December 12 2024

FLASH...TIME MAGAZINE TO NAME TRUMP 'PERSON OF THE YEAR'
1. Inflation Uptick Poses Challenge to Trump’s Anti-Inflation Pledge
2. Nationwide Frustration Grows Over Health Insurance Practices
3. Senate GOP Plans Two-Phase Legislative Strategy for 2025
4. Google Unveils AI Agent Prototype 'Mariner'
5. Why The US Lost In Afghanistan
6. Bill Belichick Named Head Coach for UNC Football
December 12, 1991: The Russian Federation becomes independent from the USSR

See the Ad Astra Podcast! Released on Apple and Spotify around 10a CST.

FLASH...TIME MAGAZINE TO NAME TRUMP 'PERSON OF THE YEAR'

1. Inflation Uptick Poses Challenge to Trump’s Anti-Inflation Pledge

Inflation played a starring role in last month’s election, and part of Donald Trump’s pitch was that he would cool things off. “I won on groceries,” the president-elect said in an interview Sunday on “Meet the Press.” In his nomination-acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July, Trump said he would “end the devastating inflation crisis immediately.” Despite his pledge to lower inflation, if Trump follows through on some of his tariff and immigration plans, economists worry he might do just the opposite. The pace of inflation had significantly cooled before the election. But anger hasn’t subsided, and costs are far higher than they were before the pandemic. On Wednesday, new inflation numbers suggested that progress on driving down rising costs had stalled. Prices for groceries, for example, were up 1.6% from a year earlier in November. But they were up 27% from February 2020.  Overall consumer prices were up 2.7% in November from a year earlier, a touch higher than October’s 2.6%. That was a far cry from the 9.1% notched in June 2022 The problem presidents face with inflation is that there is only so much they really can do to cool it off. Bringing overall prices down would be even harder—and unwelcome. Falling prices, or deflation, would make it harder for borrowers to repay their loans, stifling the economy.   

Article Source: WSJ

2. Nationwide Frustration Grows Over Health Insurance Practices

A. The killing of a top health insurance executive outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel last week triggered an outpouring of public anger at an industry many Americans blame for the ills of the nation’s healthcare system. Count doctors among the aggrieved.  They deal day in and day out with insurers including UnitedHealthcare, whose chief executive, Brian Thompson, was shot to death last week by an assassin who targeted him outside the company’s annual investor conference. Doctors say their frustration is born of intimate experience and has been building for years. Their chief complaint is the aggravation and expense of convincing insurance companies to pay them for their patients’ treatment. Even when they are ultimately approved, MRI scans and other vital but costly procedures often require days of campaigning and paperwork, say doctors. “It’s getting worse,” said Dr. Zulfiqar Ahmed, an internist in Augusta, Ga., who has practiced in the U.S. for 35 years. “This is not only UnitedHealthcare—this is universal in this country.”  

B. Members of Congress are pushing legislation that threatens to break up some of the nation’s biggest health care conglomerates, including UnitedHealth Group and CVS Health, by forcing them to sell off their retail or mail-order pharmacies. The federal legislation, introduced on Wednesday by a group of prominent Republican and Democratic lawmakers, would prohibit companies that own drug middlemen or health insurers from also owning pharmacy businesses.It is the most aggressive legislative effort in recent years to target those drug middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, or P.B.M.s — companies hired by employers and government programs to oversee their prescription drug benefits.

Article Source: WSJ, NYT

3. Senate GOP Plans Two-Phase Legislative Strategy for 2025

A. Senate Republicans are considering quick legislation early next year to strengthen border security, energy production and the military while saving a tax-policy fight for later in 2025, laying out a two-step process for passing President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda without any Democratic help.  

B. Trump hasn’t weighed in explicitly on the debate that has been raging among congressional Republicans: whether to have one big bill, or a bill focused on border enforcement followed by a separate tax bill. The two-bill approach favored by senators has momentum, including support from a key incoming administration official.

Article Source: WSJ

4. Google Unveils AI Agent Prototype 'Mariner'

Today, chatbots can answer questions, write poems and generate images. In the future, they could also autonomously perform tasks like online shopping and work with tools like spreadsheets. Google on Wednesday unveiled a prototype of this technology, which artificial intelligence researchers call an A.I. agent. Google is among the many tech companies building A.I. agents. Various A.I. start-ups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have unveiled similar prototypes that can use software apps, websites and other online tools. Mariner is designed to be used “with a human in the loop,” Ms. Konzelmann said. For instance, it can fill a virtual shopping cart with groceries if a user is in an active browser tab, but it will not actually buy the groceries. The user must make the purchase. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post that the developments “bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant.”

Article Source: NYT

5. Why The US Lost In Afghanistan

For more than a year, The New York Times visited villages in the once-inaccessible Waygal Valley, asking locals, Taliban officials and former fighters on both sides of the war for the answer. [How did a valley once free of Taliban become such a hotbed of insurgents? Or, put another way, why did so many of the people who welcomed the Americans suddenly want to kill them?] By all accounts, the Americans virtually ensured their own defeat: They repeatedly bombed their closest supporters here, showing just how little the United States understood about the war it was fighting. Civilian casualties are tragically common in war, in Afghanistan or anywhere else. But these attacks were different, residents here say. The Americans killed and maimed the very people who supported them most, swelling the Taliban’s ranks by turning allies into enemies. Convinced that Nuristan would become a transport hub and hide-out for Al Qaeda and its allies, the Americans built bases and aggressively patrolled an area that, for the better part of a century, had been granted autonomy from its own government. Nuristan was never destined to be a focal point of the war on terror. It is isolated, even by the standards of Afghanistan, a landscape of sheer mountain ridges, snow-capped peaks and river gorges, as beautiful as it is unforgiving. The British mostly steered clear of the area in their doomed forays into Afghanistan that began in the 1800s. The Russians, in their own failed bid more than a century later, barely entered. Even the Taliban avoided it during their rule in the 1990s. Only the Americans dared to encroach into the region, and in doing so created the very insurgent stronghold they feared most. The United States dropped more than 1,000 bombs in a place it never needed to be. Instead of winning hearts and minds, the Americans unwittingly sowed the seeds of their own demise here in the Waygal Valley — just as it did in much of Afghanistan — then stayed for years to reap the harvest.  

Article Source: NYT

6. Bill Belichick Named Head Coach for UNC Football

Bill Belichick, the longtime NFL coach who won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots but has not led a team in a year, will be the next football coach at the University of North Carolina, the school announced Wednesday. He agreed to a five-year deal pending approval by the board of trustees, the university said.

Article Source: NYT

December 12, 1991: The Russian Federation becomes independent from the USSR

Sources

2. https://www.wsj.com/economy/inflation-prices-trump-president-186fb5cc?st=GGt2Js&reflink=article_copyURL_share

3. A https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/doctor-physician-health-insurance-companies-anger-6f23b470?st=kLTQFN&reflink=article_copyURL_share
B https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/business/warren-hawley-pharmacy-benefit-managers.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

4. A https://www.wsj.com/politics/senate-republicans-aim-to-tackle-border-first-taxes-later-98026ef8?st=SPDFiy&reflink=article_copyURL_share
B https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-looms-large-in-republican-fight-over-2025-plans-04915319?st=QcdtMa&reflink=article_copyURL_share

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/technology/google-ai-agent-gemini.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

6. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/world/europe/afghanistan-allies-enemies-nuristan-taliban.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

7. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5982538/2024/12/11/bill-belichick-unc-coach-hiring/