Just in case you’ve ever wondered how you would go about anesthetizing an octopus (and I’m sure that most of you have) you can do so by immersing your octopus in seawater that has had isoflurane added to it:

In a study published online this month in the Journal of Aquatic Animal Health, researchers report immersing 10 specimens of the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) in seawater with isoflurane, an anesthetic used in humans. They gradually increased the concentration of the substance from 0.5% to 2%. The investigators found that the animals lost the ability to respond to touch and their color paled, which means that their normal motor coordination of color regulation by the brain was lost, concluding that the animals were indeed anesthetized.

I do not at this time plan on testing this with my cephalopods but it’s good to know.

This must be my day to be cynical. For example, when I read this article about a race for science and technology workers, I immediately began looking for the fine print. And it was easy enough to find:

The centerpiece of Thursday’s summit was the results of a four-month study on local STEM issues. Conducted by Accenture in 2014 at the request of GLBRA officials, it provided a statistical snapshot on STEM jobs and instruction, and recommended a variety of strategies to help create a “pipeline” for STEM-educated workers.

Michael Loiero, a consultant at Accenture, noted that the Great Lakes Bay Region has a STEM-driven economy, with more than $3 billion in GDP driven by manufacturing and healthcare in 2012, and added that the region has a higher concentration of many STEM careers than the national average.

There’s plenty of finessing going on here. Quoting the amount of GDP generated by manufacturing and healthcare without breaking them out may be misleading. Between a third and half of all healthcare spending is government subsidy. Of course there’s a demand for it. Consumers aren’t paying full price for it. When you cut the price paid by consumers for practically anything in half, demand for it will spike.

But there’s also this: “a consultant at Accenture”. Accenture is a major employer of H1B visa holders and one of the forces behind lobbying for an expansion of the program.

Here’s a wild idea: let wages for science and technology workers rise. Limit H1B visas to where they’re actually needed rather than to where they’ll lower wages the most. Shine more light on what jobs are being demanded and what they’re actually paying. We already have thousands of unemployed and underemployed science, technology, engineering, and math workers. In a tighter labor market wages will rise and you’ll get more students.

Of course, that does highlight another problem: how is the Great Lakes region going to attract talent? If you were a bright, young STEM worker, would you rather live in San Jose or Grand Rapids? I seem to recall that Accenture’s old parent company, Arthur Andersen, had some difficulty in finding a partner who was willing to live in GR.

The old “Rust Belt” states need to find some ways of attracting the future’s workers. The present strategy of higher taxes and deteriorating standard of living isn’t working out so well.

Today is my mom’s birthday and I thought I’d share a few pictures of her with you. I’m guessing that she’s about four in the picture above. I like this one because I think it captures a certain aspect of my mom’s personality.

Here’s a picture I just can’t resist sharing:

because it captures another aspect of her personality. I’m all but certain that my grandmother made all of the outfits she’s wearing in the pictures here. Not only was my grandmother a lead performer in the vaudeville company, she was also the costume-maker.

Okay. Here’s another one.

Always a ham. There’s a story I think I heard when one of Ruby Keeler’s children was being interviewed. When asked if she had known that her mom was a big star, she replied “No, I thought that everybody’s mom tap-danced around the kitchen.” I could really identify with that.

I’m not sure what else I can tell you about my mother. I miss her very keenly. I miss her wisdom and her joy but most of all I miss her friendship. She was my oldest, my first friend.

I didn’t find much value added by James Antle’s post at The National Interest on how Jonathan Gruber may continue to influence the PPACA. Except this very succinct characterization of the PPACA:

Obamacare is largely a Medicaid expansion plus churn between old health-insurance plans and new Obamacare-compliant ones, so far achieving modest gains in coverage at the cost of higher premiums and reduced access for many.

It’s hard to imagine the stupid American voter would be enamored of this, if smart people like Jonathan Gruber had deigned to explain it to them at the time.

That’s something that Mickey Kaus has been complaining about since 2009. It’s hard for the popularity of the PPACA to increase because most Americans don’t benefit by it or see themselves as ever being benefited by it. Sure, it’s popular among those receiving subsidies. Free beer is always popular. But the number of Americans receiving subsidies under the PPACA is actually pretty small.

I also suspect that the popularity of the PPACA will actually dwindle as the reality of its operation becomes clearer. At this point all indications point to a different sort of “death spiral” than has been predicted taking hold with consumers trying to control their premium payments by re-enrolling in plans with lower premiums but higher out-of-pocket expenses.

My concern about this is more related to the run-on economic effects. Money spent on healthcare insurance premiums can’t be spent on food, rent, clothing, or automobiles.

When I read this article at The Daily Beast on how clueless Washington is about our war with ISIS/ISIL, I could only think of Tom Magliozi’s wisecrack.

Are 535 people who are clueless more or less clueless than one person who is clueless?

My world is full of disappointments. I had hopes that a post titled “Why Affordability Is Not Obamacare’s Primary Goal” might actually have dealt with the question but, alas, that was not to be. What the post is actually about is how affordability is not the PPACA’s primary goal or, at least, how you can tell. That’s mildly interesting but not as interesting as the other question.

Let me try to answer it. The reason that affordability is not the PPACA’s primary goal (or even, perhaps, a goal it had at all) is that the law would have faced bitter opposition from providers, insurance companies, and consumers if it had been.

The only way that healthcare can be made affordable is by changing how it is delivered. Full stop.

That will be thrust on us willy-nilly. Healthcare costs will not continue to rise at three times the non-healthcare rate of inflation indefinitely. I think it would be more prudent to confront that in anticipation but I seem to be practically alone in that belief.

Jeffrey Snider’s post at RealClearMarkets largely consists of one dubious assertion piled on another. Is it really true that you cannot coherently denounce the dollar’s position as the reserve currency without wanting to return to the gold standard? Is it really true that we would be better off if the dollar were not the world’s reserve currency? Could we survive it? Would we really be better off if we returned to the gold standard? Does the dollar’s position really mean that there is no limit to the number of dollars our trading partners can hold on their electronic books?

Whatever the answers to those questions I feel that I need to leap to John Maynard Keynes’s defense. I challenge anyone to find in the actual written works of Lord Keynes support for anything that resembles what governments (and central banks) have been doing for the last sixty years in his name. Quite to the contrary my recollection is that he believed that you needed to compensate for increased government spending during the economy’s troughs with decreased government spending during the peaks.

The problem with our economic policy is not Keynes but politicians. I have never seen a politician with the sort of steely-eyed courage that such a policy would require.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune have published a harsh editorial condemning the responses of “defenders of Obamacare” to the remarks of Jonathan Gruber, the unquestioned architect of Massachusetts’s healthcare insurance reform plan who was lionized five years ago as a principle architect of the PPACA and is now something of a goat:

A 2013 video has Gruber in St. Louis describing how that “Cadillac tax” got into the ACA: “They proposed it and that passed, because the American people are too stupid to understand the difference.”

Gruber told MSNBC on Wednesday that his Pennsylvania comments were “at an academic conference” and “off-the-cuff”: “I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”

No doubt because they’re true. Gruber hasn’t renounced a thing he said.

These deceptions are a world apart from the scuzzy but not atypical payoffs (the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase) that bought the final Senate votes to pass the ACA. Nor are we citing other sponsor claims that critics of the law also see as lies: that coverage really would be affordable, that the act would lower medical costs, that it would ease federal deficits. All debatable.

What’s not debatable is that Obamacare’s arc of deception is exposed — not unique, perhaps, but blatant and, thanks to our own eyes and Gruber’s words, provable: Obamacare, in order to function, had to break its backers’ promises. Also convincing: Gruber, recorded cautioning in 2012 that if states don’t set up their own insurance exchanges, “(your) citizens don’t get their tax credits.” That’s the very issue the U.S. Supreme Court now will litigate, perhaps to the functional downfall of Obamacare.

Defenders of Obamacare dismiss these revelations with three breezy retorts: We all knew how the law really would work. (No.) You gotta do what you gotta do. (No.) And this Gruber, he’s a nobody. This third excuse basked in absurdity Thursday: Pelosi dismissively said she didn’t know who Gruber is and that he didn’t help write the ACA, so, “Let’s put him aside.” Turns out she issued a 2009 news release touting “noted MIT health care economist Jonathan Gruber” whose modeling predicted “lower premiums than under current law for the millions of Americans using the newly-established Health Insurance Exchange.” Oh, and Pelosi also had discussed Gruber at a news conference.

The editors of the Trib have been increasingly opposed to the PPACA and that editorial is actually a pretty strong statement, at least by the standards of newspaper editorials these days.

I don’t have as much problem with what Dr. Gruber has said as some do. The fact is that the PPACA’s subsidies had to be portrayable as taxes to pass constitutional muster and to be politically acceptable.

The part that I find hard to swallow is the move to turn Dr. Gruber into an unperson. You should own your mistakes. And nowadays there’s no such thing as an anonymous remark or one that’s soon forgotten.

If you don’t want your past unfortunate statements to come back to haunt you, remain silent. That’s something that’s too much to expect of career politicians.

Or Captain Queeg? Peggy Noonan contrasts the president’s vision of himself:

Last Sunday Mr. Obama, in an interview with CBS ’s Bob Schieffer, spoke of his motivation, how he’s always for the little guy. “I love just being with the American people. . . . You know how passionate I am about trying to help them.” He said what is important is “a guy who’s lost his job or lost his home or . . . is trying to send a kid to college.” When he talks like that, as he does a lot, you get the impression his romantic vision of himself is Tom Joad in the movie version of “The Grapes of Wrath.” “I’ll be all around . . . wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.”

with an image of President Obama as Richard Nixon:

I have never seen a president in exactly the position Mr. Obama is, which is essentially alone. He’s got no one with him now. The Republicans don’t like him, for reasons both usual and particular: They have had no good experiences with him. The Democrats don’t like him, for their own reasons plus the election loss. Before his post-election lunch with congressional leaders, he told the press that he will judiciously consider any legislation, whoever sends it to him, Republicans or Democrats. His words implied that in this he was less partisan and more public-spirited than the hacks arrayed around him. It is for these grace notes that he is loved. No one at the table looked at him with colder, beadier eyes than outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , who clearly doesn’t like him at all. The press doesn’t especially like the president; in conversation they evince no residual warmth. This week at the Beijing summit there was no sign the leaders of the world had any particular regard for him. They can read election returns. They respect power and see it leaking out of him. If Mr. Obama had won the election they would have faked respect and affection.

But then there’s this:

I mentioned last week that the president has taken to filibustering, to long, rambling answers in planned sit-down settings—no questions on the fly walking from here to there, as other presidents have always faced. The press generally allows him to ramble on, rarely fighting back as they did with Nixon. But I have noticed Mr. Obama uses a lot of words as padding. He always has, but now he does it more. There’s a sense of indirection and obfuscation. You can say, “I love you,” or you can say, “You know, feelings will develop, that happens among humans and it’s good it happens, and I have always said, and I said it again just last week, that you are a good friend, I care about you, and it’s fair to say in terms of emotional responses that mine has escalated or increased somewhat, and ‘love’ would not be a wholly inappropriate word to use to describe where I’m coming from.”

I do not recall Nixon ever speaking like that. I think she’s thinking of Captain Queeg.