June 2013 – Page 79

The Best Of The Dish Today

This was the day Glenn Greenwald made, but I was somewhat underwhelmed. I got a tutorial on the expression “No Homo” while wondering if we were reaching “peak faggot” on Twitter. I argued that the appointments of Susan Rice and Samantha Power were not an indication of Obama changing his mind on Syria – or interventionism in general. We found a poster boy for the GOP – in a skirt; and I copped to being slow in the past in grasping the need for conservative reform.

The most popular post of the day was Fareed Zakaria’s concise explanation of what’s going on in Turkey; and David Frum’s elegant plea for empiricism and policy innovation among Republicans. It seems a really small world when I remember the fact that the three of us were all regarded as right-wingers when we were at Harvard together; and we were all immigrants. Today, we’re still in basic agreement – but, boy, how the world has changed. Oh, and that’s a Dish reader’s window view in Leuven, Belgium, a country where Dish-readers gave us 1,458 pageviews this past week.

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And see you in the morning.

Attention, Susan And Samantha

The American public doesn’t want to intervene anywhere abroad – apart from Iran getting a nuclear weapon. 61 percent say that Syria is not our problem. 58 percent want the US not to take the lead in solving international conflict. Compare those numbers in the same poll just before the Iraq war: 48 percent thought the US should take the lead then, compared with 35 percent now. Even on the Iran question, currently 59 percent say that the country can be contained for now, and 21 percent believe it’s not a threat at all to the US, leaving a majority of 80 percent against the neocon position (smart smart smart smart smart).

We have a neo-imperial apparatus in Washington and an anti-imperial public. At some point, one of those will have to give.

Sleep And Self-Discipline

New research suggests a connection between the two:

[Y]ou have only so much mental energy during a day. From what [management professor Christopher] Barnes’s research suggests, the amount of sleep you get predicts the discipline your body can produce. Why? Sleep deprivation depletes the glucose level in your pre-frontal cortex, Barnes writes. This has consequences for your decision-making: If you don’t get enough sleep, you leave your self-control engine running on empty. If you do get enough sleep, you restore that fuel base. …

“Organizations need to give sleep more respect,” Barnes writes. “Executives and managers should keep in mind that the more they push employees to work late, come to the office early, and answer emails and calls at all hours, the more they invite unethical behavior [like cheating] to creep in.”

American Kids Aren’t Slackers, Ctd

A reader writes:

It doesn’t seem like you read that article with a critical eye. The author cherry-picked facts to support what appears to be a predefined solution. He keeps talking about required minimums, but then mentions they actually attend 25% more days. The minimums don’t mean anything; how many days/hours are they actually going is the only thing that counts. If American schools are only meeting the required minimum but other countries are exceeding the minimum then you’re not making a fair comparison.

Another:

As someone who grew up in the “system”, I can tell you with first-hand experience that, in Taiwan, I was spending roughly 14 hours a day “in class”, with about 10 hours in school and 4 hours in cram school. On weekends, I was having up to 6 hours of cram school lessons. This is the reality of education in Asian countries.

Another points to a similar experience in another Asian country:

The thing is, India as a whole may require 800-900 hours per year, but that, I imagine, only applies to Indian government schools (equivalent to US public schools) that are on the whole, pretty bad. Most middle-class kids go to private schools in India, where the instructional demands are much higher. The kids I know in India go to school from 9 am to 3 pm, but before and after school they have extra private tutoring, especially in 10th and 12th grades when their performance on the exams determines their future. Additionally, in 12th grade they take nationwide or statewide exams for entrance into medical school or engineering school, and for each of these entrance exams they take more specialized tutoring. So the 800-900 hours does not begin to represent the total amount of academic work done by these kids.

Not that I’m recommending this approach. I think it’s brutal.

Game Of Brutality

Reactions to the latest episode of Game Of Thrones (major spoilers below):

Alyssa pushes back against those who view “evidence that the show is participating in some of its characters disgusting enjoyment of violence against women”:

Though Talisa’s murder is unspeakably cruel, it didn’t read that way to me. Rather, the decision to kill her by killing her fetus made, within the astonishingly cold-blooded context of the Red Wedding, a great deal of sense. A comprehensive attempt to make the Starks extinct would include an attack on everyone in their family line, born and unborn. And as an attempt to make Robb Stark feel unspeakable emotional pain before his physical death, an attack on his wife and his unborn child that he has to witness while he is physically incapacitated is a twistedly brilliant thing to do. As Talisa died and Robb held her, the focus was on their faces, and their shared pain, just as they’d shared joyful glances during Edmure’s wedding vows, and flirted during the banquet. Our sympathies and focus were on them, rather than on a pornographic contemplation of the violence to which they’d been subjected.

Rowan Kaiser argues the chief success of Game of Thrones is that “it’s a magnificent depiction of how sexist systems ruin everyone”:

So many of the show’s best scenes deal directly with how power is acquired, lost, and maintained in the patriarchal system that this becomes an effective lens for seeing when Game of Thrones loses its moorings. The show’s much-discussed—usually female—nudity is often illustrative of a sexist world, but occasionally and subjectively goes too far and illustrates no real point other than to show nude women. And some of the worst parts of the show’s third season have deviated too far from the theme of systemic oppression. For example, both the murder of the lowborn character Roz in the middle of the season and the constant torture of Theon Greyjoy have demonstrated little except for the personal cruelty of a few of the characters. The brutal depiction of Robb’s wife Talisa’s death at the wedding falls into that category as well.

But when Game of Thrones works, it’s a magnificent depiction of how sexist systems ruin everyone, even those they’re supposed to help. Every woman on the show is oppressed in some way. And the only men who can succeed are those who submerge their humanity and happiness, or were sociopaths to begin with. Westeros’ patriarchy may be a metaphor that can’t exist in our real world, but that’s what makes it so rhetorically powerful.

Meanwhile, Kelsey D Atherton analyzes Robb Stark’s strategic mistakes.

The Climbing Cost Of Carbon

David Roberts calls our attention to “a fairly significant move on climate change” recently made by the Obama administration

How much damage does a ton of carbon emissions do? That dollar figure is known as the “social cost of carbon” and it is, as economist Frank Ackerman put it a few yeas ago, “the most important number you’ve never heard of.” Why does it matter? Because the U.S. government uses it to assess the costs and benefits of regulatory action. The higher the social cost of carbon, the more action can be economically justified. …

The federal government just bumped up the cost of carbon by 60 percent. This will, all things being equal, increase by 60 percent the amount of carbon mitigation that can be economically justified. That’s a big deal, especially in light of the fact that EPA regulations are going to make (or break) Obama’s second-term climate legacy. It won’t alter the politics of those regulations, and sadly, political considerations generally count for more than cost-benefit analysis. So this may not have any big short-term impacts. Nonetheless, if this number stays on the books — and if the government continues to update it based on the latest science — it will eventually worm its way deep into the regulatory apparatus and do something that no amount of argument and advocacy have been able to do: force the federal government to properly value the climate.

Though the US has yet to put an actual price on carbon emissions, a recent report [pdf] from the World Bank reviews the state of carbon pricing legislation in the rest of the world, finding that “over 40 national and 20 sub-national government jurisdictions have either implemented or are considering carbon pricing mechanisms”. Silvio Marcacci has the details:

As of 2013, the countries with functioning systems or carbon pricing mechanisms scheduled to start within the next few years collectively emit 10 gigatons of CO2 per year – equal to about 20% of global emissions, or the combined annual emissions of the US and EU. The Bank report highlights cap and trade systems in the EU, California, Kazakhstan, New Zealand, Quebec, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and regional markets in Japan, as well as South Korea’s developing system. In addition, carbon taxes are cited in Australia, British Columbia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Brad Plumer caveats:

[T]he World Bank concludes that there hasn’t been nearly enough progress to avoid the worst effects of global warming. “The current level of action puts us on a pathway towards a 3.5–4°C warmer world by the end of this century, [which] would threaten our current economic model with unprecedented and unpredictable impacts on human life and ecosystems in the long term.”

What’s more, many of these pricing programs could prove fleeting. In Australia, for instance, Liberal leader Tony Abbott has promised to dismantle the country’s carbon law if his party gains power in the September elections (which is looking likely). So carbon pricing could just as easily shrink as expand in the years ahead.

Along the same lines, it turns out the “bombshell” reports announcing a Chinese cap-and-trade market in the next few years were duds:

China’s Chief Climate Negotiator Su Wei reaffirmed his nation’s commitment to lower emissions relative to economic output while dismissing reports that it will adopt an absolute cap on greenhouse gases.

The Financial Times and Independent newspapers both said last month that China is looking to introduce a cap in 2016. The Independent cited a proposal by the National Development and Reform Commission, the economic planning agency where Su works. The FT cited Jiang Kejun, an NDRC carbon-policy researcher. “The paper quoted an expert,” Su said today in an interview in Bonn, where two weeks of climate talks began yesterday. “It’s not necessarily presenting the view of the government or the NDRC. The NDRC would reaffirm that we have committed to a carbon-intensity target by 2020.”

Do Mascots Need Modernizing? Ctd

Readers keep the popular thread going:

I, too, find several currently-used mascots to be unnecessary and out-of-touch, and I would not presume to suggest that offense taken at certain mascots should be minimized, but on balance, surely intent and context do matter. They are, after all, sports mascots; they are supposed to be cartoonish caricatures of the characters/groups they represent. That doesn’t necessarily render them or the selection of the related team names offensive enough to send to the trash bin.

For example, the mascot at my high school was a Viking – a cartoonish figure with a giant horned helmet wielding a cartoonish sword and a giant, cartoonish smile. Surely the fact that this mascot and related logo were intended solely as cheerleader-type figures, while the name itself was chosen to symbolize those things one would presumably admire about our visions of the Vikings – strength, bravery, and exploration – weighs in their favor despite not being an accurate visual representation of actual Northern Europeans.

At Notre Dame, my alma mater, the mascot is a fighting leprechaun, for Christ’s sake – surely about as much of a stereotype of a drunken Irishman as one could imagine – yet it is a beloved image of the university’s teams. Why? Because context and intent matter. It’s a sports mascot, not designed to mock those of Irish heritage but to serve as a reminder, even in cartoonish form, of their fighting spirit.

Another reader:

There are plenty of examples of ethnicities in team names throughout history.

The Negro League had teams like the Birmingham Black Barons, the New York Cubans and the Chicago Brown Bombers. These weren’t chosen to insult their fans but to honor them. I would dare say that if you were to visit a local softball or soccer league, self-chosen team names there would represent the same ethnic, professional, or even sexual orientation of the players. A team name is a mark of pride, not a walking insult. That’s why we don’t see people of Irish descent picketing Boston Celtics games or Northeasterners who don’t pronounce r’s at the end of sentences protesting the Yankees. The best historic nicknames reflected the ethnic, their working-class (Packers, Steelers, Brewers, Aggies, Cornhuskers) or economic class (Brooklyn Bums/Dodgers).

This slippery slope is two-sided. If Braves and Indians offend, what about nicknames that refer to European attempts to subjugate native tribes, such as Rangers, Padres, Pioneers or Oklahoma’s “Sooners” and “89ers” which refer to that state’s huge land grab?

(Photo: The Notre Dame Fighting mascot looks on during the Big East Quarterfinal College Basketball Championship game against the Pittsburgh Panthers on March 11, 2010 at Madison Square Garden. By Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)

Should States Roll The Dice On Medicaid?

In a recent study in Health Affairs, Carter C. Price and Christine Eibner calculate the impact of the states opting out of the Medicaid expansion:

With fourteen states opting out, we estimate that 3.6 million fewer people would be insured, federal transfer payments to those states could fall by $8.4 billion, and state spending on uncompensated care could increase by $1 billion in 2016, compared to what would be expected if all states participated in the expansion. These effects were only partially mitigated by alternative options we considered. We conclude that in terms of coverage, cost, and federal payments, states would do best to expand Medicaid.

Tyler Cowen counters that their analysis ignores the “real chance” of Republican control of the House, Senate, and Presidency after the next election:

I often interpret the Republicans as operating in a “they don’t really mean what they say” mode, but on Medicaid I think they basically do mean it and we already can see some of the demonstrated preference evidence. Furthermore a new Republican President would face very real pressure to “repeal Obamacare,” yet we all know that the “three-legged stool” centered around the mandate is hard to undo selectively. That ups the chance Medicaid will be the target and much of the rest will be relabeled (“repealed,” in the press release) but in some manner kept in place in its essentials. …

[I]f someone wants to argue that, given these considerations, Medicaid expansion still makes financial sense for a state, fine, I would be keen to read such an analysis. But that is not what I am seeing. The Price and Eibner piece doesn’t analyze these considerations or even bring up most of them. Governors are not stupid, or their chiefs of staff are not stupid, and many governors are far less ideological than they let on. They are politicians.

Cooling Off With The Joneses

Alex Laskey believes that behavioral science can help drastically reduce energy demand in homes:

Matt McDermott, noting that “[u]p to 10 percent of peak energy demand in the summer” goes to cooling buildings, focuses on reducing energy use through intelligent urban design:

Placement of trees and vegetation matters. Planting trees along western and eastern exposures both cools buildings and reduces energy demand. Planting on southern exposures does this as well, but must be balanced against reducing the ability of a building to take advantage of solar heating in cooler months. Vines can be used for similar results. The EPA says planting trees on the west and southwest exposures of a building can reduce energy needed for cooling by 7-47 percent. In parking lots and along streets, trees obviously provide many cooling benefits as well. …

Green roofs offer similar benefits as do trees and vegetation in reducing temperatures, though there have been some genuine questions raised about their effectiveness. A green roof can reduce the energy demand of a building, reduce air pollution in the same manner as vegetation planted on the ground, as well as help manage stormwater runoff. A far less expensive option targeting roofs, cool roof techniques radically reduce surface temperatures of a building (50-60°F lower than conventional roofing), as well as reducing energy demand, both by changing the reflectivity of the roof. Overall, a cool roof can reduce yearly energy demand of a building by 50 cents per square foot.

Who Should Get The Gift Of Life?

A federal judge ordered that Sarah Murnaghan, a ten-year-old waiting on a lung transplant, be allowed on the adult transplant waiting-list. Postrel reflects on the case:

Murnaghan’s family is correct that the 12-year-old cutoff doesn’t reflect medical considerations and, as a result, puts children like Sarah at an arguably unfair disadvantage. But any weighing of lives will seem unfair to the losers. The current system generally favors people in dire straits over healthier patients, for instance. It gives patients points for waiting a long time and, as a result, favors older, sicker patients over younger, healthier ones. That reflects one politically determined idea of fairness. But it would be equally fair– or equally unfair — to favor healthier patients who might live longer with the precious organ.

Aaron Carroll also ponders these hard choices:

The reason that kids under 12 aren’t on the list is there’s little known about how adult lungs will work in kids. If a kids’ set of lungs became available (again – tragedy in and of itself), then they’d transplant them. But that is even more rare than a pair of adult lungs becoming available (again – good thing). So an adult, or an adolescent, is prioritized, and kids under 12 have to wait for a pediatric donor.

Is this fair? Is this right? I don’t know. I know that dedicated, compassionate, ethical people set the policy.