12.06.09
Claude Levi-Strauss—and a wonderful blog
The Wife discovered the blog Cachagua Store, and a wonderful blog it is. Here’s his post on the death of Claude Levi-Strauss:
This is a food-related post.
Claude Levi-Strauss passed over the border last Friday at the age of 100. He almost made it to 101.
Claude was a famous anthropologist….anyone bludgeoned into taking Anthro 101 has been forced to read Tristes Tropiques or The Savage Mind. I hope.
Claude was the kind of genius that is readily recognizable in physics, chemistry, etc. He looked at modern culture and saw a completely different rationale for the way we live, work……cook. Had he written prose fiction, he would have won a Nobel. As it was he inspired a whole new generation of philosophers who in turn inspired physicists, chemists…..cooks….to think not just outside the box, but outside the hexahedron.
Basically, Claude looked at nature and human culture and saw that we had been struggling to define our world in blacks and whites. Ones and zeros. True and false. Good and bad. Fun and boring. He blamed all this on Plato, and he probably had a point. Well, three points as it turns out.
Claude thought the human brain was actually organized to perceive, evaluate and act on three points of view. 1, 0, and not 1 or 0. Good, bad….and not good or bad.
Claude was the son of a painter who was classically educated in Paris at the Sorbonne. He fell in love with an ethnologist and wound up in Brazil for five years in the 30’s. His observations of primitive Amazonian cultures were what lit him up.
Anyway, one of his big teaching points was the Culinary Triangle. He used this to push his point about the limiting nature of binary thought…
The lies of Joe Lieberman
Regular readers may have noticed that I’ve been keeping track of Joe Lieberman’s evolving rationales for opposing a public option. The Connecticut senator is so opposed to letting some consumers choose between competing public and private plans that he’s willing to kill the entire bill over this one issue, but his reasoning keeps changing.
Believe it or not, we’re up to seven arguments over seven months, none of which makes sense.
In June, Lieberman said, "I don’t favor a public option because I think there’s plenty of competition in the private insurance market." That didn’t make sense, and it was quickly dropped from his talking points.In July, Lieberman said he opposes a public option because "the public is going to end up paying for it." No one could figure out exactly what that meant, and the senator moved on to other arguments.
In August, he said we’d have to wait "until the economy’s out of recession," which is incoherent, since a public option, even if passed this year, still wouldn’t kick in for quite a while.
In September, Lieberman said he opposes a public option because "the public doesn’t support it." A wide variety of credible polling proved otherwise.
In October, Lieberman said the public option would mean "trouble … for the national debt," by creating "a whole new government entitlement program." Soon after, Jon Chait explained that this "literally makes no sense whatsoever."
In November, Lieberman said creating a public plan along the lines of Medicare is antithetical to "the way we’ve responded to the market in America in the past." This, too, was quickly debunked.
And here we are in December, and the independent senator has a new explanation, which he explained to the Wall Street Journal:
Why is he adamant? Mr. Lieberman says that while he is not "a conspiratorial person," he believes the public option is intended as a way for the government to take over health care. "I’ve been working for health-care reform in different ways since I arrived here," he says. "It was always about how do we make the system more efficient and less costly, and how do we expand coverage to people who can’t afford it, and how do we adopt some consumer protections from the insurance companies . . . So where did this public option come from?" It was barely a blip, he says, in last year’s presidential campaign.
"I started to ask some of my colleagues in the Democratic caucus, privately, and two of them said ’some in our caucus, and some outside in interest groups, after the president won such a great victory and there were more Democrats in the Senate and the House, said this is the moment to go for single payer.’" So, I joke, the senator is, in fact, as big a "conspiracy theorist" as me. He laughingly rejoins: "But I have evidence!"
This really is incoherent. First, independent analyses, including reports from the CBO, have found that public and private plans can compete and co-exist without driving the other out of business. Lieberman may claim to have imaginary "evidence," but there is no conspiracy.
Second, this wasn’t sprung on lawmakers after the election; it was part of all of the major Democratic candidates’ plans as far back as mid-2007.
And third, if progressive lawmakers decided this is "the moment to go for single payer," they would have proposed single payer. As it stands, they’re pushing for a watered-down public option with a state opt-out.
Lieberman’s "conspiracy theory," in other words, is bunk.
What does the secret new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement contain?
Read this account of James Love’s conversation with Ambassador Ron Kirk, the head US Trade Representative, on the question of why the Draconian Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is taking place in secret. Love cornered Kirk on a United Airlines flight from Geneva to DC following a WTO Ministerial meeting. Love asks Kirk why the treaty isn’t public, and Kirk’s answers are — at best — total weaseling and at worst fabrications.
I had a chance to talk to Kirk about the secrecy of the ACTA agreement. He said the ACTA text would be made public, "when it is finished." I told him it that was too late, and the public wanted the text out now, before it is too late to influence anything.
Kirk said he was aware that there were those who wanted the text public, but the issue of transparency was "about as complicated as it can get," and Kirk didn’t want people "walking away from the table," which would likely happen if the text was public, he said.
I said that it was untrue that IPR negotiations are normally secret, mentioning as examples that drafts of the other IPR texts, including the proposed WIPO treaty for disabilities and the climate change agreement language on IPR, as well as several drafts of the FTAA text and the 1996 WIPO copyright treaties had been public. Kirk said that ACTA "was different" and the topics being negotiated in ACTA were "more complex."
I brought up to Kirk that the USTR had shown ACTA text to dozens of corporate lobbyists and all of its trading partners in the ACTA negotiation, and the text was only secret from the public. Kirk did say USTR was discussing this issue with the White House and its trading partners, but that was about all he could say at that moment.
Ambassador Kirk: People would be "walking away from the table" if the ACTA text is made public (via The Command Line)
Getting the UK government to release a report
It’s hopeless because the report didn’t say what they had decided in advance it should say. From the Transform Drug Policy Foundation website:
The following article is the latest installment in Transform’s long running campaign to get the Government to release its publicly funded research into the effectiveness of UK drug policy . It appears in this week’s Economist magazine here. For more background see the links after the article.
Inconvenient truths
Dec 3rd 2009
From The Economist print editionStretching the law on the disclosure of public documents has been a competitive sport among civil servants ever since the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act was passed in 2000. It requires public bodies to reveal information on request, but provides 23 get-outs, designed to protect secrets that ought to stay under wraps because they threaten national security, personal privacy and so on. The rules are often interpreted in a creative way.
Now The Economist has discovered a contender for the most inventive interpretation to date. After thinking about it for nearly two years and trying out various exemptions, the Home Office has refused to release a confidential assessment of its anti-drugs strategy requested by Transform, a pressure group. The reason is that next March the National Audit Office (NAO), a public-spending watchdog, is due to publish a report of its own on local efforts to combat drugs. The Home Office says that to have two reports about drugs out at the same time might confuse the public, and for this reason it is going to keep its report under wraps.
This is believed to be the first time that a public body has openly refused to release information in order to manage the news better. The department argues that releasing its internal analysis now “risks misinterpretation of the findings of the [NAO] report”, because its own analysis is from 2007 and predates the NAO’s findings. The argument uses section 36 of the FOI act, which provides a broad exemption for information that could “prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs”.
The information commissioner, who polices the FOI act, declined to comment because the case was still open. But his predecessor, Richard Thomas, who stepped down in June, questioned the novel defence. “Certainly my office was always quite sceptical of anything which said publishing information is going to confuse the public. If that’s the case, normally you need to put out some extra material alongside it to provide adequate explanation. It’s not a reason for withholding something.”
Sir Alan Beith, the chairman of the parliamentary Justice Committee, which oversees the FOI act, was sharply critical of the Home Office’s excuse. “That’s really scraping the barrel. On those grounds you would have to ban the various hospital reports that are coming out at the moment [see article] because the public are confused about that too. It’s not an argument for censorship, it’s an argument for an even more open and clear debate.” The Home Office was making “a quite ridiculous attempt to hide from freedom of information,” he said.
The legality of the decision is also in doubt, after the department admitted that its refusal to release the document had not been approved by a minister, as is required by law. A Home Office spokeswoman called it an “administrative error”. Retrospective ministerial authorisation was being sought as The Economist went to press.
Legally or not, the Home Office will be able to hang on to its report for now because the FOI act takes so long to enforce. The commissioner’s office is said to be ready to order the release of the report now. If it does, the Home Office has 28 days to launch an appeal, which could take a year. In the meantime, drugs policy will continue to be shaped—or not—by research that the public paid for but may not see.
Doing free work for clients
When I was freelancing for a while, it was amazing the number of people who wanted free work—if I just did the work for free, I would become famous (because the product they wanted the manual for was so great), or I would be paid when the product succeeded, and so on.
So I read this with a great deal of sympathy.
Making Dashi
Today I’m making dashi so that I can make miso soup with that superb hatcho miso.
Some big businesses start to be proactive about global warming
Interesting article by Jared Diamond in the NY Times:
There is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know — because I used to share that view.
But today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.
As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.
The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.
What’s my evidence for this? Here are a few examples involving three corporations — Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron — that many critics of business love to hate, in my opinion, unjustly.
Let’s start with Wal-Mart…
Continue reading. I continue to believe, however, that most businesses will resist any change and fight any possible diminution of profits. We can look at the fights against the Clean Air Act in decades past—even though cleaning up their emissions ended up saving businesses a lot of money (because they stopped producing the emissions in the first place in many cases, by making the process more efficient), they still fought it tooth and nail. They don’t like change.
Still, it’s good to look at recent evidence.
Getting fit with a bad knee
Until I can see a physical therapist and work through a course of exercises, walking is out. TYD, though, reminded me of the Nordic Track that I have set up: easy on the knees. And today, with my knee not hurting so much, I tried it and it works like a dream. This is great, because I certainly wanted to continue exercising on the rainy days of winter.
I’ll have to work up gradually to a decent exercise duration: different muscles involved, I imagine. But that is a bright spot.
And in the meantime, I am continuing to monitor my diet and step up the amount of non-animal food (going for plants and fungi). I may go out and get some mushrooms for more mushroom burgers—those guys are great.
I got this Withings wireless scale, and I’m enjoying that: figures out weight, lean body mass v. fat body mass, and the BMI, and you get nifty graphs at their site. (Only browsers currently supported: Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. I’m pushing to add Chrome to the list.) Plus the scale itself is beautifully designed and very easy to read (a problem with my old scale).
Best outlining tools
I don’t know about this list. It doesn’t include Action Outline, which I like, nor MaxThink, which I’ve used in the past and is still around. Still, it’s worth a look. And if you do use OneNote, which is great, note this post.
Coburn and Vitter probably having second thoughts
Steve Benen at Political Animal:
Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and David Vitter (R-La.) no doubt thought they were being clever. They crafted an amendment that would force members of Congress to get their coverage through a public insurance plan, if the public option were included as part of health care reform. If it’s good enough for American consumers, it should be good enough for their elected representatives, right?
They had no idea how much Democrats agreed with the sentiment.
As we talked about this morning, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) not only loved the idea, he wanted to join the right-wing senators as a co-sponsor on their amendment. When they refused — this was supposed to be a conservative stunt, not a real idea — Brown used procedural tactics to make himself a co-sponsor of the Coburn/Vitter measure, whether they like it or not.
Then, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said she, too, wanted to join. Soon after, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) endorsed the Coburn/Vitter amendment and also asked to be a co-sponsor. “If we have a public option in this plan, as I hope that we will, I think there’s nothing wrong in insisting that members of Congress be included in that public option proposal,” Dodd said, calling the idea “wonderful.”
These guys are taking away all of Coburn’s and Vitter’s fun.
Now, it’s worth noting that the conservatives’ measure isn’t quite right. The point of a public option is choice — consumers would be given a chance to select from a series of competing plans, choosing the one that works best for them. One of the options would be a public plan. The Coburn/Vitter amendment wants to take away lawmakers’ choices and force them to get coverage through the public plan — something that wouldn’t happen to other U.S. consumers. Dems, in other words, want to give eligible Americans a choice, and these far-right Republicans want to take that choice away.
But no matter. The fun part of this is that it’s a stunt gone awry. Coburn and Vitter were probably whispering to themselves, “We’ll show them.” It didn’t occur to them that Democrats would call their bluff.
Interesting thoughts from BooMan
I’ve been an incurable political junkie for about ten years now, maybe twelve. For the past five years I’ve spent six-to-twelve hours a day reading or writing about politics, almost every single day. If you haven’t done that, you can’t imagine what the experience is like. It’s total immersion. I should have more than one Ph.D in political science by now. I have learned a tremendous amount about how politics works in this country. And the media. The number one lesson I’ve taken away from it all is that you should hate the vast majority of elected officials and members of the media in this country. I know that is depressing to hear, but it’s the truth. But I have a second lesson.
Once you learn to give up on almost all your heroes and all the people you think might change things for the better, you’ll overcome your cynicism. You’ll realize that you were wrong to think so highly of most of these people but that your instincts were right about who you should be pulling for. Total immersion in American politics will wean you of your idealism, but if you’ve watched what happens to politicians once they’ve been in Washington DC for a while this should come as no surprise to you. Yet, once you’ve lost that youthful and innocent burst of enthusiasm and you’ve digested your disappointment, you’ll get to another level where you begin to understand how progress actually occurs within this system (and how it can be thwarted).
And heroes will begin to emerge again. Heroes like Henry Waxman who fought valiantly for decades against Big Tobacco, or John Dingell who has introduced a universal health care bill every year for over half a century. If you look at them too closely you’ll see some unsightly warts. Waxman voted to authorize the war in Iraq and Dingell has been an opponent of environmental regulations. But the real heroes in Washington are the ones that keep up the fight, year after year, until they finally begin to deliver. They learn to be patient and take their progress piecemeal. They cut deals that infuriate their biggest supporters. But they keep moving the ball down the field.
If you think about it, this is how all the great reformers have accomplished their goals. It was true of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and it’s true of the people that have won rights for women and gays. If you live in the moment, you’ll find good reason to hate these people. But if you take the long view, things are much less hopeless than they seem.
"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice."
Health-insurer Aetna drops 600,000 policy holders to raise profits
You can certainly trust any business—trust it to do whatever it can to increase profits, regardless of moral, ethical, and frequently even legal considerations. Sam Stein at Huffington Post:
Health insurance giant Aetna is planning to force up to 650,000 clients to drop their coverage next year as it seeks to raise additional revenue to meet profit expectations.
In a third-quarter earnings conference call in late October, officials at Aetna announced that in an effort to improve on a less-than-anticipated profit margin in 2009, they would be raising prices on their consumers in 2010. The insurance giant predicted that the company would subsequently lose between 300,000 and 350,000 members next year from its national account as well as another 300,000 from smaller group accounts.
“The pricing we put in place for 2009 turned out to not really be what we needed to achieve the results and margins that we had historically been delivering,” said chairman and CEO Ron Williams. “We view 2010 as a repositioning year, a year that does not fully reflect the earnings potential of our business. Our pricing actions should have a noticeable effect beginning in the first quarter of 2010, with additional financial impact realized during the remaining three quarters of the year.”
Aetna’s decision to downsize the number of clients in favor of higher premiums is, as one industry analyst told American Medical News, a “pretty candid” admission. It also reflects the major concerns offered by health care reform proponents and supporters of a public option for insurance coverage, who insist that the private health insurance industry is too consumed with the bottom line. A government-run plan would operate solely off its members’ premiums.
Aetna actually made a profit in 2009 but not at levels that it anticipated…
Continue reading. And those 600,000 people? Hard cheese.
Steve Benen has Harry Reid’s comment:
… It’s interesting, then, to see Aetna announce that it intends to “force up to 650,000 clients to drop their coverage next year as it seeks to raise additional revenue to meet profit expectations.” It’s also raising premiums on its customers — again.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did the right thing today when he called Aetna out. (Jed Lewison has the video)
“You see, one of the largest private insurance companies in America made a lot of money last year — more than a billion dollars, in fact. Its chairman and CEO took home at least $100 million of that money himself.
“This health care company is going to make a healthy profit again this year. But its executives decided the profit they’re making isn’t quite big enough. So this multibillion-dollar company found a clever way to make sure next year’s bottom line is even bigger: it’s raising its rates.
“As you might expect, those higher premiums are going to be too expensive for many. How many? It could be as many as 650,000 people.
“That’s more than the entire populations of North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. It’s more than the entire populations of Baltimore and Boston and Denver and Seattle. How many people is this one company willing to drop? You could count every man, woman and child in Las Vegas and still have almost 100,000 people left over.
“But here’s the worst part: That shocking estimate comes directly from the president of the company himself. The means the company devised this strategy, crunched the numbers and saw how many American families it was going to hurt. Then the bosses shrugged their shoulders and decided to go ahead with it anyway.”
And remember, for those 44 senators who oppose the public option — 40 Republicans, three Democrats, and Joe Lieberman — protecting companies like Aetna from even a little competition from a public plan is worth killing health care reform over.
Erik Prince, Blackwater, CIA, and the law
Several commentators believe that Prince, in the Vanity Fair article, is setting up a graymail defense. Check these out:
Scahill: Prince Is Conducting Graymail – Marcy Wheeler
Erik Prince’s Brushback Pitch – Spencer Ackerman
Survival skills: Finding free, wholesome food
This is from Treehugger, which has much info on the film and the activity:
Cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression
Stanton Peele in Psychology Today:
As the holiday season is upon us, now is a good time to consider cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for depression. Ironically, the all-time Christmas classic "It’s a Wonderful Life," directed by Frank Capra and starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, presents the fundamental elements in CBT.
CBT is the new buzzword for psychotherapy – as Freudian psychoanalysis once was. Every therapist now claims to use it (if they aren’t psychiatrists who rely strictly on drug therapy). But most are just paying lip service to the treatment.
Before turning to Capra’s genius, let me first answer the question: "Haven’t antidepressants (ADs) revolutionized, solved really, the problem of depression?"
No, they haven’t. Here are three points to ponder:
(1) As all medical providers will tell you, symptoms of depression persist for the large majority of AD recipients.
(2) Clinical trials involving psychoactive placebos find negligible added benefits for ADs versus those produced by the placebos.
(3) Head-to-head comparisons of CBT and AD yield equivalent initial results, but far less relapse from CBT.
The lower relapse rate for CBT occurs because it teaches people specific techniques to employ in their lives which they retain, while withdrawal from ADs is often traumatic.
What makes CBT so deceptive is that it is a prescription for common sense. CBT tells people to schedule – and force themselves to remain involved in – work, play, social activities. It also teaches them to practice simple cognitive prophylactia – as demonstrated in "It’s a Wonderful Life."
When people commit suicide, we often mourn that they had so many positives in their lives which they ignored in favor of some recent bad events. These traumas, or fears more often, dominate depressed people’s thinking and become intolerably dire in their minds. Of course, if they waited for events to cycle through, they would find their problems are often less severe than they originally feared, and that they can be readily solved.
Meanwhile, if people weather the storm, they refocus on their positives: family, simple pleasures, past accomplishments, friends they may have forgotten, and so on.
Clarence the angel …
Police use forfeiture laws to steal from the poor
Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing:
Radley Balko posted about a woman in Wayne County who broke no laws yet had to pay $1,400 to get her car back when police seized it “after they mistook Vaughn’s co-worker for a prostitute.”
From a Detroit News article:
The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, which helps run the prosecutor’s forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.
Obama’s Justice Department supports state asset forfeiture laws, says Balko:
It’s worth noting that Obama’s Justice Department filed an amicus brief on behalf of the state in that case. They weren’t obligated to. Though the solicitor general’s office is charged with defending all federal laws, the law at issue in Alvarez is a state law, not a federal one. In fact, federal civil forfeiture laws are much friendlier to property owners. So you could make a decent case that the administration could have argued against the Illinois law. At the very least, it could have kept quiet. Instead, it argued that the state should retain the power to take property from people without ever charging a crime (and not necessarily kingpins—the Illinois law in question applies only to property valued at under $20,000), and keep that property for a year or more before affording the owner a chance to get it back.Taking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.
FDA not doing its job
Back at the start of November, Consumer Reports issued a damning report on the levels of bisphenol A detectable in a variety of packaged foods, including in foods labeled "BPA-free."
On November 30, the FDA was supposed to issue its latest assessment on the safety of BPA — a chemical used in plastics that’s detectable in the bodies of most Americans. But that date came and went, although the FDA has issued assurances that its review will be made public “before 2010.”
As Marion Nestle noted on her Food Politics blog, “I can’t think of a single reason not to ban it.” Nestle, who called recently for the feds to pass a comprehensive food-safety law, tipped her hat to Jill Richardson at the blog La Vida Locavore, for her writing about the food industry’s attempts to keep BPA legal.
Of course, like global warming, we may be too late on the whole plastics thing. Doesn’t mean we can’t try, though.
