I Miss Fafblog Comments, Spot!
if there ever were a post that the "Cratchitism" tag was meant for, this is it.
Fixed it!
I read somewhere that sales of anti-depressants were down 20% last year.* Presumably because people could afford neither health insurance nor the prescriptions. Our Grandparents had the Great Depression, we may end up calling ours The Clinical Depression.
*Who knows if it's bad or good.
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it is entirely possible that the less psychotropic drugs going around, the more sane things will seem... or maybe just more genuine.
and thanks, tph. now old Bob Cratchit is well on his way to Fafmissian idiomhood.
also: look! pie!
btr3 - with regard to sales of antidepressants, if sales are measured in dollars, continued or increased use on a dose-by-dose basis is consistent with falling sales receipts if people are switching to generics as patents expire - although it is from 2006, the article here may be similar to what you read
http://tinyurl.com/ct7tu7
another explanation for falling dollar volume - walmart and competing retailers are offering very good deals on many maintenance medications, leaving drug store chains in the dust pricewise
when i was a child, there was an advertising slogan - "better living through chemistry"
and, to be perfectly honest, at the risk of conveying too much information - my pioneering rap rhyme "it a great life"
http://tinyurl.com/3yt796
was written in the last decade of the previous millennium after i found that without Prozac, life itself seemed nearly impossible - but after getting back on it again, it was as if i could find the silver lining
"just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down" - and contrariwise
i no longer take Prozac (the name brand)- now i take fluoxetine (the generic)
it works for me, but your mileage may vary
above post for scientific, educational, cultural, and entertainment purposes only, and not to be construed as medical advice - although i am a real doctor [i wrote a real dissertation] i am not a physician
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mistah charley,
That's a good point. I don't remember any discussion of the units of measure, and I hadn't considered it.
According to this article.
According to IMS Health, prescriptions for major sleeping-pill brands rose 7% last year, while antidepressant-brand prescriptions jumped 15% ... Sales of antidepressants in 2008 were up 2% compared to 2007. While prescriptions were up, dollar sales of prescription sleep aids were down 30% in '08 vs. '07 because the patent expired on Ambien (which was succeeded by Ambien CR). Sales were also hurt by the introduction of the cheaper generic Zolpidem, not to mention the emergence of more wallet-friendly over-the-counter sleep medications such as Unisom.
Maybe depression and insomnia is nature's way of telling you - "somethings not right when you get a 2 million dollar bonus for losing 2 billion dollars." I would say that the current slogan should be: "Irrational exuberance through chemistry", or more better: "Pharma is the new Karma".
Except, I fluctuated between straight A's and straight D's in High School, didn't graduate and spent the next fifteen years doing manual labor. Post-Prozac - life isn't just automatically happy all the time, but I can consider the possibility of silver linings and summon the mental energy to act to create them. I'm close to getting my BA and can usually choose to "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" (da-dum, da-da da-da da-dum').
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Pharma pharma pharma pharma
Pharma chameleon. . .
No, it just doesn't sound right.
Well, how about:
Instant Pharma's gonna get you
Gonna knock you right in the head
You better get yourself together
Pretty soon you're gonna be dead
What in the world you thinking of?
Laughing in the face of love
What on Earth you tryin' to do?
It's up to you
Yeah, you
Instant Pharma's gonna get you
Gonna hit you right in the face
You better get yourself together darling
Join the human race
Instant Karma by John Lennon
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pharma police, arrest this man...
btr3 - Love "Instant Pharma" - I have the sheet music for Instant Karma, and can play it on the piano in a way that people can recognize the tune.
And I found all the information about "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" at the Wikipedia article very interesting. I didn't know that the song appeared on Bruce Cockburn's Live album, and now I've ordered the CD from Amazon, along with two books, neither of which is available at my local library -
Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy Dean Baker
Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes, Revised and Updated Edition Michael J. Panzner
If we each do our part by spending what money we may have left, instead of selfishly saving it, who knows if we might substantially mitigate the embiggening of the Greater Depression?
I'm on quite a tear of spending right now - $60 at Walmart yesterday, $80 at the mall on Saturday - fortunately missus charley, m.d. is gainfully employed (at present).
Speaking of Bruce Cockburn, I quoted him in a comment of mine (which I am taking the liberty of crossposting) at Yves Smith's excellent blog http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ - the bolded quote at the beginning is from her.
"...[T]he themes aren't changing all that much, the bad policies, the bad assets, the lack of will to reform, the doublespeak....But the trajectory of policy seems immune to public opinion and reason."
Amen, sister.
As the pre-revolutionary Russian peasants would say, "If only the the Father of our Nation, the Czar (our intelligent and humane President) knew how the nobles (the elites of the MICFiC - military industrial congressional financial corporate media complex) oppress us, things would be different."
What the simple faith of the peasants prevented them from understanding was that the Czar and the nobles, despite their conflicts, had a deeper shared stake in not disturbing the status quo, which depended upon continuing the oppression of the peasants. Finally came the cataclysm - and the exchange of a system in which man exploited man for one that was just the reverse, to quote Galbraith.
Similarly in the here and now, despite getting the change we suspended our disbelief in, we still find ourselves in a Bruce Cockburn song - "the trouble with normal, it always gets worse."
Let's keep on working, though - let a thousand Thomas Paines write ten thousand contemporary versions of Common Sense, and something good may come of it - and if not, at least we tried.
May the Creative Forces of the Universe stand beside us, and guide us, through the Night with the Light from Above (metaphorically speaking.)
You said it, mistah charley, ph.d.
Also, pretty soon bread and circuses will be just bread without any circuses, and we'll probably all feel pretty lucky to get that... and all the circus folks will just blend in with the regular folks, except for that one really tall steel bar bending guy, who isn't much of a blender.
Meanwhile, John Galt will still be imaginary.
But, on the plus side, maybe we'll all have a lot more free time to miss all the stuff we never had time to appreciate before.
mistah charley, ph.d. mentioned "czar" and spending money. for my money, Czar, the short-lived 1970 experimental/garage/psychedelic band, is worth a listen, you know, for a good time.
thepuppethead mentioned john galt. there is a lot of talk now about "going john galt," and frankly, the phrase is wearing on me. can't we work up some funner variations to throw in the mix? "gettin' yer gault on," or perhaps, "gulching?"
Spending money - $141.41 at Costco yesterday
[meat, vegetables, fruit, bread, kitty litter, toiletries]
I have the temerity to disagree with a man who earned $175,000,000 in 2007, although due to forces beyond his control his remuneration fell to only $350,000 in 2008. I refer to Stephen Schwarzman, chief executive of the Blackstone Group.
[crossposted from nakedcapitalism.com]
“Between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half” by the global economic crisis, Mr. Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society in New York on Tuesday, according to Reuters. “This is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime.”
Yes, and no - mostly no, in my opinion. When he says "wealth" he means "putative monetary value" - but what money is used for is buying goods and services* (and storing the ability to buy goods and services* later), and there has been no unprecedented destruction of these.
World War II is not in my lifetime, but just barely beyond it (i.e. I am a "boomer") - and there are still millions of people left on this earth who lived through an unprecedented destruction of REAL wealth.
Metaphorically speaking, the financial system is like the nervous system of the economy - it has cancer (or is it epilepsy, or syphilis?) right now, but the other organ systems are mostly OK.
*Among "goods and services" we can count the services of "public servants" - as Will Rogers said, "America's got the best Congress money can buy" - and let's not leave out the executive and judicial branches, and the guys in charge of the mass murder (war, euphemistically called "defense") apparatus.
they say the crisis is caused by a failure of trust.
i disagree. the crisis is due to a failure of imagination.
the "Between 40 and 45 percent of the world's wealth [which] has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half" wasn't ever really 'real.' with a small measure of willful ignorance, we can get ourselves back to the garden. this is the failing of our rulers.
Failure of Trust?… hmmm Isn’t the Social Security Trust Fund at about 2 trillion dollars? I remember Bush-43 was trying desperately to get that Social Security Trust Fund invested in the stock market. Almost as if his life depended on it. If he had succeeded it would have been wiped out now, of course. Good thing that my trust hasn’t failed me because (if I *was* one of those cynical suspicious people that thinks you cannot trust anybody who is in the vicinity of large quantities of cash) it could look a lot like The Incompetent One & Company couldn’t deliver on the Social Security scam so they just hand delivered the payoff to Wall Street.
Contrariwise, maybe imagination alone isn’t enough. Maybe it takes imagination plus a whole heap of trust to create the funds.
Having great wealth just makes it easier to get more wealth. Having power just makes it easier to get more power. These are positive feedback loops, and any system controlled by a positive feedback loop will oscillate out of control. I’m not going to google it right now, but as I recall it was Albert Einstein, during the Great Depression, who compared the economy to a sailing ship. As time went on, more and more wealth moves to the top until the ship becomes unstable, because too much weight is at the top, and it capsizes. During the following confusion enough weight is redistributed to allow the ship to right itself and then the cycle repeats. Empirical data seems to suggest that the cycle was minimized from the time of the New Deal until now. The word from Waveland is that the counterbalances we were maintaining on those powerful positive feedback loops. were inconveniencing the rich and powerful and therefore were evil. Now that the counterbalances have been dismantled, the economic affairs of man can return to their normal Natural Order. Think of it as the triumph of Economic Romanticism over Social Rationalism.
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For Sale: One used soap box. cheap
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sorry, BTR3. i've been thinking about your comment all day, alas without the intellectual acumen to properly respond. i am uncomfortable with your and Einstein's ship metaphor for reasons i have not yet even discerned for myself.
According to the great middle-age-male authority Red Green, middle aged men tend to give long explanations about the way the world works, but probably should not. I try to restrain myself, more or less succcessfully.
Some googling around did not turn up the Einstein-ship reference so I don't know where I read it. Attribute somebody though, because it was not my idea, even so, it makes good sense. Maybe - think of it this way; daily transactions are a part of our social structure. Very few people in our society can subsist solely on their own production. Money is our medium of exchange. When a few have more than they can possibly use, and some significant portion of the rest have none to exchange, then the whole system of exchanges will become unstable.
How about this metaphor. Money is like the blood circulating through our social body. If circulation stops then bad things follow. Blood exists as one unit of a number of interdependent organs. Money exist as one unit of a social framework.
It makes no sense to speak of money as a possession because it is a social construct that does not exist outside its social framework. It makes more sense to me to say that what we actually possess is control over some portion of the circulation.
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