How Trump can make money from his money-losing social media company

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has had his Truth Social company go public by merging with a publicly traded shell company Digital World Acquisition Corp. Under the deal SSAT owns nearly 79 million shares, about 58% of the total. While the share price peaked at $79.38 on March 22, making his shares worth about $6.3 billion, it has since dropped precipitously, and as of yesterday was trading at $33, making its worth about $2.6 billion.

David Cay Johnson writes that the true value of the stock in Trump’s company is zero since it lost $58 million last year and had revenues of just $4 million with no sign that revenues will rise. Johnson says that because the stock is highly over valued, it is the target of so-called ‘short sellers’, who make money by betting correctly that a stock’s price is going to fall.
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Likely More Cancer

Back on the 12th of last month, as part of the study I’m in, I had a CT scan that showed what could be another bit of cancer in my lungs; and a PET scan about a week later confirmed that the lump was “hypermetabolic’.

Today, I had a bronchoscopy and a biopsy of the new lump.  Since that required general anesthesia and I have no one to drive me home and watch out for me overnight, I was admitted to the hospital for “observation”.  If my last two biopsies are any indication, nothing will be observed; and I’ll be on my way home by late morning or early afternoon.

I’m not sure when I’ll find out the results of the biopsy, but it’ll be tomorrow at the earliest, maybe not until Monday.  I have appointments with the radiation and chemo oncologists next Thursday when I’ll decide what to do.  At my age, there won’t be any thoracic surgery.

Does capitalism make us unhappy? No, but also yes

Money of various denominations and countries

Americans are more unhappy than ever. Is capitalism to blame?

If you ask social media, the answer is obvious. Polls show a similar shift in attitudes, especially among Gen Z: 54% of young people view capitalism negatively, according to a 2021 poll.

But if we’re going to make this argument, it’s important to get the details right. Why, specifically, is capitalism bad for human happiness?

The simplest explanation is that capitalism gives rise to enormous inequality and forces us to struggle for survival, and that makes people miserable. But that hypothesis might be a little too simple.

Massive inequality, poverty and precarity aren’t unique to capitalism. They’ve been features of every society since the dawn of agriculture. Does this imply that no one has ever been happy, except for a tiny minority of the privileged?

The data don’t support such a stark conclusion. If you look at a worldwide survey of happiness by country, it’s true that the richest countries are near the top and the poorer ones are on the bottom. However, happiness doesn’t correlate strictly with GDP or income.

Countries with a wide range of median incomes all cluster around similar numbers. The United States, the richest country in the world, is only the 26th happiest. Some less-wealthy countries, like Costa Rica, surpass us. Mexico, with one-eighth the median income of the U.S., is only two places behind. It appears that wealth doesn’t influence happiness as much as you might guess.

Of course, poverty is harmful. If you can’t afford enough to eat or a roof over your head, you’ll be unhappy. However, inequality isn’t harmful – at least, not intrinsically. It doesn’t hurt you by the mere fact of its existence, like disease or war. If your neighbor is ten times richer than you but is practicing stealth wealth, living in a modest house and wearing non-designer clothes, you’ll never realize.

Inequality only hurts if you’re aware of it. In that case, it naturally inspires feelings of envy (I want what he’s got!) and inadequacy (am I not as good as him?), both of which make us unhappy.

This is an ancient instinct, older than humanity. As a famous experiment shows, even monkeys feel unhappy because of inequality. They’re happy to get a cucumber slice as the reward for a task, unless they see another monkey getting a tasty grape for doing the same job. Then they throw a tantrum.

This is where capitalism comes in. We’re bathed in more advertising than ever, both in the sheer quantity of ads and in their intrusiveness. Marketers spend trillions of dollars to cram commercials into our eyeballs everywhere we look. Capitalism incentivizes this behavior in a way that no previous economic system did.

And that matters, because the purpose of advertising is to make us unhappy. Its goal is to make our lives feel incomplete so we’ll spend money trying to plug the hole. No matter how much you have, it sends the message that you’re falling behind and need more.

Ubiquitous social media also supercharges our ability to peer into other people’s lives. Once, the only people you could easily compare yourself to were your neighbors on the same block. At most, you could read a gossip column or watch a TV show about the lives of celebrities. Now you can see in real time how the richest people on the planet live. That widens the circle of people you compare yourself to, and as the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy.

Social media can even make us perceive inequalities that don’t exist. We all feel the temptation to curate our lives for social media: to post only about the good parts, and to polish them up and present them as favorably as possible. That can make it seem, when you scroll through your friends list, as if everyone’s life is going great except for yours. It’s comparing someone else’s highlight reel to your cutting room floor.

It goes beyond curation into outright deception. Some “influencers” resort to selective editing and other tricks (like renting a private jet just to pose in the cabin for a photoshoot) to create the false impression that they’re leading a life of luxury.

Both advertising and social media contribute to unhappiness in this way. Capitalism doesn’t just create inequality, it strives to shove it in our faces at every turn, and that does make people unhappy.

Human psychology is such that we tend to be discontented and envious if we have less than our neighbors, and that’s true no matter how much money or how many possessions you have. Capitalism thrives on this mindset, because envy fosters the desire to compete and consume. But human suffering is the raw material that powers it.

Capitalism tells us lies about what makes us happy: more work, more money, more stuff. If you believe those lies, you’ll be running on an endless treadmill, seeking fulfillment through consumption but never finding it, going deeper into debt for no gain. Or, like many white-collar workers, you’ll get caught up in hustle culture, working grueling hours and killing yourself with stress when you already have more than enough for a good life.

The things that truly make human beings happy aren’t for sale. They include autonomy, meaningful relationships, leisure, creativity, and natural beauty. We’ll still need to work, if only to provide for our basic needs, but making more money on top of that doesn’t make people any happier.

Yet millions of Americans believe that happiness comes from being rich. They’re mortgaging their lives in service to this falsehood, encouraged by marketing that stokes feelings of greed and envy, and ruining the planet in the bargain.

The first step in fixing this problem is to recognize the illusion for what it is. All our extravagant consumption is neither a right nor a necessity. We can be perfectly content leading much simpler lives. The sooner we learn that, the happier we’ll be.

The only summary of the Cass Report that I need

I keep hearing from anti-trans activists that this major review of the literature on the efficacy of transgender treatments, the Cass Report, confirms their position, which I don’t understand. What I’ve read of the report isn’t very overwhelming at all. Rather than wading into almost 400 pages of text, though, I thought this succinct summary of the whole thing was very good.

A systematic review collects all the published research in an area and ranks the research based on how likely it is to be reliable. The weakest form of evidence are case reports, where a doctor formally writes up an anecdote about a patient. The strongest form of evidence are randomized controlled trials where patients are randomly assigned to some type of medication or intervention, or to no intervention, or to a placebo, and the groups are compared to see how an intervention compares to alternatives/no treatment/placebo. Systematic reviews of several interventions for trans youth were undertaken by the University of York including puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, social transition, and psychosocial support measures.

The results of each of the systematic reviews was to characterize the overall evidence as weak, which was the Report’s most significant finding and has been widely reported. When looking more granularly at the York papers, a pattern appears of some papers showing a psychological benefit of the intervention, a smaller number showing no change positive or negative, and no papers showing any psychological harm. For example, in the systematic review of the evidence on puberty blockers, several included studies suggested psychological benefits to treatment in a range of areas, while a smaller number of studies found no significant impact. This was summarized in both the papers and the Report as “weak evidence” but could also be accurately described as “weak evidence (in favor of treatment).”

That the evidence was weak is not an indictment of the report — by their nature, case reports are necessarily weak. The alternative is to do controlled experimentation on human children, which is going to be even more problematic! The weak evidence is what we have, and that evidence says that, for the sake of the children, we should be treating kids.

The report itself actively endorses the use of puberty blockers, as well as other treatments, in addition to further studies of their effects. However, it takes a very conservative position on when young people should be allowed to take them, and even discouraged social transitioning in young children.

A full programme of research should be established to look at the characteristics, interventions and outcomes of every young person presenting to the NHS gender services.
The puberty blocker trial previously announced by NHS England should be part of a programme of research which also evaluates outcomes of psychosocial interventions and masculinising/ feminising hormones.

So I don’t get it. Why are the trans haters treating this as a vindication of their position? What I’m seeing is a cautious, conservative review that is compelled by the evidence to give cautious, conservative recommendations in favor of some degree of treatment, and I don’t care how much Helen Lewis and The Atlantic strain to twist it into a condemnation of American policy.

As usual, expect the issue to continue to be unresolved as ideology is used to torment trans kids further.

The hemorrhaging of Red America continues

[Previous: The lights are flickering in Red America]

Rural Americans are white, conservative, and Republican. That pattern holds overwhelmingly true, and it explains almost all of the political divide in America, even if some experts shy away from the implications.

I make no claims to be impartial about this. But if you can judge a political ideology by anything, you should judge it by the success or failure it produces. When that ideology gets to govern, do its followers thrive, or do they suffer? Do they have stable, prosperous, happy lives, or do they spiral down a vortex of misery?

Let’s consider a new piece of evidence summed up by this headline: “The urban-rural death divide is getting alarmingly wider for working-age Americans“.

As recently as 25 years ago, urban and rural areas had comparable death rates among working-age adults. But since that time, cities have been improving, while rural areas are faring worse and worse. A new report from the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service shows just how wide the gap has gotten:

The report focused in on a key indicator of population health: mortality among prime working-age adults (people ages 25 to 54) and only their natural-cause mortality (NCM) rates — deaths among 100,000 residents from chronic and acute diseases — clearing away external causes of death, including suicides, drug overdoses, violence, and accidents. On this metric, rural areas saw dramatically worsening trends compared with urban populations.

…In 1999, the NCM rate in 25- to 54-year-olds in rural areas was 6 percent higher than the NCM rate of this age group in urban areas. In 2019, the gap had grown to a whopping 43 percent. In fact, prime working-age adults in rural areas was the only age group in the US that saw an increased NCM rate in this time period.

Rural areas have higher rates of drug overdose, suicide, alcoholism and other ills than cities, per capita. However, this conclusion holds true even if you exclude those causes and focus only on so-called natural deaths.

Your first thought might be that COVID accounts for a big chunk of the difference, but no. The researchers specifically excluded 2020 from their data set, because they considered it an outlier. However, including COVID would make this already huge gap into an even wider chasm, considering that the reddest parts of America had a COVID death rate almost six times higher than the blue ones.

There are no plagues that are unique to rural America. Red-state residents die from the same causes as residents of blue cities. They just die from them more often:

Among all rural working-age residents, the leading natural causes of death were cancer and heart disease — which was true among urban residents as well. But, in rural residents, these conditions had significantly higher mortality rates than what was seen in urban residents.

Why do rural residents die in larger numbers? A big part of the problem is that, because they’re more spread out to begin with, doctors and hospitals are few and far between. That makes it harder for them to get the medical care they need, both on a regular basis and in emergencies.

That problem is rapidly getting worse, because the health-care system in rural America is running on fumes. With each passing year, more and more rural hospitals are losing money, forcing them to pare back services or close entirely:

A recently released report from the health analytics and consulting firm Chartis paints a clear picture of the grim reality Ryerse and other small-hospital managers face. In its financial analysis, the firm concluded that half of rural hospitals lost money in the past year, up from 43% the previous year. It also identified 418 rural hospitals across the United States that are “vulnerable to closure.”

…According to Chartis, nearly a quarter of rural hospitals have closed their obstetrics units and 382 have stopped providing chemotherapy.

The harm inflicted by hospital closures goes beyond the sick people who are most directly affected. It tears holes in the social fabric. People with means won’t move to places where they can’t get medical care. Young people who want to start families will avoid places without labor and delivery wards. (Some rural states, like Idaho, are losing so many obstetrics wards that they may soon become maternity deserts in their entirety.)

When people don’t want to live in these places, employers will move away because they can’t attract talent. That creates a brain drain, worsening poverty and leading to a death spiral:

While people in rural America are more likely to die of cancer than people in urban areas, providing specialty cancer treatment also helps ensure that older adults can stay in their communities. Similarly, obstetrics care helps attract and keep young families.

Whittling services because of financial and staffing problems is causing “death by a thousand cuts,” said [Michael] Topchik [co-author of the Chartis study], adding that hospital leaders face choices between keeping the lights on, paying their staff, and serving their communities.

The article proposes, hopefully, that Congressional support will be needed to keep the lights on in rural hospitals. The brutal reality is that this isn’t going to happen, because there’s no constituency for it.

As the last few years have demonstrated, most voters living in these white rural enclaves don’t value their own health. More than that, they fight furiously against efforts to improve it. They’re loud supporters of Republicans whose only concern is punishing women for having abortions, or gay people getting married, or transgender people using bathrooms, or immigrants coming to this country to find jobs, or whatever culture-war noise Fox News is telling them to care about today. The politicians they elect do nothing tangible to improve their lives, and they seem content with that.

Meanwhile, the biggest policy proposals that would make a positive difference to rural voters’ lives – like the Medicaid expansion, or COVID vaccination programs, or infrastructure spending, or stronger unions, or even single-payer health care – are Democratic initiatives, and they resist all of them with furious tenacity. As long as they cling to these attitudes, their doctors will keep fleeing, their hospitals will keep closing, and they’ll keep getting sicker and living shorter lives. They’re literally dying of whiteness, and it seems that’s the way they prefer it.

If Rebecca Watson agrees, we must be right

Hey, I said the same thing! Twice! This makes the third time an atheist pointed out that Dawkins was just being a boring ol’ bigot, so we must be right.

Gosh, I hope none of his defenders start crying over the repeated rebuke. Although they deserve it, criticizing Dawkins gets them mad and they start sending me unpleasant hate mail.

The Republican descent into insanity continues

Would believe they’re afraid that people are filling their lettuce with vaccines? Publish one little paper suggesting that plant tissue could be a source of pharmaceutical mRNA, and some right-wing dingbat immediately assumes that there’s a nefarious plan afoot to inoculate good god-fearing anti-vaxxers with stuff that might make them resistant to disease. We’d never do that! Besides, it would be pointless to use lettuce as a vector, since we all know they only eat red meat. Or, it was red until they cooked it to the texture of shoe leather. (Ooh, sudden thought…maybe we could smuggle mystery chemicals into their food via ketchup.)

Getting into more serious territory, Louisiana, the worst state in the union by nearly all metrics, now wants to criminalize the American Library Association. They must really hate the ALA, because this is what the law proposes.

A. No public official or employee shall appropriate, allocate, reimburse, or otherwise or in any way expend public funds to or with the American Library Association or its successor.
B. No public employee shall request or receive reimbursement or remuneration in any form for continuing education or for attending a conference if the continuing education or conference was sponsored or conducted, in whole or in part, by the American Library Association or its successor.
C. Whoever violates this Section shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars or be imprisoned, with or without hard labor, for not more than two years, or both.

It’s not clear what has pissed off the Republican sponsors so much that they would sentence librarians to hard labor for joining the organization. It’s probably because the ALA opposes book banning and endorses literacy.

The big surprise this week is Arizona. The Republicans have a one seat majority in the Arizona house and senate, and they used it to pass a near-total ban on abortion. They got the assistance of the looney-tunes Arizona Supreme Court.

Arizona’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the state’s 1864 law banning all abortions, except to save the life of the mother, is now, enforceably, the law of the land. It is now a felony for a doctor—or anyone else—to assist a woman getting an abortion, punishable by two to five years in prison.

Arizona is a microcosm of what America would look like if the Republicans grab just a few more seats. There’s more that they have accomplished!

For example, the GOP-led legislature recently passed House Bill 2843 that would allow property owners to shoot and kill undocumented immigrants who simply walk across their property. This followed a border property owner’s arrest after he allegedly shot and killed an undocumented migrant walking on his land. Gov. Hobbs vetoed the bill this week.

Also this week, some MAGA legislative extremists were rolling on the Senate floor and speaking in tongues as they prayed for their bills to pass.

Of course, there’s also the usual Biblical shenanigans.

With a one-seat Republican majority in both the House and Senate, the legislature recently passed a bill that will allow teachers in public and charter K-12 schools to post and read the Ten Commandments in class.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Anthony Kern—a candidate for the U.S. Congress, currently under investigation as one of Donald Trump’s “fake electors” that falsely asserted Trump won the state in 2020—now moves to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs’ desk, where a veto is expected.

Imagine if the federal government were under the thumb of the holy rollers and racists and know-nothings — they’re close to a perfectly legal take-over.

I hope you’re all planning to vote in November.

The return of a cicada swarm

Parts of the northeastern US are bracing for a cicada swarm when trillions of these creatures will burst from the ground when the temperature warms up a little more.

There are thousands of species of cicadas around the world but only 10 are considered periodical – having a life cycle that involves the juvenile cicadas living underground and feeding on plant sap for years before emerging en masse to the surface.

This year will see Brood XIX, the largest of all periodical cicada groups, emerge after a 13-year dormancy underground at the same time as Brood XII, a smaller group that appears every 17 years. The emergence will occur in spring, as early as this month in some places, and will see trillions of cicadas pop up in as many as 16 states, from Maryland to Oklahoma and from Illinois to Alabama.
…

Cicadas choose to burst aboveground when the soil temperature hits a certain point – usually around 64F (17C) – and global heating, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is potentially scrambling this natural process.

Entomologists and cicada enthusiasts are excited about the prospect.

“It’s really exciting. I’ve been looking forward to this for many years,” said Catherine Dana, an entomologist who specializes in cicadas at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “For the public, it’s going to be a really special experience.”
…

For now, onlookers can still enjoy this rare burst of nature in their gardens and public spaces. “Sit back and be in awe at the spectacle,” advised John Cooley, a cicada expert at the University of Connecticut who tracks the emergences. “It will be over soon enough. Then think about where you will be in 13 or 17 years. It’s a time for introspection.”

I can’t say that I share that enthusiasm. My only encounter with cicadas was in 2004 when I was in New Jersey for a few days when the area was hit with a cicada swarm. Since that was twenty years ago, that brood must not have been part of the big 13 and 17 year cohorts associated with broods XII or XIX. But the swarm was large enough. These creatures that look like cockroaches were everywhere, making a terrific racket and you could not walk outdoors without stepping on them and squashing them, which was kind of gross. I am glad that I will be nowhere near them this time.

I do not like cicadas

I didn’t see much of them while I was growing up near Seattle, but then I spent a year in Indiana, where the cicadas are deafening in the summer. I learned to detest their shrill noisiness then. Now I live in Minnesota where we get the annual cicadas, but they aren’t so numerous as to generate the cacophony people have to live with elsewhere.

It’s going to be bad this summer, because two broods of the 13- and 17-year periodic cicadas are going to be crawling out simultaneously and singing continuously. There’s nothing you can do about it.

See how Minnesota is free of the Magicicada plague? I’ll be staying away from Iowa & Illinois & Indiana, that’s for sure.

Although…I do not dislike the cicadas so much that I would wish a fungal infection on them, especially not a fungus as creepy as this one.

Once the cicadas emerge from the ground, they molt into adults, and within a week to 10 days, the fungus causes the backside of their abdomens open up. A chalky, white plug erupts out, taking over their bodies and making their genitals fall off.

“The cicada continues to participate in normal activities, like it would if it was healthy,” Kasson told CBS News. “Like it tries to mate, it flies around, it walks on plants. Yet, a third of its body has been replaced by fungus. That’s really kind of bizarre.”

Kasson said the reason the cicadas might be able to ignore the fungus is that it produces an amphetamine, which could give them stamina.

“But there’s also something else unusual about it,” he said. “There’s this hyper-sexualized behavior. So, males for example, they’ll continue to try and mate with females — unsuccessfully, because again, their back end is a fungus. But they’ll also pretend to be females to get males to come to them. And that doubles the number of cicadas that an infected individual comes in contact with.”

What’s really evil about that fungus is that despite all the body horror, it doesn’t shut the cicadas up. In another bizarre twist, it also affects animals around them.

The fungus is also the type that has hallucinatory effects on birds that would eat them, Cooley said.

There’s more! Cicadas have another repulsive habit.

Bhamla in March published a study of the urination flow rates of animals across the world. Cicadas were clearly king, peeing two to three times stronger and faster than elephants and humans. He couldn’t look at the periodical cicadas that mostly feed and pee underground, but he used video to record and measure the flow rate of their Amazon cousins, which topped out around 10 feet per second (3 meters per second).

They have a muscle that pushes the waste through a tiny hole like a jet, Bhamla said. He said he learned this when in the Amazon he happened on a tree the locals called a “weeping tree” because liquid was flowing down, like the plant was crying. It was cicada pee.

“You walk around in a forest where they’re actively chorusing on a hot sunny day. It feels like it’s raining,” said University of Connecticut entomologist John Cooley. That’s their honeydew or waste product coming out the back end … It’s called cicada rain.”

I hope the residents of states south and east of me are looking forward to a summer of getting pissed on by shrieking zombie insects while the birds are tripping balls and spacing out.

Trump’s curious campaign against his potential allies

Rachel Leingang writes that you have to listen to in full to the rally speeches of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to appreciate how unhinged they are. The snippets that are broadcast, even if they are of his lies and lunacies, actually make him seem more lucid than he really is.

He’s on the campaign trail less these days than he was in previous cycles – and less than you’d expect from a guy with dedicated superfans who brags about the size of his crowds every chance he gets. But when he has held rallies, he speaks in dark, dehumanizing terms about migrants, promising to vanquish people crossing the border. He rails about the legal battles he faces and how they’re a sign he’s winning, actually. He tells lies and invents fictions. He calls his opponent a threat to democracy and claims this election could be the last one.

Trump’s tone, as many have noted, is decidedly more vengeful this time around, as he seeks to reclaim the White House after a bruising loss that he insists was a steal. This alone is a cause for concern, foreshadowing what the Trump presidency redux could look like. But he’s also, quite frequently, rambling and incoherent, running off on tangents that would grab headlines for their oddness should any other candidate say them.
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Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories.
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These tangents can be part of a tirade, or they can be what one can only describe as complete nonsense.

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