Later On

Big businesses are driven by one imperative: increase profits. The public good is not a part of their mission, as it is of the government’s. Big businesses have learned now how easily they can purchase legislation that’s favorable to their mission, and block legislation that’s unfavorable, and as a result Congress has been tilted away from focusing on legislation that increases the public good: their new focus is legislation that increases business profits or at the least does not threaten those profits.

As the trend continues, with the biggest businesses now operating on a global scale and with less fealty to any one country, it could eventually change our country substantially—and I doubt for the better, since the betterment of the country was the old Congressional mission. All great nations must someday fall and fade, and perhaps we see it beginning now in the US, which already is lagging among advanced nations on a variety of important measures.

Bob Herbert takes a close look at this dynamic in his most recent column:

It’s never a contest when the interests of big business are pitted against the public interest. So if we manage to get health care “reform” this time around it will be the kind of reform that benefits the very people who have given us a failed system, and thus made reform so necessary.

Forget about a crackdown on price-gouging drug companies and predatory insurance firms. That’s not happening. With the public pretty well confused about what is going on, we’re headed — at best — toward changes that will result in a lot more people getting covered, but that will not control exploding health care costs and will leave industry leaders feeling like they’ve hit the jackpot.

The hope of a government-run insurance option is all but gone. So there will be no effective alternative for consumers in the market for health coverage, which means no competitive pressure for private insurers to rein in premiums and other charges. (Forget about the nonprofit cooperatives. That’s like sending peewee footballers up against the Super Bowl champs.)

Insurance companies are delighted with the way “reform” is unfolding. Think of it: The government is planning to require most uninsured Americans to buy health coverage. Millions of young and healthy individuals will be herded into the industry’s welcoming arms. This is the population the insurers drool over.

This additional business — a gold mine — will more than offset the cost of important new regulations that, among other things, will prevent insurers from denying coverage to applicants with pre-existing conditions or imposing lifetime limits on benefits. Poor people will …

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From the blog synthesis:

If more money doesn’t ensure a better education, what does?

A few days ago, J.R. sent me a link to an excellent presentation by Sir Ken Robinson about how today’s schools kill creativity. J.R. also shared a recent post by Peter Bregman which advocates that you aren’t pushing hard enough if your path to success isn’t marked with failures. Then Kay (20 year public education veteran) sent me an email that illuminated a dynamic in education and health care that I had not considered before:

Quality

Prior to the 1960s, the American workforce excluded more people than it included, cutting off access to a huge, talent-laden pool of workers. During this time, most women were limited to three professions – nursing, teaching and administrative work. Thus limited, fully half our population’s best and brightest devoted their energy and passion to these three fields. Is it any wonder that wellness improved, schools (and students) in this country were among the best in the world, and companies were well-run?

Imagine that – society actually benefited from discrimination. How ironic!

Since there were more candidates than jobs, employers could hire the cream of the crop at "competitive" rates. Again – how lucky for education, health care, etc.!

Things changed in the 1960s – attitudes began to shift and opportunities began to grow. When presented with alternatives, once again the most talented of this community left their present and moved on to their future; this time to the detriment of education, health care, and business administration.

Creativity

Like most people, I believe that teachers are the most critical factor in student success.

Standardized curriculum/testing, prioritizing literacy and numeracy, and a lot of the challenges that Sir Ken identified have been around a long time, but until recently the teachers were so good, they overcame these issues and the students learned regardless. What’s more, because of their confidence and ability, teachers were also comfortable pushing limits, allowing their students to push limits, and together achieve great learning, knowing that mistakes and failures pave the way to insight.

In essence, the system wasn’t great prior to the 1960s, but our successes happened in spite of this, and only because

Continue reading. I was graduated from high school in 1957, and on looking back I realize that the power teachers in my small high school were all women.

Megs’s blood test showed calcium levels elevated, and since calcium is closely regulated, this is worrisome. She’ll go in on Friday for another blood draw to make sure it wasn’t just an anomaly.

I used my little Omega Pure Badger with Kell’s Original Hemp Blend Amber and got a fine lather. The little brush does a good job, but it’s more prickly than a silvertip badger and it doesn’t seem to hold (or possibly generate) as much lather. Still, I got plenty for the shave, and the Futur with the Bolzano blade did a good job with lots of sound from the Futur’s acoustics. The finish was a very nice new aftershave from Vintage Scents, whose Web site seems to be down for now.

The vet visit: Megs complained in the car until she escaped from her carrier—I discovered a zipper partially open on the front opening. Once she was free in the car, she stopped complaining and just explored things with great interest. Once we got to the vet, I put her back in the carrier and she went willingly enough.

A fifteen minute visit—$200. They gave her a rabies shot, took a blood draw for a blood panel (because she’s 7, after all), clipped her nails at my request, and told me that I could re-apply the Advantage (to kill fleas) in 3 weeks instead of waiting for 4. (I don’t think that last application was well applied and probably did not get on her skin.)

She was totally quiet coming home—depressed about the shot, I imagine—and quickly left the carrier as soon as I opened the top.

Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress:

Today, President Obama addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, AZ. In his speech, Obama reassured veterans about his health care plan: “One thing that reform won’t change is veterans health care. No one is going to take away your benefits.” Still, many veterans are reportedly wary of health reform. But ironically, one of the key pillars of reform — a public plan — is currently benefiting millions of veterans who rely on the government-provided care of the Veterans Health Administration.

Outside Obama’s speech, conservative groups including Americans for Prosperity were protesting and rallying against greater government involvement in the health care system. But like Medicare recipients who oppose government interference in the health care system, opponents of a public option should be weary of denouncing “government care” in front of veterans who can vouch for the effectiveness of government-run care.

The VA “outpaces other systems in delivering patient care,” consistently delivering higher quality health care more efficiently. A recent study by the RAND corporation found that “VA patients were more likely to receive recommended care” and “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow up”:

The study also concludes that “if other health care providers followed the VA’s lead, it would be a major step toward improving the quality of care across the U.S. health care system.” The public option — a frequent target of critics who argue that government health care would ration care or provide subprime coverage — would push health providers to adopt some of the VA’s delivery system reforms.

A public health insurance option is not a threat to Americans with private health insurance coverage; it’s an important component of the nation’s public-private health infrastructure. In 2008, federal, state and local governments contributed 47 percent of health care spending and if the VA system is any indication, then rather than intruding between the patient and the doctor or rationing care, federal dollars have only improved access and enhanced the delivery of care.

Once more. I wonder when people will tire of this.

Read this little article in Business Week on how to determine whether a conventional IRA or a Roth IRA is better for you. I can follow the process and I get the idea, but doing all those computations would paralyze me with glazed eyes. The article begins:

It has been one of those perverse things. The wealthier you are, the more sense it makes to convert a traditional IRA, where you pay taxes when you withdraw the money, to a Roth IRA, where you pay taxes on money when it goes in. But the rules have only allowed people with modified adjusted gross income no greater than $100,000—those less likely to have big IRAs—to convert a traditional IRA to a Roth. Come 2010, however, the option opens up to everyone. "For 2010 we’re going to hire extra analysts to run the numbers," says Christopher Cordaro, a wealth manager with RegentAtlantic Capital in Morristown, N.J.

More than $3 trillion sits in IRA accounts, excluding IRAs that are already Roths. Deciding whether to convert (and how much to convert) is complex. It involves some variables—such as future tax rates—that are unknowable. That, plus the pain of paying taxes now instead of later, may be why many people have been loath to consider conversion in advance of 2010.

But if you have substantial assets—and especially if you want to leave money to the next generation—run the numbers. Online calculators like the one at rothretirement.com can help, but the myriad rules and tax ramifications make talking to an adviser worthwhile. There is an out if you convert and then wish you hadn’t—perhaps because your portfolio subsequently shrank as the market fell. The Internal Revenue Service allows you to undo a conversion in a process called "recharacterization."

Here are some guidelines to help you think through the decision…

Continue reading if you can stand it.

This is an interesting report by Mehul Srivastava in Business Week:

For the past four months, we Indians have waited in vain for the monsoon rains that are our lifeblood. This June was the driest in 83 years; July, the driest in over 60. Now, as the so-called rainy season comes to an end in August, the earth is parched, dust storms rage, and farmers can barely feed themselves—let alone the rest of the country.

Waiting for the rains has become a national obsession. Newspaper headlines fret that the monsoons seem to have failed India again. The TV weatherman points to a satellite map of the subcontinent, where not a single cloud promises relief. With no rain in sight, the stock market has started to slide, especially shares in companies selling to the rural masses.

Rain is woven into the fabric of Indian life. In countless Bollywood films, lovers frolic in downpours, thunder marking their passion, raindrops signaling joy, rebirth, and blossoming romance. As long as there has been language on the subcontinent, there has been a word for what Hindi-speakers call sondhi—the scent the earth gives off when first kissed by the rain. Indian names are often variations of Sanskrit words for raindrops, clouds, and thunder. My parents, first-generation city-dwellers, named me Mehul, the god of rain-bearing clouds. When I recently told a farmer my name, he gave me a wry smile. "You tricked us again," he said, standing in his dry fields as his children struggled with a rusty hand pump, waterless in the blazing afternoon sun.

The specter of a failed monsoon is a shared humiliation. The barren fields, an entire nation looking skyward, the possibility of widespread hunger: It all seems to pull back the veneer of India’s achievements. Every day without rain punctuates the painful realization that while India can weather a global economic crisis, this most ancient of afflictions still threatens it year after year…

Continue reading. I would imagine that the world can look forward to many anomalous weather patterns as global warming accelerates.

A tomato pie! Did you ever? The description:

Think pizza meets cheesy bread and they make out in a pie crust. The recipe lends itself to estimates. Handfuls of this, handfuls of that. I measured, but you could eyeball it and it would still work out.

Sounds delightful. Here’s the recipe.

The New Scientist has a fascinating article by Michael Brooks on new developments in battery technology. And I have to say that, after reading Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, whose protagonist is besotted with chemistry, I read the names of the chemicals and their characteristics with much more interest than I would have previously. The article begins:

Picture the scene: in downtown New York City, all-electric cars glide through streets in a zero-emission transport revolution. Polluting, inefficient gasoline and diesel vehicles are nowhere to be seen – or heard. The only things getting in the way of these smooth, noiseless vehicles are the horse-drawn trams.

That’s right, we’re talking about the past. The electric car had its heyday over a century ago. Its brief reign came to an end in 1912, when gasoline-powered Cadillacs began to come fitted with starter motors. That did away with the inconvenient crank handle needed to get their engines going, and they could run for 100 miles or more on a tank on fuel. The all-electric car’s battery would run out before you reached the city limits. It was no contest.

Now, in the first decade of the 21st century, history is about to go into reverse. The climate crisis is prompting thoughts of an all-electric economy, of which electric cars will be a vital part. The idea has been taking shape in engineering labs and on the roads for a while (New Scientist, 20 September 2008, p 26), and now fresh impetus is finally coming from on high. "Our dependency on oil is dangerous and short-sighted," US energy secretary Stephen Chu wrote in Newsweek in April. "We must… move toward running new vehicles on electricity and to generating that electricity from clean, renewable sources like solar and wind power."

There’s just one rather large obstacle remaining – and it’s the same one that stalled the electric car 100 years ago. "In the end, it all comes down to the lowly battery," says Donald Sadoway, who studies materials chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Though batteries have been around for more than 200 years (see time line), precious little research effort has gone into improving them. That’s changing fast. In May, the US government set aside $2 billion for developing advanced battery manufacturing methods and $400 million towards the electrification of transport. A combination of new computer modeling techniques, innovative thinking and this well-timed injection of cash are set to transform battery technology. "We’re poised for a step change," Sadoway says…

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We’re very very poor at estimating risk. David Spiegelhalter in New Scientist:

THE British players in the unfolding swine-flu drama are providing a riveting case study of different responses to risk. While the government tries to look cool, controlled and consistent, tabloid newspapers hunt sensation and citizens exhibit every emotion from nervous anxiety to stoical acceptance. In the meantime, mainland Europe revels in portraying the UK as a land gripped by pestilence. Perhaps we all need a crash course in considering the unintended consequences of overreacting to events.

Take a couple of memorable overreactions. In the year after the terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001, so many people avoided airline travel in the US by driving that there were about 1500 additional deaths on the roads, or six times the number of air passengers that died on 9/11.

Then there is the trouble that officials can cause when they panic. In 1995, an urgent fax was sent out to doctors in the UK warning that third-generation oral contraceptives were associated with a doubling of the risk of deep vein thrombosis. Women stopped taking the pill in droves, there were thousands of subsequent additional abortions, and all because of an overreaction to a risk of 1 in 7000 being doubled to 2 in 7000.

Perhaps the greatest danger of overreaction, though, happens when a government feels it must respond to popular clamour after a high-profile event involving an innocent or vulnerable victim. When a baby is killed, or there is a murder by someone identified as mentally ill or someone on probation, people are reasonably shocked and feel that "something must be done" to prevent such things happening again.

Why do they think that extra bureaucracy will help? While the causes of individual tragedies may be apparent, this does not mean …

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This note in New Scientist is fascinating:

Unsightly skin growths [photo at link – LG] helped to save the life of Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko after he was poisoned five years ago. That’s the verdict of doctors who have treated and monitored Yushchenko since a would-be assassin laced his soup with dioxin in 2004.

It now turns out that Yushchenko was probably saved by the benign but ugly lumps called hamartomas that grew on his face and body – seen in the December 2004 photo below – which helped isolate the dioxin from his vital organs. They also helped to break down the poison, known more precisely as TCDD, by producing powerful enzymes called cytochrome P450s, which are normally confined to the liver.

The benign growths developed from skin stem cells. "A new organ was created out of normal structures of the skin, made to detoxify the dioxin," says Jean-Hilaire Saurat, the dermatologist heading the team that treated Yushchenko at the Swiss Centre for Human Applied Toxicology in Geneva.

"He’s not completely clean yet, but we’ve got more than 95 per cent of it out now," says Saurat.

Reporting the work in The Lancet, Saurat adds that the findings will be invaluable for treating and detecting milder cases of dioxin poisoning or contamination (DOI: 10.1016/s0140-6736(09)60912-0).

In the New Scientist:

The list of species that are shrinking due to climate change keeps on growing. Birds now join sheep and trees in wasting away as the temperature rises.

To discover whether there had been any change in bird size over the past century, Janet Gardner of the Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues measured the wingspan of 517 birds held in museum collections. The birds, belonging to eight species native to Australia, had been collected between 1860 and 2001. They found that four species had shrunk by up to 4 per cent in 100 years (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1011).

Two factors could explain this. Environmental degradation could have made the birds’ diet poorer, or warmer temperatures could have given an edge to birds with smaller body sizes, as they are better able to cool off. Using feather length as a proxy for nutritional status in birds, the researchers were able to rule out the possibility that smaller birds were less well nourished than their ancestors. This left global warming as the most likely culprit.

And apparently it could lead to wiping out malaria altogether. Vian Azzu in New Scientist:

A vaccine that targets the malaria parasite at a vulnerable point in its development could form part of a strategy to eradicate the disease.

Unlike other vaccines in the pipeline, which are designed to protect individuals who have been bitten, this one aims to sabotage the life cycle of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, by stopping it from passing back from humans to mosquitoes.

While preventing this transmission wouldn’t help an infected individual directly, it would benefit the population as a whole, says the study’s lead author Nirbhay Kumar of Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. "If you are living in a village and the mosquito that bites you gets infected from you, it can transmit the malaria parasite to other people in the village," he says.

To create the vaccine, Kumar’s group used genetically modified bacteria to make proteins identical to some of those involved in the parasite’s sexual development. They injected the proteins into mice and baboons, which generated antibodies. When the team added Plasmodium gametes to blood samples from these animals, the antibodies bound to and blocked the proteins. If a mosquito sucked up some of this blood it would still get a bellyful of the gametes, but they would be unable to combine and spawn new adult parasites.

One shot of the vaccine led to a 93 per cent reduction in malaria transmission, and the figure went up to 98 per cent after a booster shot (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006352).

This could be used alongside another vaccine being developed by GlaxoSmithKline, called RTS,S/AS02A, which …

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I don’t know about you, but I’m growing weary of the unending supply of stupidity that flows from the GOP—not merely incorrect (false) statements, but statements issued by the stupid to the stupid, so far as I can tell. Greenwald has a current example, but it’s just a drop in the flood:

Mike Huckabee this week traveled to a foreign country and, speaking on foreign soil, is now bashing America in front of a foreign audience:

Former Arkansas governor and presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee says the US has taken too harsh a stance against Israel on the issue of settlements.

Huckabee said Monday the US should not "be telling Jewish people in Israel where they should and should not live."

Huckabee made the comment Monday while visiting Jewish enclaves in east Jerusalem. Affiliated with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, Huckabee has been touted as a possible candidate in 2012.

According to Haaretz, Huckabee is joined on this trip by "prominent Jewish and Republican activists from the United States" and "is also planning to visit the Jewish section of Hebron, Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and Ma’aleh Adumim, the largest settlement in the West Bank."  One of Huckabee’s traveling companions, New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, says the purpose of the foreign trip is "to shine the spotlight on Obama’s policy in Jerusalem, which has just been a horror."

Apparently, insisting that Israel stop occupying and building settlements in land that doesn’t belong to it is "telling Jewish people where they should and should not live."  Every country should invoke that standard — Russia should have responded to American objections to its 2008 invasion of Georgia by insisting that the U.S. has no right to "tell Russians where they should and should not live."  It was terrible how the U.S., opposed to Saddam’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait, tried to tell Iraqis where they should and should not live.  And immigration opponents in the U.S. should really stop telling Mexicans where they should and should not live.

Isn’t there some righteous Washington prohibition on criticizing America’s foreign policy while on dreaded "foreign soil"?  Here’s what happened in 2006 when Al Gore gave a speech at a conference in Saudi Arabia in which he criticized Bush policies towards the Muslim world — as summarized by The New York Times‘ Chris Sullentrop: …

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I have no idea why this idea terrifies the Right to the degree that it does, especially given the success of Medicare. Paul Krugman tries again to explain carefully why their fear is misplaced:

It was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor’s Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance,” because the National Health Service would consider his life “essentially worthless.”

Professor Hawking, who was born in Britain, has lived there all his life, and has been well cared for by the National Health Service, was not amused.

Besides being vile and stupid, however, the editorial was beside the point. Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain — or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland — which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn’t a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.

Let’s talk about health care around the advanced world.

Every wealthy country other than the United States guarantees essential care to all its citizens. There are, however, wide variations in the specifics, with three main approaches taken.

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Extremely interesting article by Clive Thompson in the NY Times Magazine:

Is Iran going to build a bomb?

Many people wonder, but Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims to have the answer.

Bueno de Mesquita is one of the world’s most prominent applied game theorists. A professor at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he is well known academically for his work on “political survival,” or how leaders build coalitions to stay in power. But among national-security types and corporate decision makers, he is even better known for his prognostications. For 29 years, Bueno de Mesquita has been developing and honing a computer model that predicts the outcome of any situation in which parties can be described as trying to persuade or coerce one another. Since the early 1980s, C.I.A. officials have hired him to perform more than a thousand predictions; a study by the C.I.A., now declassified, found that Bueno de Mesquita’s predictions “hit the bull’s-eye” twice as often as its own analysts did.

Last year, Bueno de Mesquita decided to forecast whether Iran would build a nuclear bomb. With the help of his undergraduate class at N.Y.U., he researched the primary power brokers inside and outside the country — anyone with a stake in Iran’s nuclear future. Once he had the information he needed, he fed it into his computer model and had an answer in a few minutes.

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A dragon-themed shave this morning. The Omega Syntex brush did a great job building lather from the Honeybee Spa Dragon’s Blood shave stick. Really, there’s no reason at all not to use this brush, and if you’re a vegan, it’s the obvious choice.

The Merkur Slant with an Astra Keramik blade (to the best of my recollection) did a superb job: smooth, easy, and trouble-free, leaving my face utterly smooth. And the Draggon Noir aftershave was the perfect ending to a great shave.

As I think about it, the movie Hobson’s Choice is much more interesting than at first glance. It’s the story of the old giving way to the new — or, more appropriately, the modern (both new and with increasingly wide acceptance — when fully accepted, of course, it begins the transition to passé). In this particular case, it’s the old generation being overtaken by the new, the old ideas superseded by the new. It’s not quite an allegory, more like a fable or parable. You can view it as a war among memes. It’s well worth mulling over. And count how many examples you see in the movie of the new supplanting the old.