Month: April 2009

Here's a conversation-starter: a psychological geography study of the US:

We present a theoretical account of the mechanisms through which geographic variation in psychological characteristics emerge and persist within regions… Results provided preliminary support for the model, revealing clear patterns of regional variation across the U.S. and strong relationships between state-level personality and geographic indicators of crime, social capital, religiosity, political values, employment, and health.

And so we discover that New Yorkers do actually have something in common with Appallachians: they're all neurotic:

 

The map of "openness" is after the jump:

Here's the full study (pdf link) by Peter J. Rentfrow, Samuel D. Gosling, and Jeff Potter.

So what? Doesn't the recent spat raise more questions than it answers?

Here is the problem into which the Obama team has backed itself. By saying — in Afghanistan and Pakistan — that we're not going to allow the terrorists to maintain safe havens from which they can plot and train to carry out attacks, the Obama team now has to explain why we're not pursuing the same kind of whole-of-government approach toward bringing effective governance to the Horn of Africa. And the flip side to that question is even more devastating: if we're not doing it in Somalia, why are we wasting our time and money doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

This, to me, is the biggest problem I see in the Obama plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's not that we are establishing some terrible precedent, really, but rather that you can point to places on the map where similar problems to the ones in the Pashtun tribal belt present themselves and are not being addressed — or even discussed — in the same way. Why have we been seeking to manage the piracy problem off the Horn of Africa — and the terror problem within the Horn of Africa — yet are pursuing far more ambitious means and ends in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Another marriage equality test is scheduled for Wednesday of this week.

E.D. Kain worries that the GOP's anti-marriage equality stance will hurt the pro-life cause:

…when it comes to our little manufactured wars – terror, drug, or culture – I am a devout pacifist.  I will not fight them, because they almost inevitably lead to more pain, more chaos, and in the end, devastating defeat.

More great p.r. for the financial industry.

One senses that showing he’s in on the joke is getting a little harder for him:

SOUTH PARK pt. 3 I WAS AT CHEESECAKE FACTORY YESTERDAY AND THE MANAGER BROUGHT ME A PLATE OF FISH STICKS… (in a sarcastic tone) uuuuuuum, GREAT! : /

If you are confused about this item it’s all explained here.

I've shown unusual restraint on the latest Palin fooferaw. It's her nominee to be Alaska's attorney general, Wayne Anthony Ross, who has the kind of politics you'd expect from today's ever-self-marginalizing GOP:

[H]e called homosexuals “degenerates,” hailed the “courage” of a student who lionized the Ku Klux Klan, vowed to undermine the sovereignty of Native American tribes, and allegedly defended men who rape their wives.

Here's the KKK incident, lovingly reported by Max Blumenthal:

Among them is a 1993 piece entitled, “KKK ‘art’ project gets ‘A’ for courage,” in which Ross cheered on a local college student who had offended an African-American classmate by creating a statue of a Klansman with a cross in one hand and a flag in the other. “It might have been fun to see [the African-American student] try to remove the display,” Ross wrote. “Then she could have been arrested and her future as a student of the university could have been resolved through the university disciplinary proceedings.”

And some thought Palin would disappear after the election…

Nate Silver defines it:

…bipartisanship, as Obama intended the term, should not necessarily be confused for "compromise". Rather, it implied behaving in good-faith — hearing out opinions from different sides of the aisle and identifying the best ideas regardless of their partisan origin. Bipartisanship, to Obama, was a process rather than an outcome. He could plausibly have been acting in a bipartisan manner, even if he hadn't gotten many Republicans to go along with his agenda.

Megan lists three reasons:

1)  We pay more for our medical services.  But though the pharma industry is important, the real action is in wages.  Our medical personnel cost vastly more than their counterparts abroad in almost every category.

2)  We consume more services.

Americans get shiny new facilities–my British colleagues once derisively commented that American hospitals are "like hotels".  American hospitals don't have open wards for almost anyone.  They staff at very high levels.  Doctors conduct an inordinate amount of tests.  We use an expensive machine rather than watchful waiting.  And often, those expensive machines catch conditions that never would have turned into anything, which we then treat.  Natasha Richardson probably would have lived if she'd had an accident here, because doctors would have done a cat scan, and there would have been a Medevac helicopter available.  That's tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to save a single life.

3)  There are inefficiencies.  I don't mean "compared to other systems"–every system has some screwed-up illogicality that costs it money and makes patients worse off.  But compared to what we could have.  For example, Medicare pays for procedures, not wellness, which means that there's a chronic undersupply of geriatricians, because the specialty isn't particularly well paid even though the nation's largest healthcare provider is specifically designed for old people.  This is madness.  But every real-world system that has attempted to pay physicians for wellness has ended up giving up in disgust.