Later On

This dressing sounds great—I’m making it today.

I have owned a house or two in my time: a heavy financial burden. Now I rent, and on the whole I like it better. There are tradeoffs to consider, but the idea that it’s always better to own than to rent is untenable. Dean Baker addresses it in this article:

There has long been a strong ideological bias in the United States that has pushed families toward becoming homeowners. Instead of resisting this bias, many people in the policy and advocacy community unthinkingly echoed this ideological refrain, joining the push toward homeownership.

This would have been problematic at any time, but pushing homeownership at the peak of a housing bubble was a recipe for disaster. In the wake of the collapse of the bubble, it would be great if we could promote some clearer thinking on the relative merits of ownership and renting.

At the most basic level, it is important to recognize that ownership will not always be desirable for every family at all times. First and foremost, homeownership will typically only make economic sense when families can expect to stay in a home for a substantial period of time. If there are family or employment reasons that make long-term tenure unlikely, then homeownership is probably a losing proposition.

The arithmetic on this is fairly straightforward. As a long-run average, house sale prices equal roughly 15 times annual rent. This means that a unit that rents for $1,000 a month can be expected to sell for roughly $180,000 (15 times the $12,000 annual rent). The combined buying side and selling side transaction costs average roughly ten percent of the sale price. In other words, the roundtrip transaction costs will typically be equal to one and a half years of rent. In this example, the transaction costs associated with buying and selling the home would be equal to $18,000, which is one and a half times the annual rent of $12,000.

The high transactions costs associated with buying and selling a home mean that …

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Very interesting article by Dean Baker at TPM Café:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will release a new set of economic and budget projections for the next decade on Tuesday. These projections are likely to show a cumulative deficit over the next 10 years that is $2 trillion higher (@ 1 percent of GDP) than the deficit CBO projected in January.

The reason for the higher projected deficit is not that Congress has suddenly blown another 2 trillion of the taxpayers’ dollars on frivolous projects. Rather, the main reason for the jump in the projected deficit is that CBO is now projecting lower growth and higher unemployment over this decade than it did last January.

In other words, CBO now believes that the collapse of the housing bubble will cause even more and longer lasting damage than it did back in January. As a result of slow growth and high unemployment, the government will collect considerably less in tax revenues over the next decade than would have been implied by the earlier set of economic projections. The government will also be paying out more money in unemployment benefits, food stamps and other transfer programs than would be the case if the economy were healthier.

The real story in the new CBO projections should be the more dire economic outlook. CBO now expects the unemployment rate to be near 10 percent through most of 2010. Its new projections will show that the unemployment rate will only return to more normal levels in 2013 or even 2014, more than six years after the collapse of the housing bubble threw the economy into recession.

The implication of the new CBO projections is that millions more people will be needlessly suffering because of the economic mismanagement of the Greenspan-Bernanke-Bush crew. CBO views 4.5 percent unemployment as being the sustainable rate of unemployment. If the unemployment rate is 10 percent, more than 8 million people are needlessly out of work, with another 5 million or so being forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment. These people will be struggling to pay their health care bills, cover their mortgage or rent payments, and meet other necessary expenses for themselves and their families.

The rational response to the news that the economy will be far worse than had previously been projected should be a demand for more stimulus. After all, why should millions of people lose their jobs, their homes, and their health just because the people who managed the country’s economic policy over the last decade were incompetent?

Unfortunately, the same people who wrecked the economy are largely still running it and they still have the same set of economic priorities. Therefore, instead of talking about the economic weakness implied by the new CBO projections, the discussion will focus almost completely on the larger projected budget deficit. Instead of discussing ways in which we can reduce the unemployment rate and stimulate growth, the media will be highlighting calls for tax increases and spending cuts – measures that will slow the economy and raise the unemployment rate further.

The deficit hawks who wrecked the economy will be insisting …

Continue reading. And it’s followed by this very interesting comment:

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Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam:

And here’s Harriet:

From the Center for American Progress:

Stars and Stripes reported yesterday that the Pentagon has hired The Rendon Group to screen journalists seeking to embed with U.S. forces. As part of a $1.5 million “news analysis and media assessment” contract, Rendon examines “individual reporters’ recent work and determines whether the coverage was ‘positive,’ ‘negative’ or ‘neutral’ compared to mission objectives,” officials from the contractor said. Public affairs officer Air Force Capt. Elizabeth Mathias insists that the military has “not denied access to anyone because of what may or may not come out of their biography.” However, last month, the military barred a Stars and Stripes reporter from embedding with a unit in Iraq because he had “refused to highlight” good news. The military was also unhappy that the reporter “would not answer questions about stories he was writing.” Rendon has received millions from the U.S. government since 9/11 (at one point, taxpayers were paying CEO John Rendon $311.26/hour). The “secretive” firm personally set up the Iraqi National Congress and helped install Ahmad Chalabi as the group’s leader, whose main goal — “pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein” — Rendon helped facilitate.

UPDATE: More here.

Sounds both easy and delicious, a winning combination. The recipe—which amounts to a list of ingredients—is from Strongrrl’s blog and is by Mr. Strongrrl:

David’s peach salsa fresca:

2 large heirloom tomatoes, diced
1/2 red onion, diced
1 Anaheim pepper, seeded and diced
1 jalapeño, seeded and diced
1 fresh peach, peeled and diced
1 tbsp lemon or lime juice
1/4 c fresh cilantro, minced
1 tsp olive oil
salt to taste

When someone is set free, we have a mental image of a person walking as he will down the street, not someone bound with shackles and blindfolded—and that’s how we different from the US government. McClatchy reports:

A young Afghan held for six years at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, rejoined his family in southern Kabul late Monday, ending an odyssey that came to symbolize many of the problems of the Bush administration’s war on terror detention policies.

Mohammed Jawad, who may have been as young as 12 when he was arrested in 2002 for allegedly throwing a grenade that wounded two American soldiers, pronounced himself "very happy" but tired after a day in which he arrived in Afghanistan on a U.S. military flight — in shackles and blindfolded, according to his lawyer.

He then met with both the country’s attorney general and President Hamid Karzai before he was driven to his family’s rented brick home in a modest Kabul neighborhood by the Afghan attorney general himself.

"I am very happy that I am back home with my family," Jawad said, before he begged off answering questions, saying he had a headache.

Jawad’s journey home began in October, when a U.S. military judge in Guantanamo ruled that Afghan police had threatened to kill both Jawad and his family during his interrogation if he didn’t confess to throwing a grenade that injured two reservists from California and their Afghan interpreter. Those threats constituted torture, Army Col. Stephen Henley said, ruling that the confession therefore wasn’t admissible as evidence.

On July 30, U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle in Washington cited that ruling in ordering Jawad’s release, saying that without the confession, there was no evidence to link Jawad to the grenade attack.

Justice Department lawyers said they’d seek new evidence against him, but in the end, no civilian charges were filed, the military withdrew its charges, and Jawad arrived in Afghanistan hours before the Justice Department was due to report back to Huvelle on his status.

Marine Maj. Eric Montalvo, one of Jawad’s military lawyers who flew to Afghanistan to witness Jawad’s release, said he’d remained uncertain that Jawad would go free until he saw him actually rejoin his family.

"I don’t trust anything until I see him in his house with his family," said Montalvo, who flew to Afghanistan as a private citizen after the Pentagon denied him permission to do so in his official capacity.

Another of Jawad’s defense attorneys, Air Force Reserve Maj. David Frakt, credited Montalvo’s presence with ensuring that Jawad went free and wasn’t imprisoned again.

"When Major Montalvo arrived this morning, he went straight to the attorney general’s office and learned that Jawad was being transported to an Afghan prison. Major Montalvo intervened and persuaded the AG to divert Jawad directly to the AG’s office," Frakt said in a statement. "Jawad had a happy reunion with Eric, then Jawad’s family was summoned and they all convened in the AG’s office for a tearful and joyous reunion.

"Were it not for the presence of a member of the Jawad defense team, things might have gone very differently," Frakt said.

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It’s a difficult beast to defeat, and it is why the US currently spends MORE than TWICE the COMBINED TOTAL of the military expenditures of all other nations in the world. And, the beast knows that we can always spend more.

Winslow T. Wheeler and Pierre M. Sprey have an article in Mother Jones that explains one reason the beast prospers—and thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for pointing it out. The article begins:

In July, to great fanfare, the Obama administration finally killed the F-22 fighter jet—an underperforming, overpriced Cold War relic that has never flown a combat mission over Iraq or Afghanistan. But all the breathless talk of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ "sweeping reforms" obscures an unpleasant truth. While the rare defeat of congressional porkmongers offers a ray of hope, real reform will require a far more ambitious, persistent effort. And standing in the way is the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian official—handpicked by Gates and coming directly from a lobbying job for the giant defense contractor Raytheon.

William J. Lynn III is, after Gates, the most powerful person in the Defense Department, responsible for managing the entire building, including weapons acquisitions. His opposition to reform is well documented. During the Clinton administration, he rose to be the Pentagon’s comptroller, in charge of a system that was completely unable to account for the hundreds of billions it spent every year. Faced with this mess, Lynn’s major contribution during his tenure was to block fiscal accountability rather than promote it.  In public testimony to a federal accounting board, Lynn requested that the Pentagon be exempted from a crucial part of the Chief Financial Officers’ Act of 1990, a reform requiring all federal departments to comply with accepted financial integrity standards. The board granted his wish. Next, he advocated for a notorious bill-paying system referred to by critics as "pay and chase" under which the Pentagon hands a contractor a quick payout for bills and later tries to figure out what the money was for. Today’s financial chaos and lack of accountability at the DOD stem in part from Lynn’s handiwork.

After Lynn left the Pentagon, he accepted a plush position in 2003 as chief lobbyist for Raytheon, the DOD’s fifth-largest defense contractor. Lynn spent the next five years pushing Raytheon moneymakers such as computers for the F-22 and the electronics for the Navy’s preposterously overpriced Zumwalt destroyer. 

When Barack Obama took office, he introduced sorely needed new ethics rules to close the revolving door between government agencies and the private sector, particularly lobbyists. But within the month, he had waived those rules—specifically to permit Lynn to become deputy secretary of defense. Now that the lobbyist emeritus is back at the Pentagon, it’s clear that he hasn’t lost his aversion to reform. 

In May, Obama proudly signed the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009—Congress’ answer to the Pentagon’s chronic procurement problems. It would surely be something to be proud of if Congress and the executive branch had finally discovered their political spines, after decades of sabotaging reform attempts. But that’s not quite what happened…

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One way to determine fairness is the principle of reciprocity: turnabout being fair play. The GOP will have an opportunity to learn this principle when healthcare reform is passed by a simple majority through the Senate reconciliation process, a process that the GOP itself used to avoid filibusters (for example, when they passed the enormous tax cuts for the wealthy). Brian Beutler at TPMDC notes:

Democratic party leaders have a message for Republicans, who are crying foul over the news that they may get shut out of the health care debate: turnabout’s fair play.

In a memo that was drafted and circulated on background in April, Senate Democrats made the case that using a budget reconciliation bill to pass health care reforms is perfectly within their rights, given the Republicans’ promiscuous use of the same tactic when they were in power. Excerpts of the memo were published by various news outlets back in the spring, but the memo doesn’t appear to have been previously published in its entirety until now. And now, with Democrats ramping up the threat that they’ll invoke the process in the fall, they’re rehashing those same arguments.

"[S]hould Republicans choose not to cooperate [on health care reform], the inclusion of reconciliation instructions [in the budget] provides a backup option which could be used to prevent a filibuster and approve legislation by a majority vote," the memo reads. "[T]here is nothing unprecedented or unusual about the use of reconciliation."

The memo goes on note that Congress has invoked the reconciliation 19 times since 1980, including in 2001 and 2003 when "the Republican Congress used reconciliation to pass enormous tax cuts."

"Republicans not only used reconciliation rules to push tax breaks for the wealthy, they also made no meaningful effort to assist the growing number of uninsured Americans," it reads.

Back in the heyday of the Republican majority, the GOP was bullish on the idea of using the process to circumvent the filibuster, and now Democrats are hoping to bring that inconvenient fact back to haunt them.

"The fact is, all this rule of the Senate does is allow a majority of the Senate to take a position and pass a piece of legislation, support that position," said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who now bemoans the idea, in 2005. "Is there something wrong with majority rules? I don’t think so." …

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Phil, of Bullgoose Shaving Supplies, pointed out a new shaving forum, Simply Shaving. It’s just getting started. Stop by, take a look, and post a note.

Yet another wonderful shave. My new Omega boar brush, the 31064, is very nice indeed, even on its first use. Its capacity is still low, but that might change as it breaks in. As it was I got two good latherings before I returned to the tin of Kell’s Original Arabian Spice for more soap for the third pass. The Arabian Spice fragrance is quite nice, BTW, and much better than the Old Spice fragrance of the aftershave.

The Gillette Toggle with a previously used Iridium Super, did a very fine job. I don’t know about the Old Spice—it’s certainly not the Old Spice of my h.s. days.

Jamal Dijani at Huffington Post:

The holy month of Ramadan will begin this Saturday in most Muslim countries, a tradition determined by the sighting of the new moon, the exact date of which often divides rival Islamic countries and sects. Muslims celebrate Ramadan by refraining from eating, drinking, sexual conduct, smoking, and indulging in anything that is in excess or ill-natured, from dawn to dusk.

This year though, Muslims have more to worry about than their differences over the sighting of the new moon.

The global downturn in economy has hit Muslim countries very hard. Many Muslim families will find their iftar (fast-breaking) tables empty or lacking due to unaffordable prices and high unemployment. Early this week, consumers in the Kingdom of Jordan boycotted the buying of local and imported red meat for one week following a recent 25 per cent increase in prices just few days before Ramadan. According to the Wall Street Journal, even in wealthy countries, such as Dubai, demand for Ramadan tents — the typical setting for iftars — is showing signs of decline, while hotels are recording lower corporate bookings as companies aim to conserve cash amid a property and economic slump in the emirate.

Fear from swine flu has also not been helpful. Several muftis in Egypt and other Arab countries have been calling on Muslims to avoid crowded public places and have urged canceling the Ramadan tents made popular by young individuals who hang out there after iftar to listen to music and smoke hooka.

The worst damper on Ramadan though is terrorism and the staggering statistics on Muslims killing Muslims.

For the past several years, Ramadan has …

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Jonathan Chait in the New Republic:

I had an unusual thought not long ago while I watched a video clip of a screaming man at a town hall accusing John Dingell of effectively planning the murder of his disabled son. As I watched, the idea struck me that it was legitimately impossible to determine if the man was crazy merely in the political sense—as in, hoo boy, Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy ideas sure are crazy—or crazy in the more literal sense of a person whose mental health issues render him frequently unable to function. It was a total jump ball which kind of crazy he was. The two senses of the word had finally merged.

Genuinely curious, I watched the man—Mike Sola of Milan, Michigan—give a television interview. Sola accused Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer of having sent thugs to his home in the middle of the night and threatened to personally use "lethal force" on the next wee-hour thug home invasion. How awful, I thought. Fox News is exploiting a mentally ill man.

But then I learned that Sola came to his deranged fear by traditional, ideological venues. He had read an op-ed in the New York Post by Betsy McCaughey, the right-wing fabulist, who falsely claimed that the House health care bill would require patients to attend end-of-life counseling. Reports of this had spread throughout the conservative media, mutated into even wilder fears of government euthanizing the old and sick, and presumably lodged themselves into Sola’s apparently sane (by traditional medical standards) head.

What we are witnessing is the convergence of …

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Michael Tomasky in The Guardian:

I must report to you that the mood is somewhat grim these days among American liberals. Some feel President Obama has already sold them out. Others are angrier at conservatives and their deliberate lies about aspects of healthcare reform. But even many in this latter cohort think the White House hasn’t been pushing back against the lies hard enough. Either way, expectations are diminished – nerves are fraying, temples are greying.

What a change from just six to nine months ago. During that period, from the wake of Barack Obama’s victory through the first 100 days, liberal optimism was higher than it’s been in this country for 40 years. One could believe, on a good day, not only that America would pass healthcare reform and climate change bills (that’d be the easy part), but that Israelis and Palestinians and Iranians and Syrians and Indians and Pakistanis and North Koreans and you-name-it just might all wake up one day and text one another: you know, Obama’s win suddenly makes us aware of how silly we’ve been all these years. Let’s grow up and make peace.

I had my moments. We all did. In general, I’m pleased to report, I counselled that liberals should not delude themselves into over-interpreting the election results. They represented, I thought, a rejection of conservatism (for now), but not an embrace of liberalism. That would come only over time, and only if Obama and the congressional Democrats showed better results for people than Republicans had across a range of fronts. But the more common feeling was euphoria. So now, disillusionment has set in.

If Obama serves two terms, we are …

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I came across at last the nugget of an anecdote I heard in my junior year at St. John’s College. Here’s a paragraph on page 60 of The Meme Machine:

The story is that three dons at Oxford were chatting at a meal, and the biology don recounted Weismann’s experiment to disprove Lamarck’s hypothesis.

The theology don said, “Needless effort. The Jews have been circumcising infant boys for generations, yet still the foreskin grows.”

And the English don replied, “Here, as so often is the case, the Bard showed his prescience when he had Hamlet say:

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will…”

Read what James Fallows has to say about it.

David Goldhill in the Atlantic Monthly:

Almost two years ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.

About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.

It was a heroic story, but to me, it was also deeply unsettling. How was it possible that Pronovost needed to beg hospitals to adopt an essentially cost-free idea that saved so many lives? Here’s an industry that loudly protests the high cost of liability insurance and the injustice of our tort system and yet needs extensive lobbying to embrace a simple technique to save up to 100,000 people.

And what about us—the patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? And not just those 100,000 deaths. In April, a Wall Street Journal story suggested that blood clots following surgery or illness, the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths in the U.S., may kill nearly 200,000 patients per year. How did Americans learn to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths from minor medical mistakes as an inevitability?

My survivor’s grief has taken the form of an obsession with our health-care system…

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From New Scientist:

It’s been predicted for years, and now it’s happening. Deep in the Arctic Ocean, rising temperatures appear to be triggering the release of methane from beneath the sea floor.

Over 250 plumes of gas – mostly methane – have been discovered bubbling up in the sea west of the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. This is the first time such plumes have been seen. As a greenhouse gas, methane is about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide…

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This is interesting, though odd:

Attached women beware – single women really have got their eye on your man.

Melissa Burkley and Jessica Parker of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater asked 184 students to participate in a study on sexual attraction in which they were told they would be matched with an ideal partner. Unknown to them there was just one "ideal man" and one "ideal woman" pictured – the only difference was that half the participants were told their ideal mate was single, and the other half that he or she was in a relationship.

Fifty-nine per cent of women offered a single man were interested in pursuing a relationship. When the man was attached, 90 per cent said they were up for the chase. Men were keener on pursuing new mates overall, but didn’t mind whether their target was unattached or not.

Burkley and Parker speculate that single women may be more drawn to attached men because they’ve been "pre-screened" by other women and found to be satisfactory as a mate. (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.04.022).

Droughts and extreme weather patterns due to global warming are already disturbing food supplies, but those are not the only consequences of elevated CO2 levels. New Scientist reports:

Rising carbon dioxide levels may increase future crop yields but there is a catch: food will be less nutritious.

We already know that wheat exposed to higher CO₂ has a lower protein content. To see whether it affects concentrations of trace elements and toxins, Petra Högy from the University of Hohenheim in Germany and colleagues grew wheat under CO₂ concentrations expected by 2050. The team found an 8 per cent drop in iron and a 14 per cent increase in lead (Plant Biology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1438-8677.2009.00230.x). On the upside, levels of the heavy metal cadmium dropped by 14 per cent.

"This study brings into sharp focus the effects on wheat – one of the largest sources of nutrients for humans," says Irakli Loladze of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, who predicted the negative effects of rising CO₂ on micronutrients seven years ago.