Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:42 PM, for 13h 30m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 40.9% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the one thousand nineteenth day.
On this day in 1970, a car bomb detonated near Sterling Hall on the UW-Madison campus kills research scientist Robert Fassnacht.
Recommended for reading in full:
David A. Graham observes Trump Longs to Command the Economy (‘In his struggle against China, the president has begun to resemble his authoritarian rival Xi Jinping’):
The phrase that leaps from this meandering jeremiad [Trump on Twitter on 8.23.19] is this: Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China. In his ongoing struggle against China, Trump has begun to ever more resemble his rival Xi Jinping—an authoritarian presiding over a command economy.
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Even if Trump is serious, does he really think he can mandate the behavior of private business via Twitter missive? Who knows! Trump has shown enough autocratic impulse, and enough ignorance of how the government and law work, that it’s impossible to rule that out. It’s also possible, though, that Trump knows he can’t actually decree such a move, but understands the power of saying it anyway, both as public relations and as a way to pressure companies to act out of fear of presidential reprisal.
Trump has demonstrated a yearning for the tools of a command economy since his campaign, when he repeatedly promised to keep American jobs in the country. In November 2016, when he was still president-elect, he bullied Carrier, the air-conditioner company, to cancel the closing of a plant in Indiana. The move horrified small-government conservatives, many of whom had opposed Trump during the election, but he was just getting started. As his trade war has hurt American agriculture, the president has undertaken a $16 billion subsidy program for farmers.
James Hamblin writes Trump Orders ‘a Lot’ of Ketamine for Depressed Veterans:
Trump said on Wednesday that the government will purchase “a lot” of the drug esketamine, a derivative of ketamine.
Though ketamine is known as a recreational hallucinogen, Trump asserted that a new nasal-spray derivative would be of great benefit to veterans with depression. As he left the White House for a veterans’ conference in Kentucky, he told reporters that he had instructed the Department of Veterans Affairs to make a large purchase—overriding a recent decision by the doctors who manage the hospitals’ formulary of which drugs are to be prescribed.
“There’s a product that’s made right now that just came out by Johnson & Johnson which has a tremendously positive—pretty short-term, but nevertheless positive—effect,” Trump said. But that statement is contrary to the evidence. A review by the Food and Drug Administration of what limited studies have been done with esketamine found mixed results, leaving many scientists unsure if the drug is indeed effective and safe. Just last week, the agency published a report that said the drug was not reliably better than placebo.