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?

another cool new yorker piece

This one is called "Brain Gain" and its subject is stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall, prescribed most commonly for ADHD but now commonly co-opted as neuroenhancing 'study aids'. The whole article is interesting, but 2 things of note:

1) What type of students are most likely to use neuroenhancing drugs?
According to McCabe’s research team, white male undergraduates at highly competitive schools—especially in the Northeast—are the most frequent collegiate users of neuroenhancers. Users are also more likely to belong to a fraternity or a sorority, and to have a G.P.A. of 3.0 or lower. They are ten times as likely to report that they have smoked marijuana in the past year, and twenty times as likely to say that they have used cocaine. In other words, they are decent students at schools where, to be a great student, you have to give up a lot more partying than they’re willing to give up.

It's interesting that the highest achievers/'go getters', if you will, are not the ones most likely to use neuroenhancers. Rather its the students who want to maintain a healthy lifestyle and get their work done at the same time.

2) What is the culpability of doctors in this phenomenon?
Anjan Chatterjee, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania, predicts, some neurologists will refashion themselves as “quality-of-life consultants,” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients.” The demand is certainly there: from an aging population that won’t put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture, where work never really ends.

This is what is most worrisome - doctors acting in this bogus 'consultant' role, where they can advise on 'proper use' of neurologically active substances, without bearing any responsibility for their side effects. If you want to give perfectly healthy patients elective mind-altering drugs, so be it. But doctors are the gateway to access for these drugs, and they should bear some of the responsibility for the inevitable cases in which people go batshit crazy.

"No, Donny, these men are nihilists. There's nothing to be afraid of. "

John Goodman and Nathan Lane will be playing Pozzo and Estragon, respectively, in a Broadway production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” The material of the enigmatic "tragicomedy in two acts" is plodding (infamously critiqued as "Nothing happens, twice.") and existentially bleak but I think the tyrannical, cruel, farcical and pathetic role of Pozzo will suit John Goodman well as he has shown himself to be adroit at playing the fool and the bully (see O Brother, Where Art Thou?). It has the potential to be excellent and I would go just to hear him say

"...one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."

Although I do like to point out that, seven years earlier, Vladimir Nabokov opened his autobiography, "Speak, Memory" with the awkwardly (for Beckett) similar words:

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."

Put either way, the effect is chilling.

CoolHandTodd, on racism in soccer

This was a comment, but it deserves its own post.

CoolHandTodd said...
I can't say that I'm surprised. More than diving, silly haircuts or poorly-choreographed goal celebrations, this all too common behavior has really given the sport a black eye. The international governing body, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), has tried to crack down on fan racism as part of their prominently-featured "Say No To Racism" campaign. Regardless, this sort of nonsense continues throughout Europe.

The American winger DaMarcus Beasley, who plays for Rangers of Scotland, was subjected to monkey chants by the home fans after scoring a goal against a team in Montenegro. Luis Aragones, the current manager of the Spanish national team, somehow was able to keep his job after he referred to French striker Thierry Henry as a "negro de mierda." Throughout Europe, there have been reported episodes where black players have had bananas and peanuts thrown at them from the stands.

And the bigotry isn't exclusively targeted towards black players. At Chelsea, after replacing the wildly-popular Jose Morinho, the Israeli manager Avram Grant was bombarded with anti-Semitic chants and Holocaust references. In Israel, the team Beitar Jerusalem, a club with a traditionally right-wing nationalist fan base, have never signed an Arab player. In Mexico, Chivas de Guadalajara have a policy of signing only Mexican-born players.

The interesting thing about Italy is that there are no black players on the Italian national team (mostly because there are very few talented black Italians). Mario Balotelli will begin to change that; he is only 18 and has had a sensational season for Inter Milan (6 goals on the season so far). In 2006, Brazilian-born Marcos Senna (who defended Luis Aragones' remarks towards Henry) became the only black player to join the Spanish national team and was, by many accounts, the key to Spain winning Euro 2008. France and England, though not without their respective share of infractions, have been fielding black players for many years now.

Guys like Balotelli are, unfortunately, reliving the same role that Jackie Robinson was forced to play over 50 years ago. Let's hope that he can go on to achieve a comparable level of success.

rock it scientist officially does not endorse juventus

But only because of their overt racism. I hope my roommate and I kick their ass as Barca in Fifa 2006.

Todd, aren't you jealous that I beat you to making the first soccer-related post?

lady gaga in the house

The New Yorker has a fascinating piece that is somewhat on Lady Gaga, but also on the ephemeral nature of pop music. According to Sasha Frere-Jones, Lady Gaga represents the current return of disco-synth to the pop scene (giving Alex and Annie hope that Metric will finally get their just due). The question is, do artists like Gaga (who claim to be self-aware) bring about the shifts in popular music taste, or are they just a product of intrinsic volatility in what is "in the moment"? It's an interesting question, Lady Gaga is a pretty interesting character, and this is a very interesting piece.

john boehner on this week

I'm sorry, but HORSEFEATHERS. From his mindblowingly stupid battle with climate change (his argument? If cows have been farting for years, how can carbon dioxide be bad?) to his insistence that Americans are being overtaxed (despite salient analyses from Forbes here and here)...

You are an idiot, John Boehner.

EDIT: I'm tired of George Will. Please stop. Stop with this 'unitary executive' malarky. Please. Just stop.

anvil!

According to Alex and Todd, I'm not capable of fully enjoying this movie because of my lack of "This is Spinal Tap" education. Nevertheless, this was a funny, interesting movie (if overdoing the heartstrings-tugging aspect). I loved the aspect where they went into Lips' and Robb's Jewish roots (especially from Lips' perspective, doing something clearly out of sync with both his parents and his siblings and yet ultimately getting their support). Also, it tells us once again that the Japanese are way cooler than us (our 13 year olds love Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, their 13 year olds love metal. You be the judge). Go to www.anvilmovie.com for more info.

The Big Three

As the years pass by the prospect of a fully-protective vaccine against either HIV, tuberculosis or malaria fades out of sight. Leading researchers, such as Anthony Fauci, have suggested that HIV control will likely require a multifaceted approach combining both therapeutic and preventative methods. In the case of malaria, a disease which continues to kill millions of children in the unindustrialized world each year, it is also likely that creative approaches will be required to lessen this enormous disease burden.

SAND

Alright fine, I'll admit it: nature is pretty damn cool.

i'm such a colbert homer

but this piece was incredible. i almost died at 2:48 when he said "yeah, that does really, really make sense."

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digital green and india's agricultural problem

Digital Green is a remarkable research project that was started by a good friend of mine, Rikin Gandhi, along with a number of co-workers from when he was working at Oracle in Seattle. They attempt to use scalable technology to help farmers in India that are essentially entrenched in a feudal system in which they owe a constant fee to the landowners and are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet as the water levels precipitously drop. Directly from their website:

Digital Green (DG) is a research project that seeks to disseminate targeted agricultural information to small and marginal farmers in India through digital video. The Digital Green system sustains relevancy in a community by developing a framework for participatory learning. The system includes a digital video database, which is produced by farmers and experts. The content within this repository is of various types, and sequencing enables farmers to progressively become better farmers. Content is produced and distributed over a hub and spokes-based architecture in which farmers are motivated and trained by the recorded experiences of local peers and extension staff. In contrast to traditional extension systems, we follow two important principles: (1) cost realism, essential if we are to scale the system up to a significant number of villages and farmers; and (2) building systems that solve end-to-end agricultural issues with interactivity that develops relationships between people and content.

They are a particularly relevant group at this time in wake of one of the more horrifying stories I have seen in a long time: a mass suicide of 1,500 farmers in India. These people committed suicide in the wake of facing an unpayable debt on this year's crop:

Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: "Farmers' suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death."

1,500 is a death toll equivalent to the number of lives lost in Katrina in a situation where the government has been just as negligent in looking after their constituents. Yet, will anyone raise a red flag?

bistable circuits, hysteresis, and cell fate

i've been obsessed with posting about this, and i don't even know why, but here goes.

in biology, cells receive inputs from other cells, or the environment, and they integrate those inputs in order to make decisions - whether to produce a hormone, or to differentiate along one pathway or another, whether to live or die, etc. what's interesting about this situation is that the inputs are quite commonly analog - that is, you can linearly vary the amount of stimulus - but the required outputs are often binary - they are decisions, with pretty much an 'on' or 'off' choice. in other words, you don't want a cell to ever decide to 'kind of' die, or 'kind of' differentiate - you want all the way or nothing.

here's where positive feedback loops come into the picture. a positive feedback loop will operate such that you activate some mediator A. A then actives mediator B, which then goes back and activates more of mediator A. Now, positive feedback loops operate such that the loop won't kick in until you pass a certain level/frequency of stimulus, but after that, you'll 'jump' to a second level of signal (because the feedback has kicked in). the system will then equilibrate at one level or the other, depending on the initial stimulus - this is basically what's known as a bistable circuit. you can already see how this might be helpful to executing an on/off decision.

so where does hysteresis come in? well, hysteresis refers to the fact that, once the feedback loop has kicked in, and you have 'jumped' to the second level of activity, if you stop giving input, and then restart your input, you will more easily jump to a second level of activity - aka, the threshold for achieving a highly activated state is lowered once you've passed the initial threshold. this is important for signal integration in cells receiving discontinuous stimuli. without hysteresis, a cell receiving a super-threshold stimulus will get very little output from subsequent sub-threshold stimuli, whereas hysteresis allows subsequent stimuli to have a much larger impact in the cell's integrated output. this has the effect of making a cell far more sensitive to inputs. it should be mentioned that one of the negative aspects of hysteresis is irreversibility - in which the loop can generate so much of a feedback that achieving the "off state" is no longer possible - the cell is permanently 'on'. This loss of plasticity can, of course, be damaging.

why is this all important? Arup Chakraborty and colleagues modeled a system like this in lymphocytes, and then experimentally determined that this is, in fact, how Ras signaling occurs in lymphocytes. Now this is important because there are a number of aspects of lymphocyte activation that should be digital - thymic selection and t helper cell differentiation to name just a few. its also pretty cool that he used mathematical modeling to simulate a complex phenomenon and direct his experimental research, which validated his models. What's also interesting is that the digital behavior applies to Ras, whose signaling paradigm is critical to central tolerance of CD8 T cells (described by Ed Palmer, left).

im sure i've bored you all to death.

colbert on meaningless regulation

democrats beware.

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supreme court and civil justice

fascinating article in the new york times this weekend about the possibility of the Supreme Court getting involved in the gay marriage debate. Discusses the political and social ramifications of certain decisions (how a decision can positively or negatively affect a society's attitude towards a particular issue). Interesting to hear that Ruth Bader Ginsberg thought Roe v. Wade was poorly timed--that it came too early for people to swallow and has a consequence has set the pro-choice movement back. That the supreme court, by siding in favor of gay marriage, could tip social acceptance of it back significantly and make the human rights issue of it more problematic. Brings up all kinds of questions of what the role of the court is in furthering social justice is, especially as it regards moral questions of deep public schism...and how the court can operate most effectively in bringing about these changes, that involve a fundamental overhaul of societal attitudes.

method acting.

Apparently Woody Harrelson attacked a photographer because he thought he was a zombie.
Heartening that acting is a career in which one can claim legitimate reason for abandoning reality.

That--Woody Harrelson and his method-- is the dark side of Filmmaking. Lets look to the light. To where our humanity is illuminated, with all its futility and foibles. Where is this more apparent then in late 80s cinema? First I'd like to consider the film, Three Men and a Baby (1987). This movie is a poignant glimpse into man's relationship to his own aging. Consider the philosophy of Martin Buber, in which man's identity is determined by the "other." In this instance the other is "Baby". "Baby" being other, man cannot be baby. Man is adult. Yet adult cannot perform basic functions like changing diapers. Is man therefore useless, infirm? Lets look deeper. Weekend at Bernie's (1989). This film embarks upon a thorough examination of how middle aged men confront the reality of death. It pays homage to traditions such as Dia de los Muertes, which can be seen as attempts to regain control by laughing at death. The corpse becomes a toy. The goal is to convince others he is still alive, while shacking up in his happenin' pad. Life continues in the midst of death, yet one cannot escape the reality of the big stinky corpse sporting shades at the supermarket. Like Bernie's chest hair is there, so too is death. Bernie. Tom Selleck. They are the unsung everymen, champions of humanity in this journey called life.

Eat your heart out Carl Jung.

Dey tuk ur jerbs!!!

On the topic of immigration, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to post this gem. Keep an eye out for Tom Tancredo in the crowd.

one more thing:

a funny interview w/amy poehler about parks & recreation. i'm a little skeptical, but she's hilarious, and i loved Aziz Ansari on Scrubs, so i'll give it a chance.

final post for the week!

1. obama pushes for immigration reform - more pro-activeness from the president. Not that it will be an easy sell:

Opponents, mainly Republicans, say they will seek to mobilize popular outrage against any effort to legalize unauthorized immigrant workers while so many Americans are out of jobs.

this argument leaves me a little cold, though. I mean, the jobs currently being done by illegals still need to be done (and are being done as part of an underground economy). So doesn't legalizing these immigrants force the underground economy above ground, which also forces the newly legal immigrants to pay taxes and contribute more directly to the GDP? PLUS, increasing free exchange will prevent a legitimate problem - the 'brain drain' of talented foreign students in America who can't get an H1 visa or permanent resident status to countries where residency is easier to obtain. It's hard to imagine how having more talented people in the country would hurt the economy. the economist warns about this.

2. trouble in mexico - the trouble is that mexico is basically fucked. read this rolling stone piece if you're not convinced. Plus, there is increasing evidence that the US is encouraging Mexico to pursue its domestic drug war militarily, despite the fact that there's almost no evidence that this type of strategy is at all effective. From the Atlantic:

“If you go after Cartel X, you just make life easier for Cartel Y.”

Doesn't that pretty much summarize the problem? Of course, there's one possible way the US can help things - by decreasing the demand for illegal goods domestically:

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard suggested that marijuana’s illicit status is responsible for some of the cartel-related violence seeping into his state. His logic was simple: according to his office, 65 percent of the cartels’ revenue comes from smuggling marijuana, a business that’s only profitable because it’s illegal.

Draw the obvious conclusion yourself, but sadly, Obama was asked about this, and its not going to happen.

3. don't make me fight you, george will. - Seriously. climate change is real. So, please stop, now. You're supposed to still be a marginally credible journalist.

Will's denialism tarnishes the conservative brand. It also makes it hard to take lectures about "liberal alarmism" on climate change seriously. There's a basic credibility problem. Any argument that sees Al Gore and George Will as two sides of the same problem isn't serious.

4. oh the onion, how i love you, for this, and this as well.

5. and finally, happy passover! - Take a look at the hilarious Facebook Haggadah (thanks, Todd!) and read this lovely reminiscence from the New York Times:

The wine was decanted into carafes, the salt served in filigreed silver wells. We were not fancy people, CorningWare white the rest of the year. But these two nights, remembering slavery, were to be celebrated as if we were kings, the poor seated with princes, all meant to recline.

immigration reform

ok. about time to be discussing this.
critics of an immigration reform that targets the legalization of illegal immigrants baffle me. Whether we acknowledge it or not we have a thriving underground economy, one that manages to take American jobs while not reaping the benefits of those jobs (such as taxpayers and an enfranchised constituency). So why not reclaim them as American jobs and call the workers citizens? Also, allowing the underground economy to continue is a form of socio-economic servitude, one where civil rights and labor rights can be blatantly ignored. Illegal immigrants work hours citizens would not tolerate, are underpaid, if paid at all, and are intimidated out of any kind of legal recourse for fear of backlash by INS. It seems to me that by allowing illegal immigrants to remain illegal we are condoning a form of slavery in the United States and it makes me wonder if we have made any advances since the civil war. Hyperbolic? Look at Immokalee. And as long as people in Latin America get paid in a month, what American jobs can pay in a day, they will risk their lives to cross their border. Must we then continue to take their lives, dignity, and wages? And then not count all that in the GDP? How can we not move beyond protectionist xenophobia and explotation based on race/nationality? AHHHHH.

Oh, and also:

maddow on GITMO accountability

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

in my ongoing love of bombast, here's rachel maddow explaining why guantanamo and the torture memos are so damaging to us. Long story short: their existence severely compromises our ability to appeal for proper treatment of our own citizens, or POWs, or anyone who comes in harm's way while outside of US borders. You know how I love righteous fury.

short selling

Since I'm not very smart, I was confused on why shorting is beneficial in markets. Thankfully, Susan is around to help me with this:

Far from being an "evil" practice, short-selling is important for price discovery. It conveys negative information and makes pricing more efficient. When optimists buy and pessimists sit on their hands, the result is an upward bias in prices.

Some proponents even argue that short-selling can act as a brake in a down market, since the shorts must eventually buy in order to cover or close out their positions.

Other thoughts:

• Nice piece in Slate on the art of negotiation at the G20 by the Obama squad. I would like to add that the promise of everyone at the G20 to avoid protectionism is another plus, but then I remember that Obama insists on rescuing GM.
• The Vanity Fair piece on Bernie Madoff is amazing, but I have a few more thoughts on that that I'll save for a subsequent post.
  

sorry, alan

but susan lee kicks your ass. (with an assist from john taylor)

i swear i've complained about this.

(excerpted from www.phdcomics.com)

(One problem: if TV science were more like real science! WERE!!!)
(edit: also, "it's theoretically impossible"? Isn't it also practically impossible? I mean, isn't the point that they tried to do it and failed? Why theoretically?)

the last shadow puppets

I know. This album came out a year ago, but I'm listening to it now. I put it off for quite a bit because I felt that the Arctic Monkeys were somewhat overrated (though I like them too). Maybe its my penchant for bombast (the opening riff to "The Age of Understatement" sounds an awful lot like the opening riff to Muse's "Knights of Cydonia") but I like the fact that Alex Turner listened to a ton of Bowie, got the guy who does the string arrangements for the Arcade Fire, recruited the London Symphony Orchestra, and made a cool album. But, according to Pitchfork, there's an improvement that goes beyond the arrangements:

So obviously the biggest difference between the Last Shadow Puppets and Turner's main gig is in the lyrics. Though less immediately noticeable than the majestic production, the change in the scale of Turner's songwriting is ultimately more profound. The video for "The Age of the Understatement" is set in Russia, and compared to the Arctics' insider-ish dispatches about Life Among the Chavs or Life As the Biggest New Band Since Oasis, these songs are Tolstoy in their bird's-eye omniscience. "Burglary and fireworks, the skies they were alight," Turner sings on "Calm Like You", describing a once-exciting city and the bitter romance that took place there.

Maybe that was my problem with the Arctic Monkeys - I don't enjoy any time bands are too self-referential (that's why I so often hate most band's second album where they ruminate on what fame has done to them. Give me a break).

4 great articles!!

1. doctors opting out of medicare - initially i assumed this would just be a populist-type piece on how, in response to the recession, doctors are prioritizing patients who will net them larger profits vs. patients who are on medicare (who offers lower reimbursement rates). and to some extent, it is. but what is much more interesting is how health care providers are using various methods to try and treat as many people as possible. Some doctors are tailoring prices to what their patients can afford. Others are providing "boutique" care, in which, in return for a yearly retainer, a doctor will both accept Medicare and provide services not covered by medicare. Another option is "concierge" medicine, in which, for a larger retainer, the doctor will coordinate a patient's health care in a more detailed fashion. And finally, there are urgent care clinics, which have a lot of potential upside (acting as triage for less complex cases) but with accompanying downsides (quality of care).

2. the recession's impact on libraries - just one of those phenomenal pieces that makes you think about all the subtle effects of the recession:

"Librarians here and elsewhere say they are seeing new challenges. They find people asleep more often at cubicles. Patrons who cannot read or write ask for help filling out job applications. Some people sit at computers trying to use the Internet, even though they have no idea what the Internet is."

3. The Atlantic meets Netanyahu - I believe this was an exclusive interview that The Atlantic had with the new Israeli PM. I won't pretend to understand 0.1% of the complexity surrounding the Middle East situation, but what this interview does is make the perspective of the incoming Israeli administration clearer. The question now is, how do Obama and the Middle East trifecta of kickassness (Mitchell, Holbrooke, and Clinton) find common ground with both Iran and a Netanyahu-led Israel?

4. Vanity Fair on Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.
- Like most great pieces, this piece on the man at the helm of the (sadly sinking) New York Times does a great job of being informative, yet even-handed. It's clear by the end that the newest Sulzberger operates out of a reverence for journalism (a good thing) and the Times in its current format (probably bad, given the fact that the paper is hemorrhaging money). What is unclear is the likelihood that he, or anyone, can steer the Times out of this mess. Which sucks, because I fall squarely on the side of the Times in its battle with the Wall Street Journal. But that's just because one of my rules in life is to figure out what Karl Rove is doing, and make a beeline for the other side.

Whom are we trying to help?

The WSJ does a good job reporting on the uncomfortable reality that, despite pressure from the Obama administration, a Chrysler bankruptcy is likely the best case scenario for the automaker's creditors (the same banks we're bailing out). Is it good policy for the government to use their leverage as lenders to force struggling companies to make poor business decisions?

Speaking of our dismal domestic auto industry, this article doesn't really say anything we don't already know but I can't resist the urge to bring up the gas tax.

iowa!

i'll let andrew sullivan do the talking. and its pretty cool how many of my facebook friends have a comment on this in their profiles. go midwest, go marriage equality, and go my friends.

scrubs

I don't know why no one has noticed, but Scrubs got an improbable reboot on ABC after a pretty crappy season caused it to be dumped by NBC after last season. Most of the people I know in the medical profession tend to agree with me that Scrubs is the only remotely realistic portrayal of a life in medicine because, unlike most medical shows, which focus on the nuts and bolts of actually being a doctor (usually ratcheting up the intensity to unrealistic levels), it mostly thinks about how being a doctor affects one's every day life. The point is, somehow, without anyone noticing, Scrubs is incredible this season. They've really gotten back to the core of the show. Seriously. its awesome. Latest episodes at ABC.com.

nature is awesome.

Yeah. Warren Jones and company at Yale University with a ridiculously cool study in which they basically use lights to simulate "biological" vs. "non-biological" motion, show that normal 2 year olds tend to look at the "biological" light movements, and that autistic kids not only show no preference for the biological cues, but actually seem to show some preference for some as-yet-unexplained non-biological motions. I'll bet Warren Jones doesn't think this is because of vaccines.

Farewell, ER

How could I not blog about this? As embarrassing as it is to admit, ER was what got me interested in medicine. It was the first time I found myself fascinated by something, and while my watching the show has trailed off as my living elements of it has ramped up, I fully intend on tuning in for tonight's series finale. Thank you, Slate, for a very nice farewell piece.

miscellaneous

I have a bunch of super cool articles on my plate to discuss, but its being pre-empted by my having to read about ESCRT complex assembly. So, in the meantime, here's some cool stuff:

• new york magazine has a fun article on the yeah yeah yeahs. I think the YYYs have really figured out their sound on their latest album, for what its worth. In many ways, Fever to Tellsome of their most iconic pieces (Maps, Y Control), but Show Your Bones was the start of the group becoming more cohesive in their songwriting, and It's Blitz! is pretty much uniformly good from beginning to end.
• a yikes from slate on the stupidly persistent theory that autism is caused by vaccination, but more importantly, the quite dangerous decision to treat autism with chelation.
• Eliot Spitzer on ratings agencies! I don't care. I like him.
  

Response to Comorbidification Dilemma

(Alright, here comes the representative 'current or future internist'...)

This is a very good article, in that it brings to the attention of NYTimes readers something that is being discussed all the time in academic centers. While I like to think that we're all aware of our patients' comorbidities, that's clearly not true. Being an internist, it's particularly disconcertnig to notice how various specialists' notes don't reference the OTHER specialists (and that's where, as the article references, everyone needs a 'coach' to keep the team together...that coach being ideally the internist rather than the patient).

And this is where geriatricians have got it right. Like the article said, "What is best for the disease may not be best for the patient." I remember coming across this idea really well demonstrated in a great article by Atul Gawande (yes, another Atul Gawande article): The Way We Age Now.

But that's easier said than done. Are you really not going to anticoagulate that elder patient with unsteady balance when the literature says you should? Ideally we internists should develop the sort of relationship with our patients where we can explain the risks and benefits of our medical decisions to patients so that we're not terrified of getting sued on those occasions when we go against 'The Recommendations'. But that would require a whole lot more than 15 minutes every few months.

So what's the answer? Probably more time with patients, more streamlined computer records (come on, stimulus package!... see NEJM article this week on 'Stimulating the Adoption of Information Technology'). That way we can see the whole person and tailor our treatment accordingly.

Speaking of which...my 4:30 patient just arrived in the waiting room, wouldn't want blogging to cut in on precious patient time...