Bloomberg today quotes OMB director Peter Orszag predicting that health care legislation will complete its way through Congress within six weeks. That would be early November, 2009. What kind of health care legislation will this be? Reading the tea leaves over the past week has the law lurching rightward or leftward with each report.

Obviously, there is a great deal of discussion going on in the US at the moment around the issues involved in health care reform. It is a lamentable fact that the US spends more money per capita than any other country in the world; yet the US, on the basis of many standard public health measures (e.g., life expectancy, infant mortality), gets far from the best outcomes.

Back in July, I posted a note about a new approach to ensuring the deletion of sensitive information on the Internet. Researchers at the University of Washington had developed an experimental software package called Vanish, which first encrypted sensitive data, and then stored the encryption keys on a public peer-to-peer [P2P] filesharing network, using a trick that would result in the keys' effectively disappearing within a predictable time. Now the New York Times has a report that another group of researchers, from the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan, has developed a was to defeat the Vanish system, and ensure that the data can be "un-Vanished".

No need to search for obscure reasons or ulterior motive when scrutinizing the change in direction introduced by President Obama in the US defense policy after President's refusal to install the so-called missile shield. The expected partial deployment on European territory was one of the pillars of Bush's failed strategy against international terrorism. Obama's resolution involved several decisions of domestic and foreign policy, all high draft.

From the first moment you step off the plane upon landing in Panama, you will feel as welcome as if you were at home. This is not because of the tall buildings of Panama City, the exotic beaches or the humid tropical weather, but because the people that you will encounter and get to know during your stay will be some of the nicest and most welcoming people you could ever meet.

I recently saw the new documentary Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech. The film is about the First Amendment and free speech in the United States. More specifically, it's about the perceived endangerment of free speech in the US. There is a clearly political tone to the piece: it's makers seem staunchly in favour of the First Amendment as an inviolate tenet of American life, to be sacrificed for no one and nothing.

Just as John Mackey's statements about health care reform in the Wall Street Journal caused a firestorm of criticism that sparked what I consider to be a misguided boycott of Whole Foods by many on the left (see my blog posts here and here), now the right has caused the resignation of Van Jones as a green jobs advisor to President Obama " a terrible loss instigated by what I consider irrelevant and misguided reasons.

From Martin Wolf's analysis in Financial Times. It would take little for banks to have hands free again. What emerges from the crisis is a system even worse than the one who had caused it. The bank rescue lets the banks free hand to remake the same mistakes.

My daughter spent 4 1/2 months living with her father this last winter and spring. In our house, she did not watch television and movies were limited. At his house, she was given a television in her room. The differences since she spent those four months watching the stupid box are enormous.

Like any other industry, pharmaceutical companies are continually chasing profits. In recent years, companies like Pfizer have grown fat off of cardiovascular drugs such as Lipitor (used for lowering cholesterol). However, it seems there's a shift in Big Pharma's business model. It seems nearly all the major players are jumping on the cancer bandwagon, and ramping efforts in the realm of cancer research.

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