The things you learn on the Internet.  At the Volokh Conspiracy Ilya Somin reports on a case in front of SCOTUS regarding the raisin crop:

Things did not go well for the federal government in today’s oral argument in Horne v. US Department of Agriculture, the raisin takings case. Nearly all of the justices were highly skeptical of the government’s claim that forcible confiscation of large quantities of raisins somehow does not qualify as a taking of private property that requires “just compensation” under the Fifth Amendment. The forced transfer is part of a 1937 program that requires farmers to turn over a large portion of their raisin crop to the government so as to artificially reduce the amount of raisins on the market, and thereby increase the price. Essentially, the scheme is a government-enforced cartel under which producers restrict production so as to inflate prices.

It can be quite a jolt when you realize how far the United States is from a real free market.  It would be interesting to know exactly which program, and its breadth.

But, of course, the real question is this: should there be a real free market in food?  It should be well-known that the government regularly buys up excess corn; and, back in the 90s, the GOP briefly attempted to eliminate the agricultural subsidies.  The Economist provides a quick light-weight summary here:

To this day, to be treated as a farmer in America doesn’t necessarily require you to grow any crops. According to the Government Accountability Office, between 2007 and 2011 Uncle Sam paid some $3m in subsidies to 2,300 farms where no crop of any sort was grown. Between 2008 and 2012, $10.6m was paid to farmers who had been dead for over a year. Such payments explain why Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, is promoting a rule to attempt to crack down on payments to non-farming folk. But with crop prices now falling, taxpayers are braced to be fleeced again.

American farm subsidies are egregiously expensive, harvesting $20 billion a year from taxpayers’ pockets. Most of the money goes to big, rich farmers producing staple commodities such as corn and soyabeans in states such as Iowa.

The conservatives tend to maintain a skepticism about ag subsidies which I sometimes agree with and sometimes believe is rooted in an ignorance of how people might behave in the face of food shortages.  The Cato Institute provides this debate from 2007 on the subject of ag subsidies and how the dismantling of New Zealand’s subsidies impacted the country.  Daniel T. Griswold asserts the conservative case:

There is no dismissing the New Zealand experience. The government largely dismantled its farm programs and none of the consequences Bob predicts came true. Its citizens did not suffer any shortages or disruptions of food supplies. Productivity of New Zealand farms accelerated after reform and they now compete successfully in global markets, especially as dairy and livestock producers.

In contrast, the output and income of America’s most supported crops have lagged behind the performance of non-supported products that compete in free and open markets. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cash receipts for the most supported crops, including corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, sugar beats, and sugar cane, rose an unimpressive 14 percent from 1980 to 2005. Meanwhile, cash receipts for non-supported crops, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and greenhouse products, soared by 186 percent. Subsidized farmers are selling out their future competitiveness in the market for the sake of federal handouts.

Bob Young provides the opposition:

The New Zealand and Australia cases are held up to us on a fairly regular basis. Australia has had, and continues to have, support programs for their producers. They are now in the middle of providing disaster assistance to their producers — assistance their producers certainly need. They also operated their wheat market under a single-buyer/single-seller framework up until the very recent past. New Zealand made the jump they did when their entire economy and government were on the brink of bankruptcy. They undertook massive government reforms that cut across literally every agency. Dan might be willing to entertain such an idea, but I’m not so sure that we as a nation are ready to make that leap.

Finally, Dan talks about the farm programs as producing environmental degradation. In part because of the rules a producer must operate under to be eligible to participate in farm programs, and in part because farmers are the best day-to-day environmental stewards in this country, the average erosion rate from an acre of farmland has dropped from 7.2 tons in 1982 to 4.7 tons in 2001. Wetland protection has increased sharply and wildlife habitat has expanded significantly. Even on those disgusting corn acres — the acres that provide the feed for our livestock and are helping with our nation’s energy supply — the nitrogen used to produce a bushel of corn fell from 1.3 pounds in 1983 to 0.94 pounds in 2006.

In 2013, Bloomberg Business joined in:

A Depression-era program intended to save American farmers from ruin has grown into a 21st-century crutch enabling affluent growers and financial institutions to thrive at taxpayer expense.

Federal crop insurance encourages farmers to gamble on risky plantings in a program that has been marred by fraud and that illustrates why government spending is so difficult to control.

And the cost is increasing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture last year spent about $14 billion insuring farmers against the loss of crop or income, almost seven times more than in fiscal 2000, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The Bloomberg article is quite long and indicates the implementation of our current ag subsidies is making everyone unhappy:

With new farm legislation stalled on Capitol Hill, largely over Republican demands for deeper cuts in food stamp spending, the cost of crop insurance is drawing fire from both ends of the political spectrum.

The Environmental Working Group says the insurance encourages farmers to make riskier plantings, secure in the knowledge they will be paid even if the crops fail. The free-market Club for Growth, meanwhile, derides the program as a government handout for millionaire farmers.

Then there’s this gem:

“We shouldn’t look at crop insurance as the least evil policy,” says Josh Sewell, senior policy analyst with Washington-based research group Taxpayers for Common Sense. “It’s not like our choice is to send checks one way or send checks another way. We could just not send checks.”

As many have said before me, common sense is neither.  My observation over the years has been that if the name of a group includes “taxpayers”, then it’s a bunch of guys who are only concerned about their wallets.

While I’m sure that such a wart on what we like to think of as a free market is hard to integrate with the market – and can lead to fraud, as many engineers would consider this an instability in the system – I don’t think they really make the case for eliminating ag subsidies, only reforming them (and on that, no opinion).  On the conservative side there seems to an assumption that this is about economics, not about assuring the food is available on a regular basis.

So how much food do we produce?  The EPA has this page:

In round numbers, U.S. farmers produce about $ 143 billion worth of crops and about $153 billion worth of livestock each year.

And what about California, recently the subject of water rationing?  Richard Cornett at Western Farm Press, in 2013, gives his thoughts:

So a loss of California ag production would hit hard consumers’ wallets and their diets would become less balanced.This is because our state produces a sizable majority of American fruits, vegetables and nuts; 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots and the list goes on and on. A lot of this is due to our soil and climate. No other state, or even a combination of states, can match California’s output per acre.

Lemon yields, for example, are more than 50 percent higher than neighboring states. California spinach yield per acre is 60 percent higher than the national average.  Without California, supply of these products in our country and abroad would dip, and in the first few years, a few might be nearly impossible to find.  Orchard-based products specifically, such as nuts and some fruits, would take many years to spring back.

Soon, the effect on consumer prices would become attention-grabbing. Rising prices would force Americans to alter their diets. Grains are locked in a complicated price-dependent relationship with fresh fruits, vegetables and meats. When the price of produce increases, people eat more grain. When the price of grain rises, people eat more fruits and vegetables. (In fact, in some parts of the world, wheat and rice are the only “Giffen goods” – a product in which decreasing prices lead to decreasing demand.)  Young people and the poor in America, more than others, eat less fresh fruit when prices rise.

In some respect, I hope the ag subsidies act to spread farming out, rather than concentrating it.

NewScientist‘s Penny Sarchet reports on the recent Kasane Conference on The Illegal Wildlife Trade (11 April 2015 print “Consumers starting to reject ivory“) (paywall) held in Botswana where a change in the use of such things as ivory and rhino horn has been identified:

But the demand for wildlife parts is increasingly coming from the luxury goods market, rather than traditional medicine.

“Fundamentally it’s about luxury items and greed,” says Roberts. For example, where bear bile and gall bladders were once used for medicine, they are now added to luxury cosmetics. “Traditional medicine practitioners are becoming less important in the consumption of wildlife parts, and it’s transferring more to the big businessmen,” he says.

The phrase “less important” is relative, of course; if consumption by one audience grows while the other holds steady, or increases but more slowly, then the latter appears smaller while fundamentally, it’s growing.  This report does not clarify that point.  And since “traditional medicine” (TM) has a non-rational basis, it’s difficult to accurately deduce if TM practicioners would be able to substitute non-threatened wild life parts (say, deer horn) for those of threatened animals, unlike rationally based practices, where the emphasis is on efficacy rather than tradition, so if the substitution works, then all is well.

Back to the conference.  Speakers at the conference feel they’re beginning to make headway:

According to [Adam Roberts of Born Free USA], the demand for ivory seems to be falling. Each year the Chinese government releases a portion of its stockpile of ivory for legal use, but only 80 per cent of the most recent allocation has been taken up.

At least publicly, my perceptions of efforts in this arena have been prevention of harvesting.  But now the call is changing:

At a conference in Botswana last month, delegations from 32 countries called for a better understanding of the market forces that drive the illegal wildlife trade. It’s a big improvement on a similar declaration issued last year, which failed to discuss how to reduce demand for products like rhino horn.

It seems like common sense, but also an enormous effort.

The IFAW itself felt the last year has not gone so well, though:

While highlighting some important progress in the fight against illegal wildlife trade, a high-level government meeting in Botswana will most likely be remembered by the broken promises of almost half of the countries who just 13 months ago committed themselves to a global effort to end the scourge.

“It is appalling that countries like Chad, Cameroon and Democratic Republic of Congo, with elephant populations under extreme threat from poaching for their ivory, can’t show any headway whatsoever in slowing the slaughter,” said Jason Bell, Director of the IFAW Elephant Programme.

“In Garamba National Park in the DRC, 30 elephants were killed in the week running up to this conference, and 68 have been killed in the park in the past two months alone.”

(Update: Title change)

The NFL drama continues with a judge’s approval of the proposed settlement.  CNN provided the initial coverage here:

The agreement provides up to $5 million per retired player for serious medical conditions associated with repeated head trauma.

While the lawsuit was a combination of hundreds of actions brought by more than 5,000 ex-NFL players, the settlement applies to all players who retired on or before July 7, 2014, according to Judge Anita Brody’s 132-page decision.

It also applies to the family members of players who died before that date.

There is a maximum for each player, but no total cumulative maximum; an earlier version of the deal called for $765 million.  This deal is not acceptable to all members of the class, as the family of the late Chicago Bear player Dave Duerson will be filing suit against the agreement.

Family lawyer Thomas Demetrio objects to the exclusion of future awards for CTE, the brain trauma that some call “the signature disease of football.”

Not everyone is convinced.  Vice Sports published this article, by Patrick Hruby, is a trifle dated but suggests there’s more liability than admitted to:

To the contrary, it’s designed to save the NFL as much money as possible, to the tune of billions of dollars of potential brain damage liability. If the deal goes through, many sick retirees won’t get paid.

Seems to me, this settlement gives visibility to the formidable condition an ex-player may find himself in, and this, you’d think, must impact a prospective player.  However, I think that’s a bit optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on your viewpoint), as young men hardly ever think, and since many see the NFL as one of their few paths to a secure future, I suspect this will only lessen the stature of the sport, rather than resulting in its abandonment.  After all, back when it started, players were actually dying.  A few rules changes and that – mostly – stopped.

And I’ll just be surprised if a technical fix for headgear comes along.  You snap someone’s head around like that and the brain’ll go slosh and start bruising no matter what you’re wearing.

If you’re a retired NFL player, here’s the website.

CNN Money:

Coach (COH) is in the midst of a massive overhaul of its handbag and shoe line. The general consensus is the brand got too overexposed on Main Street. Customers grew accustomed to buying the bags at outlet shops and Coach lost its luxury cache in the process.

Damn.  I wish I had a luxury cache to lose.

Later: They fixed it.

Alex Seitz-Wald at MSNBC reports on Hillary’s visit to New Hampshire for a visit with local Democratic officials:

On campaign finance, Clinton said even total disclosure of campaign money is “not enough” on its own.

“What good does it do to disclose if somebody’s about to spend $100 million to promote their own interest and to defeat candidates who would stand up against them? What good does that do?” Clinton said.

If elected president, Clinton said she would try to re-make the Supreme Court so it would overturn the controversial 2010 Citizens United decision, which paved the way for super PACs and other outside groups to pour money into politics. “If I can get enough appointments as president, to put different people on the court, maybe that would work,” she said. But she added that retired justice John Paul Stevens told her the only way he thought real reform could happen would be through a constitutional amendment.

Clinton has made getting “unaccountable money” out of the political system part of one of the “four big fights” of her presidential campaign.

Rigging the SCOTUS would probably lead to hard feels on the right, even though they have tried to do the same.

Emphasis on tried.  Remember, the Chief Justice himself did not play to the script when National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, aka the ObamaCare case, came in front of the court, affirming the government’s right to require a tax or get healthcare insurance.  There are similar disappointments in David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and no doubt many other SC judges over the years.

Add in the fact that the SC is notoriously reluctant to overturn previous SC decisions, and I don’t really see this approach really working.

A Constitutional Amendment is possible, but the wording would have to be very careful.  I wonder if the lawmakers ever run simulations with the most clever lawyers they can find, just to discover the loopholes and eliminate them, or if they just sit around and discuss things.

John Sexton at Breitbart.com gives a short history, minus any hysteria; however, the comments section predictably goes off the boards (one reason I won’t open a comments section).

Joel Gehrke at National Standard also covers the issue, but barely mentions the money angle:

When the Supreme Court heard the case in 2009, President Obama’s attorneys argued that the ban was constitutional — even going to far as to say that the government could ban certain books that were to be published close to an election.

“Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked, for instance, whether a campaign biography in book form could be banned,” the New York Times reported at the time. “[The government’s lawyer] said yes, so long as it was paid for with a corporation’s general treasury money, as opposed to its political action committee.”

Instead, the court ruled that the government cannot deprive people of the right to engage in political speech simply because they have formed a corporation.

And that forms the basis of the money angle.  Meanwhile, The Daily Beast says Hillary will have to credit Citizens United for getting her elected:

The 2012 presidential election between President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney was the most expensive campaign in history, with each candidate’s election team and supporting groups raising $1.123 and $1.019 billion respectively. Clinton’s campaign intends to surpass that entire amount on its own, and she is allowed to do so because of a case brought to the Supreme Court because a conservative group wanted to have a larger impact on hopefully preventing her from winning the presidency in 2008. The irony is so rich.

Who knows if Clinton will be able to defeat the GOP and Republicans at the game they insisted on creating, but she most likely will at least be able to match them dollar-for-dollar in the general election.

Perhaps this explains the relatively quiet response on conservative sites: a deepening foreboding.  Remember Lloyd Bentsen’s legendary put-down of Dan Quayle at the VP debate?

Imagine Hillary facing Marco Rubio in a debate, smiling sweetly, and then tearing him apart. I may favor a different Democratic candidate, but I think she might have the best delivery.

(h/t Kerry Eleveld @ The Daily Kos)

Inaugurating a new series dedicated to the weirdnesses of state laws.  I suppose they’re a reflection of the oddballs who sometimes end up in the State legislatures … but it takes a whole collection of them to pass these laws.

Anyways, first up is Florida.  I find in my morning an invitation to sign a petition.  Turns out Florida REQUIRES … well, here’s the quote:

Florida gambling facilities don’t even want to hold greyhound races in the first place — but they’re required to by a state law that mandates dog racing.

Really makes you wonder who benefited from that state law.  If you’re interested in signing the petition to repeal this law, here’s a link.

The Trans Pacific Partnership is billed as the next big trade agreement, and now Fast Track Authority is being requested. One little problem: it’s apparently not to be discussed in public.  Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is outraged and published a letter outlining his objections:

1)    The minimum wage in Vietnam is roughly 56 cents an hour.  It has been reported that Malaysia uses modern-day slave labor in its electronics industry. If the TPP goes into effect, do you have an estimate as to how many jobs in this country will be lost as American corporations move to Vietnam and Malaysia where they can pay workers less than $1 an hour?

2)    Right now, the TPP includes what is called an Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which would allow foreign investors the right to use international tribunals as a forum for seeking compensation for laws and regulations that impact their ability to profit from investments. For example, under an ISDS provision of an agreement, a French firm is suing Egypt under an international tribunal for raising its minimum wage. Uruguay and Australia are both being sued for imposing requirements on how tobacco products are packaged. Eli Lilly is suing Canada for $500 million for “violating its obligations to foreign investors under the North American Free Trade Agreement by allowing its courts to invalidate patents for two of its drugs.” Transcanada is considering suing the U.S. under an international tribunal for refusing to approve the Keystone Pipeline. Quebec is being sued under an international tribunal for banning fracking.  After the TPP goes into effect, could a Federal, state, or local government be forced to pay compensation to a foreign company if an international tribunal rules that this company was prevented from earning an expected future profit due to environmental, labor, or consumer laws or regulations?

3)    I have been told that the TPP would force the U.S. government to waive “Buy American” procurement rules for countries that are in the TPP.  It is my understanding that under the TPP the U.S. government could not choose to buy American products over Vietnamese or Malaysian products that are made without meeting prevailing wage requirements.  Is this true, and if so, how many Americans will lose their jobs as a result?

4)    It has been reported that 100% of Vietnamese seafood imports contained antibiotics that are not approved in the U.S.  As you know, seafood imports are a common source of pathogens. Have any studies been done to determine what kind of health hazards the American people will be exposed to by the importation of these products if the TPP is implemented?

5)    Today, many millions of people living in the Asia-Pacific region benefit from access to life-saving medications at affordable prices.  Unfortunately, what is known about the current TPP draft text suggests that the agreement would threaten this access because the pharmaceutical companies could delay the time in which generic drugs could be put on the market.  Doctors without Borders has said that “the TPP has the potential to become the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines.” How many people will lose access to life-saving drugs for cancer and HIV if the TPP goes into effect?

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) seconds him.

The Administration says I’m wrong – that there’s nothing to worry about. They say the deal is nearly done, and they are making a lot of promises about how the deal will affect workers, the environment, and human rights. Promises – but people like you can’t see the actual deal.

For more than two years now, giant corporations have had an enormous amount of access to see the parts of the deal that might affect them and to give their views as negotiations progressed. But the doors stayed locked for the regular people whose jobs are on the line.

If most of the trade deal is good for the American economy, but there’s a provision hidden in the fine print that could help multinational corporations ship American jobs overseas or allow for watering down of environmental or labor rules, fast track would mean that Congress couldn’t write an amendment to fix it. It’s all or nothing.

Charles Morris, former banker and lawyer, doesn’t trust China in the least:

China’s destructive brand of competition is especially grating. Consider the example of Nucor, one of the world’s most efficient steelmakers. Nucor uses only 0.4 hours of labor to make a ton of steel, says Dan DiMicco, former chief executive, or about $8 to $10 in wages. It relies mostly on scrap steel for its raw material, while China uses iron ore, which is more expensive, and its shipping cost to the United States is about $40 a ton.

Even if Chinese labor were free, DiMicco maintains in his new book, “American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness,” there is no way the Chinese steel producers could undersell Nucor in its home market. Yet, over much of the past year, low-cost Chinese steel has flooded US markets, which, DiMicco says, is clear evidence of illegal “dumping.” Beijing, of course, says it complies with all fair trade rules.

But China plays by different rules. Its powerful manufacturing enterprises are largely state-owned, and blessed with a host of subsidies, including Party-determined prices for financings, land purchases, taxes and fuel.

Worse than that, in recent years, the Chinese government has been pressuring European and US companies to transfer proprietary technologies as a condition of winning major contracts.

Joe Firestone at New Economic Perspectives doesn’t like it one bit, either, based on a WikiLeaks missive.

An ambitious 12 nation trade accord pushed by President Obama would allow foreign corporations to sue the United States government for actions that undermine their investment “expectations” and hurt their business, according to a classified document.

Why are we negotiating the TPP at all? Why is it the business of the Representatives of the people of the United States in Congress to support agreements that will mitigate the political risks borne by American businesses who chose to invest in other nations, as well as the political risks borne by foreign corporations, who choose to invest in the United States? Why is it their business to provide protection against such risks to foreign corporations beyond the protections we provide to our own corporations?

The “expectations” of business investors are their own business, not the public’s business; and there’s no reason why either the government of the United States or the governments of other nations should have to accommodate themselves to these expectations. If it is the will of the people of a nation as expressed through their representatives to pass legislation that destroys the “expectations” of business investors, then that’s just too bad for the investors.

Private businesses have no right to expect that their governments will protect them against risks that they alone choose to take, and that they alone will profit from. Risk is part of the game of investing. It’s business.

Paul Krugman is almost indifferent:

And you know what? That’s O.K. It’s far from clear that the T.P.P. is a good idea. It’s even less clear that it’s something on which President Obama should be spending political capital. I am in general a free trader, but I’ll be undismayed and even a bit relieved if the T.P.P. just fades away.

Why? Basically, old-fashioned trade deals are a victim of their own success: there just isn’t much more protectionism to eliminate. …

Meanwhile, opponents portray the T.P.P. as a huge plot, suggesting that it would destroy national sovereignty and transfer all the power to corporations. This, too, is hugely overblown. Corporate interests would get somewhat more ability to seek legal recourse against government actions, but, no, the Obama administration isn’t secretly bargaining away democracy.

Alyssa Burgin and Bob Cash at the Monitor are quite alarmed:

Congress will vote on it, but our representatives had no part in its making. It was largely written behind the closed doors of trans-national corporations, its details hidden away, not just from the public and the press, but from our representatives. Only a few lawmakers in Congress have seen it and under a threat of legal action have been forbidden to share what they saw with the American people. Meanwhile, 600 U.S. corporate advisers were given free access to the text as it was being negotiated.

I can’t help but wonder if a “secret law” can be held against US citizens who break it – ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse, after all.  But the entire secrecy aspect is enough to turn me off.  Public debate is an important part of improving our laws and our public lives.  TPP appears to be lacking that important ingredient.

(h/t Tasini @ The Daily Kos)

CNN covers the historic confirmation of the nomination of Loretta Lynch to Attorney General of the United States:

Loretta Lynch’s father, Lorenzo A. Lynch, was in the Senate gallery watching when the historic vote took place confirming her daughter as the first African American female attorney general.

Ooops.  There you are, chest all puffed out about your daughter, and one of the biggest news organizations in the world can’t get the easy details right.

A reader reacts to my post on writing a sentence, and we engage in a bit of back and forth:

If I ever dig out from my self-inflicted condition of clutter-itis, and actually attain a measure of clarity in both space and time in my residence, I am going to have that post painted across one entire wall of my office.

Seriously.

Period.

Perhaps, in the interim, I will make a few refrigerator magnets from key phrases (fortunately my “front” door is steel and thus a lovely repository of inspirational messages before I leave in the morning.)

Or, perhaps, I will frame certain phrases and thoughts, and pepper them around my office to serve as both muses and mentors.

I must grab these thoughts and hold them tight.

I must grudgingly accept some, and whole-heartedly embrace others.

Would that everything I read was written the way you wrote that post.  But, I am a particular and rare-ish audience.  The mass market crowd will inevitably demand the occasional, or perhaps frequent, short declarative sentence.  But I hope you keep writing the way you do, with Deb as social conscience and compassionate guide, because more of the world needs to see what language can do. Let that unusual twist of phrase stir some trembling neuron…. Not the neurons that are following the plot, but that other area, where the pure intellect resides and appreciates, dare I say it, art for art’s sake.

More on this later.

Oh drat.  I just realized that I said “period” and then I rambled on anyway.

I’m incorrigible.

Oh my.  I feel … very … buttery.

That.
Is my job.

And you know that’s true too, right?  The reader had darn well better express some sincere appreciation from time to time.

I dunno.  Does the true writer HAVE TO WRITE, regardless of the reaction of the audience?  Or does the true writer have to have an audience reaction in order to understand how to improve the writing to the point where the audience shows a positive reaction?  Or is any reaction, any acknowledgement of the writer’s mere existence, enough?  Is it the act of putting words on paper medium, or the hormones released at the very thought of having intellectually stimulated some other creature in this alleged universe of ours?

I think a writer has to write, but most writers, like most humans, need to feel valued and that valuation can take the form of recognition, remuneration, simple response or any of a number of other “re” words. Whether or not you need the audience to like you, or what you wrote, is entirely up to the writer.  I know lots of people who write just to provoke and they seem to enjoy being unliked. But they HATE being ignored.

There is something different, though, about your angle on improvement.  Wanting to write a successful book appears, I’m suddenly realizing, to be a different animal altogether.  It’s not blogging, it’s not correspondence, it’s not journaling or educating or critiquing.  And now I’m starting to ponder all those other facets.

But wanting a reaction in order to improve how the reader experiences the writing.  That’s  …why.. that’s awfully nice of you, Hue.

And it goes beyond just wanting a one-time stimulation. It’s .. it’s wanting to develop a relationship, yes?  Even if only for the course of that one book. But, one hopes, throughout the writing of many more.  But it’s an engagement at any rate.  Not a performance.

All that said, I did have a friend who would write pages upon pages of what amounted to diary entries.  And then she would take them out of her …hold on to your hat…. typewriter….

and tear them up.

I was flabbergasted when she told me this.  I admit, I’m a little too fond of my own writing, but there’s just something heartbreaking about expressing yourself with the written word and then destroying it.  Expressing yourself with the intention of destroying it.  I dunno. Maybe there’s an official therapy based on that. But if I take the time to write it down, I can’t see wasting it by obliterating the effort.

Of course I have a counter.  I have looked back on something I wrote a long time ago and HATED it.  But I only destroyed such a thing once and I’ve regretted it ever since.

At the very least I should have just edited it to be less objectionable.

Oh, they hate being ignored.  That, in fact, is how I treated ruggies back in the day – erase the damage, don’t say a thing.  I ordered the aides not to say a thing, just do the necessary.  Ruggies HATED the lack of attention, and would disappear quickly.

Yes, a relationship; perhaps not the nicest of relationships.  I recall reading somewhere that someone said writing a novel consisted of withholding important information from the reader, and that is certainly true from those two and a half novels Deb & I worked on – anything from major characters to just small little character traits that turn out to be a fulcrum of a novel.  So the relationship is possibly tempestuous, devious, and no doubt a little manipulative at one level – but entirely honest at another.

But all writing has an audience – at least of the writer themselves.  Themself?  But a relationship with oneself is not usually exciting; so we write a letter to our cousin, another letter to the editor of the newspaper, then we step off the curb and try to write for some larger audience, convey ideas and relationships between ideas and then we stumble into the question of Why Read Stories (which I will someday write about on the blog) and how that applies to the would-be storyteller, and that has to be dealt with … or not.  The natural storyteller probably just knows the answer, or doesn’t need it; but I am not natural, and ask all those oddball questions.

Destroying her output .. .did she say why?  Perhaps the output reflected some inner daemon she was trying to excise, and this was the procedure – capture it on paper, burn the paper.

Hold yer breath, lady, or it’ll get right back in ya.

Progress is made on this project:

Thanks to RightWingWatch.org, we get more of Michelle’s thinking on today:

In an interview with End Times broadcaster Jan Markell that was aired this weekend, former Rep. Michele Bachmann said that people should “not despair but rejoice” that the world has reached the “midnight hour” and that “we in our lifetimes potentially could see Jesus Christ returning to earth and the Rapture of the church.”

Well, she certainly is in multitudinous company, from prophets of centuries ago right up to the Jim Jones cult who more or less decided the midnight hour had arrived and left feet first.  Of course, the logic can be fascinating and impeccable; as in most arguments, the real problem lies in root assumptions.

(h/t Mike Finley)

Christine Lepisto on Treehuggers became quite excited when a New York court granted habeas corpus to a pair of research chimpanzees:

The case involves a legal right known as “writ of habeas corpus,” intended to offer protection to people who may have been unlawfully imprisoned or detained. The writ of habeas corpus traditionally applies only to human beings. The judge’s ruling (pdf) requires that the institute “detaining” Hercules and Leo must show cause why the Nonhuman Rights Project should not be granted an order permitting them to take custody of the chimps upon determination that they are being unlawfully detained.

According to the Nonhuman Rights Project press release:

Under the law of New York State, only a “legal person” may have an order to show cause and writ of habeas corpus issued in his or her behalf. The Court has therefore implicitly determined that Hercules and Leo are “persons.”

NPR reports that the court has now backpedaled:

The judge in the case has amended her ruling to strike out the term “writ of habeas corpus.” It is now unclear whether Hercules and Leo, the chimps at Stony Brook University, can challenge their detention. You can read our post about the amended order here. …But Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University who opposes personhood for animals, told Science, “It would be quite surprising if the judge intended to make a momentous substantive finding that chimpanzees are legal persons if the judge has not yet heard the other side’s arguments.”

Science magazine has a quick summary (also available through NPR):

The case began as a salvo of lawsuits filed by NhRP in December 2013. The group claimed that four New York chimpanzees—Hercules and Leo at Stony Brook, and two others on private property—were too cognitively and emotionally complex to be held in captivity and should be relocated to an established chimpanzee sanctuary. NhRP petitioned three lower court judges with a writ of habeas corpus, which is traditionally used to prevent people from being unlawfully imprisoned. By granting the writ, the judges would have implicitly acknowledged that chimpanzees were legal people, too—a first step in freeing them.

The judges quickly struck down each case, however, and NhRP has been appealing ever since. Today’s decision is the group’s first major victory. In her ruling, New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe orders a representative of Stony Brook University to appear in court on 6 May to respond to NhRP’s petition that Hercules and Leo “are being unlawfully detained” and should be immediately moved to a chimp sanctuary in Florida. Both animals have been used to understand the evolution of human bipedalism. (Stony Brook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Which reminds me of a quote from the venerable Robert A. Heinlein, helpfully found on Wikiquote:

“Soul?” Does a dog have a soul? How about cockroach?

Yes?  Maybe?  So are animals damaged persons?  If you give a lion and a lamb both personhood, and then … well, I trust the thrust of that is obvious, but not the answer.  No doubt this has been thrashed out somewhere, but I don’t happen to know where that might be.  I cannot imagine being savage towards my cats, but they can sure be savage to the rodents crossing their paths.

Perhaps the best way to consider this is related to that old aphorism:

The measure of a civilization is how it treats its weakest members.

– many sources

We may not have to make animals into persons (although if this intrigues you, see master writer Cordwainer Smith), but how we treat them may be our measure.  For all that we use them to improve our medicines….

Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics attended the recent annual CPAC meeting (Feb 26) and First in the Nation Republican Leadership Summit, where he issued report cards on all of the candidates and would-be candidates who showed up and spoke.  At the latter, his favorite was Marco Rubio:

Style: More confident and focused than even in his well-received announcement speech. Led off with a string of jokes about Clinton, kids, and campaigns. Then turned earnest, keeping the crowd hushed and largely rapt, culminating with a resounding, sustained standing ovation.

Substance: Laid out his agenda on taxes, education, and other issues with more purpose than detail, but made it powerful by fusing it with vivid descriptions of America’s needs.

Best moment: Closed with an extended passage about the nation’s future and the urgency of moving in a new direction immediately.

Worst moment: Rambled a bit at the end of the first third of his remarks—but that’s a quibble.

Overall: Speaks about the American Experience and his own family history like an old pro, making him seem wise and thoughtful beyond his years. Continues to hit his stride, creating believers within the party and the press. When he leverages his youth to make his optimism seem more organic, he stakes a greater claim than Walker, Bush, and the rest of the field to being the right leader for a better future. Enshrined his place in the top tier more solidly than ever before.

Marco’s grades: Style A-, Substsance B, Overall A-.  Who received the lowest grade?  Jim Gilmore, former governor of Virginia:

Style: Talked rapidly, sometimes shouting, perhaps in an effort to seem forceful and driven. Showed little humor (beyond an opening clunker of a Clinton/e-mail joke), and little finesse. Occasionally hugged the side of the lectern, or wandered briefly away, only to return moments later.

Substance: Called for lower individual and corporate tax rates; elimination of the inheritance tax. Offered only generalities during an extended foreign policy section.

Best moment: Brought determination to his presentation, but no moments stood out.

Worst moment: The starkness of the line “President Obama doesn’t believe in America” turned into a downer even with a partisan audience that has little love for the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Overall: Largely unknown, even to many activists and the press; got some attention simply by being on the card. But didn’t give people a true sense of his heart, his history, or his hopes. Too dark and negative to be considered a happy Gilmore. Still, enough buzz in the room to likely encourage him to stay at it in the months ahead.

This approach to appraising candidates has provoked some reactions.  Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium:

So, Mark Halperin went to New Hampshire to watch the GOP presidential field. And then he evaluated them by handing out grades, which I guess is meant to be rigorous. I think these “grades” reveal at least as much about modern political journalism as they do about what happened in the Granite State. …

I think the real bottom line is: if he were a teacher, Mark Halperin would give nearly everybody a B of some kind, except for Marco Rubio, who he thinks is fun.

He also has a nifty graph of the grades.

Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly has similar feelings:

Curious about how this weekend’s mammoth, 17-speaker First in the Nation Republican Leadership Forum in Nashua, New Hampshire, went, I consulted Bloomberg Politics, and sure enough, Mark Halperin had prepared letter grades (actually three, for “style,” “substance” and “overall”) for every one of these birds, yea, even unto Peter King. For the most part, what the reader learned about each candidate or proto-candidate was a murky stew of Halperin’s impressions in Nashua and Halperin’s prejudices about the field and American politics….

Then there’s this assessment of Chris Christie:

Continued his newfound emphasis on entitlement changes to push his record of reform and image of truth teller. Plus: leader, leader, leader. Seems to have found a balance between confidence and brashness. Used his aplomb on the big stage to push his way closer to the top tier, but not a game-changing performance.

Again, the salient fact about Christie is that his standing among Republicans and the general electorate is hovering near elimination levels, and he’s chosen a theme—“entitlement changes”—that may preserve a role for him as a “truth teller” but will more likely make him one of the more reviled figures in American politics.

Worried about your output’s impact on the environment?  Treehugger’s Derek Markham has an alternative for you from France:

Break your paper training with the Tushy bidet attachment, which could help save your rear while saving the Earth.

How many sheets of toilet paper do you use each day? According to Tushy, the average American uses about 57 sheets daily, which adds up to a heck of a lot of trees, water, and chlorine getting flushed down the toilet or pitched into the trash. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and here at TreeHugger, we’ve been advocating for bidets for many years. Lloyd has said before that he thinks everyone should have one.

57 sheets daily?  We need better counting; the ladies surely must use more than the guys.  And just how much chlorine are we talking?

Still, bidets spray out some nice warm water….

A correspondent writes to discuss a chart in this post:

RE:  April 16 post Race 2016:  Marco Rubio, and the chart labeled How Conservative are GOP Presidential Candidates:

Seems to me, this chart is useful on more than one level.  Take note of the folks whose public issue statements widely differ from their congressional voting record.  Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz seem to have the most egregious track record for saying one thing and doing the opposite.

I find that kind of analysis very useful, if the analysis is from a trusted source. Even if you abhor Michelle Bachmann’s or Herman Cain’s platform, at least you know where they stand (relatively speaking).

Hard to argue the point, and those data points are striking.  Here’s the chart again, for reference:

I note that Rick Santorum, a one term Senator, appears to be willing to have a radical mouth but a less than radical voting button.  But how is FiveThirtyEight handling candidates with no Congressional voting record, such as Huckabee, Pawlenty, and other governors?  That’s not entirely clear.

Have you recently run into the terms evidence-based-medicine (EBM) and science-based-medicine (SBM)?  Did you think they’re the same, or at least similar?  Turns out while both seek to improve the general state of medicine, one has a blind spot that lets in the “alternative” therapies that are nearly never efficacious, as discussed in Skeptical Medicine:

Evidence based medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research.” (Sackett et.al.) …

EBM appears to place its emphasis on clinical science (controlled trials) and relegates basic science to the bottom (Level 5 evidence includes claims based on physiology, bench research or “first principles“. It should be noted that practice should never be based solely on basic science because such evidence is insufficient in clinical practice. 

So the complaint here is that the plausibility of the treatment is not considered in EBM.  A treatment that contradicts established scientific principles is not treated as needing extraordinary evidence because of this particular property.

EBM as it stands today can lead to a rabbit hole filled with unlikely and implausible claims.

SBM begins with basic science.

SBM recognizes full well that basic science is not sufficient to justify practices. Indeed, much of pseudoscience stems from this mistake. SBM asks us to consider the basic science plausibility of a claim before committing to a randomized controlled trial. It asks us to consider both basic science and clinical research. There really should be no conflict. Some avid proponents of EBM appear to think that  SBM proponents value basic science over clinical trials. This is not the case. SBM supporters simply want to consider the basic science first, or at least alongside clinical trials. Claims that contradict basic science should require far more evidence from clinical trials than should plausible claims. The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary must be the clinical evidence. 

The piece is not easy; a grasp of statistics, at least, is necessary.  But it does explain why SBM is superior to EBM in that it will recognize extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  So at least remember this: if some snake-oil salesman suggests that one of the many alternative therapies out there is for you, and cites that it’s all evidence-based medicine, ask him if it’s science-based, and if he answers affirmatively, then ask him to explain the difference.  If he gets that right, then ask how he squares the impossible basis of his treatment with it being SBM….

Sami Grover on Treehugger waxes ecstatic over the drop in China coal imports:

If the fact that the decline in coal brings a net growth in jobs is true in China as well as America, Chinese workers may have a lot to cheer about.

Because The Guardian reports that Chinese coal imports were down a whopping 42% for Q1, compared to the year before.

Now I’ve posted several times already about China’s break up with coal and how it is happening sooner and faster than anyone expected. But this single issue is so central to everybody’s wellbeing, we would be wise to continue following closely.

A year would be more impressive, but it’s still encouraging.  China’s coal production appears to also be sinking, albeit a little less than 42%, according to the Guardian:

State media reported on Monday that coal production fell in 2014 for the first time this century, with production totalling 3.5bn tonnes between January and November representing a 2.1% fall on the same period in 2013. …

The industry maintains that it has been hit by a number of one-off factors, such as high rainfall leading to high levels of hydro-electric production that has in turn impacted demand for coal. Similarly, government restrictions on the export of low-quality coal hit a market that was already suffering as coal prices fell by around 20%.

However, Xinhua acknowledged that much of the pressure on the coal industry is the result of demanding new environmental regulations from the Chinese government and increased investment in renewable energy, that has made China the world’s largest investor in clean technologies.

Covering the third leg of the tripod, Chinese consumption of coal is also falling, according to Reuters:

Clean-fuel policies, as well as an economy growing at its slowest pace in 25 years, are driving lower coal use, with power companies using a greater mix of hydro, nuclear and renewable options, especially wind.

Coal still makes up nearly two-thirds of China’s energy mix, but utilisation rates at thermal power plants – nearly all coal-fired – have dropped to 52.2 percent in the first two months of this year, Reuters calculations based on monthly power generation and consumption figures show. If that rate holds for the full year, it would be a new annual low.

This affects coal prices, Reuters also notes:

China’s coal imports fell 11 percent in 2014 compared to the previous year, the first annual decline in at least a decade.

The market is taking note. Australian coal prices – a benchmark for Asia – slumped 30 percent last year and dropped below $60 a tonne this month to the lowest level since May 2007. Producers are now holding back shipments to China amid uncertainty over quality checks under new ash and sulphur restrictions imposed in January.

In this article, the Guardian reports the Chinese are taking climate change seriously:

At the UN climate change summit in New York in September, China said it would start to reduce the nation’s huge carbon emissions “as early as possible”.

[Lauri] Myllyvirta warned that year-to-year fluctuations in energy use and industrial prediction could see coal burning grow again in future. “It may not be the peak yet, but it is a sign that China is moving away from coal.” Climate scientists say that global carbon emissions need to peak by 2020 and rapidly decline to avoid dangerous climate change.

Myllyvirta said the greatest significance of the current drop in coal use was that economic growth had continued at 7.4% at the same time, although that is a lower rate than in recent years. “The Chinese economy is divorcing coal,” he said. By contrast, the tripling of the Chinese economy since 2002 was accompanied by a doubling of coal use.

The American GOP’s refusal to take climate change seriously has led to little progress on the issue despite citizen calls for action.  Still, use of coal may be declining, although solid figures are somewhat hard to come by.  For 2013, though, we have this information (link will eventually go stale) from the Energy Information Administration of the Federal Government:

For the first time in two decades, U.S. coal production fell below one billion short tons to 984.8 million short tons in 2013 from 1,016.5 million short tons in 2012 (3.1% lower than 2012).

However …

U.S. coal consumption increased 4.0% to 924.8 million short tons, an increase of 35.6 million short tons. The electric power sector consumed about 92.8% of the total U.S. coal consumption in 2013.

This table, also from the EIA, gives coal consumption figures from 2008 – 2013, and is not particularly encouraging – we may be dropping consumption, but not by huge numbers.  Index Mundi, a site aggregating data to create country profiles, provides a Flash-chart.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/coal/

Why is coal a big deal?  Greenpeace, amongst many, has an explanation; if you’re offended by Greenpeace, rest assured that far more conservative websites will give similar information.

Coal fired power plants are the biggest source of man made CO2 emissions. This makes coal energy the single greatest threat facing our climate.

[Live in the USA?  Check out the Quit Coal website to join communities around the country organizing to fight coal and demand clean energy.]

To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, including widespread drought, flooding and massive population displacement caused by rising sea levels, we need to keep global temperature rise below 2ºC (compared to pre-industrial levels). To do this, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2015 and from there go down to zero.

A third of all carbon dioxide emissions come from burning coal. It’s used to produce nearly 40 percent of the world’s power, and hundreds of new coal plants are planned over the next years if the industry gets its way.

Apart from climate change, coal also causes irreparable damage to the environment, people’s health and communities around the world. While the coal industry itself isn’t paying for the damage it causes, the world at large is.

And that doesn’t even mention the mercury output of coal fired plants that leads to mercury poisoning in people who enjoy eating fish from the top of the food chain.

So … the United States, rather than being the leader we like to think we are, is instead stuck in squabbling mode and ceding leadership to China. It’ll be interesting to see if democracy continues to be the best political system in the world, or if the obsolete Red Chinese are actually better than us when it comes to reality-based thinking.

Fortunately, it may not matter, as it appears US industry may be preparing to slam a bit of reality into the GOP, according to this article from ThinkProgress:

There’s little question that disaster costs have increased in the last several decades. Since the Stafford Act was passed in 1988, the report notes that disaster declaration have steadily escalated — from 16 declarations in 1988 to 242 declarations in 2011.

Since 1980, the U.S. has increased its yearly spending on disaster relief.

CREDIT: smartersafer.org

The reasons for those increased disaster costs are two-fold, the report says. For one, the economy has grown since 1980, and there’s been more development — meaning there are bigger and more expensive structures to be damaged when extreme events hit. The other reason, it asserts, is climate change, which is increasing the risks that bad storms will occur across the country.

The Lawfare blog recently celebrated the publication of their new book, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones——Confronting A New Age of Threat.  I haven’t read it; what caught my eye was almost an afterthought in the post:

But as President Barack Obama recently lamented about cybersecurity, “one of the great paradoxes of our time” is that “the very technologies that empower us to do great good can also be used to undermine us and inflict great harm.”

This strikes me as an intellectual error in that attempting to assign moral values to technologies, to mere artifacts (or even intellectual constructs, such as mathematics), is to mistake what makes up morality: our actions in the context of our relationships.  It’s quite easy to think of moral and immoral actions that might be taken with drones, viral research, computers, telephones, cars, dynamite, arrows, armor, spears … see, these are all easy.  Some have more potential, some less; I’ll leave it to the foolhardy to decide if the potentials for evil and good are in balance for each artifact.

It’s not a paradox, it’s been with us from the start.  I recall, many years ago, arguing with an older gentleman as to whether technological progress was good or bad.  For all that he held a degree in physics and worked for a defense contractor, he was fairly dubious about the worth of progress; he seemed to prefer his pre-Vatican II milieu.  I was puzzled then, but contemplating the great good – and great evil – that can be done with many of today’s advances does leave me a little more connected with my friend of decades ago.

I also wonder how society will handle this: society can only bear a certain level of instability before people begin to panic, to constrain choices and whatever is causing the instability.  While the United States hardly ever puts legal restrictions on such research (usually it has to do with munitions advances, in which the inventor gets a patent and $1, and the government takes the exclusive license), socially sometimes limits are sought, such as the Precautionary Principle currently being pushed or implemented by certain organizations.  The problem with limits is that not everyone obeys limits, and there’s rarely a way to enforce it; see the attempts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, for example.  If someone knows something can be accomplished, they’ll take a shot at it.

In a followup, a Facebook correspondent reveals another place for Americans to get free college degrees:

Germany has recently offered free college to American students. Too bad that most America high schools don’t have the funding for German language classes. http://www.wtsp.com/…/german-colleges–free…/16658027/

An explanation from a German official, taken from the link:

In explaining why Germany made this move, Dorothee Stapelfeldt, a Hamburg senator, called tuition fees “unjust” and added that “they discourage young people who do not have a traditional academic family background from taking up study. It is a core task of politics to ensure that young women and men can study with a high quality standard free of charge in Germany.”

Actually, German universities were free up until 2006 when they started charging tuition. That triggered such a crush of criticism that German states began phasing out this policy. Lower Saxony was the last holdout.

It’s an interesting remark, since it implies that students require the motivation of an academic family to attend college; is the economic situation such that college, i.e., education, is not really a prerequisite for bettering one’s life in Germany?

Beginning, apparently, in 2013, Andrew Sullivan, editor of the now-dormant Dish blog, became aware of, and detested, a trend in online publications towards what was sometimes called sponsored content and other times native advertising; perhaps more euphemisms for companies hawking products in camouflage have appeared since.  Andrew’s first entry is here; a collection of them, in reverse order, is here.  From his first entry:

Did IBM also provide the art? Then I went to Quartz, the company’s new global business site. Two out of the first ten pieces I saw on the main-page last night were written by corporations, Chevron and Cadillac, presumably in collaboration with the Atlantic. (The Cadillac has now gone, replaced by another identical Chevron “piece”.) I’d like to know as a subscriber and former senior editor who exactly on staff helped write those ads, and how their writing careers are different than that of regular journalists. Jay Lauf, for whom I have immense respect, said this about the strategy of “native ads” – or what I prefer to call enhanced advertorial techniques:

“A lot of people worry about crossing editorial and advertising lines,
but I think it respects readers more. It’s saying, ‘You
know what you’re interested in.’ It’s more respectful of the reader that
way.”

Read this piece and see if you agree.

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that readers do not expect great magazines to be artfully eliding the distinction between editorial and advertorial with boosterish ad campaigns from oil companies. Usually, those advertorials are in very separate sections in magazines – “Sponsored By The Government Of Dubai” or something – but integrating them in almost exactly the same type and in exactly the same format as journalism is not that.

I can understand companies sponsoring real journalism in inventive, dynamic, interactive ways. Magazines need advertizing to survive. I also understand how banner ads are useless for many big companies. I also realize that keeping the Atlantic alive requires herculean efforts in this tough climate. But please, please, please remember that the most important thing you have at the Atlantic is your core integrity as one of the great American magazines. I see no evidence the editorial staff has compromised that in any way and regard their writers and editors as role-models as well as journalists and friends. But there comes a time when the business side of a magazine has to be reminded that a magazine can very gradually lose its integrity in incremental, well-meant steps that nonetheless lead down a hill you do not want to descend. I know they are principled and honorable people there; and I know they understand this. But please know that this stuff makes an Atlantic reader grieve.

Now Skeptical Inquirer, in a print-only article in their May / June 2015 edition, brings to my attention the blunderings of the venerable Science magazine.  David Gorski, MD, in “Science Sells Out: Advertising Traditional Chinese Medicine in Three Supplements,” discusses the myriad holes Science has dug for itself with the publishing of the first two supplements:

… the articles are formatted to appear not as ads but as regular scientific reports. … as not having “been peer-reviewed or assessed by the Editorial staff of the journal Science.”  Rather, “all manuscripts have been critically evaluated by an international editorial team consisitng of experts in traditional medicine research selected by the project editor…

Dr. Gorski continues with identification of the various logical fallacies involved in the justifications given for publishing such a supplement, the lack of evidence for virtually any of the proposed modalities, etc.  The editions were published in very last January and have attracted the malevolent attention of Orac @ ScienceBlogs.com, who rather gleefully skewers Science:

The introductory articles are painful to read, full of the obfuscations and justifications for the pseudoscience that makes up most of TCM, all wrapped up in calls for more tooth fairy science and completed with a bow of argumentum ad populum. Disappointingly, Margaret Chan, MD, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, begins this parade in an article entitled Supporting the integration and modernization of traditional medicine:

TM [traditional medicine] is often seen as more accessible, more affordable, and more acceptable to people and can therefore also represent a tool to help achieve universal health coverage. It is commonly used in large parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For many millions of people, often living in rural areas within developing countries, herbal medicines, traditional treatments, and traditional practitioners are the main—and sometimes the only—source of health care. The affordability of most traditional medicines makes them all the more attractive at a time of soaring health care costs and widespread austerity.

Calling Dr. Chan. Calling Dr. Chan. The zombie corpse of Chairman Mao Zedong called. He wants his 1950s-era justification for promoting TCM and “integrating” it with “Western” medicine back, not to mention his “barefoot doctors.”

In a followup post, Orac suggests that the singular importance of evidence-based medicine may be on the ropes:

The scary thing is, the authors might actually be right. “Integrating” quackery with medicine does seem to be the future these days, and universities, the NCCIH, the WHO, Science, and the AAAS appear to be doing their very best to make that future a reality.

Back to Skeptical Inquirer, which published a companion to the Gorski piece: “WHO’s Strategy on Traditional and Complementary Medicine”, by Thomas P.C. Dorlo, Willem Betz, and Cees N.M. Renckens.  In this scathing analysis of World Health Organization’s management of these types of medicine, they suggest this portion of the organization has been captured by the Chinese government, which derives quite the benefit from the export of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM):

Curiously, the focus of the WHO TM Strategy is neither toward rigid proof of efficacy  of the mixed bag of therapies nor toward access to effective therapy but seems to be aimed at the financial and intellectual property (IP) aspects … For China, the Chinese TM therapies are a hugely important export product worth $3.14 billion in 2013.

And they go on to note that China appears to be pursuing the commercialization of a product which will not pass the usual medical high standards, and thus they are pursuing an alternative approach to inserting ineffective, dangerous therapies into the standard medical regimes.  (Dangerous mostly in the sense that it may delay the administration of effective treatment, although some traditional therapies are indeed directly dangerous.)

Perhaps I’m just old, but this seems an almost suicidal strategy, whether it’s occurring at The Atlantic and other such publications, or at the serious science magazines.  Readers read these publications for many reasons, but that, in my memory, doesn’t include camouflaged advertisements for products masquerading as serious articles.  Look: at base level, every honest article is analysis, the unbiased examination of an issue, a product, a public issue, SOMETHING.  It gives you what you hope are relevant facts, connects them together, looks for hidden connections, and delivers a conclusion where transparent reasoning is important.  Publications like Science, Nature, The Atlantic, and thousands of other publications literally are risking their reputations for reputable articles when advertising masquerading as articles is printed in such a way as to mislead readers.  When you get a rep for misleading readers, they’ll just walk away and find someone who still practices Old Fashioned Journalism.  The importance of understanding this distinction, between doing good journalism and just turning into a poorly paid corporate whore, seems paramount to me.

The WHO issue, on the other hand, is a matter of international politics, and encompasses the idea that if you have more votes,  you can ignore reality.

And both Skeptical Inquirer articles deserve a wider audience.  Hopefully SI will publish them online soon.

Today an old post from Mark Sumner @ The Daily Kos came across my virtual desk, decrying the ways of Wal-Mart.  Here’s what caught my attention:

But this isn’t just a Walmart story, it’s an American story. Not so long ago, American corporations accepted the idea that they had obligations to their stockholders, but also to their workers and the communities where they did business. They understood that profit was a tool, a fuel that powered the corporation to achieve its goals. But now profit is the goal. It’s been fetishized beyond all reason. Many people will even tell you that there’s a law requiring companies to generate as much profit as possible. There is no such law. There never was. And the only thing more insane than believing that such a harmful law might exist, is that many seem to think it’s a good idea.

I think we sometimes forget that capitalism is simply the economic system we happen to use (I shan’t say we chose it) as we came of age; it’s a reaction to mercantilism, which as a side effect tended to favor the status quo, thus freezing folks in their initial economic classes; not that movement was impossible, but it was difficult and, more importantly, the reason for freezing out new competitors rarely made sense to the losers.  Capitalism has at least a veneer of meritocracy to it, even though we now recognize that governmental favoritism, monopolistic behaviors, and other behaviors can impede that meritocratic impulse which we find so attractive about capitalism.

In the early days, the only international companies were the trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company; the overwhelming majority of companies were strictly local companies.  This resulted in the owners and the management having to live with the results of their decisions.  If you made a decision to treat your employees poorly, you heard about it: at church, at your office, and, if you were not a monopoly, at the clerk’s counter, as the customers decided to take their business elsewhere.  Communities did not exist to further the fortunes of companies, but to further the fortunes of the citizens, and they realized that betterment of the community resulted in the betterment of the citizens.

As railroads, telegraphs, and other earlier accoutrements of modern Western civilization began to appear, corporations began to lose this accountability factor; as the owners and management became disconnected from the community hosting the company, the era of the robber barons came into being.

These practices included exerting control over national resources, accruing high levels of government influence, paying extremely low wages, squashing competition by acquiring competitors in order to create monopolies and eventually raise prices, and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices^[2] to unsuspecting investors in a manner which would eventually destroy the company for which the stock was issued and impoverish investors.^[

(source: Wikipedia)

So, in a way, today’s world is little different from 300 years ago, it’s simply that advancing technology has enabled those incapable of caring for others to … not care.  Perhaps the titular example is the Bhopal Disaster involving a leak of poisonous gas at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India.  Union Carbide’s headquarters was half a world away.  Would this have happened if the CEO of Union Carbide had lived in town with the plant?  Of course not.  But one must also consider the conscious lying of tobacco company executives as a strong contender for the title.  (On the other hand, one must empathize with them while considering their alternatives.)

But a capitalist is not necessarily a robber baron.  Conscious capitalism is a website and a term for practicing a responsible form of capitalism:

Conscious Capitalism comes to life as it is applied to business. Conscious Capitalism has four pillars guiding and underlying a business that practices Conscious Capitalism.

Higher Purpose: Recognizing that every business has a purpose that includes, but is more than, making money. By focusing on its Higher Purpose, a business inspires, engages and energizes its stakeholders.

Stakeholder Orientation: Recognizing that the interdependent nature of life and the human foundations of business, a business needs to create value with and for its various stakeholders (customers, employees, vendors, investors, communities, etc.). Like the life forms in an ecosystem, healthy stakeholders lead to a healthy business system.

Conscious Leadership: Human social organizations are created and guided by leaders – people who see a path and inspire others to travel along the path. Conscious Leaders understand and embrace the Higher Purpose of business and focus on creating value for and harmonizing the interests of the business stakeholders. They recognize the integral role of culture and purposefully cultivate Conscious Culture.

Conscious Culture: This is the ethos – the values, principles, practices – underlying the social fabric of a business, which permeates the atmosphere of a business and connects the stakeholders to each other and to the purpose, people and processes that comprise the company.

The Higher Purpose section particularly applies here, because I have to think that running a business has to include more than just counting up your profits at the end of the  year.  If this is all you’re trying to do, then why exist?  You only go through life once (apologies to reincarnationists), and merely attempting to accumulate enough capital to attract a mate (or, worse, build a McMansion) is really a betrayal of life itself; here we are with this marvelous ability to think the oddest thoughts, to achieve, and all you want to do is make money?

But, annoyed rant aside, Conscious Capitalism is an attempt to provide that community pressure on those who must take the responsibility to prevent something from going wrong, whether it be disposal of fracking water causing earthquakes, just any pollution problem.  And, by doing so, it may also be considered an attempt to save capitalism from drowning in its own effluvia.  After all, capitalists must remember that capitalism was brought into existence for the betterment of the citizenry; the profit motive, rather than being primary, is for personal motivation, and as a way to measure how well companies do in competition with each other.  If the practices, side effects, and results of capitalism do not result in the net betterment of the citizenry, then the time may come to discard capitalism.

And I say that as an investor myself.

In the context of battlefield archaeology (previously covered here) and the definition of the Anthropocene (here), we now have a discussion of how the effects of battle shows up, and will show up in the future, in the geology of the work,  “Battle-scarred Earth: How war reshapes the planet“, (print: “Battle Scars”) (paywall) by Jan Zalasiewicz and Mat Zalasiewicz:

The earliest evidence of armed conflict dates back to around 13,000 BC and a mass grave in northern Sudan. Here 59 human skeletons were discovered, many bearing signs of violent death such as spear and arrowheads embedded in their bones.

The wars of the ancients give some guide to how long the marks of war might last. The old battlegrounds were picked over, as the dust and smoke settled, by vultures, rats and human scavengers. Much later, teams of archaeologists moved in, finding smashed human skeletons and the remains of weapons such as flint arrowheads. Could these objects last longer and become geology rather than archaeology?

A few might. The simple materials of the old warriors have good geological analogues. Indeed, some are the essence of geology. There is little that is more hard-wearing than flint: tough and chemically resistant, it is one of the ultimate survivor rocks. A wooden lance can carbonise over time to become a lance-shaped lump of coal. But not everything will last that long: iron weapons, for example, may not fossilise so easily, as iron rusts at the surface and corrodes once buried. …

Bombturbation [the explosive production of a distinctive mass of metres-deep craters and churned earth and rock] can continue even after the guns fall silent. Of the estimated 1.5 billion shells fired in the first world war, perhaps a quarter didn’t explode on impact. Thousands are found every year, and people are still killed by them. Most of this unexploded ordnance lies buried, some 20 metres down. If it stays buried, could it fossilise? This seems likely. Even if the steel eventually dissolves, and the explosive transforms to petroleum, a compressed carbon-impregnated impression will remain, like a crushed and flattened dinosaur skull in a sandstone slab.

Bombturbated mud also contains the bones of fallen soldiers. Of the million killed in the 10-month-long Battle of Verdun, only some 290,000 were ever found. The rest must lie somewhere within that bomb-churned stratum. These layers are akin to bone beds – concentrations of vertebrate fossils found in prehistoric rock. But there is one striking difference: in these human bone beds, the remains are virtually all of young men.

(NewScientist 28 March 2015)

A sobering thought for the humans who knew, or were related to, those humans, isn’t it?  Or even us.  But in 500 years, when future archaeologists are digging up those bones, will they feel the same way?  If hypothetical alien archaeologists were to dig them up, and speculate on why the young males of the herd were forced into the area and then massacred, will they feel any emotion over the uncomprehending misery experienced by those young soldiers?

Not odd enough?  How about this: at Mammoth Site, in Hot Springs, South Dakota, is a paleontological dig of the eponymous creature which we visited a couple of years ago.  Most interestingly, the docent stated that only males had been found in the bone bed, at least so far.  The theory went that the adult males were not part of the herd and wandered about.  At some point, they’d wander into this sinkhole, where the surface would give way beneath them.  They’d scrabble for footing, never find it, and eventually drown.  I tried to visualize that and was rather horrified.

But what if the female mammoths of the herd picked out those young males of which they didn’t approve – perhaps for not being docile enough – and pushed them into the sinkhole, as an object lesson to the other males?  Now how should we feel?

If you drive an electric car, you may also be lowering the temperature of the city in which you drive:

But as well as providing potentially carbon-free driving, electric cars emit almost 20 per cent less heat than conventional cars. This could lower city temperatures, meaning use of air conditioning would also drop, says a team led by Canbing Li from Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Using summer 2012 in the Chinese capital of Beijing as an example, the team estimates that replacing conventional cars with electric ones would reduce the heat by nearly 1 °C. That in turn would result in a reduction in air conditioning use, leading to a drop of 10,686 tonnes per day in carbon dioxide emissions (Scientific Reports, doi.org/23g).

(NewScientist 28 March 2015 – paywall)