Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

People are complicated. Love is not.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Our messy unity will be our strength.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

In my day, never was longer.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Books are my comfort food!

Let me file that under fuck it.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

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Archives for 2014

Late Night Open Thread

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Still stone tired all the time from this low simmering cold (the ear infections are cleared up after just a few days of drops and cipro), and I took a nap after dinner that went too long, and now I can not sleep. I have a ton of things I want to blog about, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Right now I am under a quilt in my chair like an old granny with 2 of three critters on my lap (and trust me, there is nothing wrong with it- granny got it going on) doing my own personal Homicide Hunter marathon. I just love the combination of cheesiness and deadpan from Det. Joe Kenda. He just cracks me up and completely reminds me of my old tank commander, SSG. Roland. He also has the best corny lines- “You want sympathy? You’ll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.”

Got new struts and springs on the car today, had the tires rotated and the oil changed and put in synthetic oil instead of regular oil, and I am already, in rural driving, getting 2.5 mpgh more. I’m wondering if they bothered to change the oil before they sold it to me, since I have only put on 3500 miles since I got it, and it should not show that much improvement.

What’s going on in gamer news? I haven’t tried anything new in awhile, and have just been playing World of Tanks with my old army buddies.

Where are we on fall tv and new movies? Any suggestions?

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Weirder and Weirder

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The Secret Service is sounding more and more like a drunken fraternity every day:

As scandal continues to envelop the Secret Service, InsideSources has learned of a security failure leading up to the 2012 election. Multiple sources inside the Romney presidential campaign confirm that a Secret Service agent provided details of President Obama’s schedule several days prior to the President’s campaign stops becoming public.

While sources involved in other presidential campaigns tell InsideSources that Secret Service detail assigned to each campaign will sometimes disclose private and personal information about those they are assigned to protect to opposing campaign staff, this instance in particular is very revealing of failures inside the Secret Service.

In the closing weeks of the 2012 campaign, a Secret Service agent was on the ground in a key swing state to coordinate security ahead of several campaign stops by the President. The agent, who was married, made advances towards a Romney campaign staff member.

InsideSources spoke with two staffers who witnessed the events in question. Each spoke on condition of anonymity and independently confirmed the details.

In one particular incident at a bar in late October 2012, the Secret Service agent, who had a number of drinks during the meeting, unprompted and in an apparent attempt to impress one of the staffers, began providing details of President Obama’s schedule. The information included times and locations of the President’s events in the final days of the election. The President’s campaign would not release these details of the President’s schedule publicly until several days later.

The sources state that the same agent on a separate occasion provided joy rides in a Secret Service vehicle with the lights flashing.

The leaked schedule was later passed on within the campaign. Others inside the campaign recall seeing the schedule, but the source of the information was not revealed. The schedule, therefore, was met only with skepticism. The details of the President’s schedule later proved to be accurate.

This is just wrong on so many levels. And why the hell didn’t the Romney campaign tell the administration? What the hell is wrong with them?

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Thursday Evening Open Thread: KRUGTHULU!

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Professor Krugman, on the same story, “Knaves, Fools, and Quantitative Easing“:

When the going gets tough, the people losing the argument start whining about civility. I often find myself attacked as someone who believes that anyone with a different opinion is a fool or a knave; as I’ve tried to explain, however, that’s mainly selection bias. I don’t spend much time on areas where reasonable people can disagree, because there are so many important issues where one side really is completely unreasonable.

Relatedly, obviously someone can disagree with my side and still be a good person. On the other hand, there are a lot of bad people engaged in economic debate — and I don’t mean that they’re wrong, I mean that they argue in bad faith.

Which brings us to today’s installment of oh-yes-they’re-that-bad, courtesy of Bloomberg. You may remember the infamous open letter to Ben Bernanke warning that his efforts to boost the economy “risk currency debasement and inflation”; just in case you wondered about the political nature of the letter, among the signatories was that noted monetary expert William Kristol.

So Bloomberg had the bright idea, now that almost four years of low inflation have passed, of asking the signatories whether they would concede that they were wrong. Not a chance. Hey, they only said there was a “risk” of inflation, and the economy hasn’t done well, so it’s all good!

Just to say the obvious: if inflation had in fact risen, they would have claimed vindication. So it’s heads they win, tails they don’t lose…

***********
Apart from applauding the calling out of idiots, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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EbolaEbolaEbolaEbolaEbola

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Amazing how quickly we humans can pivot from “AIEEEE we’re all gonna die” to “welcome to the New Normal”. Per the Washington Post, Texas health officials have ordered “four close family members of hospitalized Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan to remain home and not see any visitors”, while tracing “a list of about 100 potential or possible contacts and will soon have an official contact tracing number that will be lower”. The Post also has a helpful article answering the oft-asked “Why hasn’t the U.S. closed its airports to travelers from Ebola-ravaged countries?”

Back story, from the Guardian:

… Thomas Eric Duncan told a nurse at a Dallas emergency room that he had recently visited Liberia, which has been ravaged by the Ebola outbreak. But an executive at Texas Health Presbyterian hospital told a news conference that the information was not widely enough shared with the medical team treating Duncan, and he was diagnosed as suffering from a “low-grade common viral disease”.

Duncan’s sister, Mai Wureh, told the Associated Press that he first visited the emergency room on Friday, but was sent home with a course of antibiotics – an outcome that hospital chiefs described as a matter of “regret”…

I’ve seen commentors speculating on other websites that the nurse just didn’t want to risk being put into quarantine herself for what was almost certainly probably just another everday infection. I certainly hope that’s not true…

… Speaking in the parking lot of the apartment complex where Duncan was staying, Mesud Osmanovic, a 21-year-old manual labourer who lives there, said he saw the ambulance arrive.

“When the ambulance came his whole family were all screaming, he got outside and he was throwing up all over the place … when he was throwing up he was trying to walk and he couldn’t walk,” Osmanovic said. He said he had met Duncan only a couple of times but knew him as kind and helpful to residents. “I know him through his family … This ain’t his first time coming to America,” he said. “He was a quiet guy, a really nice guy.”…

There was little panic among commuters at a bus stop across the street from the hospital. Billy Herman, 62, said that he was worried “to some degree, yes, but I have confidence in the CDC, that they have a standard process in place, [and] that they’re doing a traceback to see who he’s come in contact with.

“I am confident in the healthcare system in America and that if other individuals are infected, if they start having symptoms that we can control it and it won’t be mass death, fear and destruction like in those third world countries,” he said, adding that he would move away if sat close to someone with flu-like symptoms…

Mr. Duncan, according to the NYTimes, fell prey to the ancient folk wisdom that no good deed goes unpunished:

… In a pattern often seen here in Monrovia, the Liberian capital, the family of the woman, Marthalene Williams, 19, took her by taxi to a hospital with Mr. Duncan’s help on Sept. 15 after failing to get an ambulance, said her parents, Emmanuel and Amie Williams. She was convulsing and seven months pregnant, they said.

Turned away from a hospital for lack of space in its Ebola treatment ward, the family said it took Ms. Williams back home in the evening, and that she died hours later, around 3 a.m.

Mr. Duncan, who was a family friend and also a tenant in a house owned by the Williams family, rode in the taxi in the front passenger seat while Ms. Williams, her father and her brother, Sonny Boy, shared the back seat, her parents said. Mr. Duncan then helped carry Ms. Williams, who was no longer able to walk, back to the family home that evening, neighbors said…

Meanwhile, for catastrophe connoisseurs, Michael T. Osterholm, “director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota”, offers a special tidbit to Politico:

… We know how the disease will likely spread in the months ahead. Each year, thousands of young West African men and boys are part of a migratory work population not too dissimilar from U.S. migrant farm workers. Crop-friendly rains wash over West Africa from May to October, forming the growing season. These young men typically help with harvesting in their home villages from August to early October, but afterward head off for temporary jobs in artisanal gold mines in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Ghana; cocoa nut and palm oil plantations in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire; palm date harvesting and fishing in Mauritania and Senegal; and illicit charcoal production in Senegal, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Niger.

This migration is about to begin, even for young men whose villages have been recently hit by EVD. These workers find daily laborer jobs at $5 per day, half of which they remit to their families back home. Like their ancestors before them, they use little-known routes and layovers through forests to avoid frontier checkpoints. They usually have ECOWAS ID cards, providing free passage to all the member states of the Economic Community of West Africa States. It takes one to three days to travel from the EVD-affected countries to these work destinations. There is no need for Ebola to hop a ride on an airplane to move across Africa: It can travel by foot.

Densely populated African cities such as Dakar, Abidjan, Lagos and Kinshasa—teeming with jam-packed slums as far as the eye can see—could be most at risk. This is the nightmare scenario…

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Girls Just Want To Have Fun — China “Red Princess” Edition

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I’ve not commented at all about Hong Kong and the umbrella protests because I don’t know enough to add anything to what much more informed people have to say.  As noted in Anne Laurie’s post this morning, old China hand Jim Fallows has been tracking the story closely, and has been writing himself and keeping tabs on other smart takes on the situation.  Here I’ll highlight from that list only the rather meta essay Henry Farrell put up at the Monkey Cage blog on the perils of explanatory journalism in cases, like this one, when the explaining journalist can fall afoul of his or her unknown unknowns:

Explainer journalism rests instead on the authority of the person doing the explaining.

The problem with this is twofold. First, the explainers are sometimes going to get things wrong. This is especially likely in international politics, where the explaining journalist is supposed to have expertise in far more countries and far more issues than any human being can possibly know much about. Second, the explainer is going to have difficulty in admittingthat he or she has gotten something wrong. If your authority and livelihood as a writer rests on your supposed ability to explain, you are not going to want to admit that you got things seriously wrong, even if you did.

Very useful correctives to keep on hand as we read just about any source on just about any kind of story.

So, my ignorance stipulated and reiterated, let me just add this to the mix.  If I’m CY Leung, the head of the Hong Kong government, facing an unprecedented level of protest and demands for more transparent, more democratic, and more open government, I really, really, don’t want to read a post on my 22 year old daughter’s Facebook page saying this:

The necklace on my profile pic is not a dog collar, silly!!!” she said. “This is actually a beautiful necklace bought at Lane Crawford (yes – funded by all you HK taxpayers!! So are all my beautiful shoes and dresses and clutches!! Thank you so much!!!!).

Collier,_Evert_-_Vanitas_Still-Life_-_1705

And I’m really, REALLY sure I would wish she hadn’t added this:

Actually maybe I shouldn’t say ‘all you’- since most of you here are probably unemployed hence all this time obsessed with bombarding me with messages.

In the context of stories like this one, this is just so much not what any senior official would want to see splashed across headlines around the world.  I have no idea how this moment of scandal (or simply gaucherie) will play into events on the streets of Hong Kong and in government offices there and in Beijing.  But damn…that’s some spectacular buffoonery from someone who I guess fits the definition of a red princess.

Image: Evert Collier, Vanitas Still Life,  1705.

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Must be a spurious correlation

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All the wonks are chirping in on  infant mortality studies that has engaged in some impressive decomposition of international differences between the US and other wealthy nations.

We combine comprehensive micro-data on births and infant deaths in the US from 2000 to 2005 with comparable data from Austria and Finland to investigate this disadvantage. Differential reporting of births near the threshold of viability can explain up to 40% of the US infant mortality disadvantage. Worse conditions at birth account for 75% of the remaining gap relative to Finland, but only 30% relative to Austria. Most striking, the US has similar neonatal mortality but a substantial disadvantage in postneonatal mortality. This postneonatal mortality disadvantage is driven almost exclusively by excess inequality in the US: infants born to white, college-educated, married US mothers have similar mortality to advantaged women in Europe.

Aaron Carroll at the Incidental Economist looks at the paper and makes the following comment:

Reporting differences (the favorite explanation of those defending the US healthcare system from the infant mortality metric attack) explained up to 40% of the disadvantage in US infant mortality. But that would only get us closer. It would still leave us way worse….

More concerning, though, is that our neonatal mortality (or the mortality in the first month of life) wasn’t so different than the other countries. What accounted for the real disadvantage was postneonatal mortality, or mortality from one month to one year of age. That difference was almost entirely due to excess inequality in the US.

In other words, most of the infant mortality difference between the US and other countries was due to really high postneonatal mortality in less advantaged groups. If differences were due to neonatal mortality, then you would want to try and reduce preterm births. That’s often what we’ve been trying to do. But this study shows us that this isn’t where the lesion is. It’s in the postneonatal period. (This point is consistent with Austin’s latest post about NICUs on the JAMA Forum.)  It’s possible that the inpatient care is excellent right after birth, but once babies go home, their access to care is different along socio-economic lines. To fix that, you likely need to improve the health care system, or inequality in the US.

The first take-away that I get from this is that the US healthcare system is extremely fragmented and is technological heroism inclined.  Every few years there is a wave of articles about face to face contact as the next paradigm buster in public health.  And then nothing happens but massively capital intensive machines and systems are readily bought.  We have a bias towards heroism and not towards maintaining good health.

My second thought was to pull the recent data on infant mortality within the United States to see if the international comparison has relevance to inter-state comparisons.  The Kaiser Foundation has fifty four states or territories listed for the 2007-2009 time period.  There is one state that was in the Confederacy(Texas) that had a lower Kaiser calculated infant mortality rate than the national average.  Seven of the ten worst states were Confederate states.

Oh me, oh my, I must be making a spurious correlation to public health, race and class and states rights advocacy.

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I Like To Think Of This As The Universe Expressing An Opinion About Today’s Incarnation Of The Party Of Lincoln

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I mean, this picture sure seems to make a cosmic viewpoint clear:

Keyhole_Nebula_-_Hubble_1999 crop

You may consider this an open thread.

Image:  NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI) – Space Telescope Science Institute, Keyhole Nebula, crop of the feature known as “God’s Birdie,” 1999.

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