Category Archives: Uncategorized

One or two more tractors from the Minnesota State Fair:

Dr. Austin Frakt and Gilbert Benevidez, MPH, present their research on the intersection of economics and medicine, namely prices, in an article at news@JAMA:

Price transparency has been touted as a way to reduce health care spending, but there’s one big problem: it has rarely worked. That may have more to do with how it has been implemented in the past rather than a fundamental problem with the concept itself.

The idea behind price transparency is that informed consumers can price shop for medical services that have widely varying prices, like elective surgeries or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The concept is very popular, both in the United States and abroad.

But do they work?

A study published in the American Journal of Managed Care surveyed more than 140 million health plan members across 31 different commercial plans who had access to price transparency tools. Only 2% used them. Many members did not know the tools existed at all.

Sunita Desai, PhD, and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston set out to measure the association between employer-provided price information and outpatient spending. In a 2016 article in JAMA, they reported that they found that employees rarely used the information, nor was it associated with lower spending. Aetna offers a website with real-time, personalized price estimates that is used by only 3.5% of its members. Perhaps these tools can be effective in reducing health care spending, but evidence shows that low overall use is a significant bottleneck to achieving that goal.

One can argue, however, that the tools are not good enough, or that augmentation is required. That gets us to the meat:

… a recent article in the American Journal of Health Economics by Christopher Whaley, PhD, and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, examined pairing price transparency with reference pricing for Safeway employees. Here’s how it works: payers set a maximum reimbursement threshold for shoppable health care services, which is the reference price. Patients who use providers with prices above the reference price pay the difference out of pocket. Under properly designed programs, members are given price transparency tools that help them find lower-priced care.

The study watched for employee health care behavior changes over 2 years, looking at laboratory and imaging test prices. After the first year, during which only price transparency tools were offered, the authors confirmed the findings of previous studies: health plan members rarely shopped.

But when the reference pricing information was added in the second year things changed. Shopping picked up and prices decreased. Specifically, laboratory test prices dropped 27% and imaging test prices decreased 13%. The authors concluded that price tools will capture the attention of consumers only if the consumers have strong financial incentives to shop in the first place.

But disappointingly they mention, but do not expand, on one of the most important, but difficult to measure, obstacles to lowering health costs in a free market setting:

… quality is crucial in health care—where bad quality could cause serious harm. Although quality is important for other products, bad quality is typically just an inconvenience. But judging the quality of care is much harder than sizing up other products or services. Because of this, patients may use price as a proxy, assuming higher prices mean better quality. Consequently, even if patients have price information, they may not choose the lowest price available.

And it’s difficult to get quality information on doctors and facilities. Who wants to go to a second-rate facility when a mistake can worsen your condition, or even kill you^[1]? But finding that information out can be difficult, and when it’s a medical emergency, between the time requirements of the situation and the aggregation of disparate medical groups, the entire concept of price shopping recedes into irrelevancy.

The quality issue implicitly brings another issue to the fore: medicine is not a commodity. Price shopping is at its best in commodity situations, which can exist either for an entire market, or within a price point of a market.

But that doesn’t apply when your life is on the line.

I’m not saying there are bad doctors and good doctors, or bad hospitals and good hospitals. Although there are. I’m just saying that experienced doctors may bring more tools to a problem than inexperienced doctors, while fresh out of school doctors may be more informed on the tools and medicines becoming generally available than the experienced doctors, and they’re all working in one of the most complex subjects humanity has ever studied: biology.

My gut feeling is that studies such as this one are somewhat beside the point, as interesting as reference prices and that sort of thing may be.

¹ Known as iatrogenic medicine.

Kevin Drum expresses frustration that people just don’t get how hard it will be to even start fighting climate change – and our own natures:

Human beings aren’t wired to [make the changes necessary to reduce climate change]. You aren’t doing it. I’m not doing it. Europeans aren’t doing it. No one is doing it. We’re willing to make modest changes here and there, but dramatic changes? The kind that seriously bite into our incomes and our way of life? Nope.

When I mention this to people, a common reaction is disbelief. You really think people will let the planet burn before they’ll give up their cars? That’s exactly what I think, because it’s happened many times before. Over and over, human civilizations have destroyed their environments because no one was willing to give up their piece of it. They knew exactly what they were doing but still couldn’t stop. They have overfished, overgrazed, overhunted, overmined, and overpolluted. They have literally destroyed their own lifeblood rather than make even modest changes to their lifestyles.

Anybody who’s interested in constructing a realistic plan to fight climate change has to accept this. It’s the the single biggest obstacle in our way, and it can’t be wished away or talked away. As frustrating as it is, it has to be addressed on its own terms. Anyone not willing to do this simply because they don’t like it needs a very deep gut check about what they really think is important.

To amplify, this is the evolutionary drive humans, as well as most live entities, are burdened with: the drive to increase our numbers. Historically, one group could overwhelm another through sheer numbers; nowadays, technology enables weapons that lessens that advantage, but evolution drives us on.

In addition, we’re seeing what economists call the tragedy of the commons, and it’s the greatest commons of all – the biosphere. We’re savagely using it for our individual and group purposes, unable to conceptualize the idea that the world as a whole is so overpopulated that the biosphere itself is affected on a global scale.

But we cannot directly perceive it, so it lacks urgency; and, meanwhile, the evolutionary drumbeat goes on: the other groups are growing bigger, we must too!

Population biologists often talk about how different species populations change through time in response to predator or prey populations, and I’m sure they also study how subgroups within certain species also see their populations vary through time in relation to each others’ aggressions and misfortunes.

If we cannot find our way out of this conundrum, humanity’s going to see a drop in population that will be very unpleasant.

The Color Out Of Space (2010) is a truly puzzling creature. On the one hand, it’s quite well made, featuring excellent and cinematography, and while the pacing could have been improved, it wasn’t awful.

On the other hand, the story falls into the What The Hell? category. My Arts Editor may have summed it up best: aliens fly down from outer space, dine on some human, regenerate, and leave.

Yeah, that’s about as good as it gets. Really.

Based on the story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft, it didn’t try to help the audience much, and in a way that sort of aesthetic decision, similar to that of Arrival (2016), is admirable. It forces the mind open in order to try to understand just what’s going on, rather than providing a framework from which to watch the story, an inevitable part of most stories, and yet an element that must be handled with delicacy.

But this movie fails to hook the audience early, and rather than flopping around in the storytellers boat, we speed away from the story, little understand, and less caring.

And a few more tractors from the Minnesota State Fair:

Nope, not that Joe Walsh.

I’ve always enjoyed that song, though.

Former Rep Joe Walsh (R-IL) has declared for the GOP Presidential nomination:

Conservative radio host and former Illinois US Rep. Joe Walsh will challenge President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020, he announced Sunday.

“I’m going to run for president,” Walsh said on ABC’s “This Week,” also telling host George Stephanopoulos, “I’m going to do whatever I can. I don’t want him (Trump) to win.”

Walsh had said Thursday that he was “strongly, strongly considering” entering the race.

“I’m not trying to be cute or coy. I’ve told you before — if somebody’s going to get in there and go after him … it’s got to be done soon,” Walsh told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day.” “You’re running out of time. But more importantly, these are not conventional times. Look at the guy in the White House. These are urgent times.”

Walsh had previously called for a Republican to challenge the President, calling him an “unfit con man” who is “bad for the country” earlier this month. [CNN]

It’s difficult imagining anyone mounting a serious challenge in the Republican primary to President Trump, but it’s still interesting to look at Walsh and try to understand the chemistry he’s hoping to build. WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin provides an very short overview:

Joe Walsh, the former Illinois congressman turned radio talk show host, said some pretty outrageous things in his day. But unlike those who have admitted no wrong and have drunk the Trump Kool-Aid, Walsh has apologized. “On more than one occasion, I questioned [President Barack] Obama’s truthfulness about his religion,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “At times, I expressed hate for my political opponents. We now see where this can lead. There’s no place in our politics for personal attacks like that, and I regret making them.”

On The Issues has this graphical representation of Walsh’s ideological position:

To the right, for your reference, is the On The Issues graphical summation of President Trump. Based solely on these measurements, it appears there’s little to differentiate the two. Of course, there’s far more to winning a nomination than ideological position, and while I favor such mundane observations as competency and sobriety, many folks on both right and left are susceptible to charisma. While I don’t personally see it, the energy and size of President Trump’s base indicates that he has a charisma that appeals to, and, in my view, overwhelms the rational faculties of a sizable percentage of the American electorate.

Can Walsh crack that charisma? I’m dubious. Certainly, he’ll attract a few Never Trumpers, but that won’t be enough. He needs to evaporate much of the 80+% of Republicans who approve of Trump. Simply shouting every day of the campaign that Trump is a “con man,” to use his own words, an incompetent, a fool who is endangering the country, is in itself a foolish approach. Trumpists will simply cover their ears and proclaim to each other that Walsh was never, as he admits, a fellow Trumpist, merely an anti-Clinton voter. Such will Walsh be dismissed, even if he manages to enlist Fox News on his side.

Walsh would need to adopt a subtle approach designed to show how Trump is basically someone whose loyalties are fickle, not least to the principles on which this country was founded and nominally operates, that he is inconstant, exclusively self-interested, and incapable of wise, deliberate governance. There are numerous examples of these points from which Walsh can select. By asking his base why they adhere to someone who betrays their own principles constantly, he may be able to engender some cracks in that foundation.

But will he? I guess we’ll find out. Walsh is not the first challenger to Trump; former Governor William Weld of Massachusetts, an old-line Republican and former candidate for Vice President from the Libertarian Party, has also entered the field. I have not discussed him. But it shows there’s a little life in the Republican Party that worries about the traditional values of a President, and how Trump is a miserable failure when it comes to those values.

Remember that WaPo piece in which a couple of high ranking Log Cabin members endorsed President Trump? It appears that other Log Cabin members simply couldn’t abide such a terribly reasoned endorsement:

Robert Turner, the former president of the D.C. chapter of the national LGBT group Log Cabin Republicans, announced in a Facebook message on Aug. 15 that he has withdrawn his membership in the organization after it announced in an op-ed column in the Washington Post that it endorsed President Donald Trump for re-election in 2020.

“It saddens me greatly to say that today, I am ending my association with Log Cabin Republicans, an organization I’ve been heavily involved with for the last decade – including serving as president of the D.C. chapter for three years,” Turner said in his Facebook post. …

“But for me,” Turner continued, “there’s no more fight left. The national board’s endorsement of Trump, and their subsequent and hollow WaPo op-ed, is a step too far. And this leaves me sad.” [Washington Blade]

It makes me wonder just how much of clinging to power syndrome motivated that ill-considered endorsement. Granted, being a conservative LGBTQ+ person is a bit of a solitary path to walk, although Andrew Sullivan has done an admirable job of it for 20+ (or is it 30+ years, Andrew?), but allowing one’s emotions to dictate one’s moral choices is a dangerous move to make. People lose respect for you.

Like Mr. Turner basically just said.

Amidst the wailing of economists, Democrats, and farmers concerning the incompetent, amateur maneuverings of President “Trade wars are easy to win!” Trump, it’s worth taking a step back and considering that, despite the indisputable evidence that Trump is flailing and possibly in the grip of dementia, he may be on the right side of history. Here’s David Von Drehle in WaPo:

I’m talking about soft power — the use of international organizations, moral suasion, foreign aid, trade, compromise, alliances and salesmanship to achieve a nation’s aims. Brutally adept with hard power — from tanks and machine guns to concentration camps and starvation — the Chinese Communist Party has little experience with soft power. Xi is getting a crash course, with one test after another.

Hong Kong is the most immediate. More than 20 years after the former British colony was returned to Chinese sovereignty, the proud and wealthy city refuses to submit to Communist control. A law that would allow Beijing authorities to extradite dissidents from Hong Kong provoked a backlash of protest that grows larger with each effort to quell it. Close to 2 million people, according to organizers, participated in a peaceful demonstration on Sunday — arguably the biggest challenge to party authority since the 1989 student protest in Beijing, which ended in a massacre.

China is by no stretch of the imagination a democracy. The Communist Party has power and, constitutionally, will not peacefully relinquish it. The Army has been and could easily once again be used to coerce citizens into doing Communist Party bidding, and minorities such as the Uighurs face cultural and ethnic extinction.

So limiting trade with China is not necessarily a bad thing, no matter what free trade advocates and libertarians may think. Of course, there are arguments on the other side, that making China dependent on trade may limit their aggression. It’s a fine and valid argument to have.

I have little use for Trump’s methods, his claims of authority to order companies out of China, for his entire China debacle dating right back to before he was inaugurated. But with concerns about Chinese power combined with Chinese lack of scruples, and credible reports of illicit technology transfers from the West to China, it’s worth contemplating that Trump has the right idea.

He’s just a flaming idiot about how he implements it. He may end up getting pitchforked by American farmers. Which would not be a bad thing.

As North Carolina’s GOP continues its tradition of shenanigans, until just a couple of days ago, the North Carolina GOP had a web site up called Vote.GOP. EQV Analytics took a look at the site and came to a few conclusions:

The exact same service – without any of Vote.GOP’s privacy concerns – is already available at the North Carolina State Board of Elections website itself, so Vote.GOP actually delivers no value to the voter, while proving valuable indeed to the GOP by collecting the voter’s detailed personal identifying information.

They use their brand name as a way to collect private information from trusting voters.

But our analysis of Vote.GOP finds it worse than merely useless. It can, in fact, actually cause innocent voters to be purged from the North Carolina poll book, disenfranchising them.

See their analysis for the how of it, but it’s certainly a good fit with GOP voter suppression tactics nation-wide. But …

But why would Vote.GOP treat the voting rights of what are likely to be its mostly Republican users with such obvious disregard? Our review of the site’s Javascript code offers a likely answer.

Every visit to Vote.GOP peppers the user’s browser with tracking cookies, web beacons, and data-harvesting code, including code attributed to a division of Tremor International, an Israeli advertising technology company whose RhythmOne subsidiary touts its ability to harvest web users’ “demographics, psychographics, shares (including dark social media), interests, purchase behaviors, and browsing habits.” Linking up that sort of profiling with the highly personal identifying information that Vote.GOP users give away is the holy grail of campaign advertising. It enables precision micro-targeting of just the right message to exactly the voter most likely to be persuaded by it, just as Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump campaign in 2016.

Knowing that, it’s easier to understand why Vote.GOP’s developers paid only cursory attention to building a functional voter assistance service: because it’s really all about capturing vulnerable voters’ personal data.

I notice that EQV Analytics discusses how RhythmOne is trying to emulate the notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, and yet may be skipping over a far more serious concern^[1]. Because the user is now identifiable, specific activities can be connected to that user. And if those activities are in the least questionable – a dark social media site, a visit to a porn site, or any other site which is questionable in the reader’s context, and now there’s leverage. It’s illicit, morally dubious, and fits right in with the North Carolina GOP’s game plan.

It may seem unlikely that extortion could be used on such a scale for either monetary or electoral gain, but don’t be so sure. Computers are great for automating these sorts of things cheaply, so who says this sort of data collection couldn’t be turned into a stream of blackmail dollars? Some relatively simple work on the end-result collection end to isolate any damage done by victims who call in the police, and even a rupture of the scheme might be contained without rupturing the balance of the scheme.

A morality-free couple of operatives could set this up, using some technical help which is already available.

¹ And I do not take the Precision Messaging facet lightly, either. Precision messaging should be renamed to Precision, Personal, & Private Message (PPPM), because that enumerates the important facets of the operationality of this technique. What does this mean? Precision means the message can be personalized to the profile of the intended reader; Personal means the reader is identifiable; and Private, the most important of all, means the message can be anything at all, unlike a public message which is subject to immediate analysis and comparison to previous messages. No connection to honesty or consistency is required. You may receive a PPPM that says the Candidate is for A, while your neighbor, who hates A, receives a PPPM that says the Candidate is against A. Now, obviously, if you talk to your neighbor, you may detect that inconsistency. Or you may not.

And that’s how you steal votes.

I personally believe PPPM should be made illegal.

Continuing the theme of elderly farm equipment:

Perhaps ‘elderly’ is a trifle hyperbolic, but old is so mundane. Is there a better term?

A bull and his rider. Will it soon be a bull and his runner?

A movie from another era, Becket (1964) moves along at is own, leisurely pace, which nevertheless breeds tension and anticipation. Why? While battles are ignored and avoided, an early signal of the nature of the story, the political and moral evolution of one man is closely examined.

Thomas Becket is advisor and close friend to the undisciplined and volcanic King Henry II of England (reigned 1154 – 1189) when he persuades several French towns to submit to English domination, much to the dismay of others of Henry’s cohort who dream of pillage and rapine. For this, he is awarded the position of Chancellor of England. But in a world of Normans, Becket is (ahistorically) a Saxon, a member of a defeated ethnic group, and as an advisor to the leader of those who defeated the Normans, a collaborator and traitor. This gnaws at him, and all the worse when a woman under his protection is taken from him by Henry; her choice of suicide, rather than lay with Henry, merely sharpens the point that digs at Becket’s conscience. Where should his loyalties lie, with the king of the group which defeated his own, or with his sullen fellows, now victimized by the conquerors? Or is there a third way?

The Church in England is an important political player in this era, causing King Henry political heartburn, and when the current leader, who occupies the position of Archbishop of Canterbury, dies, Henry arranges via the Pope in Rome for his close friend Becket, who, as it happens, is an arch-deacon, to be consecrated a priest one day, and Archbishop of Canterbury the next, despite protests from local bishops. This is a political move designed to protect Henry’s metaphorical flank, and it is unwelcomed and discouraged by Becket. He recognizes, if dimly and incompletely, that with positions of power come responsibilities, weighty responsibilities, that may change the nature of his relationship with the King. The King is the illuminating contrast, a grasping man whose main constraint may be only Becket’s good sense; it’s certainly neither the King’s mother nor the King’s wife, who Henry both despises, nor his toadying loyalists. Henry is the absolute monarch, hemmed in only by other absolute monarchs and painful realities on the ground.

Becket, now Archbishop, is met with the immediate conflict: a priest, accused of debauching a woman in his parish, is arrested by the temporal authorities. Becket is faced with the question of whether he should permit the temporal authorities to punish the man, or if this is a matter for the ecclesiastical courts, as the senior local Bishop demands. Before Becket can act, more word arrives: The priest attempts to escape, but is apprehended and, in the presence of a Lord Gilbert, put to death.

In a time in which the Church saw itself as a peer or even a master of absolute monarchs, this is a match to the conflagration in Becket’s mind. It’s a fire that burns away the thicket of desires of the temporal world, bringing into focus the role and position of the Church in society, of which he is now a high leader, and his pointed responsibility as such a person.

Becket’s demand that Gilbert surrender himself for judgment and punishment are rejected by Henry, both for practical and theoretical reasons. Henry, lacking Becket’s good counsel, concocts a scheme to remove Becket from the position that Henry put him in, accusing him of embezzlement of funds while Chancellor. Found guilty, Becket foils an attempt to inflict immediate and potentially fatal punishment through the use of holy threats and sheer personality, and then manages to escape, with the help of a confederate, to sanctuary with the King of France.

For the next several years, Becket lives in various sanctuaries, and eventually the Pope arranges a meeting in which both Becket and Henry agree to concessions. Becket can now return to his position in England, but Henry’s rage builds until, one drunken night, his incoherent utterances are interpreted by his toadies to be an order to murder Becket, and off they troop to do so.

If you’re looking for a period piece with lots of action, sword waving and that sort of thing, this is not the movie for you. With the exception of the final murder scene, there is no action in the sense of today’s era. This is not about actions, but about transformations: from temporal concerns to spiritual concerns, of loyalties from Kings to God, even of the transfer of loyalties from ethnic group transcending to the “other” and the “outsider”, or how to live together without slitting each others’ throats.

And this is primarily an internal transformation, the willingness to change and accept different thought patterns than were previously in use. This movie is about portraying those changes, the costs they exact of those who attempt them, the advantages they can bring, and the mental anguish that can accompany these gymnastics.

And, sometimes, the temporal costs of same.

This movie, technically well done and with a flock of Oscar nominations, repays careful attention with insight into the moral construction of two important, historical men.

Recommended.

Cisheteropatriarchy:

A socio-political system in which cisgender heterosexual men have authority over everyone else. Also, the way we describe society as fundamentally based on heterosexism, cissexism, sexism, and male dominance. Here, all actors are presumed to be heterosexual, cisgender, and operate in alignment with strict gender binary roles. Patriarchy is reliant upon ideologies of domination and the exploitation of all things related to the feminine, queerness, and transness. [LGBTQA+ Glossary, Michigan State University]

Noted in the second party of Andrew Sullivan’s weekly tri-partite diary entry for this week, New York Mag:

Now comes a proposed K-12 curriculum in California that would enforce these new orthodoxies on the high-school population. It would teach kids in an ethnic studies course how to “critique [sic] empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression.” The aim is to “connect ourselves to past and contemporary resistance movements that struggle for social justice.” Children will learn to spell women as “womxn,” and be versed in what critical race theorists call “misgynoir.”

We trotted over to the Minnesota State Fair yesterday, and I took pictures of some old farm machinery.

This, I think, is a thresher.

And here is a tractor, I believe.

And another pair.

Beautiful in big, ugly ways.

It strikes me that the recent contretemps between President Trump and his hand-picked Fed Board Chairman, Jerome Powell, is illustrative of the competing priorities of Trump and the Fed Board. Here is Chairman Powell announcing an interest rate cut of .25% (25 basis points), to the 2 – 2.25% range:

In the video, he states this is intended to support an economy that he views as still in good shape, continue to support the hot job market, and in general attempt to benefit the American people.

And President Trump’s response?

Germany sells 30 year bonds offering negative yields. Germany competes with the USA. Our Federal Reserve does not allow us to do what we must do. They put us at a disadvantage against our competition. Strong Dollar, No Inflation! They move like quicksand. Fight or go home!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2019

And

….My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

President Trump wants a big drop of 100 basis points or more, despite the fact that would preclude the Fed from maneuvering if the bottom drops out of the economy, because the fact is that the interest rates the Fed are using, as it is, are preternaturally low.

President Trump knows he’s facing political disaster if the economy falls apart, but that’s his catastrophe, not the Fed’s. The Fed’s catastrophe is when the economy goes belly-up, but they have the long-term responsibility, unlike Trump. And Trump’s bad-faith promises are coming back to bite him, because he claimed the economy was a disaster when it wasn’t during his campaigning days, and that only he could rescue the economy. Now he’s President, and he claims to be the only one who can keep it going.

All self-serving, craven lies, but the problem with them is if the economy goes into recession, he’s the guy responsible, even though Presidents have limited control over the economy. They’re really more a function of Congress, and that becomes a complex metric of measurement involving not only growth, but protection of natural resources, national defense, and other factors.

Trump’s getting desperate as his rash promises of easy to win trade wars have come home to nest and crapped all over his tie. If the Fed were to so-rashly drop interest rates by 100 basis points, no doubt it would juice the economy, just like eating a tablespoon of sugar will juice my good reader, but a little later you end up cranky on the couch – if not fast asleep as the cats pisses on you.

But that’s all Trump needs, that little sugar rush. His catastrophe is a bad economy during election season. If he can get over that hump, he thinks he’s home free.

The Fed’s is the long-term depression which leaves us at 20% unemployment – or worse. They approach this interest rate setting business with sober care, especially given the novelty of a trade war.

So we have two similar but different catastrophes to be avoided by the two actors in our drama. A drama that’s all about ego, power-seeking, and the holy tenets of the far-right wing.

Hang on, folks. This ride could get very bumpy.

A few days ago we had our very own monsoon in Minnesota: 1+ inches of rain in about half an hour at our home here in Falcon Heights, more others. I decided to take some pictures, lit by grow-lights. Here’s the best.

Archaeology Magazine has an article on the tomb of the Griffin Warrior, which is dated to the period in which the Mycenean and Minoan civilizations were intermixing. It includes several fascinating images, including this one:

(griffinwarrior.org, Jeff Vanderpool/Courtesy of the Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati)The Pylos Combat Agate, found in the Griffin Warrior’s grave, is an extraordinarily fine seal stone measuring only 1.4 inches wide. It depicts the final moments of a battle among three warriors.

And, yes, GriffinWarrior.org does exist and is about the tomb. An amazing image, above. It fills me with wonder.

There’s a tension in democracy between the citizens and their decision-making power in terms of the greater good, and those they elect to Congress who are directly responsible for the greater good of the nation. There’s a lot of room for discussion and honorable dissension in that tension.

Still, I jumped when I read this this quote from the CEO of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp. Palantir supplies software used by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for managing the process of apprehension of undocumented persons in the United States. As noted here, a number of computer technology companies have run into problems when supplying competing software, as employees are uncomfortable with and may even refuse to work on such products.

But Palantir?

In an interview with Bloomberg News this week, Karp said the government should be responsible for answering difficult questions about how technologies may be used to surveil citizens.

“I do not believe that these questions should be decided in Silicon Valley by a number of engineers at large platform companies,” Karp said in the interview.

It’s interesting how one individual – or perhaps a small team of C-suiters – can make that decision, but a much larger number of engineers should not.

Think about that for a moment.

Of course, there are various caveats, such as foreign engineers not having a right to make that decision, and the engineers in question could simply leave their jobs for more morally agreeable jobs. In the latter case, though, I’d dryly observe that a corporation should really be a cooperative venture, and if large numbers of your employees are concerned that your business strategy has run over your moral standards, perhaps you should think about it.

But it really comes down to engineers who are members of a democracy being told to shut up and not have an opinion on a moral issue of the day. It’s one thing to have an opinion and express it forcefully, but to tell others that they should just sit down and work: I think that’s a problem.

This report out of Dallas has the fascination of a train wreck:

From WaPo:

America’s federal deficit will expand by about $800 billion more than previously expected over 10 years, primarily because of two legislative packages approved this year, pushing the nation further into levels of debt unseen since the end of World War II, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

The CBO also said that the impact of higher trade barriers, primarily President Trump’s trade war, could hurt economic growth amid widespread fears of a recession.

The United States was already expected to hit about $1 trillion in annual deficits next year, an unusually high number, particularly given that deficits normally contract during sustained periods of economic growth.

They just spat in the GOP’s holy water. I wonder if Trump will urge the GOP to get rid of the CBO as just another “deep state” entity.

Last night we were watching the news and saw a piece which caused a groan from both of us – the report of a study claiming fluoridation of water reduces the IQ of children born to mothers who have ingested that water as part of their diet. Kevin Drum saw it as well and doesn’t think much of it:

A 1 milligram increase in maternal urinary fluoride levels was associated with a decrease of 4.49 IQ points in boys and an increase of 2.40 IQ points in girls. This seems implausibly large, doesn’t it? But I can think of at least one crude way to check it. In 1950 virtually no water in the US was fluoridated. Today, fluoridated water reaches more than 70 percent of the population. At a minimum, this suggests that over the last 70 years the IQ levels of boys and girls (a) should have gone down, and (b) should have diverged by about 7 points. Has this happened?

In a word, no. Overall IQ scores in the United States have increased since 1950 and that steady upward trend has continued at least through 2014.

I don’t know where this study was published, and that can matter a lot. If you run into a anti-fluoridation proponent, this might give you a bit of ammunition.

I see the reins we keep on the banks are being released in order to permit them to pursue greater and greater profits, as noted by Politico:

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board voted 3-1 Tuesday to give big banks more leeway to make risky short-term bets in financial markets by loosening a landmark but highly contentious regulation known as the Volcker rule.

The FDIC and four other independent agencies have dropped their proposal to tie the rule to a strict accounting standard — a move that banks argued would have made it more burdensome by subjecting additional trades to heightened supervision. Instead, regulators will give banks the benefit of the doubt on a much wider range of trades, according to the text of the final rule.

And how do I feel about this? HAH! Last time we saw the banks making risky bets, we ended up in the Great Recession. Democrats are not happy:

The rewrite “will not only put the U.S. economy at risk of another devastating financial crisis, but it could potentially leave taxpayers at risk of having to once again foot the bill for unnecessary and burdensome bank bailouts,” House Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said in an email.

So I’m not alone. Fortunately, this is not the final say:

Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting on Tuesday signed the revised rule. Three other agencies — the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission — must still approve it.

The Federal Reserve may have, ah, reservations.

So how many more recessions will we have to go through before we get it through our collective heads that regulation is not a dirty word?

Libertarians would claim this is a self-correcting problem, that the survivors of the big crash will learn and not repeat mistakes, but I fear the chase of profits is turning out to be amnesia-causing.

Even Iceland’s approach to the Great Recession – they jailed their bankers – might not be enough.

Professor Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy points me at a curious case in which the plaintiff has moved to seal another of his case’s records, meaning they are not public, for no particularly obvious reason:

In 2017, Bonner lost a case in New Jersey state appellate court, Bonner v. Cumberland Reg’l High Sch. Dist. Justia.com, a site that (among other things) publishes online copies of state and federal court opinions, included that nonprecedential New Jersey decision; Bonner then sued in federal court, asking the federal court to order Justia to remove the opinion. Yesterday federal District Judge Peter G. Sheridan granted Justia’s motion to dismiss (Bonner v. Justia, Inc., 2019 WL 3892858):

Plaintiff seems to believe the New Jersey [appellate] opinion is his personal property…. Plaintiff seeks to prevent the [opinion] from being “reported, copied, distributed, shared, or by any other means used by anyone or any website.” “[T]he courts of this country recognize a general right to inspect and copy public records and documents, including judicial records and documents.” …

Plaintiff is proceeding pro se, and the Court should read Plaintiff’s complaint [here, amended] generously and hold it “to less stringent standards than formal pleadings drafted by lawyers.” … [But t]he amended complaint is substantively meritless, as was the original complaint.

Plaintiff is essentially attempting to seal the Appellate Division’s Opinion, which—like federal court documents—[is] open to the public. There is a heightened public interest in disclosure of materials that are filed within the Courts, which outweighs private interests in confidentiality, as the Courts are funded by the public and in general judicial proceedings are not done in secret….

It’s worth noting that public access to judicial records is one of the keys to monitoring for incompetent or unworthy judges, and so simply acceding to his request was not an option. The importance of that monitoring for the health of society is too great. Naturally, there are exceptions.

But it’s also worth remembering that these rules come from the pre-Web era, an era where one had to either visit the Court or know do a bit of work in order to request the records. In this era of online records, the satisfaction of idle curiosity is, sometimes, a little too easy.

In the end, I have no dispute over the judge’s decision. But it does bring up the subject of just how hard it’s become to drop out of society – and whether or not it’s a legitimate interest of society’s members. Most of me says that, yes, it’s legitimate, but there’s a small part of me that wonders.

Politico notes the latest President Trump maneuver:

To hear President Donald Trump and his allies tell it, the federal investigators who spent the past two years investigating the president are about to go down. …

They’re expecting all of this to come from a spate of Justice Department probes reviewing the full scope of the Trump-Russia investigation, which culminated earlier this year with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

“This was treason. This was high crimes,” Trump said during a recent Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. “This was everything as bad a definition as you want to come up with. This should never be allowed to happen to our country again.”

These hyperbolic expectations have legal experts, even some who are often sympathetic to the president, skeptical that the final product can equal the Trump-fueled rhetoric.

Keep the base worked up, deepen their paranoia, and don’t let them think. Don’t give them a reason to read the Mueller report. Use the same tactic to attack your enemies as a warning to never attack again.

The resentment of the Trump base, brought on by the rapid and sometimes illicit, in their eyes, changes sought by progressives, not to mention progressives’ attitudes, and deepened by far-right pundits building a political movement, makes them quite vulnerable to taking these charges seriously, even if Trump’s allies express doubt that they’ll amount to anything. Why? Because he’s fighting back, and that’s what the base hungers after most. The fact that he’s clumsy and ineffective is immaterial because they never learn that he’s ineffective; the news doesn’t reach them, or is swallowed up by the next controversy.

All Trump has to do is keep them convinced he’s winning. If a recession hits, then he may have a problem. That’s why he’s trying to cast aspersions on Fed Chair Powell, even though a recession is the result of many factors, most beyond the President’s control.

They say you can pop the seeds just like popcorn.