Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

On Responsibility

Here’s a good article by Michael Neumann breaking down the various legalities involved in the Georgia conflict, and in general exonerating most Russian activities.

This passage caught my eye:

There is also a relationship between war as an immorally disproportionate response, or starting war for the wrong reasons, and all its consequences. When you start a war for the wrong reasons, you are responsible for all that follows, even the other side’s atrocities. Though the other side is to blame for its crimes, so are you. You don’t even have the right to kill in self-defense. If you are wrong to start a war, you don’t suddenly fall into the right just because, contrary to your expectations, it’s you, not the other guy, who has to defend himself.

The U.S., its sycophants and apologists, often scorn the Iraqis for various behaviors in the wake of the March 2003 invasion – looting and suicide bombings and kidnappings. Here’s the bottom line – the invasion was illegal and the U.S. was not defending itself when it invaded. It is therefore responsible for everything that followed – everything. That means all of the destruction of property, all of the hundreds of thousands of deaths, all of the refugees. All of it falls on Bush’s shoulders. How much more damage can one man do?

And Georgia, likewise, is responsbile for all that happened in South Ossetia .

A Silent Cog in the Noise Machine

Here’s what I gather from the following statement by Craig Sprout:

Oh, and a note for the president of the Craig Sprout Fan Club (really, this man crush you have on me is kind of embarrassing), if there were only some way to respond to a post, other than in the comments, that would show up underneath the main post, then people could see that link and click on it and read a response at another site. Maybe someone should get to work on that, huh? They could call it . . . trackback . . . or maybe pingback . . . yeah, that’s the ticket. Someone should do that.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to run a blog, which is nothing more than a letter to the editor without the pesky editor lording over us. I have linked to Craig in a snarky kind of way, having a small joke over his decision to ban comments from his site. But what he did is an interesting phenomenon, likely tied in on an eerie psychological level to right wing talk radio. In that forum conservatives get together all day long and talk about liberals and progressives without any interference from … liberals and progressives. They get to frame the debate by defining the issue and demonizing the opposition all at once. Since the medium itself is at least as important as the content broadcast over that medium, it’s important to understand what is being practiced: propaganda.

I use the word carefully. I know what it is, I know how it works. It’s a means of persuasion using psychological tools, drowning out opposition being just one of many. It’s a vehicle that can carry any philosophy from fascist to communist. It’s been used over the years in just about every country with mass media – some (like the U.S.) very skilled, some (like the U.S.S.R.) very clumsy.

Craig is just a little guy, like me, about as noticeable as a fart in a slaughterhouse. But his technique is worthy of comment. He has adopted the methods of talk radio, perhaps unknowingly. He’s now part of the right wing noise machine – he allows no dissent and insists that his message be the only one on display. The psychology is fascinating.

Superbugs and the Free Market

We are faced with a serious problem, one requiring the full faith and credit of the free market. We need to unleash resources and creativity. That’s what markets do best, right?

The problem is drug-resistant bacteria and diseases that cannot be cured with existing strains of antibiotics. Yet market incentives are perverse. The marketplace is just as often our enemy as our friend.

This is from an article by Jerome Groopman in the New Yorker, Superbugs, August 11/18 issue:

In the past, large pharmaceutical companies were the primary sources of antibiotic research. But many of these companies have abandoned the field. “Eli Lilly and Company developed the first cephalosporins,” Moellering told me, referring to familiar drugs like Keflex. “They developed a huge number of important anti-microbial agents. They had incredible chemistry and incredible research facilities, and, unfortunately, they have completely pulled out of it now. After Squibb merged with Bristol-Myers, they closed their antibacterial program,” he said, as did Abbott, which developed key agents in the past treatment of gram-negative bacteria. A recent assessment of progress in the field, from U.C.L.A., concluded, “FDA approval of new antibacterial agents decreased by 56 per cent over the past 20 years (1998-2002 vs. 1983-1987),” noting that, in the researchers’ projection of future development only six of the five hundred and six drugs currently being developed were new antibacterial agents. Drug companies are looking for blockbuster therapies that must be taken daily for decades, drugs like Lipitor, for high cholesterol, or Zyprexa, for psychiatric disorders, used by millions of people and generating many billions of dollars each year. Antibiotics are used to treat infections, and are therefore prescribed only for days or weeks. (The exception is the use of antibiotics in livestock, which is both a profit-driver and a potential cause of antibiotic resistance.)

If there is a solution to this problem, it will come from the college campuses and the National Institute of Health – government sources. The market is not helping – in fact – is structurally unable to help. This phenomenon is known as “market failure” – the public is disserved by the profit motive. In such situations, government has to intervene to provide for the greater good.

It’s interesting – I realized as I wrote those words that in the past in my exchanges with Dave Budge (a libertarian conservative Republican who at any given time denies affiliation to any of those three schools), he claimed not to grasp the concepts of “market failure” and “greater good”. Ayn Rand herself did not believe in individuals sacrificing to a greater good – that is, she did not think there was any point in people serving anything but their own self-interest. Perhaps libertarianism, a sideshow that has much greater currency in leadership circles than among the general population, is a failed philosophy.

Superbugs are a common problem affecting all of us. Those institutions that profit from the public’s need for drugs have an obligation to step in and help us solve the problem. But they’re not – they’re busy doing the self-interest thing. Rand would be proud.

The View From the Front Window

I haven’t been posting lately. Here’s part of the reason:

That’s a picture of sunrise over Upper Quartz Lake in Glacier National Park last week. Taking in views like this while sipping on morning coffee is part of why we live in Montana, and why we put up with low pay and Roger Koopman.

Oh, and the huckleberries, twin berries, and thimble berries are ripe too. The hike to and from the lake took much longer than anticipated.

Huckleberries
Huckleberries

Bedwetters Everywhere – Be Afraid!

“I hope the day comes that you return to your wife and daughters and your country, and you’re able to be a provider, a father and a husband in the best sense of all those terms.” (Navy Captain Keith Allred, military judge in the trial of Salim Hamdan, a deer in the headlights whom the Bush Administration sought to imprison for life for driving Osama bin Laden’s pickup truck.)

There’s a presumption afoot in right wing circles that everyone in Guantanamo deserves what they are getting. Nice to see some justice at work. We don’t see much of it.

Note – the U.S. is still free to hold Hamdan as an “enemy combatant”, a classification made up on-the-spot in the crazed post-9/11 madness. It will be five months before we know if there is justice. If he’s not released, it will have been just a show trial.

Rabid Sanity Tackles Health Care

In an exchange I had with Steve at Rabid Sanity regarding health care, he referred me to two articles that take issue with the current low ranking by World Health Organization of the United States’ health care system against other industrialized countries. We’re 37th. The two articles dispute the rankings, saying they are biased in favor or state-run systems. Our system is not “perfect” one admits, but is probably the best in the world.

The first article is How surveys twist rankings on health care, by Glen Whitman. The problem is, he says, the objectives of the study.

The most obvious bias is that 62.5 percent of their weighting concerns not quality of service but equality. In other words, the rankings are less concerned with the ability of a health system to make sick people better than with the political consideration of achieving equal access and state-controlled funding.

This, he says, is a flaw in the study. The United States is very good at making sick people better – not all sick people, but that’s not the point. A health care system should be measured by its abilities, and not its delivery capacity. That 47 million of us are without insurance? Not an issue. Bias.

The rankings include measures for “health level” and “responsiveness.” “Health level” is their way of saying life expectancy, while “responsiveness” refers to a survey based on “respect for persons” and elements such as speed of service, convenience and choice — yet even in these cases half the overall weighting is determined by considerations of equality. Thus, a country with a poor level of “responsiveness” throughout the population will score higher than a country with a good level in some parts and an excellent level in others.

It’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Whitman is a professor of economics, and is not concerned about equality. And he is right: If you only measure the people we actually take care of in this country, we’re the toast of the town.

The second article, Ranking the U.S. Health-Care System, by Jim Peron (for whom it gives no credentials), says pretty much the same thing, but from a doctrinal standpoint. Peron starts off by using the word “socialist” as a pejorative, so it’s not hard to see where he’s going. Referring to a study by the Commonwealth Fund that also ranked the U.S. very low, he says

The Commonwealth Fund marked down the United States partly because “All other major industrialized nations provide universal health coverage, and most of them have comprehensive benefits packages with no cost-sharing by the patients.” Again the American system loses points because it doesn’t provide socialized medicine. And the Times neglected to note that “no cost-sharing” means the people have paid through taxes whether they receive the care or not.

This is a curiosity. The concept of insurance is based on shared risk, no different than coverage of people’s health care through taxation, also a shared-risk system. But Peron presumes that private insurance is a superior model because it is not based on taxation. That’s nothing more than personal bias.

This is priceless:

This issue is not unknown to the Commonwealth Fund. In 1999 it
published The Elderly’s Experiences with Health Care in Five Nations, which found significant delays for “serious surgery.” Only 4 percent of the American seniors reported long waits for serious surgery. The rate was 11 percent in Canada and 13 percent in Britain. For non-serious surgery the differences were more obvious: 7 percent in the United States, 40 percent in Canada, and 51 percent in Britain.

He’s talking about seniors. He doesn’t seem to realize it, but he’s comparing our Medicare, or government-sponsored system that is supported by taxes, with other countries. I’m happy that Medicare is doing well in that regard. It’s a well-run system.

In other areas, Peron simply offers up weak, made-up-on-the-spot excuses.

The United States also lost credit because fewer Americans report having a regular doctor for five years or more. But Americans are more mobile than many other people.CNN reports that Americans move every five years on average.

He does that in other areas as well, as in emergent care wait periods, lack of centralized medical records, and the number of patient complaints. (“But different cultures have different attitudes toward complaining.”)

It’s all illuminating, but not of the relative merits of health care systems. In terms of equality and delivery of care, the U.S. lags far behind other countries. But these articles, and Steve’s post to begin with, shine a light not on study biases, but rather on right wing biases. Yes, we don’t offer care to everyone. We don’t intend to! Yes, our care for the wealthy and well-insured is excellent. Those are the people the system is meant to serve.

The system works as it is intended to work, delivering excellent care to insiders, and poor or no care to outsiders. When we debate conservatives like Steve on this issue, that is the subtext, and the issue we need to highlight. Conservatives are far too caught up in rewarding the financially well-off. In health care, that’s a poor objective. Even if they attain it, they have failed us.

For that reason, they need to step aside and let us “socialists” fix our health care system. It’s long overdue. We have real answers while they offer nothing other than a curtsy to Ayn Rand.

Bicyclist Assaulted by New York’s Finest

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Incredibly, the bicyclist, who was part of a Critical Mass protest, was arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer. The officer in question claims that the cyclist was aiming at him and that he was only defending himself.

In 1968, he would have gotten away with it.

The Moons of Jupiter

This is pretty neat if you like looking at stars and stuff. The brightest object in the southern sky these nights is the planet Jupiter. Last night, using ordinary binoculars, we were able to see it well enough that three of its moons were visible. Two were on the right, one on the left.

I needed to steady the binoculars to see the moons, so I crouched way down and braced them on the back of a lawn chair. After the binocs were steadied, the moons appeared as if by magic.

Too Close For Comfort

Three separate studies predict that Barack Obama will win the coming election with between 52 and 55 percent of the vote. The studies, highlighted in this Raw Story article, predict election outcomes based on our economic condition, and have been right in almost every postwar U.S. election.

Problem: Exit polls in 2004 showed John Kerry winning the popular vote in that election by three percentage points. Yet on the Wednesday morning following the election, George W. Bush was on top by 2.5%. Something was amiss. There was a 2.75% flip. (There was a similar flip in 2006, but the Democratic victory was so large that the exit poll discrepancy has largely been pooh-poohed.)

Exit polls, a powerful tool used by the Carter Center and the United Nations to judge the fairness of elections throughout the world, have been pretty much dead on in the United States – up until about 1998. Then they went haywire. What changed?

This study, from the National Election Day Archive Project, pretty well demolishes all of the arguments used to explain the disparities between the exit polls and the vote count in 2004. It boils down to vote-counting irregularities, which in almost all cases favored George W. Bush. In other words, enough of the vote was flipped to him, usually by unauditable electronic voting machines that count the votes in secret (using proprietary software), to swing the election in his favor.

So the problem with the Raw Data article that predicts an Obama victory is that it puts the winning margin within the ‘flippable’ range – if Barack Obama secures 53% of the vote, the final tally will show him with 49.9%, losing a squeaker.

Democrats are weak on this issue, as on almost every other important issue of the day. I do not understand why. John Kerry privately admitted to Mark Crispin Miller in 2004 that he suspected the 2004 election was stolen, but publicly has been submissive and denies saying so.