Later On

Angie Drobnic Holan at Politifact.com:

The debate over health care reform has been defined by exaggerations and falsehoods. Republicans have falsely labeled the Democratic plan "government-run health care" and warned of death panels for the elderly and taxpayer subsidies for illegal immigrants. Democrats, meanwhile, have exaggerated the savings of their plan and made false claims about their favorite villains, the insurance companies.

Both sides have kept the Truth-O-Meter busy. PolitiFact has rated more than 80 health care claims since January, covering everything from the salary of insurance company executives to allegations about tax subsidies for abortion.  As congressional leaders prepare to bring their health care bills to the House and Senate floors, we’ve assembled this guide to help you sort out the truth on the health care bills. We should emphasize that the bills are in flux and details can change, but these rulings can serve as a general guide for the proposals under discussion.

Distortions from the opponents

Critics have portrayed the Democratic plan as a government takeover of health care, as a system that would prey on the elderly, use tax dollars to pay for abortion, and expand health care coverage for illegal immigrants. But in many cases, they have misstated the facts, or taken a grain of truth and exaggerated it.

• Not a government takeover of health care. The Democratic plans would leave the current system of private insurance in place while increasing regulation for insurance companies, requiring everyone to buy health insurance, and providing more subsidies for low-income people. One aspect still up in the air is the public option, a health insurance plan that would be run by the government. People could choose whether to enroll in the public option. (An estimated 12 million would, according to the Congressional Budget Office.) But Republicans have consistently portrayed the entire plan as government-run. When Sen. Tom Coburn said that under Obama’s plan, "all the health care in this country is eventually going to be run by the government," we rated it False.

• No death panels for Granny. The famous death panel rumor sprouted from a small clause in the health care bill involving Medicare. The new rule said Medicare would pay for a doctor’s visit for the purpose of end-of-life planning, such as discussions of living wills or hospice care. Opponents equated that with lessons in how to kill yourself, but every expert on health care for the elderly that we consulted said the idea was ridiculous. Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin said that seniors and the disabled "will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care." We rated that Pants on Fire…

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It’s odd, but what I see is a distinct warming trend:

Click graph to enlarge. Graph is from here.

Alan Schwarz in the NY Times:

When a survey commissioned by the National Football League recently indicated that dementia or similar memory-related diseases had been diagnosed in its retired players vastly more often than in the national population, the league claimed the study was unreliable.

But confidential data from the N.F.L.’s dementia assistance plan strongly corroborates claims of a link between football and later-life cognitive impairment. Records indicate that pro football’s retirees are experiencing moderate to advanced early-onset dementia at rates several times higher than the general population, the most glaring evidence to date of the dangers of professional football in past eras.

As the House Judiciary Committee prepares to hold a hearing on Wednesday on the issue of brain injuries in football, this latest data further underscores the possible safety risks of the modern game at all levels, from the N.F.L. to youth leagues.

The new information was collected by a lawyer for the 88 Plan, which the league and its players union began in 2007 to reimburse medical expenses of retirees being treated for dementia, and was presented to the union in a memorandum, which was obtained by The New York Times. The lawyer, Douglas W. Ell of the Groom Law Group, compared the age distribution of 88 Plan members with several published studies regarding dementia rates around the world, and wrote that “the numbers seem to refute any claim that playing N.F.L. football substantially increases” later risk for dementia.

But the outside data on which he primarily based this conclusion was not only mishandled — the wrong numbers were taken from one published study, grossly overstating worldwide dementia rates — but the analysis also included several faulty assumptions, experts said in later interviews. Correcting for these errors indicated rates of dementia among N.F.L. retirees about four to five times the expected rate.

“This was a preliminary effort at the request of the union to understand the facts,” said Ell, adding that he was acting as a lawyer for the union. “I understand now that it was flawed. I believe the union wants the true facts to come out and welcomes inquiries into this area.” …

Continue reading. Any reason not to simply outlaw professional football?

Glenn Greenwald:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded yesterday to the U.N. Report finding Israel guilty of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity by pointing out that Hamas committed war crimes — a fact nobody disputes but which doesn’t exonerate Israel in any way.  Netanyahu argued, accurately, that Hamas committed four types of war crimes, one of which is this:  “they’ve been holding our captured soldier, Gilad Shalit, without access to the Red Cross, for three years.”

So holding prisoners without providing access to the Red Cross is a “war crime”?  Who knew?

The CIA quietly moved scores of detainees out of its own “black site” prisons in recent years and turned them over to foreign governments, refusing to provide the International Red Cross any information about their treatment or whereabouts, according to a report made public this week.

There is substantial reason to believe that these “ghost detainees” included some high-profile suspects, including Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan-born jihadist captured in Afghanistan whose claims about ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were prominently used by top Bush administration officials to justify the war in Iraq, according to human-rights activists who have closely followed the issue. Following the U.S. invasion, al-Libi recanted those claims, saying he fabricated his story about Iraq-Qaeda ties in order to get his interrogators to stop their abusive treatment of him. After his recantation became known in 2004, U.S. government officials dropped all public references to him and he was never heard from again — even though he was once hailed as the U.S. military’s first big “catch” after the 9/11 attacks.

When Red Cross officials later pressed for information about what happened to such “ghost” detainees, U.S. government officials insisted they were returned to their country of origin under assurances they would be given “humane” treatment, the report states. But the Red Cross was never given access to the detainees — nor told anything about what happened to them after they were sent back.  Nor were U.S. State Department officials given details of the transfers or details about the nature of the “assurances” of humane treatment provided by foreign intelligence services to the CIA, according to a former top Bush administration official who was aware of the transfers but who asked not to be publicly identified because the issue remains highly classified. “This issue has been hiding in plain sight — but nobody has connected the dots,” said the former official.

The Red Cross remains “gravely concerned” that a “significant number” of these prisoners may have been subjected to abusive treatment — and that the organization “has not received any clarification of the fate of these persons,” the report states.

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Glenn Greenwald:

Something very unusual happened on The Washington Post Editorial Page today:  they deigned to address a response from one of their readers, who "challenged [them] to explain what he sees as a contradiction in [their] editorial positions":  namely, the Post demands that Obama’s health care plan not be paid for with borrowed money, yet the very same Post Editors vocally support escalation in Afghanistan without specifying how it should be paid for.  "Why is it okay to finance wars with debt, asks our reader, but not to pay for health care that way?"

The Post editors give two answers… 

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Trent Hamm has a post worth reading and an idea worth trying:

A little over a year ago, I began trying a new idea in my personal journal. Each day, I wrote down the five best things that happened to me that day.

I started this as a way to reflect on the positive things in my life and, psychologically, it’s been a very positive thing. I can browse through those lists and realize how good my life is, even when times feel kind of tough. Each day, I sit down and reflect on all of the good things that happened in my life. In the end, it’s really raised my mood and helped me to reflect on the wonderful aspects of my life.

Once I crossed the one year mark with this, I decided to take a tally of the things I had written down. How many involved my kids? How many involved my wife?

And perhaps most interestingly to you, how many of the entries involved spending money?

Here are the results (rounded to the nearest percentage): …

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John Cook explains at Skeptical Science:

Here at Skeptical Science, I tend to go on a bit about CO2. However, as readers often point out, CO2 is not the only driver of climate. There are a myriad of other radiative forcings that affect the planet’s energy imbalance. Volcanoes, solar variations, clouds, methane, aerosols – these all change the way energy enters and/or leaves our climate. So why the focus on CO2? Is it because I’m a hysterical treehugger determined to run peoples’ lives with a one world government? Or is there a rational, scientific reason for this CO2 preoccupation? Let’s find out which…

When I first started investigating global warming science, I attempted to discern the cause by a process of elimination. I studied all possible causes and ruled out any that couldn’t be causing all the warming. As my understanding grew, I came to realise this was an inappropriate approach. Understanding what drives climate does not occur by a process of elimination. It’s happens by a process of integration. There are many influences of climate and they all need to be considered together to gain the full picture.

For clarity, let me note a few definitions. Radiative forcing is loosely defined as the change in net energy flow at the top of the atmosphere. In this post, we’re talking about the radiative forcing from 1750 to 2005. Values are taken from Chapter 2 of the IPCC AR4 which in turn took all their values from peer reviewed papers – apologies that I was too lazy to cite all the original sources. Positive radiative forcing has a warming effect (so obviously, negative radiative forcing has a cooling effect)…

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I’m noticing that the Mühle razor pictured seems always to result in a very good shave indeed. It carries the same Astra Keramik Platinum blade that I installed when I got the razor, and today’s shave was as good as ever. The Grosvenor brush, though soaked, still didn’t carry quite enough lather for the third pass, but a quick whisk of the brush over the top of QED’s Grapefruit & Peppermint loaded with enough soap for the final pass—and I do like the Grapefruit/Peppermint combination, though it’s not one that would have occurred to me. Aqua Velva provided a cooling finish.

Pam Belluck in the NY Times:

Smoking bans in places like restaurants, offices and public buildings reduce cases of heart attacks and heart disease, according to a report released Thursday by a federally commissioned panel of scientists.

The report, issued by the Institute of Medicine, concluded that exposure to secondhand smoke significantly increased the risk of having a heart attack among both smokers and nonsmokers. The panel also said it found that a reduction in heart problems began to take effect fairly quickly after a smoking ban was instituted and that exposure to low or fleeting levels of secondhand smoke could cause cardiovascular problems.

“Even a small amount of exposure to secondhand smoke can increase in blood clotting, constrict blood vessels and can cause a heart attack,” said Dr. Neal L. Benowitz, a professor of medicine, psychiatry, and biopharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the panel. “Short-term exposure can make a big difference.”

“For places in the country that don’t have smoking bans,” Dr. Benowitz added, “smoking bans need to be put in place as quickly as possible. The longer we wait, the more disease we are accepting.”

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Michelle Conlin in Business Week:

As the Great Recession continues to devour jobs at an alarming rate, tales are legion about the millions of unemployed struggling to right their lives and recover their self-esteem. But what happens to those left behind?

Would it surprise you to learn that survivors can suffer just as much, if not more, than colleagues who get laid off? It certainly surprised a team of academic researchers who embedded themselves at Boeing (BA) from 1996 to 2006, a tumultuous decade during which the company laid off tens of thousands. The results of the study will appear next year in a Yale University Press book called Turbulence: Boeing and the State of American Workers and Managers. "How much better off the laid-off were was stunning and shocking to us," says Sarah Moore, a University of Puget Sound industrial psychology professor who is one of the book’s four authors. "So much of the literature talks about how dreadful unemployment is."

By early 1996 the researchers were busy interviewing and testing 3,500 Boeing employees—from line workers to senior executives. The timing was propitious. Struggling to adapt to new technology and competition from Europe’s Airbus, Boeing in 1997 merged with McDonnell Douglas. Over the next six years, Boeing’s workforce of 234,850 shrunk 33%, to 157,441.

With each round of layoffs, the survivors hustled to reinvent themselves. They re-proved, re-auditioned, and repositioned, only to watch yet another new manager—pushing the fad du jour—parade through the door. Employees who had once seen themselves in every plane that flew overhead were now trading in gallows humor. As in, "Dead worker walking."  …

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Very interesting article by Nathanial Gronewold in Scientific American:

The financial crisis and subsequent global recession have led to much soul-searching among economists, the vast majority of whom never saw it coming. But were their assumptions and models wrong only because of minor errors or because today’s dominant economic thinking violates the laws of physics?

A small but growing group of academics believe the latter is true, and they are out to prove it. These thinkers say that the neoclassical mantra of constant economic growth is ignoring the world’s diminishing supply of energy at humanity’s peril, failing to take account of the principle of net energy return on investment. They hope that a set of theories they call "biophysical economics" will improve upon neoclassical theory, or even replace it altogether.

But even this nascent field finds itself divided, as evidenced by the vigorous and candid back-and-forth debate last week over where to go next. One camp says its models prove the world is headed toward a dramatic economic collapse as energy scarcity takes hold, while another camp believes there is still time to turn the ship around. Still, all biophysical economists see only very bleak prospects for the future of modern civilization, putting a whole new spin on the phrase "the dismal science."

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Excellent post, which also contains the text of Obama’s speech on global warming.

Interesting:

More than half the people who take antidepressants for depression never get relief. Why? Because the cause of depression has been oversimplified and drugs designed to treat it aim at the wrong target, according to new research from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. The medications are like arrows shot at the outer rings of a bull’s eye instead of the center.

A study from the laboratory of long-time depression researcher Eva Redei, presented at the Neuroscience 2009 conference in Chicago this week, appears to topple two strongly held beliefs about depression. One is that stressful life events are a major cause of depression. The other is that an imbalance in neurotransmitters in the brain triggers depressive symptoms.

Both findings are significant because these beliefs were the basis for developing drugs currently used to treat depression.

Redei, the David Lawrence Stein Professor of Psychiatry at Northwestern’s Feinberg School, found powerful molecular evidence that quashes the long-held dogma that stress is generally a major cause of depression. Her new research reveals that there is almost no overlap between stress-related genes and depression-related genes.

"This is a huge study and statistically powerful," Redei said. "This research opens up new routes to develop new antidepressants that may be more effective. There hasn’t been an antidepressant based on a novel concept in 20 years."

Her findings are based on extensive studies with a model of severely depressed rats that mirror many behavioral and physiological abnormalities found in patients with major depression. The rats, after decades of development, are believed to be the most depressed in the world.

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Interesting:

Low alcohol consumption is bad for your health in general. Researchers writing in BioMed Central’s open access journal Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation studied the relationship between alcohol consumption and health to test the current theory which suggests improved health is responsible for the link found between low alcohol consumption and increased wages. Johan Jarl, from Lund University, Sweden, worked with a team of researchers to determine the effect of low alcohol consumption on health by measuring alcohol-related medical care costs and episodes collected during the Swedish Cost of Alcohol Project in 2002. They found that, with the exception of people more than 80 years old, men who consumed up to five units a day and women who consumed up to 2.5 units a day cost the health service more than those who do not drink. Their finding calls into question the previous assumption that low alcohol consumption is good for your health.

Several studies show that people with low alcohol intake are more highly paid. One common, but untested, explanation for this link is that low consumers spend more time at work and therefore gets better pay due to the protective effect of alcohol on some diseases. According to Jarl, "In this study, however, we found that, when including also those diseases where low consumption increases the risk of morbidity and mortality, low-to-moderate alcohol intake actually has a net negative health impact", adding, "It is therefore doubtful if the common explanation of health as the link between alcohol consumption and increased wages is valid in its existing form."

Speaking about other factors that, in the light of these findings, could account for the alcohol-wage link, Jarl said, "Family background, social networking and subjective health benefits may be responsible. It is not unlikely that the link is actually compiled of several different factors that together give a significant effect of low alcohol consumption on wage. It should come as no surprise that the nature of links such as this is normally complex and care should be taken not to oversimplify".

Source: BioMed Central

Interesting book review by Carl Bogus (unfortunate name) in The American Prospect:

The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 123 pages, $17.00

Four days after Barack Obama’s decisive victory in November 2008, I attended a conference at Yale University titled "The Next American Conservatism?" The conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute organized the conference in advance of the election — in the face of oncoming doom, as it were — to try to figure out what sort of conservatism might rise from the ashes. But although the intellectuals on the program seemed to take for granted that conservatism as we know it is dead, none of them ventured an opinion as to why it died, whether it deserved to die, or what was, or should be, next.

Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review as well as the author of an acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, offers his postmortem in an elegant little volume. Tanenhaus would not have been surprised that the participants at Yale did not even attempt meaningful speculation. "Today’s conservatives," he writes, "resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology." When a volcano erupts in your face, it is difficult to be reflective.

Tanenhaus’ book is an account of the life of modern conservatism — its birth, youth, adulthood, and senescence. He is a fine writer who recounts the tale knowledgeably and well. The story opens in the 1930s, when conservatives were trying to find an answer to the New Deal. According to Tanenhaus, the Old Right had no answer to give: Not only did it lack policy alternatives; it could not explain "why and how the world had changed." The Old Right had come out of "a pastoral land of rural communities and small towns," and it was bewildered by "an urbanized industrial nation with ever-more-complex constituencies — the teeming ethnic populations in northern cities, the increasingly organized and disciplined labor unions."

Thus a New Right emerged…

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Check out these sites.

Oddly enough, I frequently read that DDT is good and that banning it is a terrible idea, regardless of the damage to the environment and living creatures. Maybe this report will change some minds:

Women who lived in villages sprayed with DDT to reduce malaria gave birth to 33 per cent more baby boys with urogenital birth defects (UGBD) between 2004 and 2006 than women in unsprayed villages, according to research published online by the UK-based urology journal BJUI. And women who stayed at home in sprayed villages, rather than being a student or working, had 41 per cent more baby boys with UGBDs, such as missing testicles or problems with their urethra or penis.

The authors suggest that this is because they spent more time in homes where domestic DDT-based sprays are still commonly used to kill the mosquitos that cause malaria, even in areas where organised mass spraying no longer takes place.

Researchers led by the University of Pretoria in South Africa studied 3,310 boys born to women from the Limpopo Province, where DDT spraying was carried out in high-risk areas between 1995 and 2003 to control malaria. The study compared boys born to women in the 109 villages that were sprayed, with those born to women from the 97 villages that were not.

This showed that 357 of the boys included in the study – just under 11 per cent – had UGBDs. The incidence of UGBDs was significantly higher if the mother came from a sprayed village.

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From Mind Hacks:

We often think that pressure on young women to be thin is a modern phenomenon, but a fascinating letter to the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry published in 2000 noted that this is not a new development. The authors cite evidence from Ancient Rome showing a similar cultural pressures were widespread:

Garner et al. (1985) wrote about the present “unprecedented emphasis on thinness and dieting” which is one factor responsible for the increase in anorexic and bulimic disorders. It is generally believed that dieting in pursuit of a thinner shape and slimness as a standard for feminine beauty are modern attitudes. However, a clear account can be found in the ancient comedy Terence’s Eunuchus.

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Kevin Drum blogs:

Speaking of books, here’s a passage from Mark Kleiman’s When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment that I’ve been meaning to blog for a while:

Given the decrease in lead exposure among children since the 1980s and the estimated effects of lead on crime, reduced lead exposure could easily explain a very large proportion — certainly more than half — of the crime decrease of the 1994-2004 period.  A careful statistical study relating local changes in lead exposure to local crime rates estimates the fraction of the crime decline due to lead reduction as greater than 90%.

Mark’s book is focused on a particular strategy for reducing crime, so this topic gets only a couple of pages in a chapter on miscellaneous methods of crime control.  But surely it deserves more?¹  If it’s really true that lead reduction was responsible for most of the post-1990 decrease in crime, and if changing demographics played a role as well, doesn’t that mean that everything else probably had almost no effect at all?  Broken windows, open-air drug markets, three-strikes laws, CompStat, bulging prison populations, etc. etc. — all of them together couldn’t have had more than a minuscule impact if lead and demographics explain almost everything.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this, actually.  Mainly I just wanted to highlight this passage because it’s pretty interesting.  It seems a little discouraging, though, if it’s really true that all our best efforts to reduce crime over the past couple of decades have had a collective impact only barely different from zero.

On the other hand, it certainly means that federal spending to eliminate lead from houses ought to be a no-brainer.  It would cost about $30 billion, but as Mark says, it would probably save us at least $30 billion per year in reduced crime.  The fact that Congress didn’t allocate this money long ago makes you wonder if maybe the Capitol building could use a lead abatement program of its own.²

¹Of course it deserves more.  So here’s a bit more.

²The stimulus bill included $100 million for lead abatement, which is fine.  But considering just how effective lead reduction is on all sorts of policy levels, it’s sort of a crime that they couldn’t manage to dig up a little more than that out of an $800 billion total.