

How often is your heartrate or blood pressure or core body temperature read? Usually when you visit the doctor, whch for some of us is practically never. At best it's a few times a year. It's statistically impossible to get rolling averages and trends that have any meaning when your data set has between 0 and 3 entries. Technology can increase the resolution to hundreds of times every day -- and correlate that data with events.

That's just one approach. There are many other dagnostic tools that we can put in our hands that will advance medicine for both the patient and the doctors, moving disgnostics ahead by miles instead of inches.

A lot of times a doctor only gets to see a snapshot of your vitals in one instance. The values themselves can only give current state information. But it's the changes over time that can give the big picture far more clarity, revealing much more about what's happening inside your body and why.

Now if we take that richer dataset and combine it with everyone's trends, averages and causal factors, we can now build disgnostic models that tell an elaborate story about how to treat illness and injury.

It's ridiculous that medicine is in such a dark age today, knowing what we have learned in the last 100 years. Doctors and medicine in general is almost secretive about human health. What is known about the human body should be accessible by everyone at a glance. What is well known and understood by the medical community should be presented in an open-source way so that everyone has a clear understanding of what causes illnesss and what can be done immediately to prevent it, treat it or cure it.

There ought to be an app that tells us everything that can be known about our bodies. More thought has gone into monitoring the mechanical health of cars and trucks than has gone into the health of the human body. A mechanic at the shop can know instantly the speed, location and fuel efficiency of a fleet truck 1,000 miles away. In fact he get a graph of all his fleet vehicles' statistical trends, even making any number of adjustments on the fly.

Why can't we as a civilized society give the same attention to the human condition? Why can't we decide to end medical profiteering because it's immoral to let it continue?

Bringing medicine into the 21st century is a moral calling and it's not beyond the human capacity to push back against powerful lobbies; they only have the power we permit them to have through our legislature and courts.

The true entitlement society is not the young or the poor or the elderly, but corporations -- and the industry as a whole -- who believe it their calling to generate huge and growing profits from the suffering of an entire society, and will fight tooth-and-nail to keep it.

The pledge every political candidate should be to end this kind of entitlement thinking. No judge and no legislator should think it beyond his or her own moral calling to weed out the takers of our wealth who would keep us in the dark ages of medicine and deny us the right to flourish with the skill and knowledge we have gained since the American revolution.

We need a truly disruptive technology in medicine that will make obsolete the corporatist health care complex.

Are you better off?

The phrase, "perception is reality" has taken flight among US press organizations, ignoring factual information and relying on public opinion and the viewpoints of the most extreme partisan pundits as the basis for its news coverage.

The founding fathers viewed the press as so fundamental in the political process that they gave it special privilege and protections under the Constitution.  The press is afforded the opportunity to shine a light on the government and investigate claims made by politicians -- and to reveal truths not otherwise available to the average individual.  But today members of the press happily enrich themselves by advancing corporate propaganda on a wholesale level.  Their only measures of success are opinion polls and their bottom line.

Like the media, Congress is merely another operative --  a tool of a corporatist government profiting through propaganda.  But that's another article.

The way the media operates today is an obvious disservice to the country.  It's bad because in this scenario we are not holding a president accountable for his actual performance, but for his (and your) ability to manipulate public opinion.  Wouldn't it be nice if public opinion was informed by actual facts instead of the viewpoints of the loudest voices?

Every time I hear a political news story, I find myself begging the reporter to stop telling me what other people think.  Don't merely influence my opinion with other opinions.  For instance, on the economy, give me objective economic metrics so I can make an informed choice in November.

The only thing polls are good for is to show how well the propaganda is working.  Paid pundits then report cherry-picked poll data that parrots their propaganda, creating the perception of a populist guideline for the people to follow.

The theme for this year's presidential election is the now-familiar recycled catch phrase coined by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 campaign: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

That's not even mildly clever, but for reasons I don't understand, that's now the political measuring stick.  In today's media environment, we now weigh the success of the president by the viewpoints of survey participants and not the actual vital signs pointing to the health of the country.

Mitt Romney is delighted to play this game and is obviously hoping your answer to the questions is no, the people do not think they're better off, that it's time to replace the President.  While that's simplistic, it's probably effective and compelling to the intellectually inept.  This invokes a vision of the man wearing a cowboy vest and a hat fashioned from a cardboard 12-pack beer box sitting in the audience at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

But if we are introduced to nearly any economic metric, we begin to see that the country is actually healthier than it was four years ago.  Unfortunately nobody is talking about that.

The economic indicators were bottoming out by the end of 2008 and have been on a gradual recovery since then.  Unemployment was at 10.2% and that is objectively improved today at around 8.2%.  The job creation index saw a low point four years ago, but has been on the rise since.  Consumer daily spending was at an all time low at the end of the Bush administration and has risen from $59 to $74 over Obama's term.  Even the confidence index is much better; it tanked to -60 at the end of Bush's second term and is now at a four year high at -20.

Corporate media, you are all so quick to slide the soapbox over to paid campaign consultants and party cheerleaders -- people who are obviously not guided by thoughtful and impartial analysis of available information, but by bought loyalty.  What those people have to say is tainted and definitely not useful in the election process.  You would rather set the stage for conflict that generates catchy headlines for the sole purpose of attracting an audience and improving the bottom line.  It's a pity you don't provide a service directed by integrity.

So #usmedia, please report objective metrics comparing the nation's economic state four years ago to today instead of are-you-better-off polls.

The Ryan Compromise

The question Republican voters are left with is this: which of Paul Ryan's beliefs will be compromised now that he's hitched his political wagon to Gov. Romney's Presidential campaign?

One of Romney's most notable traits is that he changes positions with the winds of public opinion, leaving voters confused and confounded by the candidate's ambiguity.

Choosing a running mate that is a polar opposite -- in terms of his explicitly stated positions -- is unquestionably good for Romney, but how badly will this marriage hurt Ryan? What of his values? His moral consistency?

Imagine if you will, in light of the number of times Romney has had to apologize for his own mistakes in positions (abortion), the level at which he will be forced to qualify Ryan's incompatible policy statements.

Rep. Ryan's a spreadsheet guy; he'll always turn to the numbers to inform his own initiatives. The now-infamous Ryan Budget is the elephant in the room. Which parts of that budget conflict with Romney's plan? Which of them will he quietly dismiss?

The one major consistency between Romney and Ryan is the belief that big businesses should not be encumbered by taxes or reguations as they profit from US markets, but instead milking wage earners for all they're worth.

What conservatives don't want to talk about is that wage earners no longer have the spending power that drives economies; poverty creates no demand.

You can give all the tax and regulatory advantages to big businesses that you want, but unless they can convert those advantages into advancing sales, the economy will continue to stall.

This idea that it's now more fashionable to weigh down the buyer's spending power and pump up the nation's debt is a relatively new one -- driven buy greed and sustained by ignorance.

War on Wage Earners Gets a New Lieutenant

Like stealing the weak kids' lunch money, the corporate class is constantly figuring new ways to enrich themselves on the backs of the working class in this country. And today one of the color guards of that movement has been selected to be the number two man in a new government.

Paul Ryan, whose budget proposal would have given every advantage to commercial interests while the middle class would be left to pick up the load, is Mitt Romney's Vice Presidential pick.

Like a recent Supreme Court decision, Romney and Ryan believe corporations are people, too, which is code for freedom to amass unlimited funds to derail the peoples' choice for public office. But the Romney camp goes one further; the way they see it, corporations should not be saddled with taxes imposed on the poorest of families.

Ryan will fit right in. He's for gutting government programs that help the people, but ensuring the elite keep their power positions and riches.

Isn't it ironic how one political faction claims to hold moral high ground on family values while turning a blind eye to the suffering caused by unemployment, depressed wages, oppressive taxes and the mortgage crisis? All that talk of conservative trickle-down economics served to line the pockets of the richest and most powerful while pushing America so far into debt that there's no possibility it can be paid back.

Elite of any stripe would say I'm stricken by class envy, but that's only an attempt to divert attention away from depressed wages created by cheap labor and offshoring of production.

Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives of the ruling class are all in the pockets of the speculators, coordinating to shift economic advantages away from the actual producers of American output -- the wage earners. Ryan is now in the fight to keep this dynamic just as it has been for generations.

US Drought: an untold tax story

We've been told most grain producers have crop insurance to cover their losses during catastrophes like drought. And that might lead some to believe all's well in the heartland. But it's not good news.

Even if farmers are made whole by their insurance policies, the grain shortages are going to ripple through food and fuels markets in ways we can't imagine. And nobody's talking about it.

Many of us rightly believe the drought will increase food and fuel prices at a time when unemployment is at its highest level since the Great Depression -- and those that do have jobs have seen their wages stagnate at generational lows. That is indeed difficult to swallow.

But that's not the scary part. Did you know that taxpayers, not insurance companies, hold the lion's share of the exposure to crop insurance liabilities?

Iowa State University economics professor Bruce Babcock has said that 50 percent to 80 percent of underwriting losses will be shouldered by the federal government through a federal backstop ag subsidy program.

This is yet another alarm bell sounding for the wage earners of America.

We can have the debate about whether it's economically feasible to produce ethanol, that the energy expended to create the gasoline additive is a wash in relationship to the energy it can produce when combusted in car engines, but the facts tell us that the price of gas at the pump does not reflect the true cost to the people.

It's not enough to know that with all the layers of government subsidies and road use taxes added on, the actual price for a gallon of petro could be closer to $15 or more.

There's much more to this story.

My paranoia tells me there's dark chapter in this downturn story. Between ponzi schemes and accounting fraud we learned we'd been tricked into thinking government regulated financial instruments were adequately capitalized to endure the kinds of catastrophes we're seeing today, and likewise my fear was that insurance companies are not ready for the havoc this drought will wreak on their financial standing.

I'm sure that's another shoe bound to drop, but after realizing it's the government whose underwriting most of these policies, my fear has turned to panic. There is no taxpayer money in the federal coffers, not to mention funds to cover crop insurance payouts. Zip. Zero. There's only debt for as far as the eye can see -- more than wage earners can ever hope "grow our way out of".

Our worst nightmare comes when it becomes fashionable to admit our money has no value. That's anarchy. That's when the grocery store, gas station and utility company closes its doors because the workers have all been let go. No electricity, no water and the sewer's backed up. Infrastructure quickly crumbles. Police are gone, so crime is ramped; whatever food and gas is left will be a target for theft, and those that would try to stop it are in grave jeopardy. For a decade or longer we'll live in squaller, much like the conditions witnessed in public service commercials of third-world poverty.

You could say we'll all be -- in a word -- fu__ed.

The mini pad

I want a a super-handy, single-handed device that's more usable than iPhone & iPod.

I've been very seriously considering buying Google's Nexus 7 tablet because it has a larger-than-iPod screen and its Android implementation is not crippled like the ones other retailers are pushing.

Then, today, seemingly reliable reports that Apple is definitely announcing a mini version of the iPad with a 7.85-inch screen that'll sell for significantly less than iPad's $499 tag. That's according to "several people with knowledge of the project who declined to be named discussing confidential plans." Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said, "No comment."