Later On

Pretty cool:

I’m currently watching Bill Nighy in The Girl in the Café, in which he is one of two primary characters. He’s doing a superb job, and I suddenly realized that I’ve never seen Nighy give a performance that is anything other than superb. And he’s a delight to watch.

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic:

"You can’t really have reform without a public option," former governor Howard Dean, a prominent public-option advocate, said recently. "If you really want to fix the health care system, you’ve got to give the public the choice of having such an option." Promising as this sounds, it seems increasingly likely that the public option will be a liberal dream deferred. Republicans and conservative Democrats, panicked that the government plan will squash competition and the medical industry as we know it, are slowly killing the idea. Even President Obama, who has endorsed the idea unambiguously, has indicated a willingness to compromise on the issue.

Liberals, understandably, are in agony. But they can take at least some comfort in looking overseas–where one tiny country has managed to build a popular and successful universal health care program based entirely on private insurance. That country is the Netherlands, which several years ago overhauled its health care system and achieved most of the goals the liberal reform movement holds dear: near-universal coverage, affordable insurance, and quality health care.

Under the new system, the Dutch government has required that everybody gets insurance; in return, it makes sure insurance is available to everybody, regardless of pre-existing medical conditions or income. Although the government finances long-term care through a public program, it has turned over the job of providing basic medical coverage exclusively to private insurers, including some for-profit companies. Surveys show that the Dutch are happier with their health care than are Americans—or the people of any other developed country, for that matter. There are even signs, albeit faint ones, that the insurers are achieving what’s become the Holy Grail of health reform: using their leverage to improve the quality of care that doctors and hospitals provide—by improving the coordination of treatments for the chronically ill or steering patients to providers that get the best outcomes.

Still, there’s a catch. A big catch. Private insurance in the Netherlands works because it operates more or less like a public utility. The Dutch government regulates industry practices tightly—more tightly than the reforms now moving through Congress propose to do in the United States. The public insurance option was supposed to make up for that deficiency, at least in part, by setting a standard for service and affordability that the private industry would have to meet—and by offering a fail-safe option in case the private plans simply couldn’t keep up. If Congress ends up gutting the public plan, in part or in whole, then it needs to work even harder on making private insurance work. And it’s an open question whether that will happen.

What makes private insurance work in the Netherlands? It starts with …

Continue reading. Thanks to Jack in Greece for the pointer. Typical cost for family of two: $180/month.

Even Texans can catch on if the facts beat them hard enough—facts like these:

Amanda Terkel in ThinkProgress:

Texas currently has the third-highest teen birth rate in the country and “the highest rate of repeat teen births.” It also leads the nation in the amount of government money it spends on abstinence-only education. But some school districts in the state are now shifting away from that approach, admitting that it isn’t working:

“We mainly did it because of our pregnancy rate,” said Whitney Self, lead teacher for health and physical education at the Hays Consolidated Independent School District. “We don’t think abstinence-only is working.” [...]

Both approaches to sex education teach that refraining from sexual activity is the safest choice for teens.

But abstinence-only gives limited information about contraceptives and condoms and tends to downplay their effectiveness, while abstinence-plus stresses the importance of using such protection if teens are sexually active.

Medical experts have stated concluded that not only do abstinence-only programs not curb teen pregnancy, but “there is evidence to suggest that some of these programs are even harmful and have negative consequences by not providing adequate information for those teens who do become sexually active.”

That’s the one I have, and I think their comments are accurate.

I hope the US does not repeat the Iraq mistake by blowing out of proportion the threat to the US of Iran—which is really no threat at all. War really should be the last resort, but the US seems to love going to war. Heed Scott Ritter.

We are going to be doing this within a  couple of years. Michael Specter explores the implications in this New Yorker article:

The first time Jay Keasling remembers hearing the word “artemisinin,” about a decade ago, he had no idea what it meant. “Not a clue,” Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled. Although artemisinin has become the world’s most important malaria medicine, Keasling wasn’t an expert on infectious diseases. But he happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology, which—by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology—seeks to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world.

Scientists have been manipulating genes for decades; inserting, deleting, and changing them in various microbes has become a routine function in thousands of labs. Keasling and a rapidly growing number of colleagues around the world have something more radical in mind. By using gene-sequence information and synthetic DNA, they are attempting to reconfigure the metabolic pathways of cells to perform entirely new functions, such as manufacturing chemicals and drugs. Eventually, they intend to construct genes—and new forms of life—from scratch. Keasling and others are putting together a kind of foundry of biological components—BioBricks, as Tom Knight, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped invent the field, has named them. Each BioBrick part, made of standardized pieces of DNA, can be used interchangeably to create and modify living cells.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the New Yorker Adam Gopnik reviews a new book on the affair:

On a January day in Paris, in 1895, a ceremony was enacted in the courtyard of the École Militaire, on the Champ-de-Mars, that still shocks the mind and conscience to contemplate: Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish artillery officer and family man, convicted of treason days earlier in a rushed court-martial, was publicly degraded before a gawking crowd. His insignia medals were stripped from him, his sword was broken over the knee of the degrader, and he was marched around the grounds in his ruined uniform to be jeered and spat at, while piteously declaring his innocence and his love of France above cries of “Jew” and “Judas!” It is a ceremony that seems to belong to some older, medieval Europe, of public torture and autos-da-fé and Inquisitions.

Yet it took place in the immediate shadow of the monument of modernity, the Eiffel Tower, then six years old, which loomed at the north end of the Champ-de-Mars. The very improbability of such an act’s happening at such a time—to an assimilated Jew who had mastered a meritocratic system and a city that was the pride and pilothouse of civic rationalism—made it a portent, the moment where Maupassant’s world of ambition and pleasure met Kafka’s world of inexplicable bureaucratic suffering. The Dreyfus affair was the first indication that a new epoch of progress and cosmopolitan optimism would be met by a countervailing wave of hatred that deformed the next half century of European history.

The Dreyfus affair never goes away, and is the subject of a brave new book by the novelist and lawyer Louis Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (Yale; $24). Brave because Begley wants to use the occasion not for French-bashing, or for reciting the enduring history of European anti-Semitism, bleak as it is, but as a pointed warning and reminder of how fragile the standards of civilized conduct prove in moments of national panic. The Dreyfus affair matters, he believes, because we have, in the past decade, made our own Devil’s Island and hundreds of new Dreyfuses—the Dreyfus affair matters because we’re still in the middle of it. Begley, as he recounts the story of the Parisian fin-de-siècle legal drama, also spends many pages showing that among the prisoners in places like Guantánamo are many Dreyfuses—innocent, as he was, and, on the whole, much worse treated. He wants to arraign Americans, and particularly those who fetishize the Dreyfus case without grasping its principles: that every accused person should be able to face his accusers in a fair trial, and that national panic makes bad policy and false prisoners.

Yet a parallel can be potent without being, point by point, persuasive: Dreyfus was not the Faceless Foreigner but the Enemy Within. Far from being faceless, he was all face: the haters never tired of describing and drawing his hideousness. “His face is grey, flattened and base, showing no sign of remorse . . . a wreck from the ghetto,” the journalist Léon Daudet wrote. That hideous degradation ritual is at the heart of the Dreyfus affair; it was meant to be public and demonstrative—this is what happens to faithless Jews. The degradation of the prisoners at Guantánamo was essentially private and utilitarian: talk or we’ll subject you to unspeakable humiliations.

The Dreyfus affair matters not because of the parallel with our time but because it was …

Continue reading.

I finished Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, which was interesting in all sorts of ways. It’s also one of the few movies in which you see Go being played, though the late-game positions looked odd. I also made good headway into several other movies—going my usual route of watching multiple movies at once.

Save for brush and blade, both from Italy, I enjoyed a German shave this morning. Irisch Moos made a great lather, thanks in no small part to the Omega Syntex brush—and no water spill from the brush this time: you just have to give it a shake before starting to lather. And it is a very fine brush.

The Merkur Progress, with a previously used Bolzano blade, gave me a fine three-pass shave, and the Speick aftershave provided a fine finish.