Blog comments policy

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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The search for a non-opioid painkiller

When I was an undergraduate, while walking across a grassy field, I stepped into a hidden hole and fell forward. As I did so, I flung out my left arm to break the fall and that jerky motion was sufficient to dislocate my shoulder. I recall being in excruciating pain and was taken to the campus health center where the person who treated me was very familiar with sports injuries such as dislocation and he simply straightened my elbow, gave my arm a twist, and pushed it back into the socket. Like magic, the pain ceased immediately and its sudden disappearance made me feel euphoric. But now, although I recall the incident vividly, I cannot remember what the pain actually felt like. I remember that I was in great pain, but I cannot recall the feeling of pain.

This is not uncommon. Sufferers of pain find it hard to communicate to others what they are actually experiencing, however acute it might feel to them. This unfortunately means that pain sufferers might get less sympathy and consideration from those around them. This feature also makes treatment of pain difficult because we have no pain-o-meters to measure it and see how effective any treatment might be. Despite that limitation, there have been tremendous strides in the categorization and treatment of pain in the last century, depending on the type of pain being experienced, such as inflammatory and chronic pain from things like rheumatoid arthritis that is caused by nerve damage, acute pain from things like broken bones, and pain from cancers.
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Musk’s costly trail of damage

Elon Musk and Donald Trump made grandiose promises on the campaign trail about by how much they would cut the federal budget. After starting with the preposterous figure of two trillion dollars, they later reduced it to a smaller but still preposterous figure of one trillion, a figure that Susan Glasser writes that no one who had spent a day in Washington gave any credence to. In fact, these DOGE cuts may end up costing the government more money.

Musk is leaving government (so he says) and people are looking at the wreckage he leaves behind.

The reviews of Musk’s rampage through Washington have been, deservedly, vicious: Who, during the past few crazy months, could have possibly failed to take note of his toxic combination of entitlement and ignorance, his vastly overstated claims, and his move-fast-and-break-things ethos that has resulted in wreckage that will take years to fully assess?
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In a round of exit interviews this week, Musk has sounded all the predictable notes of a naïve billionaire businessman mugged by Washington’s political reality.
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In an interview on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” he started the messy work of separating himself from the President. “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk admitted, given that Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor will add trillions of dollars to the budget deficit. Stating the obvious, which, these days, counts as an act of lèse-majesté among the Republican sycophants who surround Trump, Musk added that the measure “undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
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It’s Thursday. Do you know what the tariffs are?

One has to feel some sympathy for the people at the US borders who are tasked with storing all the goods that arrive and not releasing them until the required duties are paid. With Trump careening from one tariffs policy to another on pretty much an ad hoc and day-to-day basis, they must be feeling as if they are in a whirlwind.

The latest reversal came last evening when the New York-based court of international trade (who knew that there was even such a court?) upheld a legal challenge that argued Trump had exceeded his legal authority when he bypassed Congress in announcing his tariffs.

The ruling by a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits argued Trump had exceeded his authority, leaving US trade policy dependent on the president’s whims and unleashing economic chaos around the world.

Tariffs typically need to be approved by Congress but Trump has so far bypassed that requirement by claiming that the country’s trade deficits amount to a national emergency. This had left the US president able to apply sweeping tariffs to most countries last month, in a shock move that sent markets reeling.

The court’s ruling stated that Trump’s tariff orders “exceed any authority granted to the president … to regulate importation by means of tariffs”.
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The court ruling immediately invalidates all of the tariff orders that were issued through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a law meant to address “unusual and extraordinary” threats during a national emergency.

The judges said Trump must issue new orders reflecting the permanent injunction within 10 days.

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UnitedHealth puts profit over health care

One thing that resulted from the killing by Luigi Mangione of the CEO of the health insurance conglomerate known as UnitedHealth is that it has resulted in that company’s practices getting closer scrutiny. And what is being revealed is ugly and bound to create even more anger against the company and its executives.

The whole private health insurance system in the US is systematically flawed and breeds corruption. Putting in private, profit-seeking entities such as hospitals and insurance companies between doctors and patients lead inevitably to fraud and waste and a siphoning off of resources that should go into health care into the pockets of insurance executives. UnitedHeath is by no means an outlier though it may be the most egregious offender because of its size and perhaps its greed.

The conditions for abuse within the Medicare and Medicaid system is clear. The government gives the insurance companies a lump sum, as opposed to per treatment. Whatever remains after the cost of treatment is profit for the insurance company. Hence there is a built in incentive to deny health care and UnitedHealth found many ways to do so.
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The population pendulum

We have a tendency to take any trend and extrapolate it far out in the future. This is done for both good and bad trends but bad trends tend to garner greater attention because they predict some kind of catastrophe.

One trend that is noteworthy is that of population growth. In my own lifetime I have seen fears about global populations reverse dramatically, from unchecked growth to problematic decline. In the 1970s, there were alarms that the runaway growth of population would result in a world where we would be crowded into a Soylent Green-like future with ever-smaller living spaces, where there was not enough food to feed everyone, leading to widespread violence and wars over access to scarce resources. One of the primary sources of these fears was the 1968 book The Population Bomb by Paul Erhlich, as recounted in an article by Gideon Lewis-Krauss.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist, and his largely uncredited wife, Anne, published a best-seller called “The Population Bomb.” For centuries, economists had worried that the world’s food supply could not possibly be expected to keep pace with the growing mobs of people. Now there was no postponing our fate. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” This was the received wisdom of the era: a decade earlier, an only slightly flippant article in Science estimated that in November, 2026, the global population would approach infinity.

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A college student’s powerful critique of Israeli genocide

Last week Cecilia Culver delivered a speech to her graduating class at George Washington University and she took the opportunity to speak out against the atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza, calling it flatly what it is, a genocide and Israel an apartheid state. It received a deservedly rousing reception and standing ovation from the assembled audience and is well worth listening to.


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Trump’s costly war on international students and higher education

For whatever reason, the Trump gang has decided to attack research and higher education. One form this has taken is to cut research grants and overhead charges that fund research programs and upend the review processes that go into awarding the grants. In addition, it seems to have decided that international students are undesirable and should be pressured to leave. It is doing this by harassing them with detentions and deportations and annulling their visas for the flimsiest of reasons.

It has also threatened universities with funding cuts if they do not kowtow to the administration’s demands. You would think that elite universities would hold out but one of them, Columbia University, was one of the first to buckle under with almost no protest. And yet despite its cravenness, it has still been subjected to large funding cuts.
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For Trump and his cronies, only white people matter

As if one needed evidence that Trump and his coterie only view the rights of white people as worth being concerned about, his granting of refugee status to white farmers while deporting people of color left and right, and his shameful sandbagging of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa during the latter’s visit to the White House (that seems to be be becoming a pattern of ambushing foreign leaders) springing on him photos and videos of unsubstantiated claims of discrimination against whites, should be evidence enough. Trump’s administration alleges ‘white genocide’ in that country while ignoring the blatant genocide by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories.

Sisonke Msimang gives the background to how a relatively small group of white South Africans have been successful in getting the ear of Trump and his cronies. The largely white trade union Solidarity and its policy arm AfriForum led by someone named Kallie Kriel used the claim of white genocide to garner publicity for their cause, making trips to the US during the first Trump term and talking with right wing media personalities like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, who are always eager to feed the sense of white grievance of their audiences.
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Reflections on the working poor

(Every year at Case Western Reserve University where I used to work, the incoming class of students were assigned a book to read which formed a theme for some of the programs during the year. The first one was a welcoming program at Severance Hall, the performing center of the Cleveland Orchestra. The university president and other officials would give remarks and the program would end with me sharing my reflections on the book. I am posting today (slightly edited) the text of the talk I gave in 2007 about that year’s book, journalist David Shipler’s The Working Poor: Invisible in America. I stumbled across this while going through my computer archives.)
 
Welcome to Case Western Reserve University! The people you will encounter during your four years here , the staff, faculty, and fellow students, are very different from the people described in David Shipler’s book The Working Poor: Invisible in America and I would like to address the question: What has created that difference?
 
Two answers are usually given. One is that we live in a meritocracy, and that we got where we are because of our own virtues, that we are smarter or worked harder or had a better attitude and work ethic than those who didn’t make the cut. I am sure that everyone in this auditorium has been repeatedly told by their family and friends and teachers that they are good and clever, and it is tempting to believe it. What can be more gratifying than to be told that one’s success is due to one’s own ability and efforts? It makes it all seem so well deserved, that there is justice in the world.
 
Another answer is that luck plays an important role in educational success. I suspect that most of us were fortunate enough to be born into families that had most, if not all, of the following attributes: stable homes and families, good schools and teachers, safe environments, good health, and sufficient food and clothing. Others are not so fortunate and this negatively affects their performance in school and later in life.
 
But there is a third possibility that is not often discussed and that is that the educational system has been deliberately designed so that just a small number end up like you and a much larger number of people end up like the people in the book, people who not only have failed but more significantly have learned to think of themselves as failures.
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