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A new study from the Department of Health and Human Services paints a bleak picture for the nation’s homeless youth, but it also recommends some steps to help the tens of thousands of homeless young people on the nation’s streets.

Here are some of the conclusions from the just-released report, done with data collected by 11 agencies nationwide that work with homeless youth:

• The average homeless youth spent nearly two years living on the streets.
• More than 60 percent of homeless youth were raped, beaten up, robbed, or otherwise assaulted.
• Nearly 30 percent of the HHS study participants identified themselves as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and nearly seven percent identified as transgender.
• About half of homeless youth had been in foster care, and youth with a foster care history had been homeless for much longer (27.5 months, on average) than youth who had never been in foster care (19.3 months, on average).

More than half of the study’s participants became homeless for the first time because they were asked to leave home by a parent or caregiver. More than half said they tried to stay at a shelter but that the shelter was full. More than half also needed a safe place to stay; help with education; access to laundry facilities; a place to study, rest, or spend time during the day; and a phone.

This comprehensive, first-of-its-kind study was funded by the HHS Administration for Children and Families’ Family & Youth Services Bureau and was conducted by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The study focused on 873 youth ages 14 to 21, who were interviewed extensively by 11 agencies in cities across the country, from Boston to San Diego.

What will it take for most Americans to see the light when it comes to Medicare for All? It will likely take the death of close loved ones—who happen to be middle-class Americans with insurance—to slap some single payer sense into us.

According to IMS Health, U.S. prescription drug spending will hit $400 billion a year by 2020. Reuters reports:

U.S. annual spending on prescription medicines will increase 22 percent over the next five years, climbing as high as $400 billion in 2020, according to a report released by health care information company IMS Health Holdings Inc on Thursday. Those figures, which take into account anticipated discounts, rebates and other price concessions that have become common, represent an annual growth rate of 4 percent to 7 percent through 2020, according to the report.

Absorb the following. The inflation rate has averaged 1 percent over the last 10 years. Drug prices have been growing at 4 to 7 percent. Pharmaceutical companies grow their revenues and profits not based on increased cost, but on the desire to extract more profits regardless of market conditions.

Does it seem like we are living in a world of perpetual campaigning? At the federal level, we have elections for president and both houses of Congress. At the state and local levels, we have elections for governor, state legislature, attorney general, secretary of state, various judicial seats, city and county boards, school boards, sheriff, coroner, mayor, and likely a dozen other offices that vary from community to community. It is also very likely that none of these elections take place at the same time. David Nir pointed out in a diary a little over a year ago that there are more than 500,000 elected officials in the United States. No wonder it seems like we are constantly having elections.

This presidential election cycle started on March 23, 2015 when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz threw his hat in the ring. The first statewide contest for president would not be held until February 2016, when Iowa voters went to the caucuses. Five Republican candidates dropped out of the race before a single vote was even cast.

And of course other elections don’t stop just because there is a presidential race going on. Often, smaller races—like school boards for example—get lost in the shuffle of all of the noise generated by a presidential election season that seems to start earlier and earlier every year.

What good does it do to to have an election season last 20 months, much less have a half dozen or more state and local elections take place during that same time? It’s no wonder we cannot get anyone to vote, let alone run for local offices.

Black people, like other human beings, are just mere mortals.

Black people do not have the strength of Superman. 

Black people do not possess the speed of the Flash. Black people lack the healing powers of Wolverine. 

Shakespeare wrote, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”

According to new research from the University of Virginia and published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, many white medical students and residents do not share his belief in the common bond of human suffering and existence.

America’s health care system often functions as a type of medical Apartheid.

As reported in the Washington Post:

African Americans are routinely under-treated for their pain compared with whites, according to research. A study released Monday sheds some disturbing light on why that might be the case.

Researchers at the University of Virginia quizzed white medical students and residents to see how many believed inaccurate and at times "fantastical" differences about the two races -- for example, that blacks have less sensitive nerve endings than whites or that black people's blood coagulates more quickly. They found that fully half thought at least one of the false statements presented was possibly, probably or definitely true…

Even more disturbing: 

"We were expecting some endorsement" of the false beliefs, said Kelly Hoffman, a U-Va. doctoral candidate in psychology who led the study. But she said the researchers were surprised so many in the group with medical training endorsed the false beliefs, some of which she called "more outlandish."

For example, 58 percent of the study's general group said they believed that "blacks' skin is thicker than whites'." About 40 percent of first- and second-year medical students also thought that was true, as did 25 percent of residents -- doctors who recently completed their studies and now are receiving more specialized training.

The practical effect of racial bias in health care is that black people are made to suffer.

The folks over at FiveThirtyEight got together last week to ponder the question, “Do You Have To Be Manly To Be President?”​ And while they did not appear to reach a definitive conclusion, the discussion was very interesting for a couple of reasons (as in how significant is the size of a man’s hands in determining his ability to occupy the Oval Office). 

From Clare Malone, a senior political writer for FiveThirtyEight:

We’ve all been conditioned in certain ways — and even if you’re down with feminism and up on the correct way to address changing gender norms, if you were born in a certain year (let’s say pre-1995), you have some pretty ingrained bias you might never get rid of. Those Snapchatting younger millennials, now, they might be a different story when it comes to perceptions of candidates in elections to come over the next decades.

It is simply assumed that millennials will not have the ingrained bias that is shared by older generations. That was my assumption as well. The conditioning of my youth is different from what they were exposed to, so their bias should be different as well.

But it really doesn’t appear to be working out that way. At least, not completely.

The most accessible and entertaining book about the 2008 financial meltdown was Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which last year was made into a justly celebrated film. Lewis tells the stories of some of the few investors who got it right, and saw the crash coming. All were out of the mainstream, delved deeply into details as few others did, and made fortunes by betting against the supposedly booming market. They were successful precisely because they saw what almost no one else did.

There were some prominent public voices who also saw what was coming, but as an example of the prevailing consensus, years of dire predictions by Nouriel Roubini earned him the moniker Dr. Doom. Other prescient voices in the years before the collapse included Dean Baker, who was warning of a housing bubble, and Paul Krugman, who said its collapse could lead to a recession. George Soros spoke of a hard landing and the need to stoke demand. Joseph Stiglitz wrote of the greater macroeconomic dangers of unregulated but integrated markets. But in March 2007, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke for the majority of economic analysts by noting the slowing housing market and that it was hurting some in the subprime mortgage market, while nevertheless finding cause for assurance:

At this juncture, however, the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained. In particular, mortgages to prime borrowers and fixed-rate mortgages to all classes of borrowers continue to perform well, with low rates of delinquency.

Most people agreed. One prominent U.S. senator was not among them: Hillary Clinton.

I grew up on Long Island, just a few miles from Patchogue, the town on the South Shore where Donald Trump spoke on Thursday. My parents moved out there in the 1970s, and my mother is still there. Plus, I work on the Island. Point is, I know it well. Like much of the rest of America, Long Island has had its share of failures when it comes to diversity.

Levittown became the symbol of suburban segregation in the U.S. It offered affordable housing for young families—whites only, if you please—fleeing the big city. Even today, Levittown is only 0.1% percent black. That’s not one out of 10, or even one out of 100. It’s one out of 1,000. That statistic doesn’t tell the whole story of Long Island, but neither can we tell the Island’s story without it.

The most consequential demographic change in the past couple of decades has been the immigration of Latinos. Again—as is true all over our country—although many locals were welcoming, some felt threatened.

Those feelings were reflected in a gang of Patchogue teenagers who, on numerous occasions, went out looking for Latinos to assault. They called it “beaner-hopping” or “Mexican hopping.” One evening in 2008 they were hanging around the town’s train station, hurling insults of an ethnic nature, and looking for someone who fit the profile. They found Marcelo Lucero, a man who immigrated here from Ecuador. They confronted him and a friend, surrounded them, assaulted Lucero, and, after he tried to defend himself, one of the youths stabbed him to death.

That brutal, hateful act took place about two football fields away from where Trump held forth just a few days ago. He was invited to a Suffolk County Republican fundraiser by the county party chair, State Sen. John LaValle. Here’s what Joselo Lucero, Marcelo’s brother, had to say:

Anyone who has been paying attention knows about [Trump]’s anti-immigrant ideas….It’s hard to understand what LaValle was thinking. I don’t know whether he considered the impact on the immigrant community and the people of Patchogue. I’m not sure which is worse: that he didn’t even think about it, or that he considered the pain involved and decided to extend the invitation anyway.

When discussing Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, frequently there are references to the nation’s indigenous history and culture and multiple languages. But rarely is there any acknowledgement of the unique and rich history and culture of Afro-Mexicans. Until very recently, the Mexican government did not collect data on Mexicans of African heritage. That has changed.

Mexico has finally recognized Afro-Mexicans in its National Census.

Mexico was previously one of the only Latin American countries to not officially count its African-descended population. Afro Mexicans fighting for constitutional recognition now have a reason to celebrate. For the first time, Mexico's national census included an "Afro" category. The country's 2015 population survey was released on Tuesday (December 8) and officially counted about 1.38 million people of African descent (about 1.2% of the country's population). 

The decision to include an "Afro" category is a major step toward recognizing the country's Black population, many of whom are descendants of slaves forcibly removed from Africa during the height of the Atlantic slave trade. Mexico was one of only two Latin American countries (the other being Chile) that did not recognize its Black citizens on the national census. This stemmed in part from the ideological leaders of post-independence Mexico who created the concept of "mestizaje," a national identity that did not incorporate Afro Mexicans. The result was the long-term marginalization and neglect of the nation's Black population.

The change is a step in the right direction, but simply being counted will not stop discrimination and incidents of racial profiling.

The black people 'erased from history'

More than a million people in Mexico are descended from African slaves and identify as "black", "dark" or "Afro-Mexican" even if they don't look black. But beyond the southern state of Oaxaca they are little-known and the community's leaders are now warning of possible radical steps to achieve official recognition.

"The police made me sing the national anthem three times, because they wouldn't believe I was Mexican," says Chogo el Bandeno, a black Mexican singer-songwriter. "I had to list the governors of five states too."

He was visiting the capital, Mexico City, hundreds of miles from his home in southern Mexico, when the police stopped him on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. Fortunately his rendition of the anthem and his knowledge of political leaders convinced the police to leave him alone, but other Afro-Mexicans have not been so fortunate.

It’s getting close to the time when people come blundering through my woods with their eyes fixed on the ground. Mushroom season. But please note that just a couple of years ago, three kids in my neighborhood picked some nice white ‘shrooms that turned out to have the lovely name of Destroying Angel. One of them lived. After a liver transplant. Think it’s edible? Check again.

Okay then. 

I’d like to say this morning was free of a different kind of toxin. Trumpless. De-Donald’d. Combed free of comb-overs. But I’d be lying. 

Once again I’d like to remind you that the pundits do not work for me. Neither do I wrangle them. I merely follow them around on Sunday morning and pick up their fresh, recently deposited…. leavings. So if some of these people still find fascination in a screaming orange zonker, well, we’re probably going to go there. 

But at least there are people looking into other colors. Like deep, deep blue.

James Nestor goes deep to have a conversation.

I held my breath and swam deeper. 10, 20, 30 feet. I heard a thunderous crack, then another, so loud they vibrated my chest. Below my kicking feet, two sperm whales emerged from the shadows, each as long as a school bus.

The cracking was coming from the whales; it’s a form of sonar called echolocation that species of dolphins, whales and other cetaceans use to “see” underwater. ...

As we kicked down deeper, within just a few feet of the mother whale’s gaping mouth, the click patterns changed, becoming slower, softer. They sounded to me like “coda clicks,” the sounds sperm whales use to identify themselves to others in the pod. The whales were probably introducing themselves. They were saying hello.

It’s a fun and interesting read this morning. I can guarantee you that Nestor’s chat with the whales is more intelligent—on both sides— than anything you’ll find on the Sunday morning talk show lineup.

Come on inside. I’m out of whales, but some of these pundits sure do have a blowhole.

This is it. Episode the last. If you’ve been following along since the first week, then you’ve now read it all. If not, this is a good time to catch up. You’ve seen the beginning, and the middle, and here comes the end. 

I sold my first short story in 1991. My first novel in 1993. For awhile there, it seemed like I was on a roll, with a couple of award nominations, a movie option, a television series created from some of my books. Then the industry started to change. Very quickly I found myself without an editor, without a contract, and back at square one. I scrambled and clawed. I did ghostwriting. I wrote books under someone else’s name, often racing through a book in a single week, week after week. Until I lost my grip on the tail end of publishing and tumbled away.

It happens. In fact, it happened to a lot of people in what used to be the “mid-list”—that space just below the bestseller lists. I was just one of thousands of people whose names used to show up on the shelves. Then they didn’t.

The rarer thing? A second chance. This is mine. I’ve enjoyed it every week and I hope you have, as well. I wanted to give you a slice of what I believe science fiction does best: taking issues away from the confinements and expectations of the day to day, and dropping them in a setting that allows them to be examined from a fresh perspective. I made the best story I could and filled it with the kind of double-meanings, allusions, sneaky little in-jokes, quirky characters, memorable settings, and blunt truths that I like to find in a story. I hope you found something you can carry home with you.

In the end, if you buy a copy that would be cool. But it’s also cool if you don’t. I appreciate the chance, and the choice. And the… Anyway, let’s get rolling. We left things last week with a big twist followed by a cliffhanger. Now we stop hanging.

Jolene Maloney, a prosecutor in Boise County, was arrested last week for drunk driving. This isn't anything new for Maloney—in 2012 and 2013 she was arrested and convicted for driving drunk. This time she was going 52 mph in a 35 mph zone. After pulling her over, officers smelled alcohol coming from her car. She initially would not perform any field sobriety tests. Eventually she agreed to, at which point she failed each one. Her blood alcohol level registered at .182/.183, more than twice the legal limit.

It's bad enough that a prosecutor would be caught drunk driving three times, and perhaps what Maloney needs is serious treatment for alcoholism before she causes real injury or even death.

What may be even worse, though, is the fact that Maloney still has her job. From KTVB 7:

An attorney for Maloney told the judge during a first appearance Friday afternoon that the defendant had not resigned or been fired from her position as Boise County's prosecutor.  A woman who answered the phone at the Boise County Prosecutor's Office earlier in the day declined to comment.

Seems like someone who’s been arrested for their third DUI shouldn’t be allowed to prosecute other people who’ve been arrested. Just saying. The judge ordered Maloney held on $50,000 bond and told her not to drive, "possess alcohol, or visit bars" while the case continues. Because this is the third time, Maloney is being charged with a felony. 

Maloney has had other run-ins with the law. In 2010 she was also charged with misdemeanor injury to a child and disturbing the peace.