Category Archives: Politics

Rescind the Second Amendment!

5 Replies

It’s been understood throughout the course of this country’s history that we as individuals have the right to defend ourselves from violence. This is perhaps best captured in the line in the Constitution that we have the “right to keep and bear arms.” As I reflect on the horrors of recent mass shootings, it becomes clear that the only way we can progress as a society is to reject this concept. If we are to maintain any semblance of civility, we need to do away with arms.

To be clear, I’m not talking about guns and weapons, I’m talking about arms as in the things coming out of your torso and connected your hands. Basically, what I’m proposing is a mass amputation of the arms of all 300 million Americans. I feel this will prevent future mass shootings of all types. Let’s say you don’t have any arms and you want to go shoot up a school. You walk up to the door, but you can’t pull open the door because you don’t have any arms to operate the doorknob. Even if, by some miracle, you managed to get into the building, how are you gonna operate your weaponry? With your teeth? I don’t think so, sicko!

I feel this program will lead to a much safer, happier America.

Why a crime decline?

6 Replies

I was just posting on the power of stories versus boring statistics. Stories have, I think we all realize, a more powerful impact. But there’s a problem with stories. They can obfuscate the truth. For instance, with the advent of the Newtown Connecticut massacre, one could hardly be blamed for thinking we’re living in an era of increased murder and violent crime. (In fact, the very reason I’m writing this post is because I’ve had conversations with a few people who have voiced this opinion.) But, in fact, the opposite is true. The statistics show that violent crime has declined quite a bit in the past 20 years, and gun ownership has also dropped.

If there is an interesting question here that no one seems to be asking, it is why has violent crime dropped so dramatically? if we could identify the cause, maybe we could augment its powers.

I’ll throw out an entertaining hypothesis I’ve seen presented elsewhere. This decline in crime corresponds almost exactly to the rise of the Internet. Has the Internet and its children (such as group video games, online dating, social media and online pornography) resulted in a generation so addicted to the computer screen they can’t run out into the streets and kill each other?

Not a bad way to go…

Leave a reply

North Korean army minister ‘executed with mortar round’

A North Korean army minister was executed with a mortar round for reportedly drinking and carousing during the official mourning period after Kim Jong-il’s death.
…
On the orders of Kim Jong-un to leave “no trace of him behind, down to his hair,” according to South Korean media, Kim Chol was forced to stand on a spot that had been zeroed in for a mortar round and “obliterated.”

However, the army minister got the last laugh as some of his hair survived. Ha!

Re-thinking fatties

1 Reply

Recently, I’ve been contemplating America’s growing obesity problem and its likely effect on the cost of health care (among other things.) As such, I was interested in this interview with author and academic Paul Campos who argues that obesity is overstated as a problem. He would probably go as far as to say it’s not a problem. The crux of his argument:

Obesity is defined completely arbitrarily as a body mass index of 30 or higher (175 pounds for an average height woman). Now body mass follows more or less a normal distribution, whiich means if the the mean body weight is in the mid to high 20s, which it has been for many decades now, then tens of millions of people will have BMIs just below and just above the magic 30 line.

This might be meaningful if there was any evidence that people who have BMIs in the low 30s have different average health than people with BMIs in the high 20s, but they don’t. At all. So the “obesity epidemic” is 100% a product of tens of millions of people having their BMIs creep over an arbitrary line. It’s exactly as sensible as declaring that people who are 5’11 are healthy but people who are 6’1″ are sick.

Despite my loathing of fatties, I’m fairly receptive to what he’s saying. I think we have heard for years that the BMIs are out of whack and that fairly stout individuals who can nonetheless run a marathon qualify as obese.

I tend to break “overweight” people up into three groups. There’s fat people, who basically fit into the Alfred Hitchcock mold — clearly big, but not really overflowing. Then there’s obese people — Kenan Thompson from Saturday Night Live might be good example. Then there’s morbidly obese people; these are the gigantic men and women I often see at Denny’s whose butt cheeks look like they weigh about 100 pounds. I’m not surprised to hear that being fat has little effect on health, and I can buy that the same might be true with some levels of obesity. But gigantic, morbidly obese people clearly seem headed for early graves. Of course, an early grave does not necessarily mean they’ll be placing a heavy burden on the healthcare system. If you die at 60, you save the system all the healthcare expenses you would’ve run up over the next 25 years had you lived to be 85.

Having said all that, I think further expiration of this topic is needed. Fat people don’t get fat in a vacuum, they get fat by eating crappy food and not exercising. If we’re saying being fat is not a problem, are we by proxy saying that crappy food and lack of exercise are not problems? (We can get into a nightmare of correlation versus causation here: one could argue that fat people who don’t exercise are not unhealthy because they’re fat, but because they don’t exercise, but that kind of argumentation is a dog chasing its tail. The moral is obvious: exercise to be healthy and you also won’t be (too) fat.)

Nonetheless, I like the contrarian nature of Campos’s logic and might even get around to reading his book.

College blows!

3 Replies

I am, of course, a big fan of writing that agrees with points that I’ve made in the past. This Newsweek article, arguing that college education is providing smaller and smaller returns, fits the bill. I found this point especially thought provoking.

In Academically Adrift, their recent study of undergraduate learning, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find that at least a third of students gain no measurable skills during their four years in college. For the remainder who do, the gains are usually minimal. For many students, college is less about providing an education than a credential—a certificate testifying that they are smart enough to get into college, conformist enough to go, and compliant enough to stay there for four years.

When I was a senior, one of my professors asked wonderingly, “Why is it that you guys spend so much time trying to get as little as possible for your money?” The answer, Caplan says, is that they’re mostly there for a credential, not learning. “Why does cheating work?” he points out. If you were really just in college to learn skills, it would be totally counterproductive. “If you don’t learn the material, then you will have less human capital and the market will punish you—there’s no reason for us to do it.” But since they think the credential matters more than the education, they look for ways to get the credential as painlessly as possible.

I’d never really analyzed the point about cheating. If you really want to learn, it makes no sense at all. But cheating was rampant at my high school – and, yes, I did it – and, frankly, some of the teachers clearly didn’t care.

The whole article is more even-handed than this quoted text suggests, but still damning.

On a side note: I’ve generally agreed with people that the “new” Newsweek is a sinking ship. But I gotta say, I’m liking their iconoclastic, anti-conventional take on things. It just might resuscitate the brand.

The sorry (and expensive) state of healthcare

5 Replies

One of my recent themes around here has been that modern healthcare is in a state of crisis. This recent LA Times article entitled “Medical spending likely to remain high despite healthcare law” states (as is obvious from the headline) that healthcare costs are not going down anytime soon. One interesting reason…

Technology has helped other industries lower costs by eliminating waste and increasing efficiencies, but it’s done the opposite in healthcare, said Michael Thompson, a principal in Price Waterhouse Coopers’ health and welfare practice in New York.

Although engineers keep building more powerful CT and MRI scanners, for example, there’s no evidence that more scans are helping to prevent disease.

Still, we’re using an awful lot of them. A study published in June in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that from 1996 to 2010, the number of ultrasounds conducted in the U.S. doubled, CT scans tripled and MRI scans nearly quadrupled.

This caught my attention. As I’ve mentioned in the past, at the onset of my unbalance issues several years ago, I had an MRI (which did uncover a brain lesion that doctors fundamentally decided wasn’t worth worrying about.) About a year later, I felt that I had uncovered the source of the problems: damage to my vestibular system. I went to an ear nose and throat doctor and… well, what I don’t let myself tell it (quoting from this blog post.)

[The doctor] was interested in the [first] brain MRI, but, during the course of the appointment, was willing to accept the findings of the previous doctors [that it could be ignored]. But at the very end of our meeting, he said something like, “Why don’t we go ahead and do another MRI just to be safe?”

So, I went ahead and did the MRI (at about $1500 cost to me, and much more to my insurance.) Several days later I called up the MRI lab. To help them find my record, I gave them the name of the doctor. They said something like, “Oh yes, we know him. He’s a frequent flyer.” (Meaning he orders a lot of MRIs.)

That comment stayed with me. Was this doctor ordering an excessive amount of MRIs? Why would a doctor order MRIs that weren’t necessary? Again, the LA Times…

The way we pay providers is another major contributor to the high cost of American healthcare, both now and in the future. The more procedures doctors and hospitals provide, the more they get paid. It’s a recipe for runaway costs, Thompson said.

When you think about it, that’s just insane. In the same way that car salesmen are paid more if they sell you not just the car but the installed security system, antilock brakes, GPS system and solar powered self warming coffee holder (I’m not sure those actually exist, but it’s a great idea) Doctors are incentivized to pile on more services and procedures to the initial bill. Of course, car salesmen don’t enjoy the level of trust that doctors do in our society (I respect most piles of dog feces more than I respect car salesmen.) Additionally most people pay for cars out of their own pocket — we’re not sharing the costs for our car purchases through an insurance pool. So what we have is a system in which trusted authority figures are given a financial incentive to prescribe excess procedures and services. Is that going to result in unnecessary prescriptions (and thus higher shared costs)? Duh!

I’m reminded of a few other anecdotal* cases that might be relevant here. An acquaintance of mine recently had some kind of shoulder surgery. Once the doctors got in there, they determined that it would not be possible to complete the goal of the surgery (which, I think, was shaving down some bone or something.) Someone else I know recently had cataracts removed, but, post-operation, it was determined that his vision had not improved.

Were these surgeries failures? Maybe… if the goal was to actually increase health. But if the goal was to increase wealth (of the doctors), then these surgeries were pretty successful.

By the way, here’s another fact from the LA Times article worth considering while ruminating on the high cost of health care: 35.9% of Americans are obese. Suddenly my “death camps for fat people” idea doesn’t seem quite so controversial, does it?

* Yes, I agree that anecdotes are not evidence. But I do think, especially if they are easily summoned, they contain a certain wisdom.

Rape and pregnancy

1 Reply

It’s rare you see interesting science involved in political kerfuffles. Thus, I was intrigued at the controversial statements by Republican Todd Akin that rape victims are unlikely to have successful pregnancies. His statement was…

“From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” said the U.S. Senate candidate in response to a question about whether abortion should be legal in cases of rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down.”

Is this actually true? After a few days of not seeing anything in the media addressing what would seem to be a key question, I came across this article. Experts: Rape does not lower odds of pregnancy The crux of the article:

[The experts] conclusion contradicts a statement made last weekend by Rep. Todd Akin, R-Missouri, who suggested in an interview with CNN affiliate KTVI that rape rarely results in pregnancy.

However, there’s an interesting side note here. This article, discussing a kind of spontaneous abortion called preeclampsia notes that post conception, the female body can “shut the whole thing down,” and does so with increased occurrence after rape. Some select quotes from the article…

More often than not, preeclampsia is the result of a hostile immunological maternal response to the paternal genome in the developing conceptus. In other words, the mother’s body is unwittingly terminating a pregnancy that has arisen with a man for whom she has an incompatible biochemistry.

By the early 1980s, scientists had started to notice that preeclampsia was more likely to occur in pregnancies resulting from “one-night stands,” artificial insemination and rape than in pregnancies that were the product of long-term sexual cohabitation.

Now why would this be? Scientists have a theory.

“It may be useful to think about preeclampsia not simply as a medical anomaly,” reason the authors, “but as an adaptation that may have evolved to terminate pregnancies where future paternal investment was questionable or unlikely.” [WF: such as rape] Their argument, which is admittedly speculative, is predicated on the basic parental investment theory in evolutionary biology. While males could impregnate a potentially limitless number of females and spread their genes far and wide without any cost but a euphoric 90-second time investment, ancestral women’s genetic interests were compromised by having sex with a man who had no intention of helping her to raise any resulting offspring. Yet, if she did, and conceived as a consequence of that intercourse, preeclampsia was a second line of adaptive defence that would terminate this “costly” pregnancy—a sort of Darwinian morning after pill, as Gallup explained it to me.

The whole article is fascinating and really worth reading.

Now, essentially both articles are correct. Rape does not seem to be a factor in whether a woman becomes pregnant. But rape does seem to be a factor as to whether she “keeps” that pregnancy. (I’d be interested in knowing how much of a factor, but haven’t seen any data yet.)

Sex photons

2 Replies

Lately I’ve been reading a bit on quantum physics. I’m not really understanding much of it but I’m intrigued by one theory, born of the quantum physics era, that you often hear discussed in the modern era: the idea that observing an event fundamentally changes the event. For example, much of quantum physics is interested in observing the movement of tiny particles. But to observe these movements you need to have light and using light means you are bombarding the experiment with photons which can change the outcomes of the event. (This is one simple example of the larger concept.)

I was reminded of this when I stumbled across this article about a Czech brothel where johns can have sex with prostitutes for free as long as they consent to let the act be broadcast over the web. A female photographer just published a book of photos documenting this brothel and has thoughts on the publicness of these acts.

“To me it seems like an extreme example of what is happening to all of us in this internet age,” says Jakrlova, who splits her time between Prague and New York. “There is an absurdity where some people have to have it online to have it become real or exciting.”
…
Jakrlova says not all the interactions she witnessed at the club felt staged. There were moments of real affection between the clients and prostitutes, but the fact that those moments were broadcast online always qualified and relativized them, she says.
“There were real moments of humanity,” she says. “But overall I found it quite depressing.”

Once we know the sex act is observed it becomes different… a performance.

I should note that I’ve been logged onto the web site that broadcasts these sex acts for the last hour and I’ve already recognized three friends of mine.

Is democracy a terrible system designed by Satan?

1 Reply

It’s recently been primary season in California and several weeks ago an interesting political advertisement showed up on my dad’s couch. It was endorsing a particular candidate — his name was Scott Peters — but it was designed to look like those “voter guides” you see distributed by certain government agencies. Now, I’ve seen these kinds of things in the past and always jokingly thought to myself, “It’s almost like they’re trying to trick old people into thinking this is the official guide that should be used for voting.” But I never seriously believed that thought.

Thus it was to my dismay when my 94-year-old dad made a comment like, “We should make a point to follow this guide when doing our mail-in votes.” I had to point out what I felt was an obvious point: that this was not an official voting guide but an advertisement. (A particularly strong piece of ammunition for this case was that the “guide” stated (in small print) that it was “Paid for by Scott Peters for Congress” and its sole recommendation was for Scott Peters.)

So now I’m wondering if, in fact, at some point during the Scott Peters campaign one of his campaign advisers said something like, “Maybe we can create a advertisement that looks like one of those official voting guides and trick clueless old people into voting for you.” And Scott Peters said, “Sounds like a plan, Bob.”

There’s a couple disturbing things about this. For one, it would indicate that Scott Peters is scum. But I’m also aware that this is not the first time I’ve seen a faux voter’s guide advertisement. In fact, they seem to be pretty common. And if they are indeed capable of manipulating the votes of old people, one has to consider that they’ve been swinging elections for years. And, it’s not just old people we need to worry about here; naïve immigrants, the mildly retarded and plain old morons are probably easy targets for such advertisements. It’s kind of ironic. We say that a 16-year-old honors student can’t vote (even though they probably have more stake in an election that anybody) but we dutifully defend the right of a 95-year-old who can barely read the fine print.

When I was driving around the Salton Sea area a couple weeks ago I had a thought related to all this. In that area, you see a lot of signs like, “Vote Sam Mitsuhara for Judge.” And, truth be told, if I lived there and went to the voting booth and was trying to figure out who to vote for Judge, I would probably think, either consciously or subconsciously, “This Sam Mitsuhara sounds familiar. I might as well vote for him.” (In the realm of cognitive psychology, this kind of preference for the familiar is called “priming.”)

Thinking about unemployment

1 Reply

We’ve spent a lot of time in recent years hearing about the dire state of unemployment and its various ups and downs. I’m wondering as to whether continuing high unemployment could lead to a further danger to the economy: people might just realize they want to work less.

Let’s consider a few things. Unemployment numbers reflect not just people not working at all, but people working less than they used to. So, people who might’ve been working 70 hour work weeks are now working 40, people who might’ve been working 40 are now working 30 etc. The “danger” as I see it is these people might say, “You know, because I’m working less, I can’t eat out at fancy restaurants as often, and I can’t buy every DVD I want, but I do find myself hanging out with friends and family, petting my dog, going for swims, and pursuing hobbies much more than I used to.”

Obviously the corporate oligarchs should do everything they can to crush this way of thinking lest it reduce the US economy to a sputter.

But let’s say people decide they want to alter their ratio of work to free time. Can a society be made to function in this manner? Could we take a job that requires a 60 hour work week and split it amongst two people doing a 30 hour work week? Obviously, there are problems with that model: you have to train two people instead of one, and both people need to be up to speed on the same set of issues. On the other hand, if one person quits, the employer isn’t totally screwed — they have a “backup” of sorts.

Obviously, certain European nations could be models for a more “laid-back” lifestyle. But I’m dubious how sustainable those models are (their big problem is that the ratio between workers and the elderly (who are sustained by workers tax dollars) are falling out of whack.) And what works for one country has no guarantee of working for another — there are so many variables like climate, natural resources, immigration etc. that make predicting success difficult.

I would propose the following approach: workers choose to work less or not at all, thereby generating more free time. How would they sustain themselves? By consuming the elderly in a cannibalistic fashion, and making handy products out of old people’s bone matter; these products could be sold at farmers markets.

I’m a fan of these “kill two birds with one stone” solutions.