huh, mr nobel, huh.

Had sort of a strange juxtaposition of events today. Riding the subway home there was a man begging for money wearing his certificate of "Honorable Discharge" from the military around his neck like a necklace and complaining loudly about the tardiness of the government in providing the benefits owed to him. This as we were riding over the Brooklyn bridge in full view of the statue of liberty, contemplating quite what it means that Obama won the Peace prize (if anything). I was filled with a great pride and a great sadness at the state of our society. I think Obama handled the prize about as well as he could short of refusing it (and I do not think one can refuse such a thing) and his remarks were eloquent and affirming. I like the idea of it as a call to action as a badge of accountability as something he and our society must live up to. To me, his winning the Nobel, with the world in the state that it is in, seems like a desperate plea from the International community for salvation. Our society has been shifting beneath our feet for the past few years, I think many feel that, and many fear what it means. I think we all want Obama to be worthy of this peace prize. To accomplish what seems, right now, impossible, because we are all so terrified of the alternative. (interesting too that this is a few days after Iran has been revealed by the UN to have unexpectedly advanced weopons capabilities). Lately the climate among my friends has been one of disappointment in Obama, of all the ways he has not lived up to what were, when he was first elected, exceedingly wild and optimistic dreams. All the ways he has not magically transformed our society. All the realities of politics and the fallibilities of humans. And I have been in many ways frustrated myself. I am frustrated. But I do think there is something significant about intent, about rhetoric, and about inspiring hope, and I think that that shift is what the prize reflects--for the fact that we can have some hope, no matter how small, even despite the many ways our country has disappointed. Maybe our hopes are too grand, and maybe more than he can accomplish. But we have to hope that he and we can, because what else are we going to do.

Speaking of penguins...

The landmark study that demonstrated the non-inferiority of penguins to non-English-speaking humans in mathematics:

Gay Penguins!

Go penguins go!

undocumented workers

This got brought to my attention tonight, and I find it completely appalling.

Apparently, a large amount of the post 9-11 clean up was done by undocumented workers. They are now suffering from exposure related health issues and are not able to get health care. To allow them to do that kind of work, under those kinds of conditions, then not to grant them residency, let alone health care for their work related issues...it blows my mind. i think i have previously rambled on about how dismayed I am that american society has never, in its history, functioned without an economy driven by some kind of sub-citizen class. we tout our constitution and our egalitarian bill of rights, but deny people these rights simply by denying them citizenship. it is an absolutely egregious civil rights violation; it is a form of servitude. Yes they are getting paid, but not adequate amounts and not with equal rights. And then to have this issue put in the context of the 9-11 clean up--well, that's just the icing on the cake.

Anyway. Word on the street is that several organizing groups are going to start doing a big push to help the 9-11 shadow workers in the fall, and as we go into Immigration reform in 2010--so please be angry about it.

A stroll through Gristede's

barney frank

yes, his ties to fannie mae and freddie mac are sketchy considering his role in government oversight of the housing market, BUT. when he speaks his mind, he's awesome. and i think maybe forcefully rejecting these lame fear-mongering contentions will serve the democrats much better than trying to assuage the concerns of people who have no real interest in what goes into the bill.

Evidence-based medicine

Two studies (here and here) published in the NEJM have received a lot of attention during the past few weeks. Essentially, two multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials showed no difference in outcomes between vertebroplasty (a procedure where a cement polymer is injected under fluoroscopic or CT guidance in an effort to stabilize the vertebral body) and a sham surgery. Yet, in the last two weeks I've had two patients referred to interventional radiology and neurosurgery for this procedure. There's a lot I want to say on this subject but I'll leave it for another time. Also, I just wanted to prove to Santosh that I am still reading this blog.

Also, the accompanying editorial.

depressio

phenomenal stuff from timothy noah on the public option, why its necessary, and (the worst part) why reform in the absence of a public option just puts more power and money in the hands of insurers. noah eloquently refutes paul krugman's assertion that the current version of reform is similar to that of switzerland's, and in doing so, makes me incredibly depressed about the prospect of true reform:

At the broadest possible level, the public option is necessary simply because it's impossible to identify a successful health system anywhere in the world based on a for-profit insurance model. If profit-driven health insurance could be made to work, then surely somebody would have figured it out by now. Paul Krugman, in an Aug. 17 New York Times column, likens health reform to the reforms Switzerland instituted in 1994: "[E]veryone is required to buy insurance, insurers can't discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies." But there's a significant difference. In Switzerland, private insurers are required to provide basic health coverage on a nonprofit basis. Under Obamacare, private insurers will continue to seek profits, and it's quite possible that the new regulatory restraints imposed on them (take all comers, don't punish the sick with higher premiums, don't seek out fine-print reasons to cancel policies after policyholders get sick, etc.) will inspire them to find ever-more-ingenious ways to avoid payouts. President Obama often says that a public option will help keep the private insurers honest. What he doesn't say, but surely knows, is that private insurers' duties to their shareholders may be irreconcilable with their duties to their customers. Should that prove true, a public option would provide a necessary refuge.

i don't care, i'll say it. don't pass 6 band-aid bills, mr. president. spend some of your political capital to get one thing done properly.

on a non-policy, but still health care note, here's a wacky article on sirtuin activators, which may mimic caloric restriction and slow aging. but count me out as a believer for a number of reasons. first, it definitely looks like an artifact of using mice that are on high caloric diets - clearly, they aren't able to get nearly the same results with wild mice or other species. second, and more importantly, i simply don't believe that the slow buildup of DNA damage over time is ultimately reversible, and I think that manipulations that try and overcome DNA damage (like messing with telomerases) are as likely to be carcinogenic as they are to be life-extending. Basically, I agree with the evolutionary biologists:

In the view of evolutionary biologists, the life span of each species is adapted to the nature of its environment. Mice live at most a year in the wild because owls, cats and freezing to death are such frequent hazards. Mice with genes that allow longer life can rarely be favored by natural selection. Rather, the mice that leave the most progeny are those that devote resources to breeding at as early an age as possible.

So call me a skeptic. Although, I do like that these drugs are present in low concentrations in red wine. Drink up, folks!

health care

I agree that its sad that time is being wasted on this insane euthanasia/death panel nonsense. But what's even more upsetting is the other part of the opposition's rationale in fighting health care -- "People love the health care that they have!" Uh, yeah. People also like credit cards with unlimited credit. This is what I don't understand about the White House's approach. Why aren't they just stating the plain fact - the health care you have is not financially sustainable. We need a new business plan for health care, because its hemorrhaging money. The way I see it, there are 4 major ideas that are being proposed to cut costs:

1. Increased efficiency - I think everyone is on board with things like electronic medical records and things of that nature, but there is a legitimate argument over insuring the 45 million uninsured. But again, here, the argument over the moral imperative (is health care a 'right') is spurious - society has already determined that health care is a right. Public hospitals don't turn away people with no insurance. So what's the best way to insure people who can't pay? Thinking in terms of efficiency would suggest that broad government coverage be focused on 1) catastrophic coverage, and 2) preventative care. Shouldn't a public plan be based predominantly around those tenets?

2. Rationing - This issue was addressed by Peter Singer a few weeks ago in the NYT Magazine, where he asked a simple question:

The way we regard rationing in health care seems to rest on a similar assumption, that it’s immoral to apply monetary considerations to saving lives — but is that stance tenable?

Probably not. Some estimates suggest that up to 80% of health care costs are spent on the terminally ill. This is where the outcries of 'euthanasia' come from, but its a realistic question. Is it sustainable, or efficient, to spend most of our money in this way? Correct me if I'm wrong, but convincing a terminally ill patient that a DNR is the right decision is more likely humane than murder, or so most hospitalists believe. Or am I wrong? What's really wrong is that the cries of death panels drown out the need for legitimate discussion on rationing.

3. Driving down drug costs - One of the other big controversies in health care reform is the sketchy dealings between the White House and pharmaceutical trade representatives. One of the big potential cost-saving measures was thought to be by having Medicare (and by extension, the government), which serves as a huge buyer of drugs, use that leverage to drive down drug prices - which is basically letting market forces set drug prices. It's not entirely clear what is going on, but it appears that the White House has ceded that negotiating capacity in exchange for a guaranteed price reduction that does not exceed $80 billion over 10 years, plus about $150 million spent on advertising to get health care reform passed. Frankly, $80 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to a $1.5 trillion health care expansion, so this is pretty much a lost cause in terms of savings. Now, so I don't seem hyperpartisan, there are plenty of arguments (some presented here) that suggest that hard line Medicare negotiations would set price ceilings that would hamper drug and health care technology development.

Perhaps. But isn't there a more measured answer to this? Is Medicare always really in the market for 1st line, newly patented state-of-the-art drugs? Can't Medicare negotiate cheap prices on generic, broadly issued drugs while still allowing high prices on the newest drugs to drive more research and development? It's another argument for stratifying health care, which leads us to:

4. Driving down insurance costs - As opposed to Big Pharma, insurance companies appear to be the main target of health care reform (to the extent that its now being called 'health insurance reform' on whitehouse.gov and in Barack Obama's op-ed in NYT today). To quote:

[R]eform will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable. [W]e will require insurance companies to cover routine checkups, preventive care and screening tests like mammograms and colonoscopies. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and prostate cancer on the front end. It makes sense, it saves lives and it can also save money.

OK, fine. That appears to fulfill the moral imperative but almost completely ignores how exactly this is going to pay for itself (in the editorial, he offers cutting 'hundreds of billions of dollars' in Medicare/Medicaid inefficiencies and preventative screening has his two cost-saving breakthroughs - not exactly enough to knock my socks off). And in fact, there are alternate, free market proposals out there. One long-winded perspective comes from David Goldhill, who in this month's Atlantic offers a businessman's perspective on how to reform health care. His idea: a combination of government-funded catastrophic health insurance, vouchers for some preventative care, and out-of-pocket payment for everything else:

First, we should replace our current web of employer- and government-based insurance with a single program of catastrophic insurance open to all Americans—indeed, all Americans should be required to buy it—with fixed premiums based solely on age. This program would be best run as a single national pool, without underwriting for specific risk factors, and would ultimately replace Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance. All Americans would be insured against catastrophic illness, throughout their lives. How would we pay for most of our health care? The same way we pay for everything else—out of our income and savings. Medicare itself is, in a sense, a form of forced savings, as is commercial insurance. In place of these programs and the premiums we now contribute to them, and along with catastrophic insurance, the government should create a new form of health savings account—a vehicle that has existed, though in imperfect form, since 2003. Every American should be required to maintain an HSA, and contribute a minimum percentage of post-tax income, subject to a floor and a cap in total dollar contributions. The income percentage required should rise over a working life, as wages and wealth typically do.

He then suggests that the elimination of comprehensive private insurance might lead to people being more efficient with how they spend money on health care - might they be more likely to turn to walk-in clinics, for example? But whether through out-of-pocket expenditures or through insurance plans, I happen to think that this idea of stratifying coverage - providing basic coverage for everyone and increasing coverage through increasing cost - is a good one. The benefit of a public 'option' (or government funded catastrophic insurance, whatever) is that it provides a competitive model for people to actually decide whether the extra cost of private insurance is worth it - forcing insurance companies to also be more efficient. I happen to think that insurance-based systems still provide alot of benefits - they spread risk around broadly and offer more continuity of care - but merely subsidizing people with vouchers to be able to pay for coverage does nothing to pressure insurance companies to lower costs. On the other hand, I totally agree with the potential to use cheap, efficient walk-in clinics at places like Wal-Mart as efficient triage sites. But ultimately, pretending that some kind of reform, including increased efficiency, thoughtful rationing of exorbitant health care expenditures, and competition to reduce pharmaceutical and insurance profit margins, is unnecessary, is patently ridiculous, and one need only look at spectacles like what happened in California this week to know that the system is broken, and getting worse.

the daily show has been phenomenal this week. i think Wednesday night's was the highlight, but all quite excellent.

the thing i don't understand--and what i think Obama started to cogently do in the town hall meeting (with the NRA dude) today is why so much coverage and conversation is being made of the crazies, and so little focusing on talking points in favor of the health care plan. You can win this debate with two points i think.
1. (and obama made this one today, thank god), we are held hostage to insurance companies who want to deny coverage.
2. give everyone Congress' health plan.

instead everyone seems so wrapped up in the complexities of the plan, in apologizing for nationalization. its frustrating to watch the liberals fail to learn this lesson (how to frame the debate in their terms) again and again--and watch it be stolen by (not even conservative politicians), but complete crazies. arrrrrgh.

the discussion on health care we should all be having

sorry todd, i think the daily show beats colbert on this one.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Healther Skelter - Obama Death Panel Debate
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

breaking my silence only for that which is most important.

who's drinking what at the obama-gates-crowley teaching moment?

gates: red stripe. of course. the hipsteriest of the "too cool" beers. even the bottle is uber hip, almost to the point of unlikeability. on the other hand, you can't argue with the quality.

obama: bud light. the ultimate bullet-proof choice. american, authentic, masculine yet low on calories, and totally boring.

crowley: blue moon. WHAT?? BLUE MOON? what kind of racist drinks blue moon? blue moon is for yuppies. its served with an ORANGE slice, for pete's sake! nobody in "The Departed" drank Blue Moon!

thanks, hufpost!

Open and shut case, Johnson.

From the madcap caper, Amos and Andrew, to Chappelle's crack-sprinkling detectives, the absurdity of black men being arrested in their own homes never ceases to amuse. Obama addressed the recent arrest of Professor Gates with sharp words mixed in with his usual charm.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

MITM

My brother-in-law begs to differ on MJ's best performance, and brings up this, his performance at the 88 Grammy Awards' "Man in the Mirror." It's lip-synching until 4:00, but then when he actually starts singing, its so full of passion and urgency that you wonder why the heck he ever lip synchs at all.

michael jackson

michael jackson was pretty much the only american music i listened to until i was 12 or so. i had a tape of his hits that my uncle made me, and i listened to it so much that the tape started to warp, so it almost seemed like he was going out of tune sometimes - the warping of the cassette film would make the playback a little slower or faster for a few seconds. as much as i loved his music on that tape that was slowly deteriorating, i remember what a mindblowing experience it was to listen to him when i bought some of his CDs in high school and was like "oh my god, he's actually better than on my tape!"

so, with due respect to his motown 25 performance, here's the coolest MJ performance I ever saw. keep in mind this was in 1995. so many things to love about this performance - his obsession with 20s/30s gangster attire (how hipster would 95 MJ be right now), the fact that this is probably one of the weakest tracks ('Dangerous') off maybe his 4th best album (Dangerous) and its still better than anything Justin Timberlake has ever done. Finally, the choreography is vintage Michael Jackson - the moves aren't so complicated, they're just executed with such perfect timing that they give you the impression that what he's doing...is magic.

Bertrand Russell...

almost made me spit out my Sprite Zero.

"If you take any true sentence in which the name 'George Washington" occurs, it will, as a rule, remain true if you substitute the phrase 'the first President of the United States.' There are exceptions to this rule. Before Washington's election, a man might say 'I hope George Washington will be the first President of the United States,' but he would not say 'I hope the first President of the United States will be the first President of the United States' unless he had an unusual passion for the law of identity."

This government is so getting overthrown.

Not that this is at all surprising, but Ali Karimi and Mehdi Mahdavikia are legitimate Iranian national heroes. In fact, it was Mahdavikia who scored what ultimately turned out to be the winning goal against the USA at World Cup '98.

Don't look now...

but there is a distinct possibility that, in next summer's World Cup hosted in South Africa, the United States will be paired with North Korea along with two other teams (most likely one from Europe and another from either Africa or South America). In one of the biggest stories in world football, the North Korean national team managed to beat out Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UEA for a place in the World Cup finals for the first time since 1966. President Obama has already expressed an interest in the tournament (suggesting that the US play host in 2018). Who could imagine a cozier atmosphere for the President and Dear Leader to get together for a chat?

An even more outrageous scenario would be if North and South Korea (who qualified with ease) were to advance from their respective groups and meet in the knockout stages. Tensions were high last year when a qualifier between the two nations had to be moved from Pyongyang to Shanghai after Kim's government refused to allow the South Korean team to sing their national anthem and display the country's flag prior to kickoff.

This wouldn't be the first time that the US has faced a political rival in the tournament: in France 1998, the Americans had their dejeuner handed to them in Lyon by a highly-motivated Iranian team in a 2-1 loss. Even more timely is the rumor that the US team may travel to Tehran to play a friendly match some point in the next six months as a tune-up for the World Cup. Recent political events, however, may have diminished the likelihood of such an exhibition. Still an exciting prospect, nonetheless.

Edit: According to Sepp Blatter, the head of FIFA, Obama has accepted an invitation to the opening of the World Cup finals next summer.

It was 105 years ago today...

Although Ulysses was written over a span of seven years (1914-1921), the entirety of James Joyce's novel is set in Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904, when Joyce and Nora Barnacle went on their first date together. A short 27 years later they were married. To commemorate that famous day, here are the opening lines of chapter 4 in which we are introduced to the character of Leopold Bloom:

"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."

Delicious.

Additionally, these tit-bits from the Times, the Guardian and the Examiner.

steve phillips is a moron.

thanks, joe posnanski, for pointing that out. i was watching a mets game over the weekend in which i heard steve phillips be distinctly critical of carlos beltran for not being 'a leader' and being 'inconsistent'. (Also the butt of Phillips' criticism? David Wright.)

Carlos Beltran OPS+ by season since joining the Mets (OPS+ is a crude measurement of a hitter's combined ability to get on base and hit for power. the "+" refers to the fact that a perfectly average hitter's OPS in a particular season is normalized to 100, so anything above 100 is above average, and anything below is below average. A 120 OPS+ is considered all-star caliber, and a 150 OPS+ is MVP caliber)

96, 150, 126, 129.

Keep in mind: he is a superb defensive center fielder, winning Gold Gloves in the last 3 years. Oh yeah, and his OPS+ this year: 167.

David Wright's OPS+ in every full season with the Mets: 139, 133, 150, 141, and 159 so far this year. But I'm sure Steve Phillips doesn't like Wright or Beltran because they're not vocal enough . AKA, they're not the chair-throwing, tobacco-chewing dirt dogs that all these baseball 'purists' love.

Shut up, Steve Phillips. The Mets fired you for a reason.

JESSE VENTURA

what can i say? he calmly vaporizes elizabeth hasslebeck and sean hannity. i think i might need to marry him.

sigh.

Decorated officer Lieutenant Colonel Victor J. Fehrenbach is being dismissed using the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" statute. Nary a peep from the Obama administration, except to uphold the existing statute, and 'no immediate plans' to change it. Lovely.

john roberts

Pretty good stuff from Jeffrey Toobin (author of The Nine) on how Roberts steers the now quite conservative Supreme Court. It's a good read but hardly surprising - would anyone have expected Roberts, a graduate of the Reagan administration who faithfully represented George W. Bush in Florida in 2000 to be anything but strictly conservative? I think its an interesting read if only to understand the motivating factors behind Roberts' decisions - a lot of it comes down to his hesitance to have the Court involved in constructing any sort of policy. He certainly feels that the role of the judiciary is strictly to uphold laws put into effect by legislators, a position that entrenches him firmly against any idea of activism. His stance against affirmative action, asserting equivalance between forced segregation and forced integration is quite telling (I happen to agree with Breyer). In this way, it makes Obama's statement following Souter's retirement more telling - that his view of the role of the judiciary is not in line with the Robers/Rehnquist view:

Obama is the first President in history to have voted against the confirmation of the Chief Justice who later administered his oath of office. In his Senate speech on that vote, Obama praised Roberts’s intellect and integrity and said that he would trust his judgment in about ninety-five per cent of the cases before the Supreme Court. “In those five per cent of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision,” Obama said. “In those circumstances, your decisions about whether affirmative action is an appropriate response to the history of discrimination in this country or whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions . . . the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.” Obama did not trust Roberts’s heart. “It is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak,” the Senator said. The first bill that Obama signed as President was known as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; it specifically overturned the interpretation of employment law that Roberts had endorsed in the 2007 case.

Certainly, debates on the the new nominee (whoever it is) will be quite interesting, and I wonder if we'll hear any peeps from current sitting justices. Probably not.

douche.

let's recap our president's statements from this week. He:

1. won't release photos showing more torture of detainees at guantanamo and other locations, despite (or maybe because) such evidence would make it all the more likely that torture was not the "isolated work of a few" but rather a broadly organized policy with culprits at the highest levels of government (and that includes you, nancy pelosi).
2. is now planning 'military style tribunals' for prisoners held in such locations, most likely because the amount of torture that prisoners were subject to during their holding makes very little evidence obtained actually admissible and would make convictions almost impossible to achieve.
3. has no plans to move on 'don't ask, don't tell' despite the discharge of almost 1,000 service members every year.

So, as Jon Stewart so ably puts it, America is entrenched in a war with stakes so high that torture must be permitted if it gives us any chance at getting the slightest bit of extra information. you would think that in a fight where the stakes are this high...anyone who wants to serve would be welcomed into the fold. nope. sorry gay people...it's not your time.

So, congratulations, president Obama, on a real winner of a week. You're a dick.

rafa

I'm a huge Roger Federer fan, but its clear at this point that Rafael Nadal dethroned him from atop the tennis world. But until I read this superb article from Sports Illustrated, I did not appreciate the methodical, yet obsessive way in which Nadal improved his game specifically to combat Federer's strengths and expose his weaknesses. And what's even more enthralling, or confusing, is how Federer has just not responded to this new challenge by switching his game up:

This attitude perplexes even Federer's staunchest admirers. Former players, coaches, peers: They all accept that his talent is, as Wilander says, "crazy," but his passive response to Nadal goes against what they've been taught a superstar does when he's down. Muhammad Ali came up with rope-a-dope, an aging Michael Jordan perfected the fadeaway jumper: The great ones adjust, sending a signal not only to their rivals but also to all the newly emboldened. It's no shock that following Nadal's trail, No. 3 Andy Murray has won six of his last seven matches against Federer, and No. 4 Novak Djokovic has won three of their last five. "What makes me scratch my head," Courier says, "is how Roger doesn't shift."

It's disappointing to see Federer stubbornly stick to a skill set that no longer allows him to dominate his opponents, when he clearly has both the mental acuity and physical talents to rise to the challenge. Let's hope he stops thinking his fall from grace is a fluke, gets a real coach, re-invents himself, and then we can home for some real excitement this summer and fall.

arsenal's struggles

ESPN Soccernet has a nice blog post by one of their correspondents on Arsenal FC's struggles. There's no question when you watch them that Arsenal has a talented young batch of players (including Theo Walcott, above, who just re-upped), but their talents seem non-directed (as my roommate often says, they play 'as if they're trying to dribble the ball into the net'). The differences are probably not too much in talent between Arsenal and the 3 Premier League teams ahead of them, but the absence of veteran leadership was clear in their sound thumpings at the hands of Man U and Chelsea. David Young laments:

In his programme notes yesterday, Wenger is quoted as follows: “Look at our midfield from Tuesday - Song, Nasri, Walcott and Fabregas - all aged between 20 and 22. So we will naturally progress if we keep going”. Within this one sentence Arsene Wenger reveals both the strength and key flaw of his current approach. It is of course fantastic that the team has several young players that could go on to prove themselves to be genuinely world class, (though there are several who definitely won’t), and it is right that some of the world’s best young players should be attracted to, and developed by, a club such as Arsenal. But, generally speaking, the received wisdom is that a footballer hits his peak between the ages of 26 and 28. In the transient modern game, where money talks and agents fan the flames of discontent in order to move players on every summer, how many of the current Gunners squad will still be with the club in five years time?

How true. So what are the chances that Arsenal can pull an experienced, aggressive goal scorer from another team in the off-season - a move that would consolidate the talents of their young players and bump the club back into competition to win league titles?

health care potential

paul krugman weighs in with good news on health care policy. maybe everyone is getting on the same page? (other than john boehner).

obamtourage

name says it all.

also from ezra:

good god, americans don't know any freaking math. only 21% of people surveyed knew how many times larger 1 trillion is than 1 million. I wonder if this affects how normal Americans perceive the mind-boggling numbers being thrown around in budget proposals, bailouts, and federal debt, and so does Ezra:

My sense is that there's basically a break point beyond which all numbers blur into "a lot of goddamn money.' A Senator disbelievingly saying that they're spending "$100 million" on health care for poor people probably isn't eliciting only 10 percent of the outrage he'd get for decrying "$1 billion" on health care for poor people.

david souter retires

I don't claim to know too much about constitutional law, and I would further admit that 90% of what I know about the current Supreme Court justices comes from reading Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine (which I highly recommend). It's probably not very surprising that Souter was one of my favorites (I'm certainly more liberal when it comes to constitutional matters than when it comes to, say, fiscal matters). I'll leave it to Ezra Klein to bid him a fond farewell, and speculate on whether term limit for Supreme Court justices might be a good idea. Meanwhile, I'll quote from Souter's furious, passionate dissent in Bush v. Gore as tribute to his impressive career.

What must underlie petitioners' entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today's decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

EDIT: here's salon.com's top 10 possible supreme court replacements.

bulls-celtics

absolutely unbelievable. 6 games in: 4 OT games, 1 double-OT game, one triple (TRIPLE!!!) OT game, with transcendent performances by multiple guys on each team: Ray Allen, Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce, Derrick Rose, John Salmons, Brad Miller, Ben Gordon. It's been an absolute joy to watch. You've got to love any basketball columns by the Sports Guy (despite the fact that this one involves one of his favorite teams) because, as he often says, he's one of 12 actual basketball fans left:

Derrick Rose took the superstar training wheels off. Rajon Rondo turned into Isiah, The Sequel: Just as talented, just as hated, just as nasty. Ben Gordon and Kendrick Perkins turned into Andrew Toney and Robert Parish. The great Ray Allen became a minus-130 favorite in the "Reggie Miller versus Ray Allen" argument and might have to change his name to "The Great Ray Allen." Paul Pierce added to his legacy and sullied it a little at the same time. Brad Miller made the Faces Hall of Fame and the Dorkiest White Guy Celebrations Hall of Fame. John Salmons and Glen Davis put themselves on the map as bona-fide NBA players. Kirk Hinrich redeemed his career. Stephon Marbury destroyed what was left of his career. Doc Rivers and Vinny Del Negro inspired their players and undermined them at the same time.

I'll leave you highlights from one of the best playoff games I've ever seen.

zack greinke, wolverine

Just for fun, here's a pretty cool article on Zack Greinke, a baseball phenom who struggled early in his career, and it turns out he had social anxiety disorder. Now that's under control, and he's basically ridiculously amazing this year.

Also, the Wolverine movie comes out this Friday. One guess on whether or not I'm excited. Although I'll NEVER forgive...well, whomever for not making Fatal Attractions into an X-Men movie. It still remains the coolest trade paperback I've ever read, and yes, that includes Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns.

doctors

a couple of interesting articles, courtesy of the new york times, both on doctors:

1. stop pharmaceutical companies from bribing doctors with gifts - the conflict of interest here is obvious, and therefore unsurprising. what is interesting to me is this:

Among the most controversial of the institute’s recommendations is a plan to end industry influence over medical refresher courses. Presently, drug and device makers provide about half of the funding for such courses so that doctors can often take them for free. Even as they have acknowledged the need for other limits, many medical societies and schools have defended subsidies for education as necessary. The institute acknowledged that many doctors depend on industry funding for refresher medical courses but said that “the current system of funding is unacceptable and should not continue.” The report recommended that a different funding system be created within two years.

I do actually think this is a legitimate concern. I mean...a new different funding system is fine and good, but from where exactly does that new funding system propose to, you know, get funding? Although, how much evidence is there that refresher courses actually work? (As opposed to individual study?) Anyone?

2. on the other hand, more doctors, please:
Well, thank god Annie went into primary care, because we need more of these, and soon. More people need medical care than ever (about to get even worse as the baby boomers enter old age) and as you can see above, fewer and fewer medical students pursue primary care as an option. The government is considering re-aligning the incentives by having Medicare compensate general practitioners more and specialists less (sounds good to me), but medical lobbyists hate the idea of taking money away from anyone. They simply suggest more doctors, but more doctors means higher costs. So.

watch out, arlen specter

glenn beck may try to kill you for this.

immediate thoughts on "vicky cristina barcelona"

reductionist, completely contrived, and eye-roll inducing. made by the typical elitist artist that compartmentalizes the world into the american troglodyte-as-businessman who knows nothing about actually living (and is a little bit racist to boot) and the artist-as-rennaisance man who is the only person who can truly understand and appreciate life - so much so that that he/she is in fact destructive, because oh my god they're exploding with vitality. vomit. i'll give props to woody allen for engineering a scene where scarlet johansson and penelope cruz make out with each other, but, dude. you're a movie director, you're not 13. i love how the only choices for the conflicted woman are the incredibly good looking artist who inexplicably can afford a highly affluent lifestyle (but would never be defined by money) and the bad haircut husband who says "oriental rugs", thinks art looks like "rorschach blots", plays bridge, golfs, and loves "japanese high definition setups." seriously. you can't make this stuff up. or, actually, you, and anyone with 8 functioning brain cells, can.

EDIT: To be fair, most of the actors (Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, and Rebecca Hall) are excellent (the incredibly wooden Scarlett Johansson, not so much), the dialouge is pretty witty, and the cinematography brings out the bohemian/free-spirited nature of Barcelona, but the one-dimentionality of the setup is just too much to overlook.

ha!

family guy has gotten annoying recently, but this is pretty funny.

who are the real victims of the financial crisis?

I'm a little busy, but I figured I'd post 2 interesting articles providing interesting perspectives on the role of populism and merit in the financial crisis.

New York Magazine has an interesting human interest piece wondering if modern bankers are being victimized by the financial crisis:

A few weeks ago, I had drinks with a friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. To her mind, extreme compensation is a fair trade for the compromises of such a career. “People just don’t get it,” she says. “I’m attached to my BlackBerry. I was at my doctor the other day, and my doctor said to me, ‘You know, I like that when I leave the office, I leave.’ I get calls at two in the morning, when the market moves. That costs money.”

Now, a lot of people in New York have BlackBerrys, and few of them expect to be paid $2 million to check their e-mail in the middle of the night. But embedded in her comment is the belief shared on Wall Street but which few have dared to articulate until now: Those who select careers in finance play an exceptional role in our society. They distribute capital to where it’s most effective, and by some Ayn Rand–ian logic, the virtue of efficient markets distributing capital to where it is most needed justifies extreme salaries—these are the wages of the meritocracy. They see themselves as the fighter pilots of capitalism.

My tendency here is to say, "Horsefeathers." (and not just because its fun to say.) If the elevated wages are justified because the efficient distribution of capital resulted in economic growth (and in the 80s and 90s it certainly did), why are the same employees not subject to paycuts when their companies' investments result in enormous economic contraction, so much so that many of these companies are, in fact, insolvent and dependent on government assistance?

On the flip side, Jeffrey Golberg in the Atlantic has a unique piece on the road ahead for the individual investor. Ignored in the grand scheme of the crisis is how a normal person making an average, or even above average salary should modify their investment plan. I'll just include a few salient quotes from the famous value investor Seth Klarman, whom Goldberg asks for personal investing advice:

“Everybody these days is a just-in-time investor. People say, ‘I’m going to leave my money in the market as long as possible, and then pull it out of the market just before I have to write the tuition check.’ But I think we’re seeing that the day you need to pull it out of the market, the market might be down 50 percent. It’s critical not to be greedy. Avoid leverage and don’t invest money that you can’t stand to lose. In the aftermath of this financial crisis, I think everyone needs to look deep within themselves and ask how they want to live their lives. Do they want to live close to the edge, or do they want stability?

Klarman went on, “Here’s how to know if you have the makeup to be an investor. How would you handle the following situation? Let’s say you own a Procter & Gamble in your portfolio and the stock price goes down by half. Do you like it better? If it falls in half, do you reinvest dividends? Do you take cash out of savings to buy more? If you have the confidence to do that, then you’re an investor. If you don’t, you’re not an investor, you’re a speculator, and you shouldn’t be in the stock market in the first place.”

I think its a pretty interesting perspective, if only because the common sense advice: don't invest money in the market that you need to keep yourself afloat on a short-term basis would have been extremely sound advice for the banks to take.

It's very interesting to me that populist anger is sort of pouring out from all political parties and economic classes, and everyone is trying to marshall populist anger for their own purposes (tea parties and lower taxes, government regulation and universal health care). But, can populist anger even be marshalled? And is stirring the pot necessarily a good idea? I'll let way, way smarter minds duke this one out: Suzanne Garment vs. Susan Lee! (Enjoy the 'comments' section in Susan Lee's article for the duel, pt. 2)

shane murphy is awesome.

I'll just quote from the Huffington Post story:

Shane Murphy, second-in-command aboard the ship seized by Somali pirates this month, is happy to be home. But he's not happy to be sharing turf with land-lubber Rush Limbaugh, who politicized the pirate affair by referring to the pirates as "black teenagers."

"It feels great to be home," said Murphy in an interview with WCBV in Boston. "It feels like everyone around here has my back, with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, who is trying to make this into a race issue...that's disgusting."

Limbaugh made the remark to suggest why President obama might have appeared preoccupied at church on the day of the operation to rescue the ship's captain, who was taken hostage by the pirates until Navy SEAL snipers shot them in a daring rescue effort.

"He was worried about the order he had given to wipe out three teenagers on the high seas," Limbaugh said. "Black Muslim teenagers."

"You gotta get with us or against us here, Rush," Murphy said. "The president did the right thing...It's a war.... It's about good versus evil. And what you said is evil. It's hate speech. I won't tolerate it."

Yeah. You're awesome, Shane Murphy. And you're a tool and a racist, Rush.

lebron.

do you think it upsets lebron that he's 50 times better than everyone else on the court? how can anyone even QUESTION if he's the best player in the game? lebron is really the ultimate combination of dominant scorer, passer, and now, defender. when he works an isolation he's like ladanian tomlinson. as a passer he's chris paul's equal. he plays defense like bryan dawkins or ed reed, just trolling around disrupting everything. its absolutely ridiculous.

i was the biggest michael jordan homer anyone's ever seen. so much so that my dad actually used to antagonize me when jordan would have a bad game (probably to teach me not to hero worship so much) and i would actually start CRYING. and i wasn't even that young. and i'm STILL going to go ahead and say it. lebron makes teams better than jordan ever did in his prime, and lebron would leave jordan for dead one-on-one. there's only a few things that jordan's got over lebron at this point.

1) jordan had the greatest killer instinct i've ever seen. it's not even the whole "game winning shot" thing - in the 4th quarter, jordan would just take games over. and not even games in the playoffs - mid season garbage games. you got the sense that he would cheat to win, if he had to. i've never seen anyone in any sport be that level of cold-blooded killer. the only one even close? kobe.

but lebron is getting there. i just saw him get upset that rip hamilton hit him in the face while he was going up for a rebound. he takes the ball down court, backs into a corner to lure hamilton to him, then blows by him and 3 other pistons, takes it to the hole, draws contact, hits the layup plus the foul, then stares hamilton down, giving him a "don't take me on" look. you got the sense that until he went to the olympics and hung out with kobe (who's so one-dimensionally obsessed with winning that it's almost counterproductive, much like jordan early in his career) he cared more about being a 'global icon' and being funny in commercials than about beating the Celtics. Not anymore.

2) i guess this is sort of related - you never thought jordan would miss the last second shot, and he almost never did. of course, that made him valuable at the very end of the game, but it also affected other teams as the game was winding down - they always had it in the back of their head that they had to put the game out of reach. lebron just isn't as good a shooter as jordan was, and that hurts his "end of the game" rep (as I just watched him blow by all 5 pistons, lay it in, and look bored.) BUT. he almost doesn't need to be as good a shooter because a) he gets to the hole virtually whenever he wants, and b) its insane how good a passer he is, and how good court vision he has. if the rest of the cavs could shoot, he's have 20 assists per game. Still, jordan's pull-up jumper was basically a dagger, because it was completely unguardable, and you knew that he would make it virtually whenever he wanted to. lebron isn't quite there yet.

still, as a composite athlete, he's in a different stratosphere from the rest of the world. he may have actually evolved into an entirely separate species. its nothing less than a joy to watch, and i say this even as red sox manager terry francona is stubbornly sticking with hideki okajima as his setup guy even though he's done, and i have to watch him give up 4 baserunner while inducing an amazing 0 outs in the 7th inning of a close game against the hated yankees. time to give okajima the old yeller treatment, tito. fuck.

the quiet coup

Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF and frequent contributor to Planet Money has a fairly distressing article in the Atlantic that's pretty similar to Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on the growth of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, in the pocket of Wall Street, as a new 'shadow government'. Johnson's setup isn't too surprising at this point:

• Production from the financial sector began to dominate GDP (helped by Volcker-induced volatility in interest rates, deregulation under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush, and finally, via generation of complex instruments that rewarded risky behavior - securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps)
• The dominance of the financial sector was transmitted directly to the government, as both the Treasury Department and the SEC became dominated by products of Wall Street. This, combined with the growing complexity of managing risk and debt, led to the prevailing theory that banking institutions were the only ones capable of regulating themselves. This led to unregulated leveraging and assumption of incredibly high levels of debt, such that a small economic failure in a market previously thought of as bulletproof would lead to a collapse (cue: housing).
  

Johnson's assessment for what needs to be done tacitly indicts the current administration's policy of offering unregulated assistance while taking great care not to disturb the natural order. His prescription is somewhat different:

1) temporarily nationalize the banks in order to restore confidence.

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer. The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

2) smash these oversized financial behemoths, Hulk-style.

The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs. Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations. Of course, some people will complain about the “efficiency costs” of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

The only sensible arguments I've ever heard over this issue came (naturally) from This American Life and Planet Money. This American Life had a really insightful piece where they followed the actual mechanics of an FDIC takeover of a small bank, and then wondered if the FDIC would even have the capacity to deal with institutions as large as Citigroup. Of course, Planet Money then followed up on this (below), with an interview with John Bovenzi, the chief operating officer of the FDIC, who insisted that they could in fact handle the load. So. Interesting.

What's so great about In Utero?

My roommate and I listened to In Utero beginning to end today, and it reminded me of all the reasons that it's my favorite Nirvana album, and one of my top...7 favorite albums. Consider the context: Nirvana's previous studio album, Nevermind, had turned the pop landscape on its head by showing that tracks as aggressive as "Lithium" could still be considered pop. Now, with fans and critics looking for the grunge Abbey Road got something quite different. So here's what i love about In Utero.

1. They kick off side 1/track 1 by burning their status as "critical darlings" in effigy. Dear music critics: "Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I'm bored and old/Self-appointed judges judge/more than they have sold." So, basically (and poetically), fuck yourself.

2. If tracks like "In Bloom" and "Drain You" from Nevermind represent the perfect amalgamation of the Beatles and the Sex Pistols, consider those 2 forces to be pitted against each other on this album. Consider that 2 back-to-back pairs include "Milk It"/"Pennyroyal Tea" and "Tourette's"/"All Apologies."

3. The inaccessible wail of some of my favorite Nirvana songs of all time: "Milk It" (featuring the incredible chorus "Doll steak/Test meat") and "Tourette's" (basically 2 minutes of incoherence ending up with Cobain yelling "Mean heart/cold heart/cold heart/cold heart/cold heart" and of course, "Scentless Apprentice," one of the only songs written by the entire band, featuring the chorus, "Get away/go away/go away"

4. On the other hand, they still produce some of the most infectious, affecting songs of their catalog. Give me "Pennyroyal Tea", "Heart-Shaped Box", "Dumb", and "All Apologies" over the Nevermind chart-toppers any day.

5. All Apologies? One of the great album closers of all time. A song that would absolutely not have been out of place on Revolver. And, by the way, who really thinks Kurt Cobain didn't kill himself? "In the sun/In the sun/Married/Buried"...come on.

I do think that, around age 12-14, kids begin to identify with music in a greater way as their own personality develops. So for me, In Utero (and another album by a disaffected artist projecting his dystopian vision on a slightly larger scale - The Downward Spiral) kind of taught me what music could do as more than just music. Maybe I would have ended up a kinder, gentler soul if I felt the same way about...I don't know, Stone Temple Pilots or something.

Todd says he's going to blog about the first Led Zeppelin album. Let's see if he means it.

geithner

Not the most encouraging profile on Geithner from portfolio.com. They basically make 2 major contentions:

1) he doesn't have the policy chops to make any ambitious moves.

It’s old news to people familiar with ­Geithner that he is not an economist and has no private-sector experience in finance, in contrast to pretty much every other Treasury secretary in recent years. For his critics, that says it all. “He may not be that comfortable with the subject matter,” Change author Cohan says. “I think that, in general, people who are good at math are more comfortable with talking about finance and thinking about financial policy and strategies. I think that if you’re going to come up with better strategies and better ideas, you need to have someone who’s a strategist, who understands how to come up with better policies.” Cohan says he’ll be “very surprised if Geithner comes up with any really new, insightful ideas on how to solve the financial problems.”

2) rather, as a beaurocrat, much of his behavior comes down to hedging bets within the established system.

Geithner’s scrupulous care not to promise too much, so as not to be seen as failing if the economic plan falls through, is not merely a reflection of “No Drama Obama.” It’s also a reflection of Geithner’s mind-set. “He’s been in bureaucracy all his life,” Seidman says, “and that’s the way they operate. You don’t get rewarded much for being right, but you take a hell of a beating if you’re wrong.” Still, one man’s bureaucrat is another man’s dedicated, lifelong servant of the commonweal, and that, presumably, is the Geithner who, one assumes, aced his interviews with President Obama.

This is perfectly in line with a great piece from Simon Johnson (former head of the IMF) in the May 2009 Atlantic that I am currently reading, so I don't want to talk about it (yet).

AMAZING

McSweeney's, on universal health care according to Dr. Mario. I'll just quote part of the awesomeness:

MYTH THREE: A government-run plan sounds
a lot like what Bowser wants

The king of all Koopas would love to take over every hospital in Mushroom Kingdom, to use them to extract Peach's DNA or create a horrific suit that looks like me to trick the princess. But government-funded doesn't mean government-run. I propose that we set up an oversight committee that would reside on Star World, a place linked to all of our lands. This committee would keep watch over the providers. It would see that free Megavitamins were distributed. Finally, it would research new health innovations, such as the powers of the rare Super Mushrooms.

And, just for fun, more McSweeney's!

dating, the internet and aligning incentives

So that I don't start to sound too morbid, I thought I'd also post about an interesting piece in the Times from last week about a somewhat unconventional dating website. SeekingArrangement.com is designed to set up wealthier 'benefactors' with younger 'companions' (aka a sugar daddy/sugar baby relationship, or, if you read Memoirs of a Geisha, a danna/geisha relationship). My initial response was to be grossed out, and see this website as a means for exploitation. But then I thought, well, it's all consenting adults involved in these interactions, right? I mean, isn't this just an example of the internet fostering free markets, and aligning buyers and sellers with like incentives? It might be kind of sketchy, but...heck, not everyone in the world subscribes to conventional relationship constructs. In fact, according to the article, only 30% of arrangements involve a monetary transaction. Alot of, well, call them geishas, aren't as interested in money so much as attention. So maybe this is just a small, crystallized, effective free market of, granted, questionable taste. Or am I wrong?

torture, ad nauseum

The New York Times headline says it all:
In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use

At the risk of being unbearably repetitive, the article goes to the heart of the issue, and shows what defenders of the CIA and 'harsh interrogation tactics' are missing. The CIA complains, "they're letting the enemy know what techniques we might use" and supporters indignantly ask "doesn't the mastermind of 9/11 deserve this kind of harsh treatment?"

Well, forget the moral quandaries of using techniques that, more than likely, result in extreme, permanent physical damage or even death. Whether prisoners in custody are 'deserving' of extreme techniques is completely irrelevant. Tipping terrorists off to these techniques is equivalently unimportant. Why? Because they don't work, of course. Morality is one issue, of possible debate, I suppose. But efficacy simply is not. And as the Times clearly delineates, no one implementing these techniques bothered to investigate their efficacy:

Overwhelmed with reports of potential threats and anguished that the agency had failed to stop the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet and his top aides did not probe deeply into the prescription Dr. Mitchell so confidently presented: using the SERE tactics on Qaeda prisoners.

A little research on the origin of those methods would have given reason for doubt. Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.

“The Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture,’ ” one 1956 study concluded. “But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”

In late 2001, about a half-dozen SERE trainers, according to a report released Tuesday night by the Senate Armed Services Committee, began raising stark warning about plans by both the military and the C.I.A. to use the SERE methods in interrogations.

In December 2001, Lt. Col. Daniel J. Baumgartner of the Air Force, who oversaw SERE training, cautioned in one memo that physical pressure was “less reliable” than other interrogation methods, could backfire by increasing a prisoner’s resistance and would have an “intolerable public and political backlash when discovered.” But his memo went to the Defense Department, not the C.I.A.

Remember (again) that, in the midst of this firestorm about interrogation techniques, we still haven't heard about a single actionable piece of information that resulted from these interrogations. Most likely because such information was simply never obtained:

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions.

Look. Obama is no saint. His decision on Bagram reeks of Bush administration rationalization. He's depressingly willing to compromise habeas corpus when it comes to overseas prisoners. What we know about him is that he's relentlessly pragmatic. So to me, this decision is more about high-yield pragmatism than moral grandstanding. Eliminate a poorly-researched, highly unpopular, ineffective set of techniques, and improve America's perception globally at the same time. So...am I just taking crazy pills or something?