Later On

Constant Reader points out some very bad developments in the news world. Glenn Greenwald:

The New York Times this morning has a remarkable story, and incredibly, the article’s author, Brian Stelter, doesn’t even acknowledge, let alone examine, what makes the story so significant.  In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly.  According to the NYT, both CEO’s agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other’s news organizations and employees.

Most notably, the deal wasn’t engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O’Reilly’s show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC.  To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O’Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings.  The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp:

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations.  A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April. . . .

In late 2007, Mr. O’Reilly had a young producer, Jesse Watters, ambush Mr. Immelt and ask about G.E.’s business in Iran, which is legal, and which includes sales of energy and medical technology. G.E. says it no longer does business in Iran.

Mr. O’Reilly continued to pour pressure on its corporate leaders, even saying on one program last year that "If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt."  The resulting e-mail to G.E. from Mr. O’Reilly’s viewers was scathing. . .

Over time, G.E. and the News Corporation concluded that the fighting "wasn’t good for either parent," said an NBC employee with direct knowledge of the situation.  But the session hosted by Mr. Rose provided an opportunity for a reconciliation, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch…

Continue reading. There’s more—and more that’s shocking. We really are slowly moving toward a government controlled by big business, and part of that is control of the information that the public gets.

Shari Roan in the LA Times:

Vitamin supplements have been both heralded and hyped over the years, only to ultimately fall from grace once research proves them to be little more than placebos in our quest for longer life or better health. But at least one substance may have true merit — vitamin D.

Long considered just a supplement consumed with calcium for bone health, this humble vitamin may have untapped potential in fighting or preventing disease, suggests an explosion of new research. Not only has it shown promise in reducing the risk of, among other things, diabetes, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer and cardiovascular disease, but it also seems to improve infertility, weight control and memory.

Two advocacy groups have sprung up in the United States to promote the substance. Food industry executives are exploring ways to fortify more products. And PubMed, an international database of medical literature, shows that 2,274 studies referencing the vitamin have been published — just this year.

"Vitamin D is one hot topic," says Connie Weaver, a professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue University in Indiana.

Next week, hope and hype may collide. An Institute of Medicine committee will convene in Washington to discuss whether the recommended daily intake of vitamin D and calcium should be increased. There, researchers overwhelmed by the vitamin’s potential will square off against skeptics who say much more study is needed before people are urged to take vitamin D supplements. Getting the newly suggested amounts would be difficult otherwise.

The last time guidelines were issued on the vitamin was in 1997, long before an onslaught of scientific information suggested people are getting too little. Currently, the recommended daily intake is 200 to 600 international units with an upper limit of 2,000 IU.

Some researchers are advocating at least 600 IU a day, with an upper limit of 10,000 IU. Giving impetus to this push are …

Continue reading.

Paul Krugman, in his blog:

Matthew Yglesias leads us to a commenter at Marginal Revolution who looks at life expectancy and concludes that “semi-socialized medicine” is good for the young but bad for the old. Tyler Cowen made the same argument in the Times a while back:

On average, European systems are relatively good for the young, who are generally healthy and need treatment for obvious accidents and emergencies, with transparent remedies. European systems are less effective for the elderly, the primary demanders of discretionary medical benefits.

As Yglesias points out, such arguments weirdly miss the fact that older Americans are covered by Medicare. If you say that American health care works well for the elderly, then the part of our system you’re praising is the “socialized” part.

This is part of a broader phenomenon. Everyone’s favorite story about the evils of socialized medicine is the fact that Canadians wait longer for hip replacements. But who pays for hip replacements in the United States? Medicare, in most cases.

So we make fun of people who want to keep the government’s hands off Medicare. But Medicare blindness isn’t just a problem for the rubes.

Bob Herbert in the NY Times:

No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.

The charge: angry while black.

The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a “teachable moment,” but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.

I have nothing but contempt for that message.

Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.

The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.

You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.

That’s a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.

It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance…

Continue reading.

The Ethicurean:

Daniel Patterson, the chef at the award-winning restaurant Coi in San Francisco, has renounced corn, saying that relentless breeding to find sweeter and sweeter hybrids that play to America’s sweet palate has led to corn that “… is so sweet that it overpowers or undermines everything it accompanies, while lacking one key component: corn flavor.” But if you go seeking the more flavorful corn of your youth, odds are high that you won’t find it because because consolidation in the seed industry has removed many old varieties from the market.

We have heirloom tomatoes—why not heirloom corn?

This sounds delicious. Full recipe and video at the link, but just check out the ingredients:

3 large ginger roots
6 limes
2-3 cups of water
1 heaped tbsp peppercorns
1 heaped tbsp raw sugar

Interesting, eh? Let’s make it.

Elise of Simply Recipes tells how to pick the best jalapeños. As she points out, some jalapeños are a waste of time—you might as well buy a green bell pepper—while others provide that satisfying burst of heat. Post illustrated with jalapeño photos, showing the difference between mild, medium, and ha-cha!

Kevin Drum has a good post on Medicare, in which he discusses possible reasons behind this finding:

Well worth reading.

Jon Stokes writes at Ars Technica:

It sounds like something out of The Matrix: a giant, world-spanning electronic network where high-powered machines, some of them using GPUs to gain a speed advantage, run secret, rapidly-evolving software algorithms that battle it out for profits in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse, attack-counterattack, that yields some $21 billion a year for the winners and can spell ruin for the losers. Except that it’s not The Matrix—it’s the stock and commodities markets, and the fact that these markets mainly consist now of computers trading against one another has been brought closer to the public’s attention by last month’s alleged theft of Goldman Sachs’ proprietary trading code [which, BTW, Goldman Sachs said could be used to manipulate the market---hmm. How did they know that? – LG].

The collection of computer-automated, high-speed trading technologies and techniques that are typically lumped under the heading of "high-frequency trading" (HFT) have been around for a while, but HFT has recently become heavily identified with the banking giant Goldman Sachs, which dominates some aspects of it on the New York Stock Exchange. And as Goldman draws more media and congressional scrutiny, so will HFT. To prepare you for the high-frequency trading media onslaught, we’ll take a look at HFT and at a stock market that really isn’t what you thought it was.

If you look under the hood of the markets in 2009, you’ll find that the trading floor has been replaced by electronic networks; the frantic, hand-signaling traders have been replaced by computer systems; and all of moves in the trader’s dance—a thousand little tricks and techniques (some legal, some questionable, and some outright illegal) for taking regular advantage of speed, location, and information to generate profits—are executed hundreds of times per second, billions of times per day. And the whole enterprise is mainly powered by the same hardware from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, that Ars readers use for gaming.

Press reports of trading days that end with big gains or losses are typically accompanied by shots of a trading floor where young traders are either euphorically throwing papers into the air (up days) or staring dejectedly at a stock ticker with hand pressed to forehead, shoulders slumped in defeat (down days). These guys, you think, are "the market," and if you looked up the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Investopedia you’d find nothing in the "Stocks Basics: How Stocks Trade" entry to disabuse you of this widely held notion. "The NYSE is the first type of exchange… where much of the trading is done face-to-face on a trading floor," Investopedia declares, and it goes on to provide a description of the workings of a floor-centered, face-to-face NYSE that hasn’t matched reality for about five years.

Only about three percent of the trading volume on the NYSE is actually carried out by means of traditional "open outcry" trading, where flesh-and-blood humans gather to buy and sell securities. The other 97 percent of NYSE trades are executed via electronic communication networks (ECNs), which, over the past ten years, have rapidly replaced trading floors as the main global venue for buying and selling every asset, derivative, and contract. So the ECNs are the markets in 2009, and those pit traders who pose for the cameras are mainly there for the cameras…

Continue reading.

Paul Krugman:

I notice from comments that a fair number of readers think that Medicare has had runaway costs. What you need to ask is, runaway compared to what?

Here’s the raw fact, from the National Health Expenditure data: since 1970 Medicare costs per beneficiary have risen at an annual rate of 8.8% — but insurance premiums have risen at an annual rate of 9.9%. The rise in Medicare costs is just part of the overall rise in health care spending. And in fact Medicare spending has lagged private spending: if insurance premiums had risen “only” as much as Medicare spending, they’d be 1/3 lower than they are.

We don’t have a Medicare problem — we have a health care problem.

Apparently, what climatologists and other scientists have overlooked—obvious, now that it’s been pointed out—is brought to your attention in this post at Climate Progress:

In April, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) said he knows with 100% certainty that humans can’t cause devastating sea level rise because God said in the Bible he would “never again” devastate humans with a flood again (see Rep. Shimkus: “Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood.” Rep. Barton: “I wish I had another dozen John Shimkuses on the committee.”).

Now, as ThinkProgress’s Lee Fang reports, Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) has extended that doctrine.  Armey told GOP members of Congress on Capitol Hill yesterday that because “the lord God almighty made the heavens and the Earth … to his satisfaction … it is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that, that we are going to destroy God’s creation.”

Under Armey’s Gospel of Pollution (GOP), God made his creation invulnerable to all human action — not counting all the species we have wiped out, of course.  For some reason, God made them vulnerable.  Same for the forests we cut down.  And, of course, all the humans killed by human-generated toxins and pollution.  That’s why it’s a Gospel — you have to take it on faith.

And this guy was House Majority leader once!

Continue reading for the full craziness of the testimony and the backstory. No wonder the GOP has so little influence (and so little representation) in science.

Via Kevin Drum:

He also points out that, nationwide, 58% of Republicans are unsure that Obama was born in the US. This is not totally surprising, since the GOP has always ignored evidence in favor of ideology.

Good article on the use of ultra-fast computers placed adjacent to stock exchange computers for fast trading. The conclusion:

So as the debate unfolds, remember to ask yourself, (1) whose information is being exploited by whom and how, (2) does this make financial markets stronger and more efficient – say by providing liquidity – during a downturn when markets need them the most, and (3) what is this doing to the price mechanism – is it helping prices converge to fundamental values or driving them further away? The evidence currently looks like HFT is doing bad things on all three accounts.

Read the whole thing. It’s brief but highly informative.

These look as though they could be handy from time to time:

If you’ve ever tried to give a pill to a cat, you know it’s not only not fun, it can be downright dangerous. Dogs will eat anything. Cats, not so much.

I had a cat that was on medication for years, and every day it was the same struggle to get a pill down her throat. Now, I have a semi-feral, and very strong, older cat who needs thyroid medication every day. I would probably have lost a finger or two if I hadn’t found these things. You just fold the pill up into the little pocket, drop it in front of the cat, and it’s gone, like magic. Everyone’s happy, especially the cat. And you don’t need the asbestos gloves anymore.

Photo and sources here.

An extremely cool gadget that looks as though it could be really useful. James Fallows has a great description with photos. From that (but read the whole thing):

Here’s how it works: The somewhat plump looking, cigar-sized item, propped on a pack of special notebooks above and below, is both a ballpoint pen — and a very sensitive, high-quality, high-capacity tape recorder. I find it better than the digital recorders I’ve previously used in picking up voices in real-life circumstances, including interviews in crowded restaurants, auditoriums, airport tarmacs, etc. The pen I have holds up to 2GB worth of recordings — many many many hours’ worth.

But in addition to recording sound, the pen also includes a very small camera at its tip, which many times per second takes pictures of whatever you are writing in the special notebooks. You don’t have to use the notebooks or write anything at all, and can just treat the system as a normal recorder. But if you do write something in the notebook, the pen registers exactly what sound you were hearing at exactly the moment you are writing a certain word, letter, or doodle. Then when you want to hear the recording, you can point the pen to that word and hear what was being said at the time. More on how it works here.

What does this mean in practice?

Continue reading.

I had to try the MWF again, this time with a badger brush. The lather was much the same as with the boar brush—indeed, the boar brush’s lather may have been a tad bit better. But this lather was quite good. I used the Edwin Jagger ebony Chatsworth with the new head and a new Astra Keramik blade. Very good shave, and I finished with Parfums de Nicolaï’s New York aftershave. Here’s what the PdN site says about the New York fragrance:

Top notes : very crisp : citrus : lemon, lemon petit grain oil, bergamot.
Lightly aromatic : lavande rand armoise oils.
Heart : spicy woody : pimento and pepper oils, patchouli oil and cedar.
Bottom notes : vanilla, leather, amber.