the climate change non-scandal

So, if you watch Faux News I'm sure you've heard a lot about this:

Fake EPA Scandal Of The Day
from Environment and Energy by Brad Plumer

Earlier this year, when the EPA was putting together its finding that carbon-dioxide endangers the public health, an economist at the agency named Al Carlin drafted a short report disputing the scientific consensus on global warming and asked his bosses to consider it. The bosses politely asked Carlin to leave climate science to actual scientists and didn't incorporate his insights at all. And with good reason: As NASA's Gavin Schmidt explains, Carlin's "critique" makes a bunch of very basic errors—no surprise, given that he's not a climatologist and was mostly just parroting right-wing pseudoscience.

Anyway, you'd expect the story to die there. Alas, no: The rogue's gallery of climate deniers—from the Competitive Enterprise Institute to James Inhofe—is now shrieking that the Obama administration suppressed The Truth about global warming. Inhofe has ordered a full investigation. You know how it goes. Over at Grist, Jonathan Hiskes has the whole sordid tale if you're in the mood. Personally, I'm holding out for a better fake scandal—this one's a little disappointing.

--Bradford Plumer

...to follow up that last post...

I love reading Krugman's blog:

Um, economists have known for 45 years — ever since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal paper — that the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough. To act all wide-eyed and innocent about these problems at this late date is either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous.

When it comes to most markets, it seems to me that the most expensive things result from "add ons" which are usually non-essential. For example, leather seats in a car with built-in DVD players. Or a 120-Hz processor speed on a giant LCD-TV. Or buying organic vegetables. With health care market dynamics, it's the most essential things that are most expensive, like a heart transplant and cancer surgery.

The market has obviously not solved the major problems with health care in our country, and while some would blame ambiguous "government" for this, Medicaid/Medicare have tiny administrative costs in comparison to traditional insurers and pay out far less for most procedures, which keeps their costs down rather than passing the buck to the consumer.

Healthcare Reform

I will leave hardcore political blogging to those better equipped. But after I read this article by Wendell Potter, a former healthcare insider, who mentioned Remote Area Medical's trip to Wise, VA (also here) as a motivator for abandoning his former job and lobbying for real healthcare reform, I had to link to it. These volunteer doctors, originally intended to do drop-in medicine in the Amazon and Congo, spend 60% of their time doing work inside the USA. Potter worked for CIGNA, who used to be our insurer, and he has two important things to say about healthcare:

1. big for-profit insurers have hijacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street investors
2. the industry is using its massive wealth and influence to determine what is (and is not) included in the health care reform legislation members of Congress are now writing

A lot of people recognize these things already, but it's important to have someone like him testify to them before the Congress. Potter says,

What I saw happening over the past few years was a steady movement away from the concept of insurance and toward "individual responsibility," a term used a lot by insurers and their ideological allies. This is playing out as a continuous shifting of the financial burden of health care costs away from insurers and employers and onto the backs of individuals. As a result, more and more sick people are not going to the doctor or picking up their prescriptions because of costs. If they are unfortunate enough to become seriously ill or injured, many people enrolled in these plans find themselves on the hook for such high medical bills that they are losing their homes to foreclosure or being forced into bankruptcy.

As an industry spokesman, I was expected to put a positive spin on this trend that the industry created and euphemistically refers to as "consumerism" and to promote so-called "consumer-driven" health plans. I ultimately reached the point of feeling like a huckster.

And,

...when I heard members of Congress reciting talking points like the ones I used to write to scare people away from real reform. I'll have more to say about that over the coming weeks and months, but, for now, remember this: whenever you hear a politician or pundit use the term "government-run health care" and warn that the creation of a public health insurance option that would compete with private insurers (or heaven forbid, a single-payer system like the one Canada has) will "lead us down the path to socialism," know that the original source of the sound bite most likely was some flack like I used to be.

Bottom line: I ultimately decided the stakes are too high for me to just sit on the sidelines and let the special interests win again. So I have joined forces with thousands of other Americans who are trying to persuade our lawmakers to listen to us for a change, not just to the insurance and drug company executives who are spending millions to shape reform to benefit them and the Wall Street hedge fund managers they are beholden to.

I really, really hope Obama doesn't cave on the public insurance option. So does Krugman.

Summary of abiogenesis breakthroughs

Following up on an item from last month, the NYT has a great summary of the four principal features of new origins-of-life models:

1. Discovery of the natural synthesis of fatty acids that spontaneously form membranes
2. Discovery of a route of natural formation of nucleotides
   
3. Discovery of RNA enzymes made solely from RNA
4. Discovery of a solution to the chiral "problem"

Quote,

With these four recent advances — Dr. Szostak’s protocells, self-replicating RNA, the natural synthesis of nucleotides, and an explanation for handedness — those who study the origin of life have much to be pleased about, despite the distance yet to go. “At some point some of these threads will start joining together,” Dr. Sutherland said. “I think all of us are far more optimistic now than we were five or 10 years ago.”

One measure of the difficulties ahead, however, is that so far there is little agreement on the kind of environment in which life originated. Some chemists, like Günther Wächtershäuser, argue that life began in volcanic conditions, like those of the deep sea vents. These have the gases and metallic catalysts in which, he argues, the first metabolic processes were likely to have arisen.

But many biologists believe that in the oceans, the necessary constituents of life would always be too diluted. They favor a warm freshwater pond for the origin of life, as did Darwin, where cycles of wetting and evaporation around the edges could produce useful concentrations and chemical processes.

Great stuff. I love learning more about abiogenesis.

The failure of the "War on Drugs" redux

I've said it before (and here), but Nicholas Kristof says it better:

June 14, 2009
Drugs Won the War
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs, perhaps by the equivalent of state liquor stores or registered pharmacists. Other experts favor keeping drug production and sales illegal but decriminalizing possession, as some foreign countries have done.

Here in the United States, four decades of drug war have had three consequences:

First, we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons. The United States now incarcerates people at a rate nearly five times the world average. In part, that’s because the number of people in prison for drug offenses rose roughly from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today. Until the war on drugs, our incarceration rate was roughly the same as that of other countries.

Second, we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad. One reason many prominent economists have favored easing drug laws is that interdiction raises prices, which increases profit margins for everyone, from the Latin drug cartels to the Taliban. Former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia this year jointly implored the United States to adopt a new approach to narcotics, based on the public health campaign against tobacco.

Third, we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend $44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14 percent get treatment.)

I’ve seen lives destroyed by drugs, and many neighbors in my hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, have had their lives ripped apart by crystal meth. Yet I find people like Mr. Stamper persuasive when they argue that if our aim is to reduce the influence of harmful drugs, we can do better.

Mr. Stamper is active in Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, an organization of police officers, prosecutors, judges and citizens who favor a dramatic liberalization of American drug laws. He said he gradually became disillusioned with the drug war, beginning in 1967 when he was a young beat officer in San Diego.

“I had arrested a 19-year-old, in his own home, for possession of marijuana,” he recalled. “I literally broke down the door, on the basis of probable cause. I took him to jail on a felony charge.” The arrest and related paperwork took several hours, and Mr. Stamper suddenly had an “aha!” moment: “I could be doing real police work.”

It’s now broadly acknowledged that the drug war approach has failed. President Obama’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, told the Wall Street Journal that he wants to banish the war on drugs phraseology, while shifting more toward treatment over imprisonment.

The stakes are huge, the uncertainties great, and there’s a genuine risk that liberalizing drug laws might lead to an increase in use and in addiction. But the evidence suggests that such a risk is small. After all, cocaine was used at only one-fifth of current levels when it was legal in the United States before 1914. And those states that have decriminalized marijuana possession have not seen surging consumption.

“I don’t see any big downside to marijuana decriminalization,” said Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland who has been skeptical of some of the arguments of the legalization camp. At most, he said, there would be only a modest increase in usage.

Moving forward, we need to be less ideological and more empirical in figuring out what works in combating America’s drug problem. One approach would be for a state or two to experiment with legalization of marijuana, allowing it to be sold by licensed pharmacists, while measuring the impact on usage and crime.

I’m not the only one who is rethinking these issues. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has sponsored legislation to create a presidential commission to examine various elements of the criminal justice system, including drug policy. So far 28 senators have co-sponsored the legislation, and Mr. Webb says that Mr. Obama has been supportive of the idea as well.

“Our nation’s broken drug policies are just one reason why we must re-examine the entire criminal justice system,” Mr. Webb says. That’s a brave position for a politician, and it’s the kind of leadership that we need as we grope toward a more effective strategy against narcotics in America

Also, two idiot Republican racists deserve mention today in South Carolina -- Trey Walker calls a gorilla Michelle Obama's "ancestor" and Mike Green says Obama will tax aspirin because "it's white and it works". Am I surprised? Nope.

Obama and the non-religious

I've been a pretty hopeful supporter of Obama's for some time, despite recognizing his shortcomings in addressing church-state separation (especially in keeping Bush's Office of Faith-based Initiatives) and civil rights (DADT, indefinite detention) to the extent I would like. But he has made historic references to the non-religious and been inclusive in his language, which has made me happy.

This meeting encourages me more:

Last week, the Secular Coalition for America, an atheist advocacy group, held its first-ever individual face-to-face with the White House. Ron Millar, the coalition’s acting director, told POLITICO that he met with Paul Montero, Obama’s religious liaison in the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Obama “is opening a little door to include us in, which we are very appreciative of,” says Millar, who says he anticipates a number of additional such meetings with the administration.

Among the concerns Millar says he touched on was proselytizing in the U.S. military: “That is something we really want to follow up with this administration, because we have not seen much there.”

In April, Joshua DuBois, the Pentecostal minister who now heads Obama’s faith-based office, met with representatives from the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination. Van Pelt, who was among the participants, says that she and others relayed their concerns over the discriminatory hiring practices of faith-based institutions receiving federal funds.

“We have stated what our position is,” Van Pelt says. “But, frankly, we’ve been told that they are listening. They have not been imparting much information to us. So it is kind of a wait-and-see attitude [on our part].”

Steve Benen's take is accurate:

There have been organizations representing atheists around for decades, but I don't recall ever hearing about one being invited to the White House for a chat. Given that White House officials have also recently engaged plenty of religious groups and communities, from across the theological spectrum -- even a Focus on the Family representative extended generous praise -- it's only fair that they also sit down with an atheist advocacy group.

That said, this seems like an encouraging development concerning the interests of atheists. Historically, administrations would keep a group like the Secular Coalition for America at arm's length. What's more, a meeting like this, not too long ago, may have sparked a controversy.

That this meeting occurred, the group raised legitimate concerns, and no one freaked out about their discussion, looks like a positive development as it relates to diversity of spiritual thought.

From Obama's Cairo speech:

There is also one rule that lies at the heart of every religion - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples - a belief that isn't new; that isn't black or white or brown; that isn't Christian, or Muslim or Jew. It's a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the heart of billions. It's a faith in other people, and it's what brought me here today.

More of this, please.

I Pity the Fool

Mr. T. gives us all reason to pause and ponder the problem of evil.