the short time span of American history

Meet Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. He was born in 1925 and is a retired history professor. Also, his grandfather, John Tyler, was the 10th president.

What?

Yes, John Tyler, born in 1790, personal acquaintance of Thomas Jefferson, has a grandson who is still alive today.

Tyler had 15 children, the 13th of whom, Lyon Tyler, was born in 1853 (when the ex-president was 63). Lyon in turn had Lyon, Jr., at age 72.

Stranger than fiction.

Dick "Dracula" Cheney

Rep. Alan Grayson (D) may not contribute much to constructive political discourse, but he knows how to make me laugh:

Chris Matthews asked Grayson what he thinks of Cheney's attacks on President Obama for "dithering" on Afghanistan.

"Well, my response is -- and by the way, I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes, because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he's talking," said Grayson. "But my response is this: He's just angry because the president doesn't shoot old men in the face. But by the way, when he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?"

It's like Grayson's whole public life is an appearance on Bill Maher.

How Soon we forget

A tongue-in-cheek comment at talking points memo:

Haven't the New Black Panters learned anything after all those years of Republican dominance? If you want to intimidate a crowd, just bring an assortment of hand guns and assault rifles!

Geesh, it's like they're still stuck in the 50s and 60s. Civic discourse has risen to a whole new modern level.

Two references here: first to an alleged case of voter intimidation by some group calling themselves the New Black Panthers (see the post under which this comment appeared); second, to the nutjobs who brought and/or brandished guns at health care town hall meetings this summer.

But no one had to remind the original black panthers to bring guns to political rallies.

Who says the 60s were tame?

"International Law" is more and less than you think it is

In this post at the group academic blog Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell makes plain up front that he is writing as a political scientist--not an international lawyer. But he does a good job, I think, of explaining why arguing about "international law" as a unified term creates all sorts of difficulties.

In short, when we talk about whether or not "international law" works, we are (or should be) having a number of different conversations.

International law encompasses international political institutions like the UN; international trade organizations like the WTO (and various regional regimes e.g. NAFTA); laws of war and humanitarian law (regulating what one can or cannot do in battle); and various conglomerations of private international law, business, and international regulatory law which are absolutely vital to the working of the global system but--since they do little more than grease the wheels of global social and economic intercourse--are relatively uncontroversial.

For each subset of international law, we are talking about different values, goals, and efficacy. Just because the UN security council is dominated by great power rivalries does not mean that "international law" per se is illegitimate or not useful (nor does it mean that seeking a security council blessing for armed conflict is a pointless task, as Farrell points out).

In political questions, international law without question is important, but in which circumstances and through which mechanisms it is difficult to determine precisely. It is in many ways akin to determining the role of ideas and morality in policymaking at the domestic level. If nothing else, there's a fruitful research agenda here (grantmaking foundations, are you listening?)

department of unfortunate names

The New York Times warns us that just because someone dies, has a heart attack, or a miscarriage immediately after receiving a flu shot does not mean that the flu shot is the cause of said misfortune. There are 2400 miscarriages a day in this country, for instance; it is a virtual guarantee that some of them will occur mere hours after being vaccinated. In our world of manufactured outrage and 15 minute news cycles, we should not mistake coincidence for causation.

This seems like good advice. But can we really trust the Centers for Disease Control, when they employ this guy as their spokesman:

“Back then, it was a neat thing to have a fax machine and get out four pages a minute,” said Joe Quimby, a press officer for the disease centers. “Now, communications have to be multimodal. Turning on the three broadcast news outlets is not going to reach everybody any more.”

Err, nothing to see here, good citizens of springfield.

The Elephant in the Room

The NFL has fined the NY Jets a total of $125,000 for not reporting last year that Brett Favre had a torn biceps tendon.

Why should teams have to report injuries? Here's how ESPN reports it:

Hiding injuries could affect an opponent's preparation, and the NFL has stepped up policing such practices. Commissioner Roger Goodell said Monday that the case would be an opportunity for the league to stress that all teams must abide by the injury report rules.

Hmm, something seems to be missing. Let's try that again:

Hiding injuries could affect an opponent's preparation the betting of gamblers everywhere, and the NFL has stepped up policing such practices. Commissioner Roger Goodell said Monday that the case would be an opportunity for the league to stress that all teams must abide by the injury report rules.

There, that's better.

The face of the faceless corporation

Bill Belichick can do little wrong in New England. Under his watch, the Patriots have been clearly the best team in the NFL (if not all of sports) over the last decade. In fact, I read the other day that the team has more wins in their last 100 games than any other NFL team in history.

That Belichick has been able to sustain this kind of success in a league with a salary cap is remarkable. He owes it not solely to his genius as a football coach, but also to the sharp personnel management of the organization as a whole. In short, they are a model corporation--they find and exploit efficiencies, and are ruthless in their execution (even stretching the rules cheating when necessary).

And just like other model corporations, they show no loyalty to their employees. If you produce you stay; if you don't, or if you can be replaced by someone more productive, cheaper, or with more potential, you're out. The latest example is Richard Seymour. A five time pro-bowler, Seymour anchored the defensive line for three Patriots super bowl teams. But last week Belichick abruptly traded Seymour to the Oakland Raiders.

As a football decision I'll defer to Belichick's judgment; he's earned it. But it's clear the move was made with little regard for Seymour himself. Seymour says he was "blindsided." His children had already started school in the Boston area, and he is also the legal guardian for a 15 year old cousin in the area. "[M]e and my family have never been separated. This was a difficult transition," he said.

Seymour's a millionaire, so I can't feel too bad for him. Certainly many would trade places with him without a second thought. But his story reflects the travails of working men and women all across the country, subject to transfer or termination without warning or care.

health care

I didn’t get a chance to watch Obama’s big health care speech last night, so I read the text today. Here’s how Joe Wilson’s boneheadedness will forever be memorialized in the written historical record:

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You lie! (Boos.)

That idiocy aside, this paragraph struck me as fundamentally the most important part of the entire speech:

I've said -- I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both these approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn't, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch. (Applause.) And that is precisely what those of you in Congress have tried to do over the past several months.

This has been Obama’s position all along (and on more issues that just healthcare). He is not a radical. He will leave the status quo more or less intact, and try to make things better at the margins. When you’re dealing with a trillion dollar industry like healthcare, those margins are pretty big. As Obama said last night: “if we are able to slow the growth of health care costs by just one-tenth of 1 percent each year -- one-tenth of 1 percent -- it will actually reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the long term.” Anyhow, it’s never been completely clear to me whether this moderate approach reflects Obama the thinker—a pragmatist acolyte of Thaler and Sunstein who wants to “nudge” the entire country by means of behavioralist economics voodoo on a wide scale—or Obama the street politician—who learned that utopian dreams don’t get you very far and you’d better get what you can in the political context you are given. I’m guessing it’s the latter, in this case.

Anyhow, what that big blockquote means is that we are not going to have radical health care reform in this country. And that means that the details of whatever bill that emerges will determine the success or failure of the bill as a whole. For example, take this paragraph:

And that's why under my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance -- just as most states require you to carry auto insurance. (Applause.) Likewise -- likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to help cover the cost of their workers. There will be a hardship waiver for those individuals who still can't afford coverage, and 95 percent of all small businesses, because of their size and narrow profit margin, would be exempt from these requirements. (Applause.)

So, how do we decide who can “afford” health insurance, and who can’t? And how big will the subsidies be, and who will receive them?

Finally, there is the much ballyhooed “public option.” Here’s what Obama had to say about it:

Now, it is -- it's worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I've proposed tonight. But its impact shouldn't be exaggerated -- by the left or the right or the media. It is only one part of my plan, and shouldn't be used as a handy excuse for the usual Washington ideological battles. To my progressive friends, I would remind you that for decades, the driving idea behind reform has been to end insurance company abuses and make coverage available for those without it. (Applause.) The public option -- the public option is only a means to that end -- and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal. And to my Republican friends, I say that rather than making wild claims about a government takeover of health care, we should work together to address any legitimate concerns you may have. (Applause.)

So is it important or not? Obama says estimates show only 5% of Americans will choose it. Is this really enough to provide competitive pressure on the insurance companies? The ideological implications of the public option seem to have outweighed its practical effects. (Granted, 5% of the US population is a lot of people).

Stay tuned.
[written 9-10-09]

Slow Tables

Here’s an interesting idea: furniture-maker Charles Shackleton saw how the growing localvore movement had created a desire among many to see where their food comes from. He wanted to use this interest to benefit his own business.

So he came up with the “Naked Table Project.” People who live in or were willing to travel to Vermont ordered tables, and got to meet everyone involved in the process of making them: from the loggers who cut down the maple trees to the sawmillers who processed the wood, to the carpenters who built the joints. Customers then helped assemble the tables themselves.

Obviously this isn’t for everyone, although Shackleton says the tables aren’t really all that expensive (though they seem pretty expensive to me). Not everyone has the time or the inclination. In large part, it seems like a way to get people to pay more for a product (the same thing works with pick your own - you usually pay more than the farmer would get wholesale). But it’s a neat idea.

The coolest part, I think, is that each purchaser planted a maple tree to replace the wood they used, and then, as Shackleton describes:

We took portraits of all the people with the tree they planted, and we took down the GPS coordinates of the seedlings, and put each number on the bottom of the table

So in a generation or two, whoever owns the table can go to that spot and see the grown-up tree. A cool way to connect the product to the land.

not an easy question

"Sometimes I think that the legalizers and the drug warriors have a secret arms control treaty, in which each side renounces the use of factually and logically sound arguments," writes Mark Kleiman.

Kleiman is an expert on public policy and crime and drugs; he knows what he's talking about.

He has previously pointed out that the estimates of the revenue California would make from legalizing marijuana are ridiculously inflated by proponents of that policy. Either that, or the estimates assume that everyone is going to start smoking ten joints a day.

According to Kleiman, "legalizers" (as he terms them) often make arguments in a free-lunch sort of way: legalize drugs and all the bad goes away--the crime, the underage use, the exploding prison populations, etc. What they tend to ignore is the following problem:

Legal drugs are cheap.

Unless you tax them at very high rates, rates of abuse will likely increase. (the opposite of the observation that drinking declines when you increase alcohol taxes).

But if you raise taxes to make drugs cost as much as they do now, you'll create all sorts of black markets, with some of the same problems of law enforcement we have now.

There are real tradeoffs to legalization. You may get less crime, but at the risk of worse abuse.

Now, I still tend to think legalization of marijuana is a good idea. It frankly is no worse than alcohol. As for the other drugs, I'm still on the fence. There is much to be said for ending the drug war, stopping the militarization of police departments, etc. But I worry about the effects of having very powerful, very addictive drugs widely available. As Kleiman points out: "Alcohol - the drug we decided to legalize and regulate - kills about 100,000 people a year: several times as many as all the illicit drugs combined." Decriminalization (but not legalization) seems the best option for now.

Haven't seen THAT argument before

Jeff Jacoby, in the Boston Globe: If he were alive today, JFK would be a Republican.

Arguments. JFK:
1. cut taxes
2. opposed affirmative action
3. vicious anti-communist

These are all true, so far as it goes. JFK was notoriously a slow mover on civil rights and somewhat of a hawk (though the "missile gap" was mainly a political ploy, and he was the voice of reason in the Cuban missile crisis).
But Jacoby makes tremendous errors of scale. There is a difference, for example, between cutting top marginal rates from 91% to 70%, as JFK did, and claiming that raising top rates from 32% to 35% (approximately) is "socialism."

I don't see JFK in the latter camp.

Times change, and the politics of the possible changes with them. Is there any reason to think that JFK, were he alive in 2009, wouldn't hold substantially the same positions as his recently-deceased younger brother?

To top it off, Jacoby concludes by arguing that Eisenhower is closer to the modern-day GOP than JFK is to the modern Dems. Goldwater, anyone?

See also David Greenberg on why JFK was no supply-sider.

Super Placebo

Recently, drug companies have canceled several major new products when the new drugs failed to outperform the placebo. Re-testing of old, successful drugs--like Prozac--has met a similar outcome. This is not because the drugs are becoming less effective, apparently, but because placebos have become more effective, writes Steve Silberman in Wired.

How is this possible? It's not as though we're using higher-quality sugar in the sugar pills.

The most likely explanation, according to Silberman, is that the pricey ad campaigns from drug companies have succeeding in convincing people that drugs work for a wide variety of conditions. And the placebo effect is based on the idea that if you think something will work, it will. So ad campaigns paradoxically may make it harder for us to heal on our own, but may make treatments more effective.

I've always been fascinated by what the placebo effect (or "placebo response," as one doctor cited in the article calls it) says about the body's capacity for self-healing. A 2007 survey of Chicago doctors found that nearly half prescribed some sort of placebo treatment to patients, showing that even the medical community has started to come around. Silberman's article describes some of the neural pathways that explain how placebos work, and also sheds light on why placebos seem to be less effective in other regions of the world. A fascinating read.

Needless to say, finding a way to harness this power would go a long way toward reducing our health care costs.

(found via Kevin Drum)

Four torture myths

Glad to hear today that Attorney General Holder is going to start an investigation into the CIA’s torture practices during the past administration. Deciding whom to punish and how can be tricky—morally, legally, and politically—but I’m glad that President Obama’s previous approach (namely, hoping the problem would go away) has proven politically untenable.

Anyhow, since any investigation is guaranteed to give rise to much outrage on all sides, I figured I should write up some thoughts I had during the last round of debates.

In short, it would be helpful if the following were more widely understood as myths:

1. Torture is justified because of the ticking time bomb scenario
On the surface, this is quite compelling: a terrorist has hidden a time bomb, whose detonation will kill thousands of people. You have him in custody. Shouldn’t you torture him until he tells you where it is?
The more you think about this, the more preposterous it seems. To make this work as a policy, you would need to have 1) an imminent threat of mass destruction; 2) a suspect in custody; and 3) virtual certainty of the existence of the bomb and the guilt of the suspect. (Number 3 is vitally important, otherwise this is a warrant to torture anyone at any time on the presumption of a plot). Has this situation ever occurred outside of Die Hard and 24?
But even if it did—let’s say we managed to intercept one of the hijackers on September 11 and he told us there was a plot but not the details—that is no reason to make torture official policy, as the Bush administration did. Would the capturing FBI agent be morally correct to use torture to solicit the necessary information? Yes, and if one is a particularly ruthless utilitarian, one could even argue that that agent is morally required to torture one person to save thousands. But, as Kevin Drum once pointed out if such an unlikely situation were to occur, and an agent “successfully” tortured the subject, the president would no doubt issue a pardon. A policy to make torture legal ahead of time is counterproductive.

2. Torture is justified because it is applied only to terrorists who deserve no better
Khaled Sheikh Muhammed is a mass murderer, why should we care what happens to him? The problem is that many of the suspected terrorists (a majority of those at Guantanamo) subject to inhumane detention were not like KSM. They were either completely innocent, or else relatively minor players—like Abu Zubaida. This fact, despite its frequent appearance in magazine articles (and even on This American Life) never seems to have bubbled up into the top level discourse to the point where torture apologists have had to take notice.

3. Torture harms only the victim
“Enhanced interrogation techniques” cause their victims extreme anguish. Waterboarding, as defined by the ICRC is torture. (And as Mark Danner has pointed out, the SERE program on which interrogation policies are based was itself based directly on the illegal techniques used by such paragons of virtue as 1950s-era China). But a policy of torture also turns Americans into torturers—and not simply in the moral, abstract sense, but concretely. Someone has to slam those prisoners against walls and listen to their gasping screams as cascades of water convince them they will drown. This isn’t healthy.

4. Torture means shooting someone in the kneecap
Thanks to TV, we tend to think that only physical violence—breaking fingers, burning eyelids, ripping out fingernails—counts as torture. We don’t fully realize the physical pain that comes from being shackled in a standing position with arms overhead for hours or days at a time, nor the emotional trauma caused by sleep or sensory deprivation (Atul Gawande wrote an excellent article on the almost certain insanity caused by extended solitary confinement – definitely worth reading).

I’m not even touching here the debate about whether or not torture produces reliable intelligence that could not be attained by other means, nor the legal questions.

In terms of what should be done going forward, the overriding goal ought to be the creation of a durable and powerful opinion—in government circles and the public at large—against torture. We must create an atmosphere in which no reputable public figure can endorse torture (with torture understood broadly, as explained above). A good start would be a 9/11 Commission-style endeavor to produce a document that has wide public credibility and that lays bare some of the misconceptions that still pervade our discourse on the subject. I don’t think that Congress is capable of doing this—only an external “bipartisan” commission would be capable.

score one for not faking

I've wondered before about the precise mix of incompetence and deviousness in the Bush administration. Could the man really be as dumb as he sometimes looked? Or was it all an act, meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator? And did George W. actually make policy according to fundamentalist evangelical beliefs, or did this, too, serve as a sort of smokescreen.

Well, score one for fundamentalism:

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

The story comes from the Council for Secular Humanism, not exactly a disinterested source for these matters. But apparently this has been reported several times in the French press, and more than one French source confirms that it happened. And it does conform, as the Council's article notes, with the briefing books that Donald Rumsfeld prepared for the president, complete with biblical quotations on the cover. Presumably, Rumsfeld knew the best way to get Bush's attention.

If indeed Bush did try to convince Chirac through Biblical prophecy, this raises yet another question about the previous administration--were his advisers no smarter than he was? How could anyone possibly think this wouldn't backfire?

via Kevin Drum

... please

Best/worst company name ever: Nigro, Nigro & White

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