On Birthers

The blog-reading public* is clamoring** for my thoughts on the Birther movement. I vacillate (or is it oscillate? I don't recall mentally turning around and achieving a point of zero velocity, so maybe I just keep going in a circle) between kinda enjoying the spectacle -- look at all the crazy white people! (they're all white) -- and being frightened of it. I mean, these people vote, hold jobs, and drive cars.*** And when it comes time to have a serious discussion in this country, about health care, for example, the opinions of these crazies appear in polls that help to dictate politicians actions. So nutters are hardly benign, and it is not like we're talking a vocal but tiny minority -- "No" and "Not Sure" accounted for 58% of Repulicans when asked if Obama was a legit citizen (and 17% of Independents, and 7% of Democrats -- am I wrong to think that the 7% of Democrats who aren't sure if Obama is a citizen all live south of the Mason-Dixon line, and vividly remember Strom Thrumond's 1948 campaign?)

This brings me to a point made quite succintly by Andrew Sullivan:

If that is what you really believe - that people in cities or suburbs, that minorities, that gays, that blacks and Hispanics are not part of "real America" - then of course, you are angry. You believe a fake America has taken over. You cannot understand this. So you start believing that we have a fascist/communist dictatorship, that there was some fraud allowing a non-citizen to become president, that the government is about to "take over" all healthcare provision ... and on and on. And no one is left in the GOP to challenge this, to calm it down, to present practical alternatives to the obvious crushing problems the country and the private sector have in paying for increasingly costly healthcare.

I depart from Judge Smails, however, in the source of all this paranoia -- I think it is almost 100% racial. In his own words:

For sure, there's a component of racism/xenophobia/Muslim/FunnyName to all of this. But it seems evident to me that this is much better explained by partisanship. If it were strictly --- or evenly largely --- racism, then we'd see a large number of poor white self-identified democrats (among whom racist attitudes poll as strong or stronger than most Republicans; plus they significantly outnumber poor white republicans) believing Obama wasn't born in the U.S. But we don't see that at all --- it's by and large a republican thing. So I'm inclined to believe that this is your classic partisan conspiracy belief --- not unlike the 30% of Democrats who believe Bush knew about 9/11 ahead of time or the 40% of democrats who think the vote in Ohio in 2004 was rigged. Even in the face of zero evidence for their cause, partisans are quick to latch on to conspiracies. It helps people feel good about themselves. And, of course, conspiracy theorists are nothing if not believers that the lack of evidence for their case is even more evidence of a conspiracy.

I think the crux of our disagreement is that I'm not sure I believe that, among poor white Democrats, "racist attitudes poll as strong or stronger than most Republicans." Well, perhaps better put, I suspect that racist poor whites are now a tiny tiny fraction of the Democrats' coalition (the 7%), almost all of them having moved to the Republican party over the last 20 years or so. So while the feelings correlate along party lines, that doesn't mean partisanship is driving these feelings.

The last time the Democrats lost an election ('04) some responded by saying the vote was unfair, undercounted, whatever, and given what happened in Florida in '00, that's not an entirely crazy thing to jump to, especially in the days immediately following the election. But the Republican response has been to deny that they guy was even born here, despite a birth certificate and a birth announcement in the Hawaiian papers, with these thoughts still going strong 8 months after the election?! Sorry, there's not an equivalence here. I think there is something much deeper driving these protests, and I think the non-whiteness of Obama is the source of it.




* Actually, one person
** And "asking" is probably more accurate than "clamoring"
*** Probably while texting

What is happiness?

A reader sends in a recent piece from the New York Times, an author reflecting on happiness. Read the whole thing (it's the length of a regular OpEd) but here are some sentences that caught my eye:

I was similarly miserable throughout the happiest summer I ever spent in New York City.

I wonder, sometimes, whether it is a perversity peculiar to my own mind or just the common lot of humanity to experience happiness mainly in retrospect.

We do each have a handful of those moments, the ones we only take out to treasure rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.” One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio. But this kind of intense and present happiness is heartbreakingly ephemeral; as soon as you notice it you dispel it, like blocking yourself from remembering a word by trying too hard to retrieve it.

Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living.

I agree with a lot of his sentiments. In some ways, I think I'm lucky (or perceptive, or something) to appreciate my happy moments while they are going on rather than only in retrospect. But there are also a lot of times when, if you asked me how are you doing, I don't think happy would be the first word out of my mouth (e.g. organic chemistry classes in college) but I now recall quite fondly as some of the best times in my life. Part of this may be nostalgia, for I know that I will never be in organic chemistry classes in college again, while time with my family, games at Fenway, etc. are all on-going events in my life. That certainly doesn't mean I don't appreciate the latter, but I think there is a different kind of happiness one experiences in the midst of something, compared to when you look back on something that is gone, never to come back.

The same is true for science

Ezra Klein ponders the often-stated result that having children decreases your happiness. He parses the research a bit more, and compares happiness to living a satisfying life. He concludes with this:

It may not be very fun to do your work or care for your children, but the two seem to be important contributors to a satisfying life. Which makes intuitive sense. On a moment-to-moment basis, I sort of loathe writing this blog. I would far rather be drinking a beer on my porch. But in the aggregate, I'm much more satisfied with my life when I'm writing this blog. I guess what I'm trying to say is that these data leave me confident that having children will be almost as rewarding as writing a blog. And I plan to tell that to them, and often.

No dunce caps needed

Since I'm surrounded by teachers, I'll point to this by Yglesias:

Smaller classes can have positive effects, but the effect is much smaller than the impact of having effective teachers. In other words, if you have 100 kids it’s better to have four good teachers teach them in groups of 25 than to have four good teachers and one bad one teach them in groups of 20. And not only better, it’s also cheaper. And since it’s cheaper, you could use the money you saved by not hiring the fifth teacher to make sure you pay the four good teachers enough to keep them in the classroom.

I'm pretty sure my wife is a good teacher, so if her school wants to pay her more, that's a policy I can get behind.

King Corn

I (finally) have gotten around to reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. There's a lot of stuff in there that I kinda already knew: factory farming of animals is disgusting, agricultural policy in this country creates all the wrong incentives, we're feeding corn to cows even though they normally eat grass. Of course, learning about these things in more depth is nice.

But one thing that I don't think I had appreciated nearly as much was the sheer pervasiveness of corn in our diets. Any processed food, and I do mean any, has corn in it. Maltodextrin, MSG, lecithin, and the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup -- all these ingredients, and many many more, are processed from corn.

So I decided to do an experiment, to see if I could avoid corn for a single day. I thought of this experiment the morning of, so I didn't have a lot of lead time to, say, arrange for a deep sea fishing trip to catch my dinner, plus my gun was, uh, in the, uh, gun shop, so I couldn't go hunting for, uh, varmints.

Breakfast was easy: coffee. There's a whole food if there ever was one.
Lunch: Went to the local Stop n' Shop, and after a lot of label-reading, was left with strawberries, Stonyfield organic yogurt, cashews, and V8 juice.
Dinner: Cheese and wheat crackers, homemade granola with yogurt.

Obviously there are a lot of really tasty things I could have eaten for dinner if I weren't feeling particularly lazy -- grass fed beef, for example (but no ketchup!) And my lovely wife pointed out to me that I kinda cheated with all the yogurt & dairy, as even those cows were likely corn-fed. So yes, corn is indeed everywhere.

Now, I'm certainly not going to cut corn out of my diet, this was just an experiment to see how ubiquitous it is. That said, I don't think processed foods are all that good for you, and we'd probably all be in better health if everything we ate didn't have high fructose corn syrup in it. I've heard it argued to those who have these thoughts that, well, if we all ate organic, we wouldn't be able to produce enough food to feed everyone. This I'm not so sure about. Corn, as it is currently grown, requires a helluva lot of petroleum-based fertilizer, which ain't cheap. Plus, by feeding it to cows or breaking it down into its component parts and industrially treating it (i.e. where maltodextrin comes from), a lot of energy gets used up. In other words, if you eat the corn itself, you're getting a very high percentage of the energy captured from the sun, but with each layer of feeding or processing, there's about a ten-fold drop in efficiency. Sure, corn is cheap, but that's because our government wants it to be. Plus, all these inefficiencies (run-off of fertilizer into rivers, giant lagoons of cow crap) have externalities that currently aren't being accounted for. But since our democracy would obviously fall apart if we didn't allow Iowa to hold the first caucus, I'm sure our idiotic corn-centric policy isn't going to change any time soon.

Science!

Andrew Sullivan points to an interesting finding:


His post in its entirety:

Robin Hanson points to the above graph from a recent survey and posits: If the public knew the truth, I expect two effects: The public would consider scientists to be less authoritative as a neutral source on policy questions, and Since scientists are respected, the public would become less conservative and more liberal. But it seems to me that scientists may simply be responding to the redefinition of conservatism in America as a fundamentalist Protestant religious grouping that denies evolution, favors (intellectually indefensible) Bibical literalism, and has a problem with the Enlightenment. Many scientists might remain conservative in the sense I hold - belief in limited government, pragmatic change, individual freedom - but feel they have to call themsleves "liberal" considering the views of those who now go by the name "conservative."

Sullivan's analysis certainly rings true to me. Further, I disagree with Hanson that the public considers scientists to be authoritative on, well, anything related to public policy.

Huh what?

While reading in Sports Illustrated about Mark Buehrle's perfect game, I couldn't help but notice the guy in the background of these pictures of Dewayne Wise's incredible ninth inning catch. An incredible play is happening right in front of him, and he's completely passed out. It also looks like the bottle of beer he has still has the cap on it.

Deadline trades

In baseball yesterday, the Sox traded Justin Masterson and two prospects for Victor Martinez. In the last four years, Victor has put up an OPS of 0.856, 0.879, 0.701 (an injury shortened 2008), and 0.832 so far this year. Now, these are good numbers but hardly elite slugger numbers. What does make him an All-Star, though, is that he's putting up these numbers mostly from the catcher position. In previous years, he's started ~125 games at catcher and ~30 games at 1B, but this year his split has been much closer to 1:1.

Essentially, the Red Sox now have five players for four positions: Lowell, Youkilis, Varitek, Martinez, and Ortiz to rotate through C, 1B, 3B, and DH (the ability of Youkilis to play both 1B and 3B, and play them well, in invaluable in this regard). Martinez, like Varitek, is a switch-hitter, although his vs. righty and vs. lefty splits are quite similar (Varitek is much better batting from the right side). Given the age of both Lowell and the Captain, Francona shouldn't have much trouble finding reasons to sit them as the season wears on. It will also be good to have a serious bat to come off the bench for pinch-hitting duties. As I wrote about at the All-Star break, the most serious concern for the Sox was giving too many at-bats to the Mark Kotsays of the world. Well, they've solved that problem, and given themselves some nice insurance if Lowell's hip acts up again.

As for LaRoche, well, we hardly knew ye. I'm not really sure that Casey Kotchman brings much more to the table, and I think he'll be playing the role of Doug Meintkewitz (nope, not looking up how to spell that), coming in off the bench as a late-inning defensive replacement. Whatever that is worth...

I think it is safe to say that, of all the teams in the AL East, the Red Sox did the most to improve.

The Know-Nothings

DamnGoodTechnician promises a post on "dealing with the scientific uneducatedness of one's family." Yesterday I made the mistake of mentioning the term "PCR" in an email to some contemporary male friends. One guessed that PCR stood for Peruvian Chesty Redhead (hmm....)

Now, anyone who's gotten past intro bio in college knows what PCR is, but the vast majority of otherwise-educated folks have no frickin' clue. I'm not sure if this is odd or not -- I mean, it is a tremendously powerful innovation that has revolutionized biology over the past 20 years. I'm wondering what the equivalent things are in other professions. What is the lawyer version of PCR?

1st and 10

Since humidity has finally (?) arrived in New England, I've been thinking a bit more about non-gross times, such as the fall, when there is football. If you've got a few minutes to spare, read this press conference by Coach Belichick. Who talks like that? No one, really. My favorite part:

Q: This is your 10th season here. How have you changed as a coach since your first game here in 2000? BB: I’d say I’m a lot friendlier.

Now, I know that a lot of non-Patriots fans think he is a total jag-off. But what I love about him is that he absolutely despises the vapid media. As do I.

More coffee?

Judge Smails passes along this article from Slate, which gets at exactly what I was saying about Starbucks in relation to Diesel Cafe. Key quote:

Soon after declining Starbucks's buyout offer, Hyman received the expected news that the company was opening up next to one of his stores. But instead of panicking, he decided to call his friend Jim Stewart, founder of the Seattle's Best Coffee chain, to find out what really happens when a Starbucks opens nearby. "You're going to love it," Stewart reported. "They'll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar." The prediction came true: Each new Starbucks store created a local buzz, drawing new converts to the latte-drinking fold. When the lines at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason, these converts started venturing out—and, Look! There was another coffeehouse right next-door! Hyman's new neighbor boosted his sales so much that he decided to turn the tactic around and start targeting Starbucks. "We bought a Chinese restaurant right next to one of their stores and converted it, and by God, it was doing $1 million a year right away," he said.

Now, I don't know if this proves anything either way about a Domino's Pizza in JP... but it certainly shows that 'common sense' is often wrong when it comes to free markets and people's behavior.

Chain stores

Next week, there's a community meeting in my section of Boston (Jamaica Plain) to discuss the possibility of allowing a Domino's Pizza franchise to inhabit a currently-empty storefront. JP has a long history of having a reflexive dislike of chain stores, and I'm sure these folks will make up the vast majority of this meeting. I disagree, and think that the Domino's should be allowed in. Here's why...

First, precedent... currently JP has a CVS, a Dunkin Donuts, a 7-11, and two Tedeschi's, so it is not like you have to be a non-chain store to be there. So from solely a consistency standpoint, I don't see how they could be kept out. And if the people of JP are really, really against chain stores, then fine, don't shop there, and it will go out of business. But it seems like a sizable percentage of JP residents are not against chain stores, as the aforementioned places have been in business for awhile.

I've heard it argued that JP already has enough pizza places (by my count, there are 5 on a mile-long stretch of the main drag) so that's enough, we don't need any more. I don't like this argument either. More than one of the pizza places is, at least to my palate, terrible. That they are still in business means either that there is plenty of demand for pizza or that people really do have a wide-variety of pizza palates (or that some of the joints are mob fronts). I'm no kool-aid drinker when it comes to the power of the free market in all things, but in the realm of pizza, I'm more than willing to the let people vote with their feet.

And certainly, an open business is much better for the community than an empty store front. Areas that thrive (for example, Davis Square in Somerville) do so because they are destinations -- people want to go there because there are other people there. This is why Davis Square can support both the Diesel Cafe and Starbucks -- indeed, the former has continued to thrive despite the presence of the latter. Naively, you might think that the two coffee shops would cut into each other's business: this would be true if the number of people in Davis Square was fixed. But it isn't -- because it is an attractive place, housing occupancy is higher, and people who don't live there still visit. Contrast that to a world where the Diesel Cafe is across the street from a boarded up building. So this is an example of a rising tide lifting all boats.

Mental Health

Joe Pantoliano, probably best known (by me, anyway) as Cosmo in The Fugitive, has started a foundation to raise awareness for those with depression and other mental illnesses (he has depression). The website is: http://www.nkm2.org/

Certainly, this is a whole area that doesn't get discussed in the open nearly enough, so I'm glad to see the power of celebrity doing something in this regard. While discussing this during a Sox game with Don & Eck on NESN, he mentioned that more servicemen and women are killing themselves in Iraq than are being killed in combat. Jeebus.

P.S. You might remember him from Risky Business, The Matrix, Memento, or The Sopranos

Regular Health

Apparently the only thing happening in the world is health care. Better than dead celebrities and Harvard professors, I guess. For purely archival purposes (since I'm sure everyone has already seen it), here's Bill O'Reilly showing that he has no quantitative literacy:

I'm sure Jon Stewart had fun with that.

Turning to the White House, today they unleashed their eight things that need to be in any health care bill in order for Obama to sign it. Worth going over point-by-point:

No Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions: Insurance companies will be prohibited from refusing you coverage because of your medical history.

Certainly this is a good thing, although I do wonder how much higher your premiums will be if, say, you have diabetes. Or put another way, you could certainly imagine an insurance company not denying you coverage but rather charging you an exorbitant amount for it because you're risky.

No Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pays: Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses.

Ah, ask and ye shall receive, there will be a cap on expenses (I should note that I'm reading these as I post them). Okay, this raises a lot of questions, though. So, if there's only so much that you can be charged per year for health care, who picks up the rest? Is that cap a progressive cap (i.e. if you're rich, you have a higher annual cap)? And I'm no economist, but I do know that it is universally accepted that things like rent control are bad, as it creates a situation where there is not enough supply (or too much demand, or something...). I'd have to learn a lot more to know if these concerns would apply to health care.

No Cost-Sharing for Preventive Care: Insurance companies must fully cover, without charge, regular checkups and tests that help you prevent illness, such as mammograms or eye and foot exams for diabetics.

This is a no brainer. While the rate limiting step for me getting a physical is remembering to do it, time constraints, etc., there are plenty of poor folks out there who probably do think twice about that extra twenty dollar co-pay, so anything to remove the barrier, the better. I do wonder, though, how does one define preventative? I imagine there are a lot of things that are in a gray area.

No Dropping of Coverage for Seriously Ill: Insurance companies will be prohibited from dropping or watering down insurance coverage for those who become seriously ill.

This is another no-brainer. The point of insurance is to pool costs so that we're all spreading out the risk for the few who get expensively ill.

No Gender Discrimination: Insurance companies will be prohibited from charging you more because of your gender.

Well, this helps half of us, and hurts half of us. Not sure this is terribly important.

No Annual or Lifetime Caps on Coverage: Insurance companies will be prevented from placing annual or lifetime caps on the coverage you receive.

Seems like this could have been folded into point two. This is starting to read like the ten commandments.

Extended Coverage for Young Adults: Children would continue to be eligible for family coverage through the age of 26.

Fine with me, since a lot of youths continue to live with their parents post-college anyway, they might as well mooch health care coverage.

Guaranteed Insurance Renewal: Insurance companies will be required to renew any policy as long as the policyholder pays their premium in full. Insurance companies won't be allowed to refuse renewal because someone became sick.

This basically covers the loop-hole where an insurance company could say hey, we're not denying coverage, we're just not renewing it.

Okay, that's the eight. They're benign enough to be fine. What they don't discuss, of course, is cost, which is the bulk of the reason why we're trying to reform the system in the first place.

Drinking crazy juice

Ms. McGee sends along this tidbit of news:

In other pockets of the state, the reaction to Democratic proposals has been strong, too. At a recent town-hall meeting in suburban Simpsonville, a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to "keep your government hands off my Medicare." "I had to politely explain that, 'Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,' " Inglis recalled. "But he wasn't having any of it."

I spent awhile thinking about what exactly about this story bothered me so much. I realized it is not so much that there are stupid people out there, but rather the complete and utter confidence these idiots have in their worldview, to the point where no amount of evidence can sway them.

Indeed, you see this with the Obama-isn't-a-citizen brigade as well (which a frighteningly high number of GOP congressmen seem to not exactly discourage) -- either their sources for news are so limited, or their cognitive dissonance so high, that they honestly believe Obama wasn't born here, nevermind that birth announcement in the Hawaii paper placed forty-some years ago.

I wonder if this is one downside of the internet, that it makes it much easier for the crazies to find each other and reinforce their worldview. Or maybe we've always had people who are just as nuts. I think they were quieter in the past, though.

Take that, you straw man!

In debating Krugman, Tyler Cowen makes this point, to somewhat defend the ability of the free market to provide health care:

There are plenty of health care services in this country, such as laser eye surgery, or plastic surgery, which are supplied in more or less market settings. I don't consider their efficiency an open and shut case, but it's quite possible we'd be delighted if other areas of health care worked this well in terms of cost-lowering and innovation and even availability. It could be that these services are more transparent or it could be they are simply less regulated and further removed from third-party payment.

Cowen, laughably so, leaves out the most obvious reason for the competition that allows for "cost-lowering and innovation" -- these are totally optional procedures! You can shop around for the best price on laser eye surgery because you have time. You do not, however, have time to shop around for the best deal on a triple bypass. Further, insurance does not cover LASIK or boob jobs, and your health doesn't suffer if you don't get them. So this is really not the right way to prove Krugman wrong.

Gun control

Living in a city as I do, it is perhaps not surprising that I think the nation's gun laws are too lax, not too restrictive. Which is why I really like this tongue-in-cheek OpEd by E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post:

Isn't it time to dismantle the metal detectors, send the guards at the doors away and allow Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights by being free to carry their firearms into the nation's Capitol? I've been studying the deep thoughts of senators who regularly express their undying loyalty to the National Rifle Association, and I have decided that they should practice what they preach. They tell us that the best defense against crime is an armed citizenry and that laws restricting guns do nothing to stop violence. If they believe that, why don't they live by it?

Let's hope we don't have a burnout

Did you know that Carrie Fisher, i.e. Princess Leia, was once married to Paul Simon (the singer, not the Senator) and also fooled around with Chris Dodd (the Senator)?

We're going to need a bigger boat

I knew Harvard was big, but I didn't know this big... a recent email missive from some dean, talking about Professor Marc Kirshner, noted:

To give you some perspective on this honor, only 22 of Harvard’s more than 12,000 faculty members hold University Professorships.

12,000?!?! That is a lot of dorks.

The other University Professors, in case you're wondering, can be found here. Both Gates & Summers are on the list. Kinda oddly, Kirshner is the first biologist to make the cut.

Burn baby burn

While scrolling through a database of available grants, I came across this offering from the Department of Defense:

The FY09 PRCRP Collaborative Translational Science Award requests applications from these Focus Areas only: Research into melanoma and other skin cancers related to deployments of service members to areas of high exposure by: A) Understanding molecular and immunological effects of UV at the level of the cell and at the level of the human host, and B) The genetic epidemiology and increased susceptibility to melanoma and other skin cancers.

Now, this isn't quite my area of research so it isn't something I'd apply for [by which I mean, not something I'd write a grant for that my boss would claim as his own] but it did make me think that, jeez, a lot of our servicemen probably have a lot more on their minds in Iraq than a regular application of sunscreen, yet said application is really really important for preventing problems later on. At least the DOD is thinking about that.

I'm worth $5,000,000

A little late to the party on this one, but Peter Singer had a good oped in the Times this past weekend, about rationing and health care:

When a Washington Post journalist asked Daniel Zemel, a Washington rabbi, what he thought about federal agencies putting a dollar value on human life, the rabbi cited a Jewish teaching explaining that if you put one human life on one side of a scale, and you put the rest of the world on the other side, the scale is balanced equally. Perhaps that is how those who resist health care rationing think. But we already put a dollar value on human life. If the Department of Transportation, for example, followed rabbinical teachings it would exhaust its entire budget on road safety. Fortunately the department sets a limit on how much it is willing to pay to save one human life. In 2008 that limit was $5.8 million. Other government agencies do the same. Last year the Consumer Product Safety Commission considered a proposal to make mattresses less likely to catch fire. Information from the industry suggested that the new standard would cost $343 million to implement, but the Consumer Product Safety Commission calculated that it would save 270 lives a year — and since it valued a human life at around $5 million, that made the new standard a good value. If we are going to have consumer-safety regulation at all, we need some idea of how much safety is worth buying. Like health care bureaucrats, consumer-safety bureaucrats sometimes decide that saving a human life is not worth the expense. Twenty years ago, the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, examined a proposal for installing seat belts in all school buses. It estimated that doing so would save, on average, one life per year, at a cost of $40 million. After that, support for the proposal faded away. So why is it that those who accept that we put a price on life when it comes to consumer safety refuse to accept it when it comes to health care?

Bad polls

I love polls, I really do. I think they often turn up fascinating results, and a dream job of mine would be to conduct polls all day about all sorts of things. This might be why I hate it when polls are incorrectly used and bandied about. Over the weekend the Washington Post did a poll asking whether people approved or disapproved of Obama's handling of health care. Since his approval rating in this regard was has gone from 57 to 53 to 49% approval from April to June to July, this finding was treated as evidence that, well, Obama and health care reform were in trouble, that the country, the median voter, the people who will boot the Democrats out of Congress in 2010 were turning against the Administration.

But that's not what the poll said. The poll said that 49% of people approved of the way Obama was handling health care (with 44% disapproval). It did not say WHY. Paul Krugman, for example, probably disapproves of the way Obama has been dealing with health care. Does that mean he's going to vote Republican in the midterms? I don't think so. Indeed, the same poll asked who you thought was doing a better job on health care, Obama v. GOP Congressmen -- Obama won hands down, 54 to 34. Funny I didn't see that number reported anywhere.

One Small Step for... Me

Exactly 10 weeks ago, [name redacted until after the lawyers are done with me] hit me with his car while I was on my way to work. Since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, my ankle went from the picture on the left to the picture on the right.*
Kinda fitting that, on the 40th Anniversary of the Moon Landing,** my doc gave me the thumbs up to start walking again, while wearing a moon boot no less. My right leg is currently huge, while my left one is rather withered and/or atrophied.

* Actually, the 'normal' picture is what it looked like after they set it -- I didn't just happen to have a pre-accident x-ray of my ankle
** Yes, I know it was actually filmed in a Hollywood studio, please don't send me your personal manifesto

BU can suck it

A very nice girl of 22 works in my lab. She is unmarried with 3 year old twins whom she loves very much and cares for very well. Every day, she drops them off at day care or camp or school or what have you, works for 8 hours, then picks them up, feeds them, gives them a bath, puts them to bed, and then someone from her family babysits while she takes night classes at BU to earn her Bachelor of Science. And don't forget, these are twins we're talking about, meaning there's two of them.

Today I was asking how many classes she had remaining before getting her degree with a major in biomedical sciences, and she mentioned that she was nearing the end, but still had to take some required core classes: History, English, and Philosophy 101. I commented that gee, that must be damn expensive, and I was right: each class is a couple thousand bucks. I then asked why she didn't take the classes at Harvard, because as a Harvard employee, there's only a nominal fee to enroll in night classes. She said that BU won't accept Harvard classes for credit. Let's say that again: Boston University won't accept non-major classes from Harvard and instead engages in a blatant money-grab from a single mother... with twins!

I'm sure most other schools are similarly greedy, but wow, you'd think some dean would be willing to make an exception. So BU can suck it.

Rationing

The Votemaster makes a point I agree with:

One of the points that be central to the 2010 campaign debates is the issue of rationing health care. It is completely taboo in America but of course it happens. Suppose you are unemployed and don't have health insurance and only a $500,000 heart transplant can save your life but you don't have the money. What happens next? Answer: you die. That's called rationing. There is no way the U.S. or any other country can provide every citizen with unlimited health care. In particular, somebody has to decide if, of example, it is worth spending $54,000 for a drug that slows the spread of kidney cancer and might increase the patient's life by 6 months, but will increase everyone else's insurance premiums. Nobody ever wants to talk about these tradeoffs in public, but there are there of course. What a health-bill will do is create some kind of committee to make decisions like how much a 6 month life extension is worth for 20-year-olds, 50-year-olds, and 80-year olds. Right now, private insurance companies quietly make such decisions every day. Any health bill will force the process into daylight and cause an uproar.

I think this is something Obama needs to get out and stress more, that there is already plenty of rationing, even for those who have health care through their employer.