Daily Archives: 06/04/2013

(Community Matters) Not to just keep posting NYTimes headlines . . . and, I hadn’t realized the sooner-than-expected housing recovery was Wall Street driven as institutions were purchasing 10s of thousands of homes.  That’s laudable and also gives some pause. Overall appears a good thing, even an innovative way to make money and help speed up recovery. I’m sure there’s downside and worries – hopefully less worry than appreciation.

(Community Matters) Groundbreaking innovation in pharmacology with promising early results fighting cancer. 

The drugs, still generally in early testing, work in an entirely new way, by unleashing the immune system to attack cancer cells much as it attacks bacteria. That could be an alternative to often-debilitating chemotherapy.

The new drugs work by disabling a brake on the immune system called the programmed death 1 receptor, or PD-1.

Much of the previous attempts at cancer immunotherapy have focused on the first problem — trying to train the immune system to recognize the tumor and attack it.

The PD-1 drugs tackle the second problem of immune system suppression. How many cancers this will work for is still unclear.

(Community Matters) This doesn’t bode well for King Abdullah II.

(Community Matters) No surprise to anyone who realizes Bush/Cheney intentionally manufactured these deficits with Nordquist’s advice on the two rounds of tax cuts. Whether through supply side or vodoo economics, they’ve long angled to shrink government and the Ayn Rand crowd (think Paul Ryan) to dismantle %/or substantially scale back social security and medicare.

Krugman: The Geezers Are All Right [re: Social Security} The risk is that we might, at some point in the future, have to cut benefits; to avoid this risk of future benefit cuts, we are supposed to act pre-emptively by…cutting future benefits. What problem, exactly, are we solving here?

The truth is that the long-term outlook for Social Security and Medicare, while not great, actually isn’t all that bad. It’s time to stop obsessing about how we’ll pay benefits to retirees in 2035 and focus instead on how we’re going to provide jobs to unemployed Americans in the here and now.