March 7

 Good morning, all. Cloudy and frosty this morning. The frost on the roofs has gone. Not much planned today. The State of the Union is scheduled for tonight. We won't watch. It starts about the time we call it a day and go to bed. I don't think it is worth staying up to watch Biden's amorphous hopes for his agenda which depends on his own reelection and a majority of like minded Democrats being elect also. And I suspect we would see the usual ill-mannered Republicans acting up in spite of their Speaker asking them to behave like adults.

Reading this Business Insider article about a woman who warned of the meltdown in the derivatives markets a decade before the 2008 crash I remembered The Big Short which detailed another Cassandra, male this time, who saw the same danger much closer to when it became obvious to all of the people whose job it was to look out for such catastrophes.

EuroNews reports on a drug causing concern. Physicians have prescribed pregabalin for a variety of condition but patients have had problems from side effects and then even more severe symptoms when trying to get off of it. Studies in Sweden report a significant number of suicide cases had the drug in their systems.

Stray thought: It feels like we have been on a merry-go-round (or a gerbil ball) for the last three years. When the Senate held their "trial" of Trump's Impeachment Republican leaders (and Trump's lawyers) insisted that it really wasn't their job to do anything so drastic as find him guilty, on the political stage, of insurrection and bar him from further office. Instead they insisted that there is a judicial system which can hold him accountable of the crime of insurrection.  It is the DOJ's job. The DOJ took a long time to charge him for that and now the case is languishing waiting for the Supreme Court to decide on Trump's claim of Presidential immunity. Then when the courts in Colorado and the Secretary of State (backed by the courts) decide he is an insurrectionist and should be bounced from the ballot, the Supreme Court rules that ONLY CONGRESS can decide how the 14th Amendment should be administered. Isn't it so reasonable that the very institution that abdicated that job gets it back gift wrapped by the Supremes. And so it goes. Thomas Zimmer says pretty much that in his substack post.