Later On

A surprising number of Americans—principally from the Right—have taken the position that a community center should not be built one block from a couple of strip clubs (New York Dolls and the Pussycat Lounge), which happen to be located on hallowed ground. (The strip clubs, like an off-track betting parlor, are on “hallowed ground” and don’t seem to be a problem.) A block farther away from Ground Zero, at the site of a defunct Burlington Coat Factory store, there’s a plan to build a community center that will be open to all and include, among other things, a prayer room for Muslims, like the one now active in the Pentagon, another target on 9/11.

Those objecting to the community center (which they place two blocks away, directly at Ground Zero, and call a “mosque” because that is scarier than “community center”) say that they recognize that the owner of the building has the right to build a community center there, especially if it includes a prayer room (thanks to Constitutional guarantees and a general feeling that a person can do what they want on their own property), but that exercising that right might hurt the feelings of the victims of 9/11 (except, presumably, the innocent Muslims who were at work in the World Trade Center that day and were also killed).

Strangely, polls done in Manhattan show that people who actually live there have no problem with the community center, but those objecting are so concerned that feelings might be hurt that they ignore the poll and continue to butt into something that really, truly is none of their business: they don’t even live in the neighborhood.

First: having a right means that you can exercise that right. If you cannot exercise the right, what earthly good is it? It becomes like all the human rights that were included in the Soviet constitution: nice to read, but you couldn’t really use any of the rights. If the guy who owns the building has the right to build the community center, then game over. He can build it.

Second: all these people so concerned about the feelings of others: I wonder what they thought about the “draw-a-cartoon-of-Mohammed” contest, specifically designed to hurt the feelings of orthodox Muslims. I don’t recall the outrage from the Right, protective of the feelings of others, in that affair.

In fact, I believe what is going on is a clear outbreak of religious bigotry. The fact is that Muslim places of worship are being fought—directly against the guarantees of the Constitution and the American spirit of tolerance and religious freedom—all over the country. Some completely despicable politicians try to finesse the issue with all the subtlety of a four-year-old by saying Islam is not a religion. That single statement reveals the rotten core of the movement.

If that’s not convincing, take a look at this post by Matt Duss at ThinkProgress and tell me that what you observe is not religious bigotry:

At an anti-Islam rally yesterday at Ground Zero, a person of color wearing a skull cap and wandering through the crowd was targeted with insults and nearly attacked by protesters for the offense of looking vaguely Muslim. The videographer summarized the episode this way:

A man walks through the crowd at the Ground Zero protest and is mistaken as a Muslim. The crowd turns on him and confronts him. The man in the blue hard hat calls him a coward and tries to fight him. The tall man who I think was one of the organizers tried to get between the two men. Later I caught up with the man who’s name is Kenny. He is a Union carpenter who works at Ground Zero. We discussed what a scary moment that was for him.

Glenn Greenwald observes that the video “shows some extremely ugly stuff that’s been unleashed.” Watch it:

Interesting way to “honor” Ground Zero, no?

John Cole points out:

At about 25 seconds in, he quite astutely points out to the crowd that “All y’all dumb motherfuckers don’t even know my opinion on shit.”

They also fail to understand the principles of the US Constitution and the concept of religious tolerance and seem to have a lot of free time on their hands to get so deeply involved in something that’s absolutely none of their business.

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman on Karen Hughes’s contribution to the controversy.

Loyalty, broadly defined, is tenacious support of the object of the loyalty, as in the Sen. Carl Schurz’s remark in the Senate on February 29 1872: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."

Notice that the true loyalty in that phrase is loyalty to the right: if the country is in the wrong, Sen. Schurz would not support its actions, but rather work to set it right. This is similar to the loyalty of the two partners in a good marriage: each is aware of the other’s faults and recognizes errors when made by the other, and each tries to help the other set things right and do better.

But in business, politics, the military, and other venues, "loyalty" is often given another meaning by the powerful—and here I readily find many examples: Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, the Kennedy family, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, certain of the directors of Columbia Pictures International (from the book Indecent Exposure: A true story of Hollywood and Wall Street, which I just finished), and so on. This meaning of loyalty is often explicitly requested—"I want a staff that is loyal to me"—and is often a matter of supporting a person especially when they are wrong.  They generally see loyalty as personal loyalty: you support the leader through thick and thin, and she or he will support you.

Of course, in the event (as countless thousands have discovered) loyalty is not really a two-way street: the powerful person has more to lose, and thus is less loyal to the underling than the underling is required to be to the person. Quite a few, for example, have been dumped by politicians seeking survival, regardless of how loyal they’ve been.

Indeed, anyone who demands your loyalty is suspect. Loyalty is properly directed to principles, and only for so long as it can be shown to support the appropriate goals. Being loyal to a person means, in my mind, telling them frankly when you see them as being in the wrong, and offering strategies to set things right. Being told you’re wrong is unpleasant—particularly if you are wrong—and powerful people don’t like to sit still for that. So they usually will say that the person offering the critique is being disloyal and move them out of the inner circle of "truly" loyal supporters. (That is how the powerful drift further and further away from consensual morality, and in particular from the consensual code of ethics.)

The Lucretia Borgia synthetic bristle brush worked up a superb lather from the soap deposited on my beard by the Valobra shave stick. The 1940′s Aristocrat, with a Swedish Gillette blade, did a very smooth shave, with a splash of Arlington a fine finish.

My morning weight on Friday, 30 July, was 232.0 lbs (105.5 kg).

My morning weight on Friday, 20 August, was 231.9 lbs (105.4 kg).

I am so glad that I got the nutrition counselor. I would simply have given up without that monitoring and advice. We tried minimizing caloric intake, and the counselor (along with both my daughters) said that my goals could not be reached via diet alone: exercise—and exercise to the point of huffing and puffing—was essential. I finally started the exercise, and weight loss promptly resumed.

Once again I learn the lesson.

Morning weight today: 228.3 lbs (103.8 kg).

12 minutes on ski machine, no stops. TYD recommends that I stick to 12 minutes for one more week, and since I seem to be losing weight again, why not?

I have an on-going dialogue with a gastroenterologist about the problems stemming from medical malpractice. From a practicing doctor’s point of view, the problem is seen as enormous insurance premiums. These, of course, are in fact a symptom of the number of medical malpractice lawsuits, so the medical profession (and the GOP) seek to sharply limit those lawsuits by capping awards at a relatively low level ("tort reform"). But, again, the number of medical malpractice lawsuits is but a symptom of the amount of medical malpractice.

Doing "root-cause analysis" means finding the root causes of a problem so that those can be attacked. And what is a "root cause"? It’s a cause that you can do something about. When the medical profession looks at insurance premiums and tries to tackle that problem by changing the civil law system, they clearly have not done root-cause analysis.

Tom Baker, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who studies insurance, wrote a book: The Medical Malpractice Myth. Ezra Klein reviewed it for Slate. From the review:

. . . The best attempt to synthesize the academic literature on medical malpractice is Tom Baker’s The Medical Malpractice Myth, published last November. Baker, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who studies insurance, argues that the hype about medical malpractice suits is "urban legend mixed with the occasional true story, supported by selective references to academic studies." After all, including legal fees, insurance costs, and payouts, the cost of the suits comes to less than one-half of 1 percent of health-care spending. If anything, there are fewer lawsuits than would be expected, and far more injuries than we usually imagine.

As proof, Baker marshals an overwhelming array of research. The most impressive and comprehensive study is by the Harvard Medical Practice released in 1990. The Harvard researchers took a huge sample of 31,000 medical records, dating from the mid-1980s, and had them evaluated by practicing doctors and nurses, the professionals most likely to be sympathetic to the demands of the doctor’s office and operating room. The records went through multiple rounds of evaluation, and a finding of negligence was made only if two doctors, working independently, separately reached that conclusion. Even with this conservative methodology, the study found that doctors were injuring one out of every 25 patients—and that only 4 percent of these injured patients sued.

The Harvard study stands for a large body of literature. On their own, however, the results don’t disprove the Republicans’ thesis that many medical malpractice suits are frivolous. Maybe badly injured patients don’t sue, while the reflexively litigious clog up the legal system, making tort reform a viable solution. But a new study, released in May, demolishes that possibility. Dr. David Studdert led a team of eight researchers from Harvard School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Harvard Risk Management Foundation* who examined 1,452 medical malpractice lawsuits. They found that more than 90 percent of the claims showed evidence of medical injury, which means they weren’t frivolous. In 60 percent of these cases, the injury resulted from physician wrongdoing. In a quarter of the claims, the patient died.

When baseless medical malpractice suits were brought, the study further found, the courts efficiently threw them out. Only six of the cases in which the researchers couldn’t detect injury received even token compensation. Of those in which an injury resulted from treatment, but evidence of error was uncertain, 145 out of 515 received compensation. Indeed, a bigger problem was that 236* cases were thrown out of court despite evidence of injury and error to patients by physicians. The other approximately 1,050 cases, in the research team’s opinion, were decided correctly, with damage awards going to the injured and dismissal foiling the frivolous suits.*

Nor is there evidence to show that the level of jury awards has shot up. A recent RAND study looked at the growth in malpractice awards between 1960 and 1999. "Our results are striking," the research team concluded. "Not only do we show that real average awards have grown by less than real income over the 40 years in our sample, we also find that essentially all of this growth can be explained by changes in observable case characteristics and claimed economic losses."

Which brings us back to the Republicans’ and Democrats’ divergent approaches. The Obama-Clinton legislation fits well with Studdert’s and RAND’s findings. It also builds on successful efforts by the nation’s anesthesiologists and a few hospitals to reduce their medical malpractice payouts.

Anesthesiologists used to get hit with the most malpractice lawsuits and some of the highest insurance premiums. Then in the late 1980s, the American Society of Anesthesiologists launched a project to analyze every claim ever brought against its members and develop new ways to reduce medical error. By 2002, the specialty had one of the highest safety ratings in the profession, and its average insurance premium plummeted to its 1985 level, bucking nationwide trends. Similarly, feeling embattled by a high rate of malpractice claims, the University of Michigan Medical System in 2002 analyzed all adverse claims and used the data to restructure procedures to guard against error. Since instituting the program, the number of suits has dropped by half, and the university’s annual spending on malpractice litigation is down two-thirds. And at the Lexington, Ky., Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a program of early disclosure and settlement of malpractice claims lowered average settlement costs to $15,000, compared with $83,000 for other VA hospitals…

Frank Rich has a very powerful column, and much of the power comes from the calm and factual recounting of the entire history of the controversy, as much as from the effects it will have on US interests. He begins:

The “ground zero mosque,” as you may well know by now, is not at ground zero. It’s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room. It’s not going to determine President Obama’s political future or the elections of 2010 or 2012. Still, the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan — on the “hallowed ground” of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club — will prove eventful all the same. And the consequences will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24/7 over the parameters of tolerance, religious freedom, and the real estate gospel of location, location, location.

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

You’d think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan “surge” would not act against their own professed interests. But they couldn’t stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country. The ginned-up rage over the “ground zero mosque” was not motivated by a serious desire to protect America from the real threat of terrorists lurking at home and abroad — a threat this furor has in all likelihood exacerbated — but by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy’s evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor,” interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

As well Ingraham might…

Continue reading.

objectified, available as Netflix Watch Instantly.

12 minutes.

No stopping.

Also: no music. I got a new 32GB SDHC card for the Cowon, so I’m loading it up. 32 GB is a lot of music and voice. I have on there the Iliad, the complete plays of Shakespeare, and Don Quixote, though of course voice recordings use little space.

Charlton Heston speaks well and convincingly. Watch the whole thing.

I’ve really been enjoying my (free) subscription to "Jazz on the Tube". Here’s are some examples:

Why did this continue? Why were not doctors and nurses who knew of the problem raising Cain? Why wasn’t Congress on the job? Gardiner Harris reports in the NY Times:

Thirty-five weeks pregnant, Robin Rodgers was vomiting and losing weight, so her doctor hospitalized her and ordered that she be fed through a tube until the birth of her daughter.

But in a mistake that stemmed from years of lax federal oversight of medical devices, the hospital mixed up the tubes. Instead of snaking a tube through Ms. Rodgers’s nose and into her stomach, the nurse instead coupled the liquid-food bag to a tube that entered a vein.

Putting such food directly into the bloodstream is like pouring concrete down a drain. Ms. Rodgers was soon in agony.

“When I walked into her hospital room, she said, ‘Mom, I’m so scared,’ ” her mother, Glenda Rodgers, recalled. They soon learned that the baby had died.

“And she said, ‘Oh, Mom, she’s dead.’ And I said, ‘I know, but now we have to take care of you,’ ” the mother recalled. And then Robin Rodgers — 24 years old and already the mother of a 3-year-old boy — died on July 18, 2006, as well. (She lived in a small Kansas town, but because of a legal settlement with the hospital, her mother would not identify it.)

Their deaths were among hundreds of deaths or serious injuries that researchers have traced to tube mix-ups. But no one knows the real toll, because this kind of mistake, like medication errors in general, is rarely reported. A 2006 survey of hospitals found that 16 percent had experienced a feeding tube mix-up.

Experts and standards groups have advocated since 1996 that tubes for different functions be made incompatible — just as different nozzles at gas stations prevent drivers from using the wrong fuel.

But action has been delayed by resistance from the medical-device industry and an approval process at the Food and Drug Administration that can discourage safety-related changes.

Hospitals, tube manufacturers, regulators and standards groups all point fingers at one another to explain the delay.

Hospitalized patients often have an array of clear plastic tubing sticking out of their bodies to deliver or extract medicine, nutrition, fluids, gases or blood to veins, arteries, stomachs, skin, lungs or bladders.

Much of the tubing is interchangeable, and with nurses connecting and disconnecting dozens each day, mix-ups happen — sometimes with deadly consequences.

“Nurses should not have to work in an environment where it is even possible to make that kind of mistake,” said Nancy Pratt, a senior vice president at Sharp HealthCare in San Diego who is a vocal advocate for changing the system. “The nuclear power and airline industries would never tolerate a situation where a simple misconnection could lead to a death.”

Tubes intended to inflate blood-pressure cuffs have been connected to intravenous lines, leading to deadly air embolisms. Intravenous fluids have been connected to tubes intended to deliver oxygen, leading to suffocation. And in 2006 Julie Thao, a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison, Wis., mistakenly put a spinal anesthetic into a vein, killing 16-year-old Jasmine Gant, who was giving birth.

Ms. Thao, who had worked two eight-hour shifts the day before, was charged with felony neglect. She pleaded no contest to two misdemeanor charges. But experts say such mistakes are possible only because epidural bags are compatible with tubes that deliver medicine intravenously.

“This is a deadly design failure in health care,” said Debora Simmons, a registered nurse at the University of Texas Health Science Center who studies medical errors. “Everybody has put out alerts about this, but nothing has happened from a regulatory standpoint.”

Continue reading. It’s interesting to note that anesthesiologists encountered a similar problem: the connecting devices were all the same, regardless of whether the gas was oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, or whatever. This caused some deaths, but the anesthesiologists took action and forced connectors to be unique for each gas so that misconnections became impossible. Other medical specialties have refused to take any action to reduce instances of malpractice—indeed, medical doctors for the most part even refuse to follow a checklist. When malpractice does occur, the medical profession prefers to attack patients and lawyers (over which they have no control) rather than change their practices and weed out incompetent doctors (over which they do have control).

What is it about the military code of conduct that so greatly encourages lying. Lying about Pat Tillman, for example, or about Jessica Lynch. “Lie, Lie, Lie.” That would seem a more appropriate motto than “Duty, Honor, Country.” Glenn Greenwald:

When the controversy first arose over the lack of redactions in the war documents released by WikiLeaks, the website insisted that, using the New York Times as an intermediary, it had asked the Obama administration for help in removing names of Afghans before releasing the documents, a claim the Pentagon vehemently denied.  The New York Times, needless to say, sided with the Government — that’s what the NYT does — but they did so by simultaneously confirming the truth of WikiLeaks’ version of events.  From the Associated Press article, July 31, on that controversy:

Also on Saturday, a New York Times reporter who has been the newspaper’s liaison with Assange, dismissed Assange’s claim that WikiLeaks had offered to let U.S. government officials go through leaked documents to ensure that no innocent people were identified. Assange told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview that aired Thursday that the New York Times had acted as an intermediary and that the White House hadn’t responded to the offer.

Times reporter Eric Schmitt told the AP that on the night of July 23, at White House spokesman’s Robert Gibbs’ request, he relayed to Assange a White House request that WikiLeaks not publish information that could lead to people being physically harmed.

The next evening, Schmitt said, Assange replied in an e-mail that WikiLeaks was withholding 15,000 documents for review. Schmitt said Assange wrote that WikiLeaks would consider recommendations made by the International Security Assistance Force “on the identification of innocents for this material if it is willing to provide reviewers.”

Schmitt said he forwarded the e-mail to White House officials and Times editors.

“I certainly didn’t consider this a serious and realistic offer to the White House to vet any of the documents before they were to be posted, and I think it’s ridiculous that Assange is portraying it that way now,” Schmitt wrote to the AP.

On Friday, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said it was “absolutely, unequivocally not true” that WikiLeaks had offered to let U.S. government officials go through the documents to make sure no innocent people were identified.

Do you see what happened there?  Schmitt, wanting to side with his Pentagon friends, publicly suggested that Assange was lying when he claimed that he offered to allow the Government to suggest redactions, even as Schmitt himself acknowledged that “Assange wrote that WikiLeaks would consider recommendations made by the International Security Assistance Force ‘on the identification of innocents for this material if it is willing to provide reviewers’,” an offer Schmitt says he conveyed to the White House.  In other words, Schmitt defended the Pentagon’s denials that Assange made this offer even as he himself described the very events which proved Assange was telling the truth.  At the very least, WikiLeaks clearly indicated its willingness to have government officials review the documents and make recommendations about redactions — something those officials refused to do.

Read the rest of this entry »

Melissa Clark has a nice little post in the NY Times on making hot-pepper sauce, and includes two recipes:

Tangy Salted Green Chilies

Garlicky Red Chili Hot Sauce

The GOP has worked hard in Congress to obstruct all efforts to aid unemployment—the GOP believes if the country as a whole is hurting financially, the voters will blame the party in power and thus the GOP will win. Damage to the country and its people? Irrelevant. Winning is everything. Steve Benen:

It’s pretty obvious that the U.S. market has been in a crisis situation for far too long. By any reasonable measure, 2010 is vastly better than 2009, but with the unemployment rate pushing 10%, and initial claims for unemployment insurance climbing to 500,000 last week, the scope of the problem is enormous.

But that’s no excuse for partisan nonsense. House Ways and Means ranking member Dave Camp (R-Mich.) issued a "report" yesterday, showing that — get this — the nation has lost jobs over the last year and a half. "While Democrats promised their 2009 stimulus would create 3.7 million jobs, the reality is far different," stated a release from Camp’s office. "To date, 2.6 million jobs, including 2.5 million private sector jobs, have been lost."

This is lazy, intellectually dishonest drivel. That it’s coming from someone who may be the next chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee is more than a little distressing.

Even a House Republican should be able to understand the reality here. When the Recovery Act passed, the economy was in freefall. When President Obama was sworn into office, the economy was losing nearly 800,000 jobs a month. By Camp’s absurd reasoning, a recovery effort that didn’t magically transform the entire economy, and instantly stop the job losses, necessarily constitutes failure. It’s the kind of ridiculous argument one might hear from a partisan hack, desperate to score a cheap, baseless point, but leading members of Congress should know better.

Consider this chart Ezra Klein recently posted. The point isn’t that the stimulus was perfect — it should have been much bigger, not smaller as Camp would have hoped — but rather, that the job losses predate the policies advanced by the Obama administration. (It’s based on data economist Rob Shapiro put together, using Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.)

I realize guys like Camp have a petty little game to play. They either don’t understand public policy very well, assume the public doesn’t understand public policy very well, or perhaps a little of both. But independent analyses of the administration’s recovery efforts prevented a catastrophe. The administration should have done much more — in other words, it should have moved much further away from what Republican proposed — but the objective evidence is nevertheless clear.

Camp’s entire approach to economics has been thoroughly discredited, and at a moment of crisis, he and his GOP colleagues got it very wrong. He has a reason to be embarrassed, not a reason to publish silly reports.

Yesterday I ate with care, did my Nordic, and seem to have finally broken through the 230-lb plateau: I weigh 229.0 this morning—and you can be sure that I’m not celebrating with food.

I did indeed have the Padrón peppers sautéed in olive oil with a little salt, including a batch for an evening snack. I hadn’t realized it, but the rule seems to be 85% mild, 14% slightly spicy, and 1% tongue-bleeding-fire hot. I hadn’t hit that last guy until last night: one entire glass of water, a thin slice of butter I chewed up, half a cucumber eaten… nothing helped until, after 2-3 minutes, the fire collapsed on its own. I do like the peppers, but serve with large bowls of chilled whole-milk yogurt.

Today I’m doing 12 minutes Nordic again, but tomorrow I go to 15 minutes for a week.

PEPPER UPDATE: A guy at ShaveMyFace.com offers this:

We’ve been growing them for about 5 years now. Had a batch last night as a matter of fact. One thing is for certain, if you let them grow too big they are guaranteed to be 100% tongue-burning hot.

From now on, I’m eating the small ones.

Honeybee Spa kindly sent me two experimental soaps to try, both menthol. The Peppermint Frost above is one of them, and the Apollo blades were sent by Razor Emporium, also to try.

Peppermint Frost might as well be called “Christmas Morning”: the fragrance of peppermint combined with the chill of menthol really brings the season to mind. I did note that the lather in the brush did not last so well as other Honeybee Spa soaps—possibly because of the menthol, of which the soap seems to have a lot (which will greatly appeal to menthol fans). I went back to the puck after the first pass to refresh the Rooney Style 1,1.

Still, reloading the soap is not a biggie, and I bet this soap will be popular with the menthol crowd. The Apollo blades seemed very like Derby blades, which to me are somewhat “tuggy,” but which others like a lot. As noted previously, individual response to a given blade varies widely. I did indeed get a smooth shave, using the Apollo Mikron razor, and then a splash of Blenheim Bouquet starts the day.

I just ate my first batch of padron peppers, of which I learned from this post. I used this recipe.