Got registered at the VA, went to the DMV, and got Shawn’s license all fixed, and now chilling with the dogs. He’s now a WV resident, and I wish I could explain how hard it was to do that. You would have thought I was making Osama bin Laden my roommate.
Archives for April 2014
Friday Evening Open Thread: Find the Funny Where You Can
This lady deserves a raise. As we strap in and buckle down, what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?
Friday Evening Open Thread: Find the Funny Where You CanPost + Comments (77)
Long Read: “How the global banana industry is killing the world’s favorite fruit”
No recipe exchange tonight, so in its place you get a Quartz report on the pros and cons of the global food market:
During harvest last year, banana farmers in Jordan and Mozambique made a chilling discovery. Their plants were no longer bearing the soft, creamy fruits they’d been growing for decades. When they cut open the roots of their banana plants, they saw something that looked like this.
Scientists first discovered the fungus that is turning banana plants into this rotting, fibrous mass in Southeast Asia in the 1990s. Since then the pathogen, known as the Tropical Race 4 strain of Panama disease, has slowly but steadily ravaged export crops throughout Asia. The fact that this vicious soil-borne fungus has now made the leap to Mozambique and Jordan is frightening. One reason is that it’s getting closer to Latin America, where at least 70% of the world’s $8.9-billion-a-year worth of exported bananas is grown…
Even if it takes longer to arrive, the broader ravaging of the commercial banana appears inevitable. And we don’t need to imagine what that would mean for banana exports—the exact scenario has already happened. Starting in 1903, Race 1, an earlier variant of today’s pathogen, ravaged the export plantations of Latin America and the Caribbean. Within 50 years, Race 1 drove the world’s only export banana species, the Gros Michel, to virtual extinction. That’s why 99% of the bananas eaten in the developed world today are a cultivar called the Cavendish, the only export-suitable banana that could take on Race 1 and live to tell…
But the bigger difference now is that, compared its 20th-century cousin, Tropical Race 4 is a pure killing machine—and not just for Cavendishes. Scores of other species that are immune to Race 1 have no defenses against the new pathogen. In fact, Tropical Race 4 is capable of killing at least 80%—though possibly as much as 85%—of the 145 million tonnes (160 million tons) of bananas and plantains produced each year, says Ploetz.
Guantanamo Torturer, “Just Following Orders Procedures”
James Mitchell: "I'm just a guy who got asked to torture people for the Fatherland" http://t.co/m82RoCLCvn
— billmon (@billmon1) April 18, 2014
Just in time for the Christian observance of Good Friday, because Pontius Pilate was another government contractor who caught undeserved flack for dutifully handling terrorist suspects according to procedure. From the Guardian article:
Dr James Elmer Mitchell has been called a war criminal and a torturer. He has been the subject of an ethics complaint, and his methods have been criticized in reports by two congressional committees and by the CIA’s internal watchdog.
But the retired air force psychologist insists he is not the monster many have portrayed him to be.
“The narrative that’s out there is, I walked up to the gate of the CIA, knocked on the door and said: ‘Let me in, I want to torture people, and I can show you how to do it.’ Or someone put out an ad on Craigslist that said, ‘Wanted: psychologist who is willing to design torture program.’ It’s a lot more complicated than that,” Mitchell told the Guardian in his first public comments since he was linked to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program seven years ago.
“I’m just a guy who got asked to do something for his country by people at the highest level of government, and I did the best that I could.”
Mitchell is featured prominently in a new report prepared by the Senate select committee on intelligence, which spent five years and more than $40m studying the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.
The findings, according to a summary leaked to McClatchy, are damning: that the agency misled the White House, Congress and the American people; that unauthorised interrogation methods were used; that the legal opinions stating the techniques did not break US torture laws were flawed; and perhaps most significant, that the torture yielded no useful intelligence.
But Mitchell said the program’s successes had been deliberately ignored…
Long before the Senate intelligence committee began its review, Mitchell was identified in a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report that examined the efficacy of the agency’s torture program. A heavily redacted copy of the IG report was released five years ago. It said Mitchell and Jessen had “probably misrepresented” their “expertise” as experienced interrogators when pitching coercive techniques to the CIA as a way to obtain actionable intelligence from prisoners…
Mitchell said his credentials are impeccable. He has spent his career studying the terrorist mindset first as a bomb disposal specialist, then as a hostage negotiator, a clinical psychologist and an instructor at the Air Force’s elite survival school…
Mitchell also noted that he’s a big supporter of Amnesty International and wanted to help the human rights organization raise money for child abuse by volunteering to sit in a dunk tank…
Read the whole thing; there’s a whole novel’s worth of human futility, self-aggrandization, finger-pointing and excuse-making packed into one short interview.
Guantanamo Torturer, “Just Following <del>Orders</del> Procedures”Post + Comments (48)
Great Quotes (Open Thread)
Here’s a great quote:
“…The day shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole.”
— Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch
Here’s another:
“Honey, men are like dogs. You chase them, they’ll run. You run, they’ll chase you.”
— My mom
What are your favorite quotes? Please feel free to discuss that or other topics, such as weekend plans. I’ve gotta get some quiches made tomorrow.
Also, we’re having stormy weather and tornado warnings. Here’s the sky:
But with rare exceptions, our Florida tornadoes are not nearly as scary as the ones out in Sooner country. More like “tornadettes” or “tornadinis.”
Better signals for Obamacare success
Kevin Drum is laying out some markers for what he would consider an Obamacare success story in 2023. He raises a good point about pre-65 mortality rates.
But my biggest issue is with the age-adjusted mortality rate. I know this is a widely popular metric to point to on both left and right, but I think it’s a terrible one. Obamacare exclusively affects those under 65, and mortality just isn’t that high in this age group. Reduced mortality is a tiny signal buried in a huge amount of noise, and I very much doubt that we’ll see any kind of clear inflection point over the next few years.
I think there are a couple of different metrics that would be fairly useful and fairly easy to get widespread agreement that these changes would indicate that Obamacare is working fairly well. The biggest change would be a significant increase in Quality Adjusted Life Years for people between the ages of 18 and 64. A QALY is a way of valuing how good a year of health is. The source of all knowledge gives a good definition:
The QALY is based on the number of years of life that would be added by the intervention. Each year in perfect health is assigned the value of 1.0 down to a value of 0.0 for being dead. If the extra years would not be lived in full health, for example if the patient would lose a limb, or be blind or have to use a wheelchair, then the extra life-years are given a value between 0 and 1 to account for this
QALY is a better signal than raw 18-64 mortality rates because right now, a 55 year old with chronic conditions is still strong enough and in good enough shape most of the time to get to Medicare. However the time period between significant impairment and Medicare eligiblity is less than optimal health. Improving health may not reduce the 18-64 mortality rate, but it dramatically improves quality of life while reducing costs. The Boston Globe recently ran a story about active disease management for diabetes and highlighted the business case:
About 60 percent or so people with type 2 diabetes can keep side effects at bay by simply managing sugar levels, exercising, and watching their weight, said Dr. Sam Nussbaum, a former endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an executive vice president for the insurer WellPoint.
On the flip side, if the disease is ignored, it can lead to multiple, severe complications. It’s the leading cause of heart disease, strokes, kidney failure, and vision loss.
A relatively healthy person with diabetes can cost insurers around $5,000 a year.
‘‘But if you let any of those long-term, difficult complications develop, then you’re talking $100,000-plus,’’ Nussbaum said
Improved quality of life may not show up in mortality statistics, but the overwhelming majority of people strongly prefer vision over blindness, strongly prefer not going on dialysis, and strongly prefer not going through cardiac rehab. There is a massive quality of life gain for an individual whose diabetes or other long term chronic condition is effectively managed because they now have access to affordable health insurance and thus affordable healthcare (where the insurers have the incentive now to engage in effective disease management) rather than the chronic condition only being intermittently managed or treated for acute flare-ups.
Grandma’s hands
Andrew Aaron Ross Sorkin is such an unbelievable tool (I knew it was the NYT guy not the West Wing guy, I just messed up the NYT’s guy name):
He insisted that the pregnancy was a game changer for Hillary Clinton.
“It’s gonna change the dynamic of the campaign,” he said.
How exactly?
“It’s a softening, there’s a compassion thing,” Sorkin explained. “You don’t think that over the next two years on the campaign trail this is gonna be part of the narrative? Come on. That’s interesting.”
The other panelists did not find his observation interesting.
When even the sickeningly stupid cast of “Morning Joe” finds your facile horse-race theories ridiculous….