Author: Brian

“Medicare Scare-Mongering,” New York Times, 9/26/09

• The New York Times decried and debunked Republican “scare-mongering” on what health insurance reform would mean for Medicare.
• As the Times says, for Republicans to “posture as vigilant protectors of Medicare” reeks of “cynicism and hypocrisy,” considering that they have “in the past tried to pare back Medicare.”
  o As recently as this past April, Republicans in Congress voted overwhelmingly to end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher program that provides a fixed sum of money to buy private insurance.

• With their recent scare tactics, the paper says, Republicans have been “obscuring and twisting the facts and spreading unwarranted fear.”
• In fact, the Times points out, “the various reform bills now pending should actually make Medicare better for most beneficiaries — by enhancing their drug coverage, reducing the premiums they pay for drugs and medical care, eliminating co-payments for preventive services and helping keep Medicare solvent, among other benefits.”
• President Obama believes Medicare is a sacred trust with America’s seniors. Reform protects Medicare. It doesn’t use dime of the Medicare trust fund to pay for reform and it strengthens the financial health of the program.

Thinking about vector.

The one variable that overwhelmingly predicted the presence of the germ was the presence of a cat. Cat owners were eight times more likely than others to have MRSA at home.

Only after we treated all three members of the family were we able to get rid of the infections.

“There are a number of papers coming out now showing that pets pick up MRSA from us and that they shed it back into the environment again. What’s happened for the first time that we’ve noticed is that you’re getting flip back and forth,” said Scott Shaw, head of the infection control committee at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University.

The idea of mind and by extension of selfhood that I want to bring forth through the notion of extended self is that of a self that is located neither inside nor outside the brain/body, but is instead constantly enacted in-between brains, bodies and things and thus irreducible to any of these three elements taken in isolation.

Even though the self is by nature grounded and inextricably bound up with the body, it also escapes the natural confines of any single body or brain.

The extended self I am proposing here is not simply a self embodied; it is a self enacted through the act of embodying.

Lambros Malafouris of Cambridge presents “a view of selfhood as an extended and distributed phenomenon that is enacted across the skin barrier”.

Words like ‘me’ and ‘I’ neither fossilize nor do they leave any readily identifiable and universal material trace.

The existence of a transparent phenomenal inner ‘I’ causing the human hand to move and alter the world in full awareness is assumed before and behind even the earliest artefacts recovered in the archaeological record.

But when and how did humans develop the experience that they own their bodies and started to feel as the authors of their actions?

Chris Tobias:

Underlying the carbon-cutting question are: Where will the new energy industries be located? Who will be building the wind turbines, solar panels and highly efficient light emitting diodes? The countries that cut carbon emissions fastest will have a competitive advantage.

Stabilizing the earth’s climate is a complex undertaking and fraught with risk. If the United States leads — and does so boldly — I believe the world will follow.

Gary Jones, psycho-signals from the muck:

Does it taste good and have a pleasing texture? How much does it cost? Is it readily available or must you jump through hoops to get it? The answer works both ways since preferences vary. Some people insist on paying large amounts for food. It’s a signaling mechanism to raise their social status and distinguish themselves from lesser humans. Some people may not have the money to buy status, but they have the energy to jump through hoops to get rare if not costly foods, and raise their status that way. Some base their status on “getting it bought right”. For them low cost may not be a necessity so much as a signaling method proving their astuteness and attention to opportunity.

I don’t judge. My beef is good and it’s produced in good ways. I’m satisfied with those measures of performance. But I’ll charge you however much you require. I’ll sell you fillets at $20 a pound if that’s what blows your skirt up. Happy to oblige. I’ll also sell them to you for $6 but make you wait and jump through some hoops if that’s what you seek. Same for unusual cuts for the foodie that can cook. What we rural folks call “boiling beef”, meaning that it’s tough but flavorful and so suitable only for soups and stock, also happens to be very nutritious. It’s either cheap peasant food or exotic functional food depending on what you want. As an expert of sorts it’s all of these things to me, so I can appreciate whatever perspective you hold.

When you think long about food it becomes clear that the whole idea of some umbrella label such as organic can’t possibly be of any real value. It’s either too general to be useful or too specific to be applicable. It’s the wrong question, and even if answered only gives you one of the many, many answers that you might need.

The first of these monsters was a cloth monkey mother who, upon schedule or demand, would eject high-pressure compressed air. It would blow the [infant macaque’s] skin practically off its body. What did this baby monkey do? It simply clung tighter and tighter to the mother, because a frightened infant clings to its mother at all costs. We did not achieve any psychopathology.

However, we did not give up. We built another surrogate monster mother that would rock so violently that the baby’s head and teeth would rattle. All the baby did was cling tighter and tighter to the surrogate. The third monster we built had an embedded wire frame within its body which would spring forward and eject the infant from its ventral surface [i.e., its front]. The infant would subsequently pick itself off the floor, wait for the frame to return into the cloth body, and then again cling to the surrogate.

Finally we built our porcupine mother. On command, this mother would eject sharp brass spikes over all of the ventral surfaces of its body. Although the infants were distressed by these pointed rebuffs, they simply waited until the spikes receded and then returned and clung to the mother.

barely imagined beings

official photo of the G20 First Ladies, yo!
http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/hi_res/g20_flgroup_full_LJ-0470.JPG

smashBrain 2.0 :

common vs knowledge

‘The news’ itself, as a unitary entity, is no longer something we can take for granted.

On the contrary: it is increasingly incoherent—’a mass of niches’.

The News?

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning.

Life is just goin’ on no matter how we slice it up.
This Pittsburgh G20 pic is titled Berlusconi Can’t Help Himself.
Might also be expressing he so-o-o agrees with his new friends.

penmanship:

…people who are writing lies press harder on the paper and produce taller letters than those who tell the truth.

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist:

not the worst case scenario

Sylvia Paull:

If I sound cynical it’s because I’ve seen too many cycles of change that change nothing. Public rallies for saving universities miss the point.

Education is being transformed by the free flow of information enabled by search engines, public encyclopedias and other repositories of information, and open curricula. And it’s people both in the universities and in the business world who are wreaking this change.

MIT’s Paul Raeburn noticed investigative reporting at the Buffalo News:

In a well-written, considered op-ed in the Buffalo News, he offers a few useful tidbits I hadn’t seen anywhere else. We know that insurance companies are prone to cancel the insurance policies of people who get expensively sick.

One detail I hadn’t heard was that insurers make these decisions in what are called ‘rescission committees‘.

Andrew Skolnick uncovers the real death panels – a compelling argument that insurance companies must be regulated.

I was wondering today if it’s odd that many journalists say, for example, “I was out covering a story”, “I covered that story” and so forth. Isn’t it much better to say, “I’m working on uncovering a story today” or “I’m flying tomorrow to uncover a story”? In these days of dominating corporate media, how often does covering a story mean just that?

John H. Cochrane, University of Chicago, at House Committee on Financial Services:

We need Wall Street to reconstruct the financial system so that as much of it as possible can fail, with pain to the interested parties, but not to the system…

Too large to fail must become too large to exist. [pdf only]

Strategic Foreclosure:

There were 217,000 loans in July where the borrower hadn’t made a payment in at least a year but the lender hadn’t begun the foreclosure process – 17% of home mortgages that are at least 12 months overdue.

The mobile Internet is completely carrier-controlled, and its potential is stifled by that. Not only do the carriers say “not over my dead body” when it comes to making the mobile Internet like the regular Internet, they are also fighting like mad to make the real Internet less like itself.

Meg Whitman kicked off her campaign for California governor choosing to be introduced by former governor Pete Wilson. Here comes another round of regurgitated jingoism, policies of tax reduction and the hands-off doctrine already painfully disproved.

She’s immediately pledged to castrate California’s emerging renewables sector on her first day in office by repealing the State’s efforts to build green business.

Nuts.

Offering sensibility, Mark Newsom points out:

California’s challenge is competitiveness, grasping as much of the share of these markets as possible by being the industry leader in greenhouse gas abatement technology. To date, we’ve done a great job – California captured $6.6 billion in green capital between 2006-2008. And all these start-ups need workers; so green jobs have the potential to be for California what the defense industry was in 1980s.

Scientific American:

Johan Rockström of Stockholm University and his colleagues are proposing nine “planetary boundaries”.

From climate change to chemical pollution, the boundaries are meant to set thresholds, or safe limits, for natural systems with respect to human impact.

Rockström says. “What are the Earth-system processes that determine the ability of the [planet] to remain in a stable state?”

There’s brand.

There’s honor.

The tongue is a muscle on the floor of the mouth that manipulates [wiki]

There are too many bullies inside our head:

“Advertisers are learning to their horror we’re in an era where any claim can be made in any ad and as a result no one believes anything.”

The Utility That Quit The Chamber:

Peter Darbee, chairman and CEO of California’s Pacific Gas & Electric, on Tuesday, took a very public stand against the US Chamber of Commerce for what he calls “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort” the facts around global climate change.

To oppose regulation, the US Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying group that represents three million USA businesses, argues that climate change is not a result of human activity.

It’s late and I’m tired and wandering. As I get older I am remembering my friends, and discovering some are gone.

Transportation in Orbit, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 345, No. 1, 130-142 (1963), George Fox Mott:

Transportation has now no geographical frontiers.

Its role is so vital to modern civilization that it has become more than a service function—it has become a partner of the government, the commerce, and the society which it serves and represents the occupation and livelihood of a large section of the population as well.

Having developed piecemeal, it has been subject to patchwork regulation and is uneven in its performance.

By the nature of the dilemmas facing the industry, transportation administration and co-ordination lag far behind transportation technology. This state is critical today, and a renaissance in transportation has been taking place and is on the verge of great acceleration.

Many leaders in transportation areas are active in planning for and carrying out improvements in transportation policy and operation. Many inequities and operational lags need to be corrected.

Common carriers, the backbone of the system, are operating under financial, political, and manpower difficulties. The rivalry of air and highway carriers has faced the railroads with competition which their heavily regulated quasi-public-utility status has not helped them to meet. Full advantage cannot be taken of technological improvements, due to regulations which are now inequitable or inappropriate or simply unworkable or unwieldy. Labor, from an embattled position at the beginning and during the flush period of transportation expansion, has now become an equal protagonist with management in the transportation system.

Transportation labor and management have not yet reached full co-ordination for total utilization of their resources.

Transportation capital has not been freed of its fetters; costing and pricing have become increasingly unrealistic and inoperative in the market place.

Political pressures now carry equal weight with economic and service factors.

Transport leaders in a pool of experience and knowledge are aware of the imperfections of the system, and many of them have sound plans for replacing dislocation and loss with co-ordination, profit, and the full service efficiency the system is capable of offering.

The last time I visited with George Fox Mott was at the great St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco during the early 80s convention of the Democratic Party. He had been USA Inspector General of Allied Government in Korea and Japan after World War II, and later the Director of the American-Korean Foundation from 1952 until 1962. We were both on the board of Monorail.

A Good Boston Fellow who had known in his life every Secretary of Transportation ever put in office he liked to say.

Economists must grasp living.
We will hold them more accountable than thieves.

New approach to macroeconomic modeling by means of jump Markov processes by specifying transition rates appropriately in the backward Chapman-Kolmogorov (master equation); solutions of master equations to obtain aggregate dynamic equations, and fluctuations by solving the associated Fokker-Planck equations.

Modeling and analysis of multi-agent models to investigate such things as herding behavior and return dynamics, i.e., power-laws in share or stock markets; Modeling and analysis of multiple country models by state space time series technique; aggregation of economy with heterogeneous agents by neural network methods; adaptive learning algorithms.

It’s utterly clear now.
We can’t escape each other.