Month: December 2013

A reader writes:

When I quit smoking, my weight balloons. It doesn’t matter how much I watch what I eat or how much exercise I get, I gain a lot of weight. When I got about 70 pounds above my normal weight, I started smoking again. Within a year, I’m down to my normal weight. I eat because I need to – not because I want to. My Type II diabetes disappeared. Pains in my feet and joints went away. Yet, I am classified as practically a leper from non-smokers even though I do not smoke around them. I asked my family doctor for help regarding my appetite and metabolism, but he said he couldn’t provide anything like that because it’s so bad for you. For me, smoking was my least bad option. I will quit again by the end of this year. Then the cycle will continue.

Another writes:

What Kelly Quirino is describing is detoxing from a drug; she is also trying to cope with the triggers inherent in withdrawal from any substance – in this case, it is cigarettes. Oh no, she’s eating more! So what? A temporary gain in weight is hardly as risky for one’s health than an addiction to nicotine, which will increase the user’s risk to heart disease, cancer, COPD, diabetes, and so on. Even worse, her smoking hurts her children’s health, who are vulnerable to second hand smoke, and are also more likely to become smokers.

Nicotine is more addictive than heroin; 32% of those who try smoking become addicted, as opposed to approximately 23% of people who use heroin. Smoking and tobacco use are insidious addictions, partly because smokers rarely see themselves as what they are: addicts. And as addicts, smokers need to detox from nicotine, utilize medications to stop smoking, and treat their smoking cessation as seriously as one would any other addiction.

But there is one big drawback to the rehab approach:

12-step groups are full of smokers who have traded in their more damaging addiction for the one that they see as benign – smoking. During my stint in rehab, I heard many justify their tobacco use as beneficial to their recovery, which it probably was. (Disclosure: I had my addictions, but was never a smoker.) However, trading one addiction for another is not a solution for the long term. The fact of the matter is smoking is not benign, nor is quitting it anything less than ending an addiction.

Update from a reader:

“Nicotine is more addictive than heroin; 32% of those who try smoking become addicted, as opposed to approximately 23% of people who use heroin.”. I think it is time to give these comparisons a break, or at least include some context. Tobacco is a legally purchased substance. Buying cigarettes is a simple as walking to the store. The availability of heroin is much more challenging. It seems to be that availability is a factor that should be considered when comparing the “addictiveness” of a drug.

Exactly one year ago my state, Washington, legalized marijuana possession and use. Though the actual “stores” don’t open until next spring, marijuana is now readily available, and the pro-active dispensaries mean that I can even get it delivered within the hour.

Prior to a year ago I’d probably smoked weed 10 times in my life. Since legalization? Ummm … Pretty much almost every single day. The difference is that I didn’t have a huge desire to violate the law previously, and did not honestly have a good idea where to find weed conveniently. For me, at least, marijuana was as “addictive” five years ago as it is today, but now it’s legal and very accessible.

An expert weighs in:

Kelly Quirino wrote, “I wander around, feeling like there’s something I’m supposed to be doing but coming up empty. I’m crabby, and sad, and my hands feel completely useless,” sounded so familiar to me. It’s what I heard over and over from the 60+ former smokers I interviewed in depth for a book that’s coming out in a week, Quit Smoking for Life. (It’s a legit, gimmick-free book, backed by the American Cancer Society and several academics, tobacco researchers, etc.)

I don’t know if you’d consider posting this, since it’s “promotional,” but if the hardcore smokers I interviewed can overcome tobacco addiction, and they did, then Quirino and your readers who smoke can as well. The reason most smokers fail their attempts to quit is that they don’t adequately prepare for how they’ll occupy their hands, mouths, and minds, or how they’ll cope with stress or with other people smoking around them.

Planning is the critical step between deciding to quit and quitting, yet most smokers just wing it – and fail. Most of the folks I interviewed had failed multiple times before finally succeeding with a mapped-out quit. They all said quitting sucked but that it was more bearable than they’d expected and that it changed them, as human beings, in ways that made them never want to return to smoking.

Writing this book gave me considerable compassion for smokers and made me loathe the tobacco industry even more than I already did.

Readers suffering from ulcerative colitis have testified to the cigarette’s ameliorative effects. Another suggests:

Those with colitis should give e-cigs a try if the effective ingredient for them happens to be nicotine, not the tobacco. Perhaps they can get the relief they need without exposing themselves to the dangers of regular cigarettes.

After analyzing the company’s data-driven business model, Tim Wu argues that “much more so than a network that reaches viewers through a third-party cable operator like Comcast or Time Warner, [Netflix] knows what its customers actually like and how they behave”:

Right now, American viewers are averaging only about 45 minutes of Internet-streaming video per week, a blip in comparison with total television intake. Given that audiences trained for decades to respond to event-driven television, how realistic is it to expect more viewers to shift from traditional TV? John Steinbeck offered one answer: “It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.” Any historian of consumer technology would add that machines change much faster than people.

Television in particular moves so slowly that the last time the concept of the network really came up for grabs was the late ’70s.

That’s when Ted Turner (the Turner Broadcasting System), Pat Robertson (the Christian Broadcast Network), and the founders of HBO successfully used satellites to begin to beam programming to cable subscribers. The ensuing frenzy resulted in the launch of a dozen networks, including ESPN, MTV, CNN, Discovery, and Bravo. Most of those channels are still around, not necessarily because of the strength of their programming, but because the reigning content hierarchy has been so entrenched.

Netflix believes it has a powerful factor in its favor as it tries to change viewers’ habits. “Human beings like control,” says [chief content officer Ted] Sarandos. “To make all of America do the same thing at the same time is enormously inefficient, ridiculously expensive, and most of the time, not a very satisfying experience.” There is a freedom achieved when your options extend beyond that night’s offerings and the limited selection of past episodes that networks make available on demand. Specifically, it’s the freedom to only watch television you really enjoy.

Previous Dish on Netflix here.

James Antle spotlights it:

The right tends to have one of two responses to figures like Mandela abroad or Martin Luther King, Jr. at home: suggest their radicalism is more important than the struggles of the people they championed or to try to claim them as conservatives. Neither approach will do.

The lack of empathy many white conservatives feel toward communities of color may not be the only barrier between the right and minorities. But it is an important barrier.

Many conservatives who have been supportive of civil-rights struggles overseas err in another direction: expressing their concern through bombing and sanctions, as if the people and their leaders live in separate hermetically sealed containers. Condoleezza Rice once compared the war in Iraq and the fight against Jim Crow, an analogy that may strike many Iraqi refugees as inapt.

TNC chimes in:

As Sam Kleiner demonstrates in Foreign Policy, apartheid would ultimately draw some of America’s most celebrated conservatives into its orbit. The roster includes Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Jesse Helms, and Senator Jeff Flake.

Jerry Falwell denounced Desmond Tutu as a “phony” and led a “reinvestment” campaign during the 1980s. At the late hour of 1993, Pat Robertson opined, “I know we don’t like apartheid, but the blacks in South Africa, in Soweto, don’t have it all that bad.”

Not all prominent conservatives were so dishonorable. When Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of sanctions of South Africa, Mitch McConnell, for instance, was forthright—”I think he is wrong … We have waited long enough for him to come on board.” When Falwell embarrassed himself by condemning Tutu, some Republican senators denounced him.

But the overall failure of American conservatives to forthrightly deal with South Africa’s white-supremacist regime, coming so soon after their failure to deal with the white-supremacist regime in their own country, is part of their heritage, and thus part of our heritage. When you see a Tea Party protestor waving the flag of slavery in front of the home of the first black president, understand that this instinct has been cultivated.

Chotiner diagnoses conservatives’ history with Mandela as mostly Cold War fever:

Conservatives today—or at least those writing pieces, rather than commenting on them—don’t speak up for the apartheid regime, but they also don’t show much of a desire to think about the Cold War, and the moral costs of having fought it. … It is not simply that the United States waged nasty military campaigns like the one in Vietnam, or supported death squads throughout Latin America. Nor is it simply that the United States backed undemocratic regimes everywhere from Pakistan to South Africa to Greece. It’s also that the war prevented many of the people fighting it from viewing Mandela in anything but Cold War terms. Think about it this way: Isn’t there something tremendously wrong with a war which requires your side to miss the importance of a figure like Mandela? Isn’t there something tremendously wrong with a war that requires you to view apartheid-era South Africa as part of the “free world?” (It should also be said that the position being defended here is strategically inept too. The Soviet Union did not fall because America supported the South African government and various other unsavory regimes.)

Serwer adds his thoughts:

The point of remembering all this is not mere point-scoring. It is to remember that sometimes the radicals are correct, that in the heat of the moment, movements for justice can be easily caricatured by those with authority as threats to public safety, and those seeking basic rights and dignity as monstrous villains. And then after the radicals win, we try to make them safe and useless to future radicals by pretending our beloved secular saints were never radical at all.

It’s tempting to pretend we’ve all always agreed about Mandela, or about racial equality, or about South African apartheid. It would avoid awkwardness or hostility to join together in mutual admiration and mourning for a figure who was indispensible in so many senses of the word, without recalling those who stood against him.

Mandela believed in forgiveness, but he also believed in truth and reconciliation. And the truth is that many self-proclaimed champions of individual freedom in the United States refused to champion the individual freedom of black people in South Africa and at home.

Susan Boyle revealed in an interview this weekend that she has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Ellen E. Jones thinks this makes Boyle more culturally relevant than ever:

For people who feel isolated or stigmatised, it is usually a comfort to know there is someone else in the same situation – especially a successful person. It’s now slightly less stigmatising to suffer from depression (Alastair Campbell, Stephen Fry and Rebecca Ferguson from The X Factor all have) or to go bankrupt (Miquita Oliver and Burt Reynolds know all about that) and we’ve been thanking Tom Daley since last week for making it that little bit easier for teenagers to come out as bisexual or gay…

At first she was celebrated as a victory for talent in a culture obsessed with physical attractiveness, and a reminder to not judge a book by its cover, but as she’s become more successful, the PR blurb has morphed into something more familiar and much less interesting. Susan is now a classic underdog, a rags-to-riches success and a reminder to ordinary people to dream their own impossible dream. It’s well-worn trope of reality TV, and in this case it’s more than just trite, it obscures the real triumph of SuBo. She’s not, and never has been, an ordinary woman to whom we can all relate; she’s a very unusual woman with an extraordinary talent and specific needs. Her presence in popular culture is a much-needed reminder to never underestimate people who, for whatever reason, don’t fit the mould.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is happy for Boyle:

Recognizing that there’s a reason for one’s behaviors, rather than some kind of personal failing because they’re not like everybody else’s, has got to be pretty validating — especially after more than five long undiagnosed decades of living. For a smart woman once mocked as “Susie Simple,” one who has also battled depression and “got laughed at because people didn’t think I’d do well … It’s a condition that I have to live with and work through, but I feel more relaxed about myself.” Boyle says she hopes that now “People will have a greater understanding of who I am and why I do the things I do.”

Dreher writes that he is “deeply appreciative of her decision to go public with this diagnosis, both to raise awareness of it and to show what Aspies can achieve.” He also discusses his son’s Asperger’s and how it has changed his perspective on his own habits:

Learning about Asperger’s and the autism spectrum from this experience as a parent of an Aspie has made me aware of my own Aspie tendencies. It’s easy to see my son’s inordinate demand for order and logic as an expression of his cognitive condition, but I have always seen the same trait in myself as an expression of moralism. Maybe it is, to some degree, but I have had to concede that a lot of this probably comes from an abnormal neurology, not from an overdeveloped conscience.

Unless Congress acts, 1.3 million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits on December 28th. Rand Paul claims this is for their own good:

http://youtu.be/bmqUI3o492o

Matthew O’Brien counters:

This long-term unemployment trap has nothing to do with long-term benefits. Indeed, [Rand] Ghayad [a PhD candidate at Northeastern University] looked at the labor markets for unemployed people who are and aren’t eligible for benefits, and found they’ve been equally dysfunctional. No, this long-term unemployment trap has to do with our great recession, and not-so-great recovery. With a labor market that doesn’t work for people who made the mistake of losing their job at the wrong time. If anything, unemployment benefits have kept people from giving up; remember, you have to be actively looking for a job to qualify for them. The San Francisco Fed, for one, estimates that unemployment would have been 0.4 percentage points lower without extended benefits, mostly because more people would have stopped trying to find work.

Josh Green runs the numbers:

How much does growth stand to suffer?

Well, according to the U.S. Labor Department, the cost of extending federal benefits through 2014 would be about $25 billion. But the economic impact of cutting them off would be larger. That’s because the unemployed reliably spend the benefits they get, creating a “multiplier effect” in the economy. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics (MCO), estimates that every dollar of unemployment benefits generates about $1.55 in economic activity, meaning that the federal benefits set to end later this month will cost the economy about $39 billion in spending next year (which would, in turn, have supported 310,000 jobs, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute).

However, the effect on the economy will be worse than just the lost spending from those 1.3 million people. Throughout the year, state unemployment benefits will expire, with those who lose them having no emergency federal benefits to fall back on. Last week, a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Labor Department estimated that an additional 3.6 million people stand to lose access to benefits next year, so the drop in demand will be much larger than $39 billion.

Kilgore doubts unemployment benefits will get extended:

So it appears a budget “deal” that raises appropriations above sequester levels and avoids another government shutdown will involve sacrificing the Democratic priority of extending unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. It’s not clear why congressional Democrats are making it so clear so early that these folks are going to be the first to go over the side, but as Greg Sargent reports abundantly today, the signals are unmistakable.

Beutler looks at how the unemployment benefits fight intersects with the ongoing budget negotiations:

This is back-of-the-envelope. But if emergency unemployment benefits lapse, the $25 billion hit to the economy would largely, if not entirely, offset the fiscal easing Ryan and Murray are contemplating on the discretionary side of the budget. That’s not trivial

If a Ryan-Murray deal were the only viable budget vehicle, then digging in for extending emergency UI benefits as part of said deal would be such an obvious play politically, and on the economic merits, that it’s hard to see Democrats’ reluctance to pick the fight at this juncture as anything other than a testament to their belief that Republicans could act unilaterally and leave them on the hook for shutting down the government.

Given the weak-kneed performance House GOP moderates staged during the shutdown fight — the willingness they demonstrated to allow hard-liners to lead them by the nose — it’s hard to blame Democrats for assuming these guys might not be reliable allies of convenience. And if that assessment is correct, then the two in the bush are unattainable, and Democrats are making the right move.

A charity group in Amsterdam is paying alcoholics to clean up public parks – and paying them in beer:

The former public nuisances start off the working day with two cans of beer each at 9 a.m. and walk out into the park and the adjoining streets with their garbage bags. They have another two beers at lunch and one more when they’re done at 3:30 p.m. Apart from the beer, the day’s wages amount to 10 euros ($13.69). In typical Dutch fashion, this is a highly practical arrangement: With a can of beer costing as little as 40 U.S. cents, the men earn less than $20 per six-hour day if you count the hot meal they are served. This is far below the national minimum wage, $11.60 per hour. Nobody complains. The beer is the alcoholics’ fuel, and some of them even say they are drinking less because, for the first time in years, they have some structure to their day.

Katelyn Fossett wrote last month about the problems she sees with the policy:

Paying alcoholics in beer doesn’t just turn a blind eye to the problem in the name of practicality but turns it into labor that benefits the city, even at the risk of worsening these alcoholics’ drinking problem. The plan highlights a problematic quality of so-called “Dutch pragmatism”:

If a government really does subscribe to the premise that social ills like alcoholism are inevitable, then can it be implicated in encouraging it, even if it’s part of a scheme that obviously profits the city? In other words, if cities are free from the burden of correcting social ills because they are inevitable, are they also free from the guilt of potentially worsening it?

Eric Crampton disagreed with Fossett, writing that instead of “enabling alcoholism [the initiative] looks a lot more like harm-minimisation to me”:

I don’t know, but would be willing to bet, that most of these workers were consuming rather more than the equivalent of five cans of beer per day before they started in. The delivery is paced throughout the day so there’s no chance any of them get drunk. By delivering the beer as beer rather than as the cash equivalent encourages pacing things rather than having the workers spend it all on lower cost per unit binge at the end of the day.

Sarah Hedgecock zooms out:

Although the first program of this kind was in Canada, it’s well-suited to the Netherlands’ famous disdain for zero-tolerance policies. It’s certainly an approach employed in many countries with regard to other vices: the idea takes the same approach as methadone clinics, which provide a less-strong drug to serious heroin addicts on the road to recovery. If some of Amsterdam’s alcoholics are working a full shift and drinking beer, it’s that many fewer lying unemployed in the city’s parks, polishing off bottles of hard liquor. In other words: it’s not a cure, but it’s a start.

Update from a reader:

Your post about Amsterdam’s harm reduction strategy for alcoholics reminds me of a story on This American Life a few years ago about the St. Anthony wet house in St. Paul Minnesota.  It’s a residence for homeless chronic alcoholics in which the residents are allowed to drink on site.  The theory is that it keeps them from doing so under a bridge and dying of exposure.  It was also chronicled in the New York Times Magazine in 2011.  I like this sort of pragmatic harm reduction, though the idea of someone being so far gone is really quite sad.

Yesterday, the administration called Sy Hersh’s latest report – turned down by the Washington Post and the New Yorker – “simply false.” Money quote:

“The intelligence clearly indicated that the Assad regime and only the Assad regime could have been responsible for the 21 August chemical weapons attack,” Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement to The Hill. “The suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false.”

Count me unsurprised that the US intelligence establishment refuses to accept that its findings might have been cherry-picked by those in the administration who had long wanted to go to war in Syria anyway. Count me also unpersuaded by the push-back.

Check out, for example, this blog on the circumstances surrounding the August 21 attack. It really does what the new media does best: it takes you through the evidence, with links, to a conclusion that the al Nusra front might very well have been the instigator. It convinced me, at the very least, that this remains an open question. Liberal internationalists are just as likely as neocons to see things they want to see and ignore those things they don’t. The need to meddle in other countries finds its justifications as it goes along. A reader adds:

If you look at the Russian presentation of facts and evidence, especially as put out by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, it was far more accurate and more candid than was the American presentation of facts and evidence.

In the end the Russians played a key positive role in defusing the situation. But what’s really remarkable, they were also consistently far more honest about what they were up to, and what was going on on the ground in Syria, than was the United States. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

I come away from this thinking very poorly of our intelligence establishment. They’re bloated, lazy, stupid and increasingly dangerous to the United States and the world. It’s a clear demonstration of the fact that throwing billions of dollars at it doesn’t get you better intelligence.

The GOP rails on about this moronic Benghazi “scandal.” But this is a real scandal. Watch official Washington just ignore it.

(Photo: An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube by the Local Committee of Arbeen on August 21, 2013 allegedly shows Syrians covering a mass grave containing bodies of victims that Syrian rebels claim were killed in a toxic gas attack by pro-government forces in eastern Ghouta and Zamalka, on the outskirts of Damascus. The allegation of chemical weapons being used in the heavily-populated areas came on the second day of a mission to Syria by UN inspectors, but the claim, which could not be independently verified, was vehemently denied by the Syrian authorities, who said it was intended to hinder the mission of UN chemical weapons inspectors. By DSK/AFP/Getty Images.)