Later On

Steve Benen:

We talked last week about a trend that’s hard to overlook: every time Democrats push legislation that lowers the deficit, Republican lawmakers and their conservative allies oppose it. Given that the right likes to pretend that deficit reduction is a top priority, it seems like there’s a disconnect here.

This morning, Matt Yglesias goes further, trying to make it painfully obvious that, nonsensical rhetoric notwithstanding, conservatives really don’t care about deficit reduction. Here’s the easy-to-understand, five-point indictment:

1) There have been two presidents who were members of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, and they both presided over massive increases in both present and projected deficits.

2) The major deficit reduction packages of the modern era, in 1990 and 1993, were both uniformly opposed by the conservative movement.

3) When the deficit was temporarily eliminated in the late-1990s, the mainstream conservative view was that this showed that the deficit was too low and needed to be increased via large tax cuts.

4) Senator Mitch McConnell says it’s a uniform view in his caucus that tax cuts needn’t be offset by other changes in spending.

5) The deficit reduction commission is having trouble because they think conservative politicians won’t vote for any form of tax increase.

I’m trying to imagine what the conservative response might be to this — and I’ll look forward to seeing what they come up with — but when looking for any evidence at all that the right is serious about deficit reduction, literally nothing comes to mind.

I’d add, by the way, that conservatives really only pretend to care when they’re not in power. Before becoming president, Reagan said deficit reduction would a top priority. In office, that commitment was quickly cast aside. Before the 2000 race, Bush said a balanced budget was critically important to him. He then became the single most fiscally irresponsible president in American history.

Now that the right is out of power again, they look back with surprise. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)recently conceded when Republicans controlled the levers of power, "it was standard practice not to pay for things." But if voters give them another chance, this time will be different. Sure. Of course it will — right after Republicans get those hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the rich secure for another decade.

The key here isn’t just to point out GOP hypocrisy and record of abject failure, it’s to remind the political world to stop buying into the nonsense. The conventional wisdom still, even now, accepts the notion that conservatives care about deficit reduction. They don’t. They care about tax cuts, regardless of the fiscal consequences.

Fool me once, shame on you*. Fool me on a nearly daily basis over the course of several decades….

Marion Nestle:

I keep hearing rumors that food industry opposition is what is holding up release of the FTC’s position paper on nutrition standards for marketing foods to kids.

I titled my previous post on this report “Standards for marketing foods to kids: tentative, proposed, weak,” because I thought they left far too much wiggle room for companies to market products that I would not exactly call health foods.

Now, Melanie Warner points out that even so, the proposed standards will exclude a great many highly profitable food products.  Hence: food company opposition.

Susan Linn of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood quotes an executive of the food industry’s Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative: “There are very few products, period, that meet these standards, whether they’re primarily consumed by adults or children.”

The food industry has consistently opposed giving the FTC more authority over marketing of foods and supplements.  Here is another reason why this agency needs it.

Do any of my current readers believe that we can simply trust the food companies to do the right thing? or that if the food companies do wrong, the unfettered free market will fix any problems automatically?

Both are by Steve Benen, and both are well worth reading.

The Political Consequences of Economic Know-Nothingism

When an Entire Political Party Moves to Bizarro World

The second one shows clearly that the GOP today is not worth listening to. They have stopped making sense.

Shell demonstrates that BP doesn’t know how to drill a well.

The military is shirking its responsibilities to the troops. Mark Benjamin in Salon:

Marine Sgt. Tom Bagosy stepped out of his black GMC Sierra pickup and onto the gray, speckled pavement of McHugh Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare in the heart of Camp Lejeune, N.C. He held a pistol in his right hand.

The military police car that had pulled him over idled on the shoulder a safe distance behind him. The midday traffic stopped. Bagosy stood for a moment on the warm pavement under a cloudless May sky. Then he raised the pistol, pointed it to the right side of his throat just below his jaw, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet sliced through his jugular vein, traveled through his skull and exited near the top left side of his head. He crumpled down in the road. Even if the bullet had failed to rip through his brain, shooting through the jugular was solid insurance. He would have bled out in minutes anyway.

Bagosy, 25, who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, had become another statistic in the war-fatigued military and its steadily escalating suicide rate. Last year, 52 Marines committed suicide. The suicide rate among Marines has doubled since 2005, and the Corps has the highest suicide rate in the military. The circumstances of Bagosy’s death, however, provide a particularly poignant case study in what many critics say is the military’s inadequate response to that suicide crisis.

Bagosy’s story shows how the military’s ineptitude in the face of crisis affected a single family — in this case, a Marine in the last hours of his life, and his two young children and his wife, who waited in vain that day for him to come back to his home just outside Camp Lejeune.

These circumstances are particularly troubling because Bagosy died a year after a former Camp Lejeune psychiatrist risked his reputation and career to warn Navy officials that unless Camp Lejeune dramatically improved mental health services — and in particular, develop precise, rigorous protocols for handling Marines who might kill themselves or others — there would be deadly consequences.

That psychiatrist, Dr. Kernan Manion, repeatedly warned Camp Lejeune and Navy officials in writing starting in the spring of 2009 about the risk of more Marine suicides, murder and "immediate concerns of physical safety" if Camp Lejeune did not improve. Frustrated by what he saw as a lack of action by officials at Camp Lejeune, Manion took his concerns to a series of military inspectors general in late August. He was fired four days later. The Defense Department inspector general is investigating that case.

The lessons from Bagosy’s suicide are especially provocative because minutes before his death, Bagosy was inside the Camp Lejeune Deployment Health Center, the place where doctors are supposed to help Marines like Bagosy. Healthcare workers there knew he had problems. They knew he had already been diagnosed with both a brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, the signature injuries of the current wars. He’d been seeing a doctor there and a therapist. He’d talked with his therapist about thoughts of suicide. Officials at the clinic the day he died also knew Bagosy was acutely suicidal that very morning and that he was armed, because his wife, Katie, had called to warn them about all of it. They had decided he needed to be hospitalized.

Yet he managed to get away from the clinic, and minutes later Bagosy would lay covered by a bloody sheet on one of Camp Lejeune’s main thoroughfares.

Bagosy first started seeing doctors at Camp Lejeune in the summer of 2007 after a tour in Iraq…

Continue reading.

David Abraham writes an op-ed in the NY Times:

CONGRESS has proven adept at placing blame for the gulf oil spill — depending on whom you listen to on Capitol Hill, BP bears the bulk of the responsibility, or the Interior Department and its increasingly inadequate regulations, or both.

There’s no question that each of these deserves blame. But there’s also no question that the responsibility for developing safe offshore operations extends much further, to Congress itself.

For more than a decade, legislators have allowed themselves to be lulled by industry assurances that drilling in deep water posed little danger. One could say that Congress, just like the companies it has attacked, was obsessed with oil.

Before the spill, Congress had not debated regulatory safety on wells in the gulf since the 1990s, and when it did, lawmakers focused on how to drill for more oil — which, after all, meant more jobs and more federal revenue for pet projects.

In a 1995 attempt to encourage more exploration, Congress agreed to reduce the cut of the proceeds the government could collect on oil and gas drilling in deep waters. Ten years later, despite higher oil prices and declarations from President George W. Bush that more incentives were not needed, a Republican-led Congress reduced royalties yet again.

And in a sign of how money had influenced and distorted the debate, throughout the last decade the Louisiana Congressional delegation, for a time including the state’s current governor, Bobby Jindal, backed expanded offshore drilling so that Congress could use proceeds to pay for coastal damage caused by oil-and-gas operations. In 2006 the delegation supported legislation giving a share of federal royalties to states that allowed drilling in federal waters off their coasts, essentially using national revenue to encourage more exploration.

Read the rest of this entry »

MDs often are eager to push tort reform as a way of ending medical malpractice lawsuits. A much better—and more constructive—approach would be to work to end medical malpractice, but that, of course, requires effort on the part of the MDs, who are not much interested. A recent study published in JAMA:

Physicians’ Perceptions, Preparedness for Reporting, and Experiences Related to Impaired and Incompetent Colleagues

Catherine M. DesRoches, DrPH; Sowmya R. Rao, PhD; John A. Fromson, MD; Robert J. Birnbaum, MD, PhD; Lisa Iezzoni, MD, MSc; Christine Vogeli, PhD; Eric G. Campbell, PhD

JAMA. 2010;304(2):187-193. doi:10.1001/jama.2010.921

Context  Peer monitoring and reporting are the primary mechanisms for identifying physicians who are impaired or otherwise incompetent to practice, but data suggest that the rate of such reporting is lower than it should be.

Objective  To understand physicians’ beliefs, preparedness, and actual experiences related to colleagues who are impaired or incompetent to practice medicine.

Design, Setting, and Participants  Nationally representative survey of 2938 eligible physicians practicing in the United States in 2009 in anesthesiology, cardiology, family practice, general surgery, internal medicine, pediatrics, and psychiatry. Overall, 1891 physicians (64.4%) responded.

Main Outcome Measures  Beliefs about and preparedness for reporting and experiences with colleagues who practice medicine while impaired or who are incompetent in their medical practice.

Results  Sixty-four percent (n = 1120) of surveyed physicians agreed with the professional commitment to report physicians who are significantly impaired or otherwise incompetent to practice. Nonetheless, only 69% (n = 1208) of physicians reported being prepared to effectively deal with impaired colleagues in their medical practice, and 64% (n = 1126) reported being so prepared to deal with incompetent colleagues. Seventeen percent (n = 309) of physicians had direct personal knowledge of a physician colleague who was incompetent to practice medicine in their hospital, group, or practice. Of those with this knowledge, 67% (n = 204) reported this colleague to the relevant authority. Underrepresented minorities and graduates of non-US medical schools were less likely than their counterparts to report, and physicians working in hospitals or medical schools were most likely to report. The most frequently cited reason for taking no action was the belief that someone else was taking care of the problem (19% [n = 58]), followed by the belief that nothing would happen as a result of the report (15% [n = 46]) and fear of retribution (12% [n = 36]).

Conclusion  Overall, physicians support the professional commitment to report all instances of impaired or incompetent colleagues in their medical practice to a relevant authority; however, when faced with these situations, many do not report.

Author Affiliations: Mongan Institute for Health Policy (Drs DesRoches, Rao, Iezzoni, Vogeli, and Campbell); Biostatistics Center (Dr Rao); and Department of Psychiatry (Drs Fromson and Birnbaum), Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.

Medicine is a business, and businesses require regulation and third-party monitoring—because businesses are notoriously poor at self-regulation, as we see.

Two brief articles on shaving yesterday, one in the LA Times (which included a link to Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving) and one in the Wall Street Journal. Traditional shaving is definitely making a comeback.

I needed a break from all the shaving cream. Calani seems to be an okay soap that produces an okay lather, but nothing to write home about. The soap’s fragrance was mild but pleasant, and the Feather razor (and blade) did an excellent job. A splash of Booster Oriental Spice, and I’m ready to prepare for the ladies.

If you are promised a "speedy" refund or recovery, apparently that means around 5 years, more or less. Benjamin Weiser reports in the NY Times:

A federal judge has rejected a claim by a terrorist defendant in Manhattan that his nearly five years of detention by the American government before being transferred into the civilian court system violated his Constitutional right to a speedy trial.

The ruling comes in the case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who last year became the first former detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to be moved into the civilian court system for trial.

The decision by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan could make it easier for the Obama administration to try other former detainees, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed planner of the 9/11 plot, in the civilian system.

“The government is entitled to attempt to hold Ghailani accountable in a court of law for his alleged complicity in the murder of 224 people and the injury of more than 1,000 others,” the judge wrote, refusing to dismiss the charges against Mr. Ghailani.

Mr. Ghailani faces charges of conspiring in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa. Mr. Ghailani later trained with Al Qaeda and worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, the authorities have said.

After Mr. Ghailani was captured in 2004, he was held in secret overseas jails run by the C.I.A. and later in the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. In 2009, the Obama administration ordered him transferred into the civilian system, and he was brought to New York for trial.

“Although the delay of this proceeding was long and entirely the product of decision for which the executive branch of our government is responsible,” Judge Kaplan held, “the decisions that caused the delay were not made for the purpose of gaining any advantage over Ghailani in the prosecution of this indictment.”

Mr. Ghailani is scheduled for trial this fall in New York.

Both Mr. Ghailani’s lawyers and a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan declined comment on the ruling…

Continue reading.

Important news for the Court: Five years is NOT "speedy," a fact obvious to the meanest intellect. I would love to lock this judge in a room and tell him that he will be released "speedily," and let him go at the end of July in 2015. And then ask him if 5 years is "speedy."

It’s hard not to become disgusted at our government’s posturing and increasing inability to function properly.

I noticed that kitchen clean-up is not the chore it once was. Reason: every second day I have to wash and cook a bunch of greens (today: 2 bunches of kale, plus broccoli to steam, strawberries to clean, chicken breasts to poach (and that requires simmering chopped carrots, celery, and onion along with some herbs for 30 minutes or so to make the poaching stock—and then once the breasts are cooked, I use the resulting stock to cook grains).

The result is that I never have more than 1 or 2 days’ worth of dishes to clean.

So far it’s been clear: Obstruct everything, put holds on everything, filibuster everything, let nothing pass. It hasn’t been successful, but that seems to be the total of the GOP proposals and vision for government. Steve Benen:

Democrats tend to needle Republicans with a fairly important detail: the GOP doesn’t have a policy agenda. It wants power largely to prevent Democrats from acting on their policy agenda, but when it comes to substance and crafting a coherent policy vision, the GOP comes up empty. As Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) recently conceded, he finds "plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas."

Jonah Goldberg thinks the "party of no" strategy has been a great success for Republicans, but suggests it’s time for the GOP to "call Obama’s bluff and offer a real choice."

My personal preference would be for the leadership to embrace Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s "road map," a sweeping, bold and humane assault on the welfare state and our debt crisis. Doing so might come at the cost of trimming the GOP’s victory margins in November, but it would provide Republicans with a real mandate to be something more than "not-Obama."

Kevin Drum seems ready to leap through his computer monitor.

I swear, I would pay cash money if the Republican leadership would promise to actually do this. Goldberg thinks that liberals aren’t popular? That’s peanuts. If Republicans made a serious run at passing Ryan’s road map the party would end up just slightly more popular than the Taliban. I think there would literally not be a single demographic or interest group in the entire country still supporting them. Even the tea partiers would start pretending to be Democrats. Hell, they’d probably take up the cause of repealing the 22nd amendment and allowing Obama to be elected president for life. [...]

So I dare them. I double dog dare them. Let’s hear about how you’re going to cut federal spending by a trillion dollars over the next five years and by a third over the next 50. Details, people. Let’s hear ‘em. Make my day.

It’s hard to overstate how right Kevin is. Congressional Republicans refuse to put forward a substantive policy agenda, not because they’re just too darn busy, but because they know it’s very likely voters would absolutely hate it. In particular, Ryan’s "road map" — eliminate Medicare, privatize Social Security, huge tax cuts — was so transparently ridiculous that the House GOP leadership went out of its way to not endorse it.

But this goes well beyond Ryan’s plan. Note that would-be Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sat down with the Washington Post recently, and refused to give any details about how Republicans would govern. It’s not a mystery why — he lacks Goldberg’s confidence in the popularity of right-wing proposals.

During the debate over health care reform, House Republicans swore for months that their alternative package was on the verge of being released. GOP leaders delayed it until the last possible moment, and prayed no one paid attention to it, because it was truly laughable. Or how about last year’s Republican budget proposal — which managed not to include any actual numbers?

Goldberg wants Republicans to "offer a real choice" to voters? That’s a fine idea for a party with a) a coherent vision; and b) the courage of its convictions. There’s no reason to think the Republican Party has either.

That said, Goldberg does raise one fair point: if Republicans run and win without presenting an alternative agenda, they’ll have no mandate if they’re successful at the ballot box. The vote in November will reflect disappointment with the status quo, but it won’t be an endorsement of the GOP’s ideas.

If Republicans want a mandate, they’ll have to present a meaningful, detailed agenda to the public for scrutiny. If they do, I’ll match whatever Kevin’s willing to pay.

Because… God doesn’t like it? Reason is unclear to me. Steve Benen:

During the prolonged debate over health care reform, the most prominent "culture war" fight was over abortion, and whether the new law would allow indirect, circuitous public funding of it.

The issue of contraceptives — specifically, legally mandated coverage of contraceptives in American health care plans — didn’t generate much attention. Dana Goldstein has a fascinating report today about how that’s likely to soon change.

[T]he Daily Beast has learned that many conservative activists … are just waking up to the possibility that the new health care law could require employers and insurance companies to offer contraceptives, along with other commonly prescribed medications, without charging any co-pay. Now the Heritage Foundation and the National Abstinence Education Association say they plan to join the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in resisting implementation of the new provisions. [...]

Currently, 27 states require insurers to cover birth control, but federal health reform has the potential to go much further — mandating that prescription birth control be offered to consumers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia free of "cost-sharing," or payments at the pharmacy counter.

At issue are yet-to-be-written federal regulations on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Proponents of women’s health want changes to preventive-health-care guidelines to be made quickly, while the right gets organized to fight coverage of birth control.

Matt Yglesias sees a fight worth having.

Politically speaking, I think this is the fight progressives have been wanting to have for some time now — something that would highlight the deeply reactionary and anti-woman ideology that drives the main institutional players in the anti-abortion movement. But will it be possible to get people to pay attention?

It’s tough to predict what folks will care about, but this dispute offers clear upsides for the left. After all, family-planning programs are wildly popular, and contraceptives are commonly used nationwide. Goldstein also noted the business community is supportive: "A new report from the National Business Group on Health found that most companies would save money in the long run by providing their employees with co-pay-free birth control."

Here’s hoping Obama administration officials ignore conservatives and pursue guidelines that are good politics and good policy.

Dean Baker writes in the Guardian:

While BP has taken some heat over its spill in the Gulf, it is remarkable how limited the anger actually is. Many defenders of the company have made the obvious point: it was an accident. BP did not intend to have a massive spill that killed 11 people, devastated the Gulf ecosystem and threatens the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers.

Of course this is true, but it is also true that a drunk driver who runs into a school bus did not intend to be involved in a fatal collision. As a society, we have no problem holding the drunk driver responsible for a predictable outcome of their recklessness. Driving while drunk dramatically increases the risk of an accident. This is why it is punished severely. A person who is responsible for a fatal accident while driving drunk can expect to face many years in jail. Even someone who drives drunk without being in an accident often faces jail time because of the risk they imposed on others.

This raises the question of why the public seems to accept that the top officials at BP, who cut corners and made risky gambles in their drilling plans, should be able to "get my life back," as BP chief executive Tony Hayward put it. The people who lost their livelihood as a result of BP’s spill will not get their lives back, even if BP does pay compensation. Certainly the 11 workers killed in the original explosion will not get their lives back. Why should the people responsible for this carnage be able to resume their life of luxury?

There are two separate questions. The first is a narrow legal issue concerning the extent to which Hayward and other high level executives can be held criminally liable for the accident. It may be the case that the laws are written so that even if companies commit gross negligence that results in enormous harm, including multiple deaths, top officials are not criminally liable. This is a question about the status of current law. The second question is a moral and economic one about what the laws should look like.

From either standpoint, it is very difficult to see why we would want to say that reckless behaviour that would be punished with long prison sentences if done by an individual, somehow escapes serious sanction if done as part of a corporation’s pursuit of profit. Do we give a get a "get out of jail free" card to people when they are wearing the hat of a top corporate executive? This makes no sense.

Just to take the extreme case, suppose that Tony Hayward was racing back to the office after a three-Martini lunch in order to prepare the paperwork for a big contract that he had just negotiated. On his way, he hits a school bus, killing 11 children. Would it make sense to absolve him of blame for these deaths because it was the result of his efforts to raise BP profits? And, if that doesn’t make sense, why does it make sense to absolve him of responsibility for the deaths of 11 oil rig workers that was the direct result of his decision to cut corners in order to increase profits.

We can ask the same question about the responsibility of the top executives of the Massey Energy corporation, whose shoddy safety practices led to the explosion that cost 29 workers their lives. We should also ask why the top executives of the Utah American Energy company weren’t subject to criminal prosecution when their recklessness led to the deaths of six miners and 3 rescue workers in a mine collapse in 2007. In these cases and many others the problem was not simply bad luck. In all three cases, the accidents were the direct result of reckless behaviour on the part of the management of these companies. They ignored standard safety measures in order to save money.

Of course most acts of recklessness don’t result in fatalities, just as the vast majority of incidents of drunk driving do not end in fatal collisions. Nonetheless, when they are caught, we still punish drunk drivers for their recklessness…

Continue reading. He doesn’t seem much interested in the position that we should just trust businesses to do the right thing, or the free market as a solution.

Following on this post, James Fallows blogs:

Over the weekend I mentioned an offhand comment by Bharat Balasubramanian of Germany’s Daimler AG — that’s "Dr. Bharat" to you –about the unwholesome effect on America’s income distribution of American corporations bringing profits back home but sending manufacturing jobs overseas. This has provoked a deluge of mail, pro and con, of which I offer two samples for now. First, from someone who like Dr. Bharat sees the US from a European-comparative perspective:

As a Norwegian who lived in the US for six years before returning, I concur with Dr. Bharat’s idea that Europe – or at least Northern Europe – has a more robust middle class than the US. One of the things that surprised me while living in the US is the idea that pretty much everyone goes through the same high school system in preparation for academic studies – the idea seems to be college or bust. In comparison, in most Northern European countries about half of high school students go to vocational schools that provide them with solid training for non-academic work. I know there are vocational schools in the US but it’s a much less comprehensive system and, crucially, it’s for post-secondary students. For a lot of kids who don’t have the aptitude for academic studies and drop out of high school that is too late.

A comprehensive vocational school system at the high-school level has, the way I see it, two advantages. The most important one is that it provides young people with the skills demanded both in manufacturing and services and increases productivity. Second, it elevates the status of certain workers and provides them with higher wages. For instance, hair dressers in Norway are very good because they have gone through a program with both training in school and an apprenticeships. They also get paid well because the supply of professional hair dressers is limited to those who have gone through the program. Sure, I miss getting a hair cut at a barber shop in the US for less than $10, but the distributional effects of my having to pay several times that for a hair cut here is very good since it redistributes money from a highly-educated well-paid white collar professional to someone who is less paid. Of course, hair dressers aside, for manufacturers the productivity benefit of having a good supply of well-trained welders, machine operators and other technicians should be obvious.

Now, from Ron Russell of the Seattle area:

Dr. Bharat’s comments indeed strike a chord- but I think the situation is in some ways worse than he is portraying.

My wife and I have a small company (just above Kenmore Air Harbor on Lake Washington, FWIW) that designs and develops high tech embedded electronics devices- most recently a computer to monitor scuba diver’s gas saturation. But it could just as easily be medical devices or products for any specialized industry not large enough to be on the radar of an Apple or Samsung. There is considerable economic activity at this not-mass-market level. We are engaging in entrepreneurship in a way that would not have been conceivable when we started our careers (we’re about 60). We design on very capable computers, we can access vast technical information databases online, we can send files over the internet and have finished circuit boards to test in days. We make products that can compete technically with the biggest companies, but just address smaller markets. We are a technology version of the family farm. We could be ads for the new "knowledge based" economy. Yet businesses like ours are threatened by the collapse of US manufacturing capacity.

Why? In the short term, because businesses at our scale, dealing in the thousands and not millions, need skilled assembly that can be done locally, we need skilled machinists and prototyping facilities to be available here, not on the other side of the world. The personal interchange and creative interaction that comes from a designer working directly with those who do the manufacturing is invaluable. The best designs come from working closely with those who know intimately the processes that go into creating the product.

In the longer term, losing manufacturing is a path to losing our creative edge. It’s a fantasy to believe we can educate some kind of technical elite absent a connection to the physical reality of making things. The kind of technical secondary education common in Europe, yet almost absent in the US, creates people who do know how to build things. Some of them will have great ideas, and will put them into practice. Meanwhile, I watched my daughter’s high school drop all shop classes rather than modernize them, and ramp up "technology" education- mostly by teaching kids how to use Word and Excel. This is so profoundly wrong as to bring tears of frustration to this high tech entrepreneur. Not everyone in society is destined to be a designer or developer. We need skilled manufacturing for a healthy society and economy, and that takes workers with the right skills.

Andy Grove got it right in his recent comments: losing manufacturing jobs puts at risk both our society and the wellsprings of our creativity.

Obviously this is a bigger topic than we can handle right here. My main pensée on the subject remains this article from the Atlantic, published nearly twenty years ago, when Japan (rather than Germany or China) was the cautionary example of purposeful employment policy. More to come.

It’s inevitable, I suppose. As the on-going direct evidence of climate change becomes ever more obvious, those who cling to the denialist position are, more or less by definition, the most obtuse and scientifically illiterate, poor things. Take this article in Skeptical Science by John Cook:

Watts Up With That concludes Greenland is not melting without looking at any actual ice mass data

To properly understand what’s happening with our climate, it’s imperative we consider the full body of evidence. Unfortunately, much confusion is sowed by those who cherrypick select pieces of data while neglecting the full picture. A good example is a blog post at Watts Up With That by Steve Goddard, titled Greenland Hype Meltdown. Goddard characterises the reports that Greenland is losing ice as a “continuous stream of gross misinformation”. Curiously, he provides no actual data on Greenland’s ice mass to expose this gross misinformation. Instead, he cites temperature from a single weather station and some photos he took while flying over the ice sheet.

Let’s look at actual measurements of what’s happening to the Greenland ice sheet. The change in ice mass has been measured using a variety of methods. Satellites use altimetry data to measure the speed of the glaciers as they slide into the ocean. What they find is the glaciers have been sliding faster downhill and dumping more ice into the ocean. Satellite radar altimetry and airborne laser altimetry have also been used to measure the thickness of the ice sheets – they both find the ice sheet is thinning.

GPS receivers have been placed at selected locations around Greenland to measure how much the bedrock is lifting in response to thinning ice sheets. These find the land is now rising up at an accelerating rate. An overall picture is obtained by satellites measuring the change in gravity around the ice sheet. As the ice sheet loses mass, the gravity around Greenland changes, as measured by the GRACE satellites. These measurements find accelerating ice loss.

Net accumulation and loss of ice mass from Greenland are calculated using measurements of precipitation, snow accumulation and the discharge of glaciers into the ocean. The net accumulation/loss measurements find the same rate of ice loss as the GRACE gravity data. When all these independent lines of evidence are compared, we find a consistent picture of accelerating ice loss over the last decade and a half.

Figure 1:  Rate of ice loss from Greenland. Vertical lines indicate uncertainty, horizontal lines indicate averaging time. Blue circles are from altimetry, red squares are from net accumulation/loss and green triangles are from GRACE. The black line is a straight-line (constant acceleration) fit through the mass balance data for the period 1996–2008 with a slope of 21 gigatonnes/yr² (Jiang 2010).

Is there any evidence that this ice loss has stopped recently? The latest gravity data, released just over a month ago, shows continued accelerating ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet. This is because ice loss has spread from southern Greenland to the northwest, confirmed by gravity measurements and GPS data. Currently, Greenland is losing ice mass at a rate of around 286 billion tonnes per year.

Figure 2: Greenland ice mass anomaly (black). Orange line is quadratic fit (John Wahr).

The full body of evidence gives us a variety of direct measurements, using independent techniques, all arriving at the same answer. When Naomi Oreskes referred to “multiple, independent lines of evidence converging on a single coherent account”, she may as well have been talking about Greenland ice loss.

Steve Goddard is correct when he says there’s a “continuous stream of gross misinformation” about Greenland ice loss but it’s not coming from the peer-reviewed research which paints a remarkably consistent picture. Instead, the misinformation comes from those who ignore the full body of evidence and cherrypick bits and pieces to paint a misleading picture.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

If you read Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article about central line infections three years ago, you already know that CRBSIs — catheter-related bloodstream infections — maim and kill tens of thousands of hospital patients a year. And you also know that these infections can be reduced nearly to zero through the use of a simple checklist that boils down to "keep everything really clean." So it’s infuriating all over again to read today that a new survey of doctors and nurses suggests that pretty much nothing has changed:

Why aren’t hospitals leaping to adopt these best practices?…. More than half of the 2,075 respondents, most of whom were infection control nurses employed by hospitals, reported that they use a cumbersome paper-based system for tracking patients’ conditions that makes it harder to spot infections in real time. Seven in 10 said they are not given enough time to train other hospital workers on proper procedures. Nearly a third said enforcing best practice guidelines was their greatest challenge, and one in five said administrators were not willing to spend the necessary money to prevent CRBSIs.

[Peter] Pronovost said part of the problem was that many hospital chief executives aren’t even aware of their institution’s bloodstream infection rates, let alone how easily they could bring them down. When hospital leaders decide to create a culture in which preventing infections is a priority, he added, nurses feel empowered to remind physicians to follow the checklist when inserting catheters, physicians are provided antiseptic soaps as part of their catheter kits and infection control personnel have the best tools to monitor patients.

Italics mine. How is it possible that hospital CEOs don’t even know about this? We’re talking about something that saves lives, costs almost nothing, and would probably reduce healthcare costs by over a billion dollars nationally if it were adopted aggressively. And equally, why is our medical system still so screwed up that doctors routinely treat nurses like serfs who are too cowed to insist on sterile procedures? I mean, talk about the cost of lingering patriarchy. In this case, it might someday kill you.

MDs tend to fight against medical malpractice lawsuits by attacking tort law, lawyers, and anyone else, rather than look to see how they can minimize malpractice. It’s so much easier.

Kevin Drum:

I would like to nominate this for least surprising lead of week:

The sweeping legislation that grew out of Toyota Motor Corp.’s sudden-acceleration crisis — heralded as the most important auto safety bill in a decade — has been scaled back significantly in the face of auto industry opposition.

You can substitute any rich interest group you like for "auto industry" in this story and you’ve pretty much written the recent history of American politics. Pretty uplifting, no?

Our Representatives and Senators, on the whole, do pretty much what corporations and lobbyists tell them to. Or so it seems—and naturally enough: the lobbyists give them lots of money.

I don’t have a smartphone yet and will probably go Android when I do move on this, so this article by Dan Gillmor caught my eye:

Back in the 1980s, Apple Computer (as it was known then) released a product called Hypercard. It was an easy-to-use programming tool, based on a simple and elegant programming language called HyperTalk, combining databases and a graphical display to create applications called "stacks." Programmers and non-programmers alike flocked to it, and created a huge variety of stacks that ranged from useful to quirky.

In the 1990s, Microsoft released Visual Basic. It, too, greatly simplified the programming process and was adopted by vast numbers of people — many inside large enterprises — whose work reinforced the Windows monopoly.

In the past decade, Web development took on some of the same qualities, giving average people ways to create applications to run on the Web with great ease and simplicity. Blogger, WordPress and Drupal, among others, became the content-management systems of choice, for example, and Yahoo’s brilliant Pipes let people do sophisticated mashups without knowing a line of Java or other popular languages.

Now comes a tool from Google that is getting quick buzz. It seems more in the Hypercard/Blogger genre than Visual Basic, which was made for beginners but did take some skill, but nonetheless a possible breakthrough. This one, built for the mobile age, is called the AndroidApp Inventor. I haven’t been able to try it yet, but its description suggests great potential. Google says:

You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor. Often people begin by building games like WhackAMole or games that let you draw funny pictures on your friend’s faces. You can even make use of the phone’s sensors to move a ball through a maze based on tilting the phone.

But app building is not limited to simple games. You can also build apps that inform and educate. You can create a quiz app to help you and your classmates study for a test. With Android’s text-to-speech capabilities, you can even have the phone ask the questions aloud.

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.

Based on the work of a number of people including Hal Abelson at MIT — a brilliant computer scientist who also understands how app development need to get into wider distribution, not just the coder community — the open-source environment leverages of other educational software projects.

One of the most important elements of App Inventor is that . . .

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Paul Jay at Canada.com:

Gideon Levy, a columnist in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aratz writes:

If there remained any vestiges of hope in the Middle East from Barack Obama, they have dissipated; if some people still expected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lead a courageous move, they now know they made a mistake (and misled others)."

The masked ball is at its peak: Preening each other, Obama and Netanyahu have proved that even their heavy layer of makeup can no longer hide the wrinkles. The worn-out, wizened old face of the longest "peace process" in history has been awarded another surprising and incomprehensible extension. It’s on its way nowhere.

In spite of all of Obama’s promise and promises, he winds up in the same trap. US policy in the Middle East depends on Israel as a pillar of its power in the region (along with Saudi Arabia and Egypt). The Israelis know it and even if Israeli policy weakens US influence in the Arab world, for strategic interests and domestic politics, Obama can’t make a real move even if he wants to.

Canadians saw Prime Minister Harper an even more ardent dance partner for Netanyahu in Canada a few weeks ago. The Israeli PM was in Ottawa when commandos attacked the Turkish humanitarian aid ship and nine people were killed. Harper said nothing. Even the Americans said there should be an inquiry.

Lost in Obama’s and Harper’s swearing of allegiance to the Israeli people and the Jewish state is any discussion of just who is the current State of Israel good for? It’s taken for granted that Israel exists to defend its Jewish population, but take a closer look.

When I was in Jerusalem recently, I interviewed Israeli economist Shir Hever of the Alternative Information Center. According to Hever, 18 families in Israel control roughly 60 percent of the equity value of all companies in Israel. The country has gone from being one of the most equitable in terms of distribution of wealth to one of the worst.

Hever says the Israel elite not only oppresses Palestinians, it is also exploits the majority of its Jewish population. Here’s an excerpt of the interview.
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JAY: So, in talking to people in Israel, one thing I hear constantly is the fight here is about national identity, it’s about the defense of the Jewish state. I don’t hear very much about economics of Israel or the economics of occupation. So how does national identity relate to the economics here?

HEVER: Well, the economic reality of Israel, of course, plays a part in every aspect of Israel’s existence-in the politics, in the society, and, of course, also in identity issues as well. The occupation of the Palestinian territories defines Israel’s economy in a large way. About two-thirds of Israel’s history, it has been occupying power, controlling Palestinian territories. But even before that occupation, Israel has created a very particular system of economic control, which is designed to promote the idea of a Jewish state. The Jewish state is not merely a cultural idea; it’s not merely a symbolic idea; it’s a material reality which is designed to redistribute wealth in order to draw as many Jews as possible to this area and to maintain a sustainable control of the Jewish population over a piece of land which is by nature bi-national.

JAY: Now, in terms of the Israeli economy, what percentile at the top controls the majority of the Israeli economy in terms of ownership?

HEVER: Israel is very centralized in terms of capital, far more than most developed economies in the world. About 18 families in Israel control roughly 60 percent of the equity value of all companies in Israel. So it’s concentrated in the hands of 18 families. Of course, there are other rich people in Israel who control some more of that other 40 percent.

JAY: So what are we talking about? What kind of things do they control, in terms of what makes up the bulk of the Israeli economy and the ownership? . . .

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