SAR #16101

As an organizing principle, greed is better than cruelty.

Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone: Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, disingenuously asks“Who Owns the Future?” being pretty damned sure it's he and his fellow wizzards.He's wrong, it's Siri.

Aye, There's The Rub: Research continues to find that our ubiquitous use of anti-bacterial soaps does more harm than good, to us, to those around us and to the environment. Worst damage is the impetus these compounds give to the development of bacteria resistant to antibiotics, making relatively harmless bacteria into relatively deadly ones.

Friends In High Places: Bob Graham, former Florida governor, Democratic U.S. Senator and chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says the Select Committee's secret report has 28 excised pages detailing the “substantial” support the 9/11 hijackers received from an organized network financed by the Saudis. He personally finds it “ implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn't speak English, most of whom had never been in the United States before, many didn't have a high school education, could have carried out such a complicated task without some support from within the United States.”

A New Spin On Global Warming: Greenland has lost so much ice – over 600 trillion pounds a year of late – that it is changing the distribution of weight on the Earth, which is changing the way the Earth wobbles on its axis. The shift is harmless, but interesting.

Downsized: The homeless in Los Angeles cannot, by law, possess more stuff than can be stuffed into a 60-gallon trashcan. Presumably the city will be issuing transhcans, or perhaps setting up sizing boxes like the ones for carry-ons at the airport. The new law also instructs the police to confiscate homeless people's tents from public property if they are not taken down at daylight.

Assume A Cow Is A Circle: Blinding us with numbers, Wharton Business School Professor Olivia Mitchell assures us that Social Security going to experience a $28 trillion shortfall. This is technically possible only if Social Security exists as an ongoing program for forever. Actually for ever and ever. For my lifetime and your lifetime and the lifetime of my grandchildren, taxing all income at the current rate will make the program solvent. End of story.

Asked & Answered: “Is the media biased against Bernie Sanders?” Bernie who?

A Bit Fit: As a nation of individuals, we have readily accepted that we are personally responsible for our own wellbeing. It's not true, of course. Scientists can do a good job of evaluating the risks and benefits of this or that drug or exercise for large groups and populations, but translating the group experience to the individual is chancy at best. Society would be better off if we united to address the environmental factors that damage our health and paid a lot less attention to questionable “lifestyle”changes. As long as factors outside of the individual are part of the causal chain that produces health, unless we do something about these factors, no amount of lifestyle modification is going to lower the burden of disease in populations. Sure, there are individual things you can do – stop smoking, exercise more, eat healthy – but before you marry a Fitbit, ask yourself how many diet books you've bought.

NY Frame of Mind: In March the Emerson College poll gave Clinton a 48 point lead over the guy from Vermont. Now Bernie is only 18 points away. In California Hillary's lead is down to 6 points after leading by double digits in January.

A Parting Shot: