Servants of the Damned

Judd Legum has a very interesting interview at Popular Information. It begins:

I recently finished reading “Servants of the Damned,” a new book by New York Times business investigations editor David Enrich. The book exposes how Jones Day, one of the world’s largest law firms, has used its immense power to enable corporate misconduct and, more recently, the Trump administration. I reached out to Enrich because his book provides essential insights into how corporations, with the help of firms like Jones Day, manipulate the political system. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. I hope you enjoy it. — Judd

LEGUM: You describe regulatory changes around advertising that facilitated the growth of Jones Day and other law firms into much larger, much more powerful forces. It switched the focus of the firm from being officers of the court to doing whatever it takes to advance corporate interests and maximize firm profits. How much of this do you think is a reflection of Jones Day’s evolution versus Jones Day responding to the demands of the modern corporation?

ENRICH: It’s actually a really easy answer to that question. It’s both. There’s a symbiotic relationship between these law firms and their big corporate clients. It’s not a coincidence that as the global economy globalized and big companies became global, law firms were following suit.

It’s a cycle that kind of reinforces itself, because the more you expand, the more revenue you need to pay for that expansion, which means you need to become more aggressive in pursuing clients and assignments. The bigger you get, and the faster you get bigger, the more pressure there is on your lawyers to swallow the concerns that they might otherwise have had, put morality aside, and really just focus, within the confines of legal ethics and the law, on how far can we push to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible.

LEGUM: One of the through lines of the book I was really interested in is this idea of the law firm and how it chooses its clients. Do the misdeeds of the client reflect on the attorney? The pat answer that Jones Day keeps falling back on is that everyone needs an attorney, even unpopular people.

ENRICH: . . .

Continue reading.

Good old Anki — that’s Alfa November Kilo Lima —and the NATO phonetic alphabet

I just shipped a big box of Go boards to The Son for The Grandsons, and UPS notified me that there was an “exception,” so of course I called. I ended up having to give the tracking number — which actually includes both numbers and letters — to three operators. The letters turned out to be difficult.

When I called, I naturally got the Canadian UPS representative, who had had trouble in getting the tracking number right from my dictation. Once she got it right, she saw that the package is now in Seattle, so she transferred me to a US UPS representative. The US representative (once she got the tracking number right from my dictation) saw that the package was an international shipment, so she had me call an international UPS representative. The international representative had no trouble with the tracking number because by then I had learned how to dictate the tracking number correctly, and she informed me that the exception was already cleared and the package was continuing to wend its way (not her words) to the destination.

My takeaway from all that: I really must learn the NATO phonetic alphabet. That alphabet has been carefully developed so that the phonetic name for each letter sounds distinctly different from any of the other letter names so that you don’t run into the confusions that ensue when, say, “b” is heard for “v” or vice versa — Bravo (b’s name) does not sound at all like Victor (v’s name). Moreover, it is a standard a phonetic alphabet, so people are generally familiar with it if they do any work at all with spelling out words or tracking numbers.

All the NATO letter names are spelled as usual, with two exceptions:

“Alfa” and “Juliett” are intentionally spelled as such to avoid mispronunciations.

That quotation is from a Wikipedia article, which is interesting and worth reading.

So I decided to learn the NATO phonetic alphabet and to start today. From my Esperanto study, I know that Anki is perfect for this. As you can see at the link (and again the Wikipedia article is worth reading), Anki is a flashcard system that uses spaced repetition to ensure efficient and relatively easy learning — that is, things you are having difficulty with you see often, and things you know fairly well you see less often, and things you really know you see quite seldom (but still occasionally — and if you have difficulty when they pop up, then you will see them again sooner).

You can — and in most cases should — make your own deck of flashcards, but decks can be shared and if a deck is made to match the sequence of a particular textbook, for example, it makes sense to share. And the NATO phonetic alphabet is a natural for a shared deck. As the Wikipedia article says:

While Anki’s user manual encourages the creation of one’s own decks for most material, there is still a large and active database of shared decks that users can download and use.^[13] Available decks range from foreign-language decks (often constructed with frequency tables) to geography, physics, biology, chemistry, and more. Various medical science decks, often made by multiple users in collaboration, are also available.

Anki has two websites: one is to download the app, and the other is used by the app for decks of flashcards. “Using” generally refers to the daily practice of going through the deck(s) you are learning, but it can also mean creating a flashcard (or a whole deck) — or searching through the shared decks and downloading any that are relevant.

So I downloaded one of the NATO phonetic alphabet decks, and I have already reviewed the first 10 cards. (Anki gives you only a few new cards each day, and since in this case there are only 26 cards, I’ll quickly get through them.)

Tomorrow I’ll use the app again, and it will present me with some new cards and also some of the cards from today — namely, those that gave me trouble. Within a few days I’ll know the NATO phonetic alphabetic cold.

I wrote a fairly detailed post on my own experience with Anki when I was studying Esperanto. If you’re interested in learning anything where spaced repetition and flashcards might be useful, take a look.

Update: Great way to practice

After I had learned the phonetic alphabet cold using Anki, I noticed a marked mental pause when I would try to use it in practice. It was as if I knew it, but to access it to use it, I had to go into a different mental room and take it off the shelf. In other words, it wasn’t at the tip of my tongue so I could just cite by reflex. The NATO name was indeed attached to its letter, but by a long tether, as it were.

What I needed was to routinely practice for a few minutes each for, say, a week, until the tether shortened and finally the NATO name was actually part of the letter itself. I found on the web a random letter generator — in fact, a random word generator, but it will also generate random letters.

So I set it to generate random uppercase letters, 10 at a time. I then recited aloud the NATO name for each letter as fast as I could. Each run-through took about 6 seconds, so in 30 seconds I could do 5 run-throughs, 50 letters in all.

I decided 5 run-throughs of 10 letters each was enough for a session. I did a morning run-through and an evening run-through, and in a week, the NATO name was embedded in the letter: no hesitation, no need to wait to adjust.

I figured once every week or two, I’ll refresh, but now I have it. A few days ago, I again had to recite a tracking number, and this time the NATO names just came automatically from my mouth — and the customer-service agent readily recognized them, because are the names that people are familiar with.

Tampa Bay is a possible catastrophe

In July of 2017, I blogged about an article by Darryl Fears in the Washington Post, which begins:

TAMPA BAY, Fla. — Mark Luther’s dream home has a window that looks out to a world of water. He can slip out the back door and watch dolphins swim by his private dock. Shore birds squawk from nearby nests in giant mangroves.

He said it’s hard to imagine ever leaving this slice of paradise on St. Petersburg’s Bayou Grande, even though the water he adores is starting to get a little creepy.

Over the 24 years since he moved into the house, the bayou has inched up a protective sea wall and crept toward his front door. As sea level rises, a result of global warming, it contributes to flooding in his Venetian Isles neighborhood and Shore Acres, a neighboring community of homes worth as much as $2.5 million, about 70 times per year.

“Why stay?” asked Luther, an oceanographer who knows perfectly well a hurricane could one day shove 15 feet of water into his living room. “It’s just so nice.”

Tampa Bay is mesmerizing, with 700 miles of shoreline and some of the finest white sand beaches in the nation. But analysts say the metropolitan area is the most vulnerable in the United States to flooding and damage if a major hurricane ever scores a direct hit.

A Boston firm that analyzes potential catastrophic damage reported that the region would lose $175 billion in a storm the size of Hurricane Katrina. A World Bank study called Tampa Bay one of the 10 most at-risk areas on the globe.

Yet the bay area — greater Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater — has barely begun to assess the rate of sea-level rise and address its effects. Its slow response to a major threat is a case study in how American cities reluctantly prepare for the worst, even though signs of impacts from climate change abound all around.

State leaders could be part of the reason. Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration has reportedly discouraged employees from using the words “climate change” in official communications. Last month, the Republican-controlled state legislature approved bills allowing any citizen to challenge textbooks and instructional materials, including those that teach the science of evolution and global warming.

The sea in Tampa Bay has risen naturally throughout time, about an inch per decade. But in the early 1990s, scientists say, it accelerated to several inches above normal, so much that recent projections have the bay rising between six inches and more than two feet by the middle of the century and up to nearly seven feet when it ends. On top of that, natural settling is causing land to slowly sink.

Sea-level rise worsens the severity of even small storms, adding to the water that can be pushed ashore. Hard rains now regularly flood neighborhoods in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Clearwater.

y a stroke of gambler’s luck, Tampa Bay hasn’t suffered a direct hit from a hurricane as powerful as a category 3 or higher in nearly a century. Tampa has doubled down on a bet that another won’t strike anytime soon, investing billions of dollars in high-rise condominiums along the waterfront and shipping port upgrades and expanding a hospital on an island in the middle of the bay to make it one of the largest in the state.

Once-sleepy St. Petersburg has gradually followed suit, adorning its downtown coast with high-rise condominiums, new shops and hotels. The city is in the final stages of a plan to build a $45 million pier as a major attraction that would extend out into the bay.

Worried that area leaders weren’t adequately focused on the downside of living in a tropic, the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council reminded them of the risks by simulating a worst-case scenario hurricane, a category 5 with winds exceeding 156 mph, to demonstrate what would happen if it entered the Gulf of Mexico and turned their way.

The fictitious Phoenix hurricane scenario projects that wind damage would destroy nearly half a million homes and businesses. About 2 million residents would require medical treatment, and the estimated death toll, more than 2,000, would top the number of people who perished from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Florida’s most densely populated county, Pinellas, could be sliced in half by a wave of water. The low-lying county of about a million is growing so fast that there’s no land left to develop, and main roads and an interstate connecting it to Tampa get clogged with traffic even on a clear day.

“If a hurricane 4 or 5 hit us,” St. Petersburg City Council Chairman Darden Rice said, referring to the two highest category storms, “there’s no doubt about it. The plan is you’d better get out of Dodge.”

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn’s warning was even starker. Standing outside City Hall last year, he described what would happen if a hurricane as small as a category 3 with 110 mph to 130 mph winds hit downtown.

“Where you’re standing now would be 15 feet under water,” he said. . .

Continue reading. There’s quite a bit more. It’s a lengthy article and if Fiona hits Tampa, we’ll know how much of the article is reliable.

Thank God Tampa’s had the past five years to prepare and reduce the risk. However, important but non-urgent things tend to be pushed aside by urgent matters (whether those are important or not).

The whole megillah Grooming Dept shave

All today’s shave software is from Grooming Dept, and for the occasion, I brought out Moisturizing Pre-Shave from back room — seldom on-stage, he’s a vital part of the entire ensemble and plays his vital role in every shave. I continue to learn more how best to use this and now take the smallest smidge to prepare my wet stubble for the lather to come.

And what a lather Mallard Corretto makes! The first impression is the lather’s velvety thickness, closely followed by the pleasure of the fragrance: “Coffee, Brandy, Plum, Berries, Honey, Cacao Dust, Vanilla, Patchouli.” My Rooney Victorian did a great job, but it had a great soap to work with. The soap’s ingredients:

Water, Stearic Acid, Duck Fat, Kukui Nut Oil, Goat Milk, Castor Oil, Potassium Hydroxide, Cupuacu Butter, Kokum Butter, Glycerin, Jojoba Oil, Myristic Acid, Shea Butter, Sodium Hydroxide, Fragrance, Coconut Milk, Tamanu Oil, Lauryl Laurate, Carnauba Wax, Beeswax, Allantoin, Sodium Lauroyl Lactylate, Betaine, Sodium Lactate, Silk Amino Acids, Oat Amino Acids, Sesame Oil, Macadamia Oil, Caprylyl Glycol, Sodium Gluconate, Ethylhexylglycerin, Tetrasodium Glutamate Diacetate, Tocopherols, Silk Peptides.

With my stubble so well prepped, RazoRock’s Game Changer .68-P had an easy time of it, gliding comfortably through the stubble, removing all roughness with no effort.

The new arrival is the Rejuvenating Serum, in this case Grapefruit + Vetiver (which I bought through Italian Barber, which has a good variety of Grooming Dept products on hand). This product is more like a skin treatment and a far cry from an aftershave splash. You apply one or two drops to your damp, clean-shaven face and massage it in a bit. It does indeed leave the skin feeling younger. The secret’s in the ingredients:

Caprylic/Capric Triglycerides, Jojoba Oil, Camelina Oil, Argan Oil, Kukui Nut Oil, Abyssinian Oil, Meadowfoam Oil, Moringa Oil, Safflower Oil, Olive Squalane, Borage Oil, Avocado Oil, Grapeseed Oil, Pumpkin Seed Oil, Blackberry Seed Oil, Calendula Extract, Radish Seed Extract, Pomegranate Seed Extract, Bisabolol, Tocopherols

Altogether, a very nice shave. Great start to the day.

The tea this morning is another varietal, Murchie’s Ceylon Kenilworth: “A true ‘Orange Pekoe‘ size leaf, producing a bright, oaky taste with body and strength. The Kenilworth Estate is known for producing creamy teas with rich, full body.”

 

Why COVID isn’t like the flu (yet) in one brutal graph

Via The Eldest, Erin Prater’s article in Fortune, which leads with the chart above and continues:

Since COVID first hit the U.S., some have argued that the nascent disease is no more dangerous than the flu, which sweeps the U.S. every fall and winter.

“This is a flu. This is like a flu,” former President Donald Trump insisted at a Feb. 26, 2020, press briefing, just as the virus hit the U.S. “It’s a little like a regular flu that we have flu shots for.”

While the two can present with similar symptoms—like fever, cough, fatigue, sore throat, muscle aches, and headache—and are both more likely to be fatal for the elderly and immunocompromised, the comparison falls apart when it comes to the death toll. 

One graph in particular shows just how stark the mortality difference is between the two. Flu deaths appear almost flat compared to surges in COVID deaths over the past three years. 

“We’re now trying to treat [COVID] like a seasonal influenza and it’s just not yet,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), recently told Fortune.

There were 1,055 COVID deaths in the U.S. two weeks ago, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to only 4 flu deaths the same week.

COVID deaths have spiked several times over the past few years due to new variants of the virus, taking hundreds of thousands of lives annually (463,210 last year). By contrast, the flu only took an estimated 22,000 lives during the 2019-2020 season, according to the CDC. 

Over the past 12 years, the flu’s estimated annual death toll has been as low as 12,000, but never higher than 61,000—just an eighth of COVID’s death toll in the first year of the pandemic.

Since the earliest days of the pandemic, weekly COVID deaths have been at least 15 times that of weekly flu deaths—and sometimes as much as 811 times.

Since COVID first hit the U.S., some have argued that the nascent disease is no more dangerous than the flu, which sweeps the U.S. every fall and winter.

“This is a flu. This is like a flu,” former President Donald Trump insisted at a Feb. 26, 2020, press briefing, just as the virus hit the U.S. “It’s a little like a regular flu that we have flu shots for.”

While the two can present with similar symptoms—like fever, cough, fatigue, sore throat, muscle aches, and headache—and are both more likely to be fatal for the elderly and immunocompromised, the comparison falls apart when it comes to the death toll. 

One graph in particular shows just how stark the mortality difference is between the two. Flu deaths appear almost flat compared to surges in COVID deaths over the past three years. 

“We’re now trying to treat [COVID] like a seasonal influenza and it’s just not yet,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), recently told Fortune.

There were 1,055 COVID deaths in the U.S. two weeks ago, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to only 4 flu deaths the same week.

COVID deaths have spiked several times over the past few years due to new variants of the virus, taking hundreds of thousands of lives annually (463,210 last year). By contrast, the flu only took an estimated 22,000 lives during the 2019-2020 season, according to the CDC. 

Over the past 12 years, the flu’s estimated annual death toll has been as low as 12,000, but never higher than 61,000—just an eighth of COVID’s death toll in the first year of the pandemic.

Since the earliest days of the pandemic, weekly COVID deaths have been at least 15 times that of weekly flu deaths—and sometimes as much as 811 times.

Here for the long haul

COVID’s death toll is unlikely to sink to flu levels any time soon, experts say, even though U.S. health officials have expressed hope that COVID boosters will soon become an annual occurrence, much like the flu shot.

“I think COVID deaths will continue to exceed flu deaths for a while, unless we see something new in influenza,” like a deadlier strain developing, Dr. Stuart Ray, vice chair of medicine for data integrity and analytics at Johns Hopkins Department of Medicine, recently told Fortune.

When it comes to leading causes of death in the U.S., COVID has landed as No. 3 for the last two years, while influenza and pneumonia, grouped together, have landed as No. 9, according to the CDC. 

Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agrees with Ray. He says 

COVID’s death toll is unlikely to sink to flu levels any time soon, experts say, even though U.S. health officials have expressed hope that COVID boosters will soon become an annual occurrence, much like the flu shot.

“I think COVID deaths will continue to exceed flu deaths for a while, unless we see something new in influenza,” like a deadlier strain developing, Dr. Stuart Ray, vice chair of medicine for data integrity and analytics at Johns Hopkins Department of Medicine, recently told Fortune.

When it comes to leading causes of death in the U.S., COVID has landed as No. 3 for the last two years, while influenza and pneumonia, grouped together, have landed as No. 9, according to the CDC. 

Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agrees with Ray. He says 

Continue reading.

Eat More Dairy, Less Red Meat to Prevent Type 2 Diabetes

I wish I had known this long ago. Miriam E. Tucker reports in Medscape:

Among animal protein foods, low-fat dairy consumption may minimize the risk of developing type 2 diabetes while red meat raises that risk, a new analysis finds.

“A plant-based dietary pattern with limited intake of meat, moderate intake of fish, eggs, and full-fat dairy, and habitual consumption of yogurt, milk, or low-fat dairy, might represent the most feasible, sustainable, and successful population strategy to optimize the prevention of type 2 diabetes,” lead author Annalisa Giosuè, MD, of the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, told Medscape Medical News.

She presented the findings from an umbrella review of 13 dose–response meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies on September 20 at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) 2022 Annual Meeting.

The study is believed to be the first comprehensive overview of the available evidence from all published meta-analyses on the relationship between well-defined amounts of animal-origin foods and the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Giosuè and colleagues focused on animal-based foods because they represent a gap in most guidelines for type 2 diabetes prevention, she told Medscape Medical News.

“The existing evidence and dietary recommendations for type 2 diabetes prevention are mainly based on the appropriate consumption of plant foods: high amounts of the fiber-rich ones and low consumption of the refined ones as well as those rich in free sugars. And also on the adequate choice among fat sources — reduction of saturated fat sources like butter and cream and replacement with plant-based poly- and monounsaturated fat sources like nontropical vegetable oils. But not on the most suitable choices among different animal foods for the prevention of type 2 diabetes,” she explained.

The new findings are in line with the Mediterranean diet in that, while plant-based, it also limits red meat consumption, but not all animal-based foods, and has consistently been associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes. Vegetarian diets have also been associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, but far less data are available for that, she said.

Asked for comment, session moderator Matthias Schulze, MD, head of the department of molecular epidemiology at the German Institute of Human Nutrition, Berlin, told Medscape Medical News: “Decreasing intake of red and processed meat is already a strong recommendation, and these data support that. You have to make choices for and against [certain] foods. So, . . .

Continue reading.

There are substantiated health risks in eating animal protein foods in general, so rather than cutting back animal protein intake to “limited intake of meat, moderate intake of fish, eggs, and full-fat dairy, and habitual consumption of yogurt, milk, or low-fat dairy,” it made sense to me to eliminate all of those from my diet and stick to whole-food plant-based foods. I get plenty of variety, the food is tasty and satisfying, and avoid all the problems associated with eating animal proteins. Plus it is simpler just to eliminate animal protein entirely rather than trying to figure out “moderate” intake. One doesn’t need those foods, they carry risks, so why eat them? (I know: they’re tasty. But so are whole-food plant-based foods — or at least they can be. Recent example.)