The Highest and Lowest Paid Jobs in America, in One Really, Really Ridiculously Long Chart

http://mic.com/articles/92023/the-highest-and-lowest-paid-jobs-in-america-in-one-really-really-ridiculously-long-chart

Bad Science

Free-market academic research policies have unleashed medical quackery and scientific fraud, forcing consumers to pay premiums for discoveries we’ve already funded as taxpayers

At the heart of the US healthcare system’s profit-based approach to medical science is the harsh truth that money alone can prolong life. Take, for example, the class of genes dubbed “tumor suppressors.” Because of their ability to regulate cell growth, tumor suppressors are at the forefront of cancer-prevention research. A positive test for mutations in a tumor suppressor gene like BRCA1 or BRCA2 is a leading indication of high risk for breast or ovarian cancer.

But despite the potential life-saving importance of the discovery, the cost of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 test is prohibitively expensive. At $4,000 a test, it is four times that of a full genetic sequencing. The only reason the price for a potentially life-saving evaluation could be this outrageous is due to the actions of one company, Myriad Genetics. While the Supreme Court recently struck down Myriad’s claim to the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, declaring that human genes can’t be patented, Myriad continues to assert its monopoly on the test  for susceptibility to breast cancer.

What’s even more egregious about Myriad’s price-gouging is that many of the costs of developing the BRCA1 and BRCA2 test have already been paid for by the public. The research to identify those genes as cancer triggers was publicly funded through the University of Utah School of Medicine. Myriad Genetics was simply a startup founded by researchers at the university to take possession of the patent after the test’s discovery. And it was only because of the Bayh-Dole Act that this could take place...............................................
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/bad-science/

Big Brother’s Liberal Friends

Henry Farrell

October 30, 2014

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/big-brother%E2%80%99s-liberal-friends-11515

Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley are a dismal advertisement for the current state of mainstream liberal thought in America. They have systematically misrepresented and misunderstood Edward Snowden and the NSA

IT IS strange that the Obama administration has so avidly continued many of the national-security policies that the George W. Bush administration endorsed. The White House has sidelined the key recommendations of its own advisers about how to curtail the overreach of the National Security Agency (NSA). It has failed to prosecute those responsible for torture, on the principle that bygones should be bygones, extending a courtesy to high officials that it has notably declined to provide to leakers like Chelsea Manning. The result is a remarkable degree of continuity between the two administrations.

Yet this does not disconcert much of the liberal media elite. Many writers who used to focus on bashing Bush for his transgressions now direct their energies against those who are sounding alarms about the pervasiveness of the national-security state. Others, despite their liberal affectations, have perhaps always been enthusiasts for a strong security state. Over the last fifteen months, the columns and op-ed pages of the New York Times and theWashington Post have bulged with the compressed flatulence of commentators intent on dismissing warnings about encroachments on civil liberties. Indeed, in recent months soi-disant liberal intellectuals such as Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley have employed the Edward Snowden affair to mount a fresh series of attacks. They claim that Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and those associated with them neither respect democracy nor understand political responsibility.....................

Great interviews

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/series/greatinterviews

For two weeks, each day's paper came with a free booklet containing some of the most famous encounters in journalism history, from David Frost's conversations about Watergate with Richard Nixon to Marilyn Monroe's last interview, Princess Diana's confessions to Martin Bashir and Bill Grundy's disastrous grilling of the Sex Pistols on live television.

As well as the transcript and archive material, each interview is introduced and set in historical context by a famous writer, journalist or artist, from Damien Hirst to Nick Hornby, Hilary Mantel to Nancy Banks-Smith.

Nixon - 'I have impeached myself'

Edited transcript of David Frost's interview with Richard Nixon broadcast in May 1977

 7 September 2007 10.18 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/07/greatinterviews1

David Frost: The wave of dissent in America, occasionally violent, which followed the incursion into Cambodia by US and Vietnamese forces in 1970, prompted President Nixon to demand better intelligence about the people who were opposing him on the domestic front. To this end, the deputy White House counsel, Tom Huston, arranged a series of meetings with representatives of the CIA, the FBI, and other police and intelligence agencies.

These meetings produced a plan, the Huston Plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against anti-war groups and others. Some of these activities, as Huston emphasised to Nixon, were clearly illegal. Nevertheless, the president approved the plan. Five days later, after opposition from the FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, the plan was withdrawn, but the president's approval was later to be listed in the articles of impeachment as an alleged abuse of presidential power.

Would you say that there are certain situations - and the Huston Plan was one of them - where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation, and do something illegal?
Richard Nixon: Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

By definition.
Exactly, exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they're in an impossible position.

The point is: the dividing line is the president's judgment?
Yes, and, so that one does not get the impression that a president can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a president has to come up before the electorate. We also have to have in mind that a president has to get appropriations from the Congress. We have to have in mind, for example, that as far as the CIA's covert operations are concerned, as far as the FBI's covert operations are concerned, through the years, they have been disclosed on a very, very limited basis to trusted members of Congress.......................................................................................................

http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/07/greatinterviews1

The western model is broken

The west has lost the power to shape the world in its own image – as recent events, from Ukraine to Iraq, make all too clear. So why does it still preach the pernicious myth that every society must evolve along western lines?
Tuesday 14 October 2014 
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/14/-sp-western-model-broken-pankaj-mishra

“So far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the western model,” according to a new book, The Fourth Revolution, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This seems an extraordinary admission from two editors of the Economist, the flag-bearer of English liberalism, which has long insisted that the non-west could only achieve prosperity and stability through western prescriptions. It almost obscures the fact that the 20th century was blighted by the same pathologies that today make the western model seem unworkable, and render its fervent advocates a bit lost. The most violent century in human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for the “bland fanatics of western civilisation”, as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called them at the height of the cold war, “who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”.

Niebuhr was critiquing a fundamentalist creed that has coloured our view of the world for more than a century: that western institutions of the nation-state and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and that the aspiring middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about accountable, representative and stable governments – that every society, in short, is destined to evolve just as the west did. Critics of this teleological view, which defines “progress” exclusively as development along western lines, have long perceived its absolutist nature. Secular liberalism, the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen cautioned as early as 1862, “is the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this”. But it has had many presumptive popes and encyclicals: from the 19th-century dream of a westernised world long championed by the Economist, in which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, to Henry Luce’s proclamation of an “American century” of free trade, and “modernisation theory” – the attempt by American cold warriors to seduce the postcolonial world away from communist-style revolution and into the gradualist alternative of consumer capitalism and democracy....................................

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/14/-sp-western-model-broken-pankaj-mishra

How Corrupt Are Our Politics?

SEPTEMBER 25, 2014 ISSUE

When New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo was elected in 2010, he promised to restore integrity to state government. Two and half years later, as several state legislators were indicted for bribes, and perhaps just as importantly, as Cuomo’s reelection loomed, he did what many politicians do when faced with a vexing problem: he appointed a commission. In July 2013, with much fanfare, Cuomo announced the creation of the Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, which came to be known as the Moreland Commission. He promised that it would be independent. As he put it at the time, “Anything they want to look at, they can look at—me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman.” And he featured the commission in his reelection ads, proclaiming that “trust is everything.”

Less than one year later, Governor Cuomo prematurely shut down the commission, claiming that he’d been able to persuade the legislature to adopt new ethics rules in exchange for doing so. But many questioned the decision. The new laws were actually quite tepid. And reports emerged that the governor’s office had consistently interfered with the commission’s work, leaning on it not to pursue investigations of the governor’s allies and supporters. The New York Times published a damning account, based on a three-month investigation, finding that the governor’s office and its agents had “deeply compromised the panel’s work, objecting whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Mr. Cuomo or on issues that might reflect poorly on him.”1

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/sep/25/how-corrupt-are-our-politics/