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How Did Groundhog Day Start?


Every year on February 2, crowds gather at Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to watch a groundhog emerge for the day. You know the drill—if he sees his shadow, bad news: There will be six more weeks of winter. But if he doesn’t see a shadow, spring is right around the corner.

In reality, groundhogs don’t make the best meteorologists, and poor Punxsutawney Phil doesn’t have a great track record (as of 2016, he’d made the right call just 39 percent of the time, according to Stormfax). So how did the bizarre tradition of Groundhog Day get its start?

The roots of Groundhog Day aren’t as random as they might seem. The beginning of February marks the halfway point between winter solstice (the shortest day of the year) and spring equinox (when night and day are about the same length). Pagans would celebrate February 1 or 2 with a festival of light to mark the start of spring. Gaelic legend says that if the goddess Cailleach wanted a long winter, she’d make the day bright so she’d have sunlight to gather more firewood. But a dreary day she’d stayed in because spring was on its way.

Medieval Christians adopted the festival and handed out candles. The feast day falls 40 days after Christmas, marking the end of the period when Jewish tradition would have considered Jesus’ mother unclean after giving birth. (Learn about the surprising histories behind your favorite Christmas traditions.) She would have been allowed to worship in the Temple again, so February 2 is also considered the day that baby Jesus would have been presented there for the first time. One old English song connects the day to the weather:

“If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.”

Eventually, Europeans started looking to animals’ hibernation patterns on Candlemas to predict the weather. Some watched to see if bears would come out of their dens, while the English looked for hedgehogs, and the French waited for marmots.

Germans, whose tradition said a badger would walk out of its hole if there was snow but retreat back inside if the sun was out, brought the custom to the United States. The Pennsylvania Dutch gave it their own twist by replacing badgers with groundhogs, probably because the hibernating animals were so common in the Keystone State.

In 1887, watching for Punxsutawney Phil became an official event. Since then, other cities have started looking to their own groundhogs, like New York’s Staten Island Chuck and Georgia’s General Beauregard Lee. Whichever furry forecaster is your trusted favorite, cross your fingers for a speedy, shadow-free spring.

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Donald Trump’s White House is in chaos. And he loves it.


I cannot possibly add anything to this and offer it as a better explanation than I can devise.MA

By Chris Cillizza
January 31, 2017 at 11:44 AM
On Monday night on CNN, Carl Bernstein made this proclamation: “The president and his presidency is in chaos.”
It’s a remarkable statement given that we are only 11 days into the presidency of Donald Trump. It’s also very hard to dispute.
Consider this amazing — and I do mean amazing — WaPo story today about how Trump and his inner circle produced the very controversial executive order instituting a travel ban on refugees and all visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The story details the infighting and blame game among Trump’s top advisers and includes some eye-popping lines.
Among them:
* “Defense Secretary James Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly fumed privately to associates over the weekend because they had been caught unaware by a travel ban that was drafted and set into action largely in secret by the White House, according to three people who have spoken with them.”

* “The problem they’ve got is this is an off-Broadway performance of a show that is now the number one hit on Broadway,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich of the Trump administration. (Sidebar: Gingrich is an informal adviser to Trump!)
* “A little bit of under-competence and a slight amount of insecurity can breed some paranoia and backstabbing,” one White House official said of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. “We have to get Reince to relax into the job and become more competent, because he’s seeing shadows where there are no shadows.”
Any one of those lines is problematic in a normal White House. The quote from an anonymous White House official about Priebus who, let me emphasize, is the White House chief of staff, is stunning. If that line was used in “House of Cards,” I would roll my eyes and say it would never happen in real life.
And, it’s not just the Post story that shows the seeming tumult among Trump’s senior advisers. A piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday details how Department of Homeland Security chief John Kelly is at odds with the White House over staffing in his organization. A Vanity Fair post details the struggles of Trump son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner as he seeks to exert influence over the president.
Read any one of those stories and the word “chaos” jumps to mind. Or “turmoil.” Or “dissension.” All of them convey the same thing: Less than two weeks into his presidency, there is a knife fight happening daily among Trump’s top aides.

Bernstein clearly meant his chaos comments in a negative way. Chaos, in traditional political thinking, is bad. It suggests a president who doesn’t really have control over his people and a White House that resembles a roller coaster car shuddering as it travels at too high a speed down the tracks.
And, maybe that’s all true. It’s possible that the Trump train is on the verge of jumping the tracks. (Mixed metaphor alert!)
But, every indication from what we know of Trump the businessman and reality TV star suggests that he revels in the chaos, that he believes the chaos produces just the sort of results he likes.
Think back to the “boardroom” on “The Apprentice.” Bring everybody in. Let them attack one another and level allegations. Consult with a few of your consiglieres — George for the win! — and then make a bold and, often, unpredictable decision. Yes, that was a TV show. But it was a TV show created by Trump (and Mark Burnett). That means that the way the show worked came directly out of Trump’s brain and generally speaking represents his view of how things should work.
Remember that for Trump, appearances matter most. And he likes the perception of himself as the decider, the buck-stopper, the only one who can cut through all of the noise and battling egos to make the call. In order to make that image truly work, you need noise around you at all times. So Trump put in place a senior leadership team that would create it.
The other important point here is that Trump believes all of life — business and politics included — amounts to a sort of survival of the fittest/toughest. His critique of Hillary Clinton’s health during the 2016 campaign was based on the idea that anyone who has a weak moment — as Clinton did at a 9/11 memorial service — can’t possibly be up to the top job in the country. For Trump, the constant battles between his aides are a sort of real-life “Survivor” episode. The toughest SOB is the one Trump wants. And only through political combat can that be determined.

The combination of chaos, combat and constant sniping is not a bad thing in the worldview of Donald Trump. In fact, it is the one truly necessary thing.

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“It will not get better”: Former Bush administration official has a warning about President Trump’s administration


A short read that sums up a Trump (TOTUS) Presidency and its effect.MA

Ex-Condoleezza Rice aide Eliot A. Cohen also has strong words for conservatives who are working with Trump
Matthew Rozsa

Topics: Donald Trump, Eliot A. Cohen, Frank Lavin, Lezlee Westine, richard w. painter, News, Politics News.

Yet another former official for President George W. Bush has gone on the record criticizing President Donald Trump — this time it’s Eliot A. Cohen, who served as a counselor to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009.
Trump’s first week as president has already been marred by a “dark and divisive inaugural speech, extraordinary attacks on a free press, a visit to the CIA that dishonored a monument to anonymous heroes who paid the ultimate price, and now an attempt to ban selected groups of Muslims,” Cohen wrote in The Atlantic. He pointed out that “because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better.”
Cohen predicted that Trump’s poor character and choice of advisers will “probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have.” Cohen continued, “It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.”
He went on to condemn his conservative friends who are thinking of working with or even for the dangerous new president.
“For the community of conservative thinkers and experts, and more importantly, conservative politicians, this is a testing time,” Cohen wrote. “Either you stand up for your principles and for what you know is decent behavior, or you go down, if not now, then years from now, as a coward or opportunist. Your reputation will never recover, nor should it.”

That said, Cohen ended his article on an optimistic note: “In the end, however, he will fail,” Cohen predicted. “He will fail because however shrewd his tactics are, his strategy is terrible — The New York Times, the CIA, Mexican Americans, and all the others he has attacked are not going away. With every act he makes new enemies for himself and strengthens their commitment; he has his followers, but he gains no new friends.
Added Cohen: “He will fail because he cannot corrupt the courts, and because even the most timid senator sooner or later will say ‘enough.’ He will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Cohen is not the first former Bush administration official to speak out against Trump. In an opinion piece for The New York Times posted earlier this month, former chief White House ethics lawyer Richard W. Painter slammed the president’s numerous conflicts of interest:
“He continues to refuse to release his tax returns, even though many of his cabinet nominees will have to disclose theirs in order to get confirmed by senators skeptical of, among other things, foreign business entanglements,” Painter wrote. “He also did not announce a divestment of ownership interest in his businesses, even though this is a step that his own cabinet appointees will have to take in order to comply with a federal conflict of interest law. Instead, Mr. Trump will simply turn management of the businesses over to a trustee chosen by him, and to two of his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. This is not a separation at all, and from a conflict of interest vantage point, it won’t work.”
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Similarly Lezlee Westine, who served as White House director of public liaison and deputy assistant to the president under Bush, endorsed Hillary Clinton in August. Although she didn’t directly attack Trump, her reasons for endorsing Clinton seemed to indicate that she was concerned about Trump’s lack of experience.
“Our nation faces a unique set of challenges that require steady and experienced leadership,” Westine said. “That is why today I am personally supporting Hillary Clinton. She has the expertise and commitment to American values to grow the economy, create jobs and protect America at home and abroad.”
The former political director for president Ronald Reagan, Frank Lavin, returned to the themes of Trump’s character when endorsing Clinton that same month.
“Trump falls short in terms of the character and behavior needed to perform as president,” Lavin wrote. “This defect is crippling and ensures he would fail in office.”

Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and his work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

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Donald Trump, The Radical Right Is Setting You Up In Washington!


This post from Russell Simmons speaks directly to what the Trump Presidency could mean. MA

Russell Simons

01/26/2017

I know we haven’t spoken since your run for office. The truth is, I never thought you would become president. I’m sure the comments I made publicly and to the press against your platform broke our friendship apart. That said, I still have some advice for the man I used to consider a friend. You are being set up.

I am convinced you are the Trojan horse. The extremists in the Republican Party and religious right have been praying for a long time to put a candidate in the position to turn back the tide of our forward push for justice and equality, which is in effect the American dream. The pendulum of consciousness always swings towards compassion and justice. There are moments that it swings back but once given a taste of freedom the people will thirst for it and will not let anyone take that away. African-Americans will never again be slaves, women will never again lose their right to vote or go quietly back into the coat hanger days, the LGBTQ community will not go back into the closet, the right to worship as we see fit will not be taken from one — you will have to strip it from everyone.

No American president has ever entered the Oval Office with an agenda so set on trying to undo the civil, social and political gains for equality that have been so long fought. And now we are bracing to have all of our victories overturned. Those lowest common denominator radicals of the Republican party have you locked in a role to do their bidding.

You came into the race as a strong independent voice and now you are going down a path of having the mainstream Republican party impeach you for many of your questionable choices that some of them support privately, but don’t want to carry the weight of.

I find it hard to believe you are comfortable going down in history as being impeached as the president who was taken out for Russian ties or signing off on the Dakota/Keystone pipelines benefiting a company you held stock in? When this happens where will they be? They will tell the American public it was all on you as they reap the rewards of some of the worst decisions a president has made for the people he is supposed to serve. If you are impeached, Vice President Pence will have the position he has always wanted with all the dirty work done for him without having lifted a hand. And in the best case scenario for you, which is you stay for the entire term, you will leave a legacy of heightened racial discord, massive environmental destruction and the shame of having repealed legislation that promoted equality and fairness for all Americans. You will continue to be shunned and protested against by the majority of citizens who will blame you for your radical and dangerous attacks on everything America stands for.

My advice to you is don’t let yourself get played by these suckas in Washington. Or we, the American public, will all pay for your naivety. We will be left to suffer as individuals who must deal with racism being accepted again, women being treated as second class citizens, the aftermath of immigrant families broken up and deported and an environment that will succumb to the mounting crisis of climate change. Future generations will be in an irreversible position of not being able to sustain the Earth they live on. You will be forgotten and dismissed by the radical right when you are long gone. A foolish blip in the big story of a sad American tragedy.

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TOTUS


It is evident that we are in for a rocky four years of governing, we have a President who seems to have no idea of the job he has taken on and seems to believe he can govern alone. Add to this a neer do well Congress and you have a perfect cocktail of ineptitude.MA  

Donald Trump’s Profound Laziness Is Already on Full Display
Jay Willis
January 23, 2017 9:27 AM Getty Images
Welcome to the first “fake it ’til you make it” presidency in American history.
President Donald Trump’s first three days are in the books, and they proved exactly as horrifying and surreal as the last 18 months that Candidate Trump inflicted on America. On Saturday, while on an official visit to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters—and in front of a memorial honoring the men and women of the intelligence community who died in service of their country—Trump rambled angrily about his “running war with the media,” just moments after trotting out newly minted White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to shout delusional, easily disprovable lies about, of all things, the number of people who attended his inauguration. What’s clear is that unapologetic propagandists now occupy the White House dais, and for the next four years, Americans will be governed by officials who remain wholly uninterested in earning their trust.
Trump’s obsession with crowd size is emblematic of his most crippling insecurity: He has no creativity, no originality, and no clue what to do next. His desperate craving to be liked runs so deep that, as he transformed from political outsider to major-party nominee to president-elect, he began shamelessly borrowing ideas from the types of respected, popular politicians that he wished he could be. His wife’s address at the Republican National Convention lifted entire sections from a speech delivered by the previous First Lady. He stole an inspiring photograph of giddy, euphoric crowds taken at the inauguration of his predecessor, because no such crowds attended his. Even the smallest subjects cannot escape this creatively bankrupt laziness: When planning the inaugural ball, his people requested an exact replica of the cake President Obama had made four years earlier. So, yes, Donald Trump kicked off his presidency by plagiarizing a cake.
The little indiscretions are funny, but they are more revealing than entertaining. For years, the Republican Party has solemnly pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, that dastardly albatross responsible for making healthcare available to 20 million previously uninsured Americans, as soon as they are given the chance. Every serious GOP presidential candidate—including Trump—made their plan for replacing the ACA a central tenet of their pitch to prospective voters. On his first day in office, Trump’s version of delivering on his promise was issuing an executive order that “directed” federal agencies to try really hard to make Obamacare go away.
It is the policy of my Administration to seek the prompt repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111-148), as amended (the “Act”). In the meantime, pending such repeal, it is imperative for the executive branch to ensure that the law is being efficiently implemented, take all actions consistent with law to minimize the unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens of the Act, and prepare to afford the States more flexibility and control to create a more free and open healthcare market.
This isn’t leadership. It demonstrates no coherent vision. It’s a feeble, feckless, empty gesture, the kind you make when you (1) know you’re supposed to think that something is bad, but (2) also aren’t really sure what that thing is and can’t be bothered to read the Simple English Wikipedia article describing it, either. Even Trump’s omnipresent campaign slogan—”Make America Great Again”—shows just how brutally bereft of original ideas he is. It’s the sort of vague, aspirational nonsense that one would expect to hear from a man who learned everything he knows about being president of the United States from watching other men play one on TV.
Of course, no newly elected president steps into the White House fully prepared for the myriad challenges he or she will face. But Trump is unwilling or unable to grasp his shortcomings, and instead appears prepared to mask them by employing a two-pronged strategy: Come out with strong, forceful takes on substantively irrelevant subjects that he can easily understand, and glibly borrow from others when it comes to the hard political decisions that Americans expect him to make. This patchwork, smoke-and-mirrors approach to governance isn’t sustainable, but so far, it’s all he’s got.

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No Jedi Mind Trick


Ewan McGregor Praised By Stars For Canceling on Piers Morgan

Ewan McGregor is receiving praise from fellow celebrities for canceling an interview with Piers Morgan in the wake of the journalist’s criticism of the Women’s March.
As Gossip Cop reported, Morgan ripped the Women’s March On Washington in a series of tweets on Saturday. He was immediately hit with a backlash, which only led him to criticize the peaceful protests even more. He went on to write a Daily Mail column blasting Madonna’s Women’s March speech, in which she admitted to thinking about “blowing up the White House.” He also again lambasted the event in general.
Now on Tuesday, McGregor was scheduled to appear on “Good Morning Britain,” for which Morgan is one of the anchors. The actor tweeted, however, “Was going on Good Morning Britain, didn’t realise @piersmorgan was host. Won’t go on with him after his comments about #WomensMarch.” Not surprisingly, Morgan immediately fired back on Twitter, as well as on air. He also quickly wrote a new Daily Mail article slamming the star. The headline: “Memo to anyone who voted for Trump or Brexit — pedophile-loving hypocrite Ewan McGregor holds you in utter contempt. So why on earth would you want to see any of his movies ever again?”
In addition to calling out McGregor’s political views and his work with Roman Polanski, Morgan argued that the T2 Trainspotting actor was unprofessional for bailing at the last minute, after already arriving at the ITV studios. He pointed out that other staffers had been working on the segment, and it been promoted since Monday. He further suggested McGregor could’ve confronted him instead of leaving.
But McGregor is also being cheered for his decision to back out. Patrick Stewart tweeted, “Bravo Ewan. Standing right there with you.” The message was retweeted by Ben Stiller. Vincent D’Onofrio said, “Good man Ewan. I back you 100%.” And Jessica Chastain posted, “You are an incredible human being. Thank you for your support of #WomensMarch and women all over the world.”
As Gossip Cop reported at the time, McGregor was one of the celebrities who tweeted in support of the Women’s March last weekend. He wrote, “I’m with you in spirit today women of the world. My daughters are marching. I’m so proud to see this extraordinary power.”

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House GOP Enacts Rule Allowing Lawmakers To Fire, Slash Salaries Of Individual Federal Employees


It is odd that the Congress is not making moves to slash their own salaries. Just another reason to watch the Congress closely. MA
House GOP enacts rule allowing lawmakers to fire, slash salaries of individual federal employees
5:52 a.m. ET

Peter Weber
At the same closed-door meeting on Monday where House Republicans voted to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics — a move scrapped after a public outcry — the House GOP also adopted a motion by Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) that allows Congress to single out individual federal employees and eliminate their jobs or reduce their pay down to as little as $1, or cut specific federal programs, through amendments to the budget. The procedural mechanism, adopted Tuesday, is called the Holman Rule, named after the Indiana congressman who created it in 1876, The Washington Post explains:
Early in its history, the rule was used to eliminate patronage jobs, particularly customs agents, in the late 19th century before the federal workforce shifted to a nonpolitical civil service. The rule was dropped in 1983, when then-House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) objected to spending cuts proposed by Republicans and conservative Democrats. Griffith, known as the unofficial parliamentarian in the hard-line conservative Freedom Caucus, sought to revive it out of frustration with an $80 million federal program that pays for the care of wild horses on federal land in the West. He considers the program wasteful. [The Washington Post]
Democrats and even some of Griffith’s GOP colleagues opposed the change, arguing that it could be abused to target bureaucrats for political reasons — Donald Trump’s presidential transition team has requested the names of federal workers who focus on climate change, for example — and will gum up the budget process with politically controversial, small-bore amendments. In a concession to skeptical Republicans, the rule expires in a year unless re-authorized. You can read more about the Holman Rule at The Washington Post. Peter Weber

The Empty Talking Heads


 

The two prominent political pundits, explainers and almost human talking heads have uttered (and probably will continue to) statements that are geared more to incite voters more than inform. Without them we would never know how people in the spotlight can influence opinion through faux news and information. Apparently Mr. O’Reilly is in the camp of the alt-right.  MA

Newt Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly are both well known pundits(?) who take to the airwaves at any opportunity to use their celebrity to tout crap! Recently Gingrich offered explanations that Mr. Trump has decided to stop using the “drain the swamp” statement since the Donald was “over it”. Mr. Gingrich is called a Trump ally but it may be more like a self appointed explainer.

This from Mr. O’Reilly:
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said efforts to abolish the Electoral College system are “all about race.”

O’Reilly said on “The O’Reilly Factor” Tuesday night there is a “hidden reason” for liberals seeking to change the system.

“If the Electoral College were abolished, presidential candidates could simply campaign in the nation’s largest cities, New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston,” he said. “And rack up enough votes to pretty much win any election.”

O’Reilly claimed Democrats wanted to campaign only in cities where “the minority vote usually goes heavily to the Democrats,” effectively “neutralizing the largely white rural areas in the Midwest and the South.”

“Very few commentators will tell you that the heart of liberalism in America is based on race,” O’Reilly said. “It permeates almost every issue – that white men have set up a system of oppression and that system must be destroyed.”

O’Reilly said that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and to some extent nominee Hillary Clinton, peddled the idea that “so-called white privilege bad, diversity good.”

“The left sees white privilege in America as an oppressive force that must be done away with,” he said.

Summing up his argument, O’Reilly said, “The left wants power taken away from the white establishment, and they want a profound change in the way America is run.”

Calls to abolish the Electoral College have been mounting since Clinton lost the election to President-elect Donald Trump, despite winning nearly 3 million more votes than him. She ended up with a total of 227 Electoral College votes to his 304 – five electors who were supposed to vote for Clinton defected and voted for someone else on Monday, while two refused to cast their ballots for Trump.

To Fix Obamacare, The GOP Needs To Tackle This Major Flaw In The Health Care System


 

Here again the failure of the GOP to fully understand and assist in the creation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), The GOP effectively denied coverage for many due to their political goals being put ahead of the public good.MA
Rita Numerof, PhD, president of Numerof & Associates
22 Hours Ago
CNBC.com

As Republicans in Washington get set to reshape national health-care policy, it is critical that the surrounding debate distinguishes between two related but distinct issues: access to coverage and access to care.
In other areas of policy, we understand this distinction. We know that the issues of homelessness and affordable housing are linked, but not the same. Solutions for one are not automatically fixes for the other. We see the same thing with other basic health issues like food security and nutrition.
Only in health care do we consider the decades-long challenge of delivering high-quality and cost-efficient care “solved” once everyone nominally has access to some sort of insurance.

But real health-care reform is not just about coverage. Getting people into exchange plans they can barely afford, with heavy (and increasing) deductibles and taxpayer-funded subsidies, is a “homeless shelter” fix. It’s better than being on the streets — for sure — but a homeless shelter isn’t a home any more than a high-deductible “bronze” plan is a real health-care solution for a family that can barely afford to pay the rest of its bills.
If we want to fix this system, it’s time to get serious about replacing fee-for-service provider reimbursement with approaches that link costs to outcomes, like bundled payments and population health.

Health care in a post-Obamacare world: Centene CEO
Thursday, 15 Dec 2016 | 7:15 AM ET | 04:50
“If we are serious about reform, we need to move beyond the current obsession with coverage to a real debate about accountability, transparency, cost and quality.”
The Obama administration has pushed forward on several value-based care initiatives, but one of the most striking success stories we’ve had occurred under the previous Republican administration.
In 2008, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) announced it would no longer pay for so-called never events — preventable incidents like hospital falls or objects left in patients after surgery that should never happen in modern health-care delivery organizations.
This first meaningful connection between payment and outcomes led directly to a 17 percent decline in hospital-acquired conditions from 2012 to 2013. Notably, it took financial incentives/consequences before this happened.
Unfortunately, there are worrisome signs that the incoming Trump administration is less committed to the idea of value-based care. It will be important to differentiate between the baby (payment reform) and the bathwater (onerous regulations and reporting requirements) if we’re ever going to get to true value in health care.
A second key goal for reform is more in keeping with Trump’s campaign messages. Unwinding the existing incentives for consolidation would help preserve the competitiveness of many local markets, and thereby protect working-class families. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) established a bureaucratic labyrinth of new organizational structures, regulations and incentives.
Rather than focusing on the capabilities and culture needed to move toward better outcomes at lower cost, providers and payers have been compelled to invest in new staff and technologies to comply with all these new regulations.
On the provider side, this effort spawned a flood of consolidation, with health-care delivery systems buying or affiliating with other systems, and physicians seeking refuge in employment from proliferating bureaucracy. A grave danger we face as a nation is that all these systems become too big to fail — and, more importantly, too big to care.
Finally, it is past time to require transparency of cost and outcomes, so consumers can make informed choices about their care. Having awareness that not every hospital is performing equally well allows consumers to make judicious decisions, an important first step toward a true market-based health-care system.
Health care is an issue that affects all Americans. It costs too much, it is piecemeal, there is little accountability for outcomes, and it is not consumer-centered.
In virtually every other industry, consumer demand drives service providers and product manufacturers to improve quality and compete on price. In contrast, the approach in health care has always been to try to reduce costs by manipulating organizational structures — as with HMOs or Accountable Care Organizations — while leaving in place the original sin of fee-for-service provider reimbursement.
This will always incentivize volume-driven care decisions, not a focus on outcomes.
If we are serious about reform, we need to move beyond the current obsession with coverage to a real debate about accountability, transparency, cost and quality.
Commentary by Rita Numerof, PhD, president of Numerof & Associates, a firm that helps businesses across the health-care sector define and implement strategies for winning in dynamic markets.

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The internet is broken. Starting from scratch, here’s how I’d fix it.


Informative article on the beginnings of the internet and its subsequent misuse/ abuse. It is a slightly dry read but worth going through and if you think you know it all then you definitely need to read this. MA

Published on December 14, 2016

Walter Isaacson
CEO at Aspen Institute
My big idea is that we have to fix the internet. After forty years, it has begun to corrode, both itself and us. It is still a marvelous and miraculous invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation, bats in the belfry, and trolls in the basement.
I do not mean this to be one of those technophobic rants dissing the Internet for rewiring our brains to give us the twitchy attention span of Donald Trump on Twitter or pontificating about how we have to log off and smell the flowers. Those qualms about new technologies have existed ever since Plato fretted that the technology of writing would threaten memorization and oratory. I love the internet and all of its digital offshoots. What I bemoan is its decline.
There is a bug in its original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet.
Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content.
All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously.
For years, the benefits of anonymity on the Net outweighed its drawbacks. People felt more free to express themselves, which was especially valuable if they were dissidents or hiding a personal secret. This was celebrated in the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Now the problem is nobody can tell if you’re a troll. Or a hacker. Or a bot. Or a Macedonian teenager publishing a story that the Pope has endorsed Trump.
This has poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying, and made email a risk. Its inherent lack of security has allowed Russian actors to screw with our democratic process.
The lack of secure identification and authentication inherent in the internet’s genetic code has also prevented easy transactions, thwarted financial inclusion, destroyed the business models of content creators, unleashed deluges of spam, and forced us to use passwords and two-factor authentication schemes that would have baffled Houdini.
The trillions being spent and the IQ points of computer science talent being allocated to tackle security issues makes it a drag, rather than a spur, to productivity in some sectors.
In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has proven him correct.
The Web is no longer a place of community, no longer an agora. Every day more sites are eliminating comments sections.
If we could start from scratch, here’s what I think we would do:
Create a system that enables content producers to negotiate with aggregators and search engines to get a royalty whenever their content is used, like ASCAP has negotiated for public performances and radio airings of its members’ works.
Embed a simple digital wallet and currency for quick and easy small payments for songs, blogs, articles, and whatever other digital content is for sale.
Encode emails with an authenticated return or originating address.
Enforce critical properties and security at the lowest levels of the system possible, such as in the hardware or in the programming language, instead of leaving it to programmers to incorporate security into every line of code they write.
Build chips and machines that update the notion of an internet packet. For those who want, their packets could be encoded or tagged with metadata that describe what they contain and give the rules for how it can be used.
Most internet engineers think that these reforms are possible, from Vint Cerf, the original TCP/IP coauthor, to Milo Medin of Google, to Howard Shrobe, the director of cybersecurity at MIT. “We don’t need to live in cyber hell,” Shrobe has argued.
Implementing them is less a matter of technology than of cost and social will. Some people, understandably, will resist any diminution of anonymity, which they sometimes label privacy.
So the best approach, I think, would be to try to create a voluntary system, for those who want to use it, to have verified identification and authentication.
People would not be forced to use such a system. If they wanted to communicate and surf anonymously, they could. But those of us who choose, at times, not to be anonymous and not to deal with people who are anonymous should have that right as well. That’s the way it works in the real world.
The benefits would be many: Easy and secure ways to deal with your finances and medical records. Small payment systems that could reward valued content rather than the current incentive to concentrate on clickbait for advertising. Less hacking, spamming, cyberbullying, trolling, and the spewing of anonymous hate. And the possibility of a more civil discourse.
Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, is the author of The Innovators and biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. This essay is partly drawn from a talk delivered to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.