Month: April 2014

Where The Males Have (Little) Vaginas And The Females Have (Big) Penises, Ctd

We learn something new from readers every day:

I enjoyed that link on the gynosome, but I think that your coverage of sexual orientation and biology focusing on things like 29saw_drawing-blog480bug penises miss issues about sexual orientation that genuinely fascinate biologists. The concept of “natural law” doesn’t really carry much weight with actual biologists, and it’s not all that surprising that there is an insect in which the female has a penis.

There are hundreds of species with these sorts of reproductive role reversals, including males who incubate eggs internally or even in their mouths, and in which female parental investment is limited. At this point, it’s almost trivial to point out that same-sex behavior and even same-sex parenting is common in nature, or that every possible variation on genitalia occurs somewhere in nature. Even in mammals, there are females with “penises.” Female hyenas have pseudo-penises bigger than those owned by males, and they swing their dicks with more élan and pride than the males do!

This is all entertaining, but it misses the deeper and more interesting question evolutionary biologists ask about homosexuality:

“Why does a trait that appears to reduce reproductive fitness persist?” There’s no moralizing about right or wrong in this question, just curiosity about how same-sex sexual attraction makes sense from the standpoint of natural selection, when it appears to lead to reduced reproduction on the part of those who have this trait. All of the unusual traits discussed above really do result in increased reproductive fitness. But same-sex sexual attraction itself? Now that’s a different and more interesting issue than the gender role differences and odd anatomy described above.

Biological speculation on this issue is based on a few assumptions. First, there is a strong indication that being gay is an inherent biological trait mediated by genes rather than a cultural variable or something that is socially constructed, given its apparent occurrence in roughly the same percentage across human populations at all times.

Second, it must not be maladaptive or it would not persist. I’d like to refer you to an older Scientific American blog post by a gay evolutionary biologist that outlines some of the thinking on this issue. I do hope you get a chance to read it, because one of my very few complaints about the Dish is that I wish you discussed science with more of the subtlety and depth of understanding with which you discuss faith.

(Image of a not-male hyena by Christine Drea)

The View From Your Obamacare

Not all of the experiences from our readers are positive:

I was going to get a new car, but the increase in my premiums sapped up the income I’d set aside for the additional expense.  So I guess I’m stuck with my 12 year old truck.  Oh, should also mention that my deductibles nearly tripled and my coverage sucks in comparison.

Another reader:

While I recognize the large-scale benefits of the ACA, we found its implementation absolutely devastating to our small business.  Our company is a medical device developer/manufacturer with about 12 employees. Because we employ mostly high-pay, high-skill engineers and scientists, almost none of our employees qualified for any sort of subsidy. Most of our employees are married and have kids, so they needed the most expensive policy, the dreaded “Self + Family” option.

Because we are a small-business, we did not have the H.R. resources to shop for private insurance and had to contract a third party to do so for us. And because we are a small company, we had virtually zero bargaining leverage with insurers. Larger companies in our area ended up with much better group policy offers from the same insurer as us. In general, our policies went up about $300/month per employee, and our deductible increased from $2,500 to $3,850.

But what is the absolute worst is that insane 2.3% medical device tax enacted to “pay for” the ACA.

It taxes gross revenue, not net profit, so even if our company were to have a down year where we actually lost money, we STILL have to pay that tax on our total proceeds from sales (no matter what NYT columnists claim, most medical device companies aren’t enjoying massive profits via monopolistic evil).

This is completely absurd. I am a wildly left-leaning proud socialist, and I recognize the utility of taxes to pay for things, but the idea that gross income is taxed instead of net profit is a giant FUCK YOU to medical device companies. And worse yet: the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t have the same tax! If net profit were taxed, let’s say, then medical device companies could pour their profits into R&D prior to being taxed, which would foster innovation, bolster high-pay scientist/engineering jobs, and generally help the sick in this and other countries.

Long story short, someone obviously had to get the short end of the stick in ACA, and it is patently clear that it is the small, high-tech businesses who had no lobby.

Another:

I have been a supporter of the President and the ACA since the beginning. I certainly understand the political compromises that had to go into the development of the law and it’s far from perfect, but I was certain it would help a lot of people and help bend the cost curve of medical expenses.

However, my personal experience was somewhat shocking. I pay the full price for my family health insurance plan and my premium costs went up by 21% over the previous year to just under $1,650/month. I still have a $1,500/ $3,000 deductible and my co-pays on both doctor’s visits and medication went up by a few dollars as well.

Being in Massachusetts, my plan didn’t have to change very much to comply with the ACA. Guaranteed insurability was already state law, and a few small additions were added to the plan; doubling of rehab visit days in a calendar year, mental health visit co-pays equalized with other doctor co-pays etc. They also added pediatric dental as a requirement, but looking at plans that didn’t have that provision (if you had external dental coverage you could drop it) only lowered the premiums by about $30 a month.

I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is and pay extra if it’s helping implement a law that I believe in, and I make enough money that I can begrudgingly afford it. But this experience tells me that the upset self-employed and small business owners on Fox News talking about the unaffordable costs of this law are not completely full of it.

I was really taken aback by how much my premiums increased – much more in both percentage and dollar terms than in any other year, yet health care cost inflation was supposed to have leveled off? Trust me, I shopped around so it wasn’t just my provider; all plans similar to mine cost within $100 a month of this one – and it’s still considered a bronze plan (HMO not PPO). I have yet to see any justification for this increase and I hold out hope that our Mass. Based insurers are just overestimating costs and I’ll get a nice fat check next February when Harvard Pilgrim pays less than 85% of their income in benefits.

Like I said, I’m willing to pay the extra money – but single payer still sounds pretty good to me.

The Segregation Of Southern Politics

Obama Support

Nate Cohn highlights the increasing political uniformity of Southern whites:

While white Southerners have been voting Republican for decades, the hugeness of the gap was new. Mr. Obama often lost more than 40 percent of Al Gore’s support among white voters south of the historically significant line of the Missouri Compromise. Two centuries later, Southern politics are deeply polarized along racial lines. It is no exaggeration to suggest that in these states the Democrats have become the party of African Americans and that the Republicans are the party of whites.

The collapse in Democratic support among white Southerners has been obscured by the rise of the Obama coalition. Higher black turnout allowed the Democrats to win nearly 44 percent of the vote in states like Mississippi, where 37 percent of voters were black. But the white shift is nearly as important to contemporary electoral politics as the Obama coalition. It represents an end, at least temporarily, to the South’s assimilation into the American political and cultural mainstream.

This all intensified under Obama. And none of this is really disputed. Those who see no racial aspect to this have to explain a huge fucking coincidence, do they not? Aaron Blake thinks black voters could decide who gets the Senate:

Six of the 16 states with the highest black populations are holding key Senate contests in 2014. A seventh — the most African American state in the country, Mississippi — is holding a contest that could get interesting if there’s a tea party upset in the GOP primary.

This is a highly unusual set of circumstances, especially when you consider that most states with large numbers of African American voters generally don’t hold competitive Senate races because they are safely red (in the South, generally) or blue (in the Northeast).

What’s more, black voters don’t just matter to a lot of races; they also matter to the most important races.

Has The FCC Given Up On Net Neutrality?

Derek Mead outlines the FCC’s new proposed Internet regulations:

While the exact framework has yet to be announced, it’s expected that ISPs will be able to charge content providers extra for higher speeds. It would likely be voluntary, which is a key legal distinction; if Netflix doesn’t want to pay Comcast for bandwidth, it won’t have to. And if Time Warner Cable wants to negotiate different rates for special treatment with Google, NBC, and Netflix, it’ll be open to do so. But regardless, it will mean that those that have money can cruise in the internet fast lane, and those that can’t will be stuck with what’s left.

It represents a fundamental shift away from net neutrality, which assures that end users can pay for faster speeds but all content is treated the same. Net neutrality proponents argue that such equality is crucial for the vibrancy of the web. If Netflix has to pay more for faster streaming speeds, it will probably just pass those costs on to users; if a startup can’t afford to leverage a better delivery deal, it’s going to find it even harder to compete with the web giants.

Tim Wu is dismayed:

The new rule gives broadband providers what they’ve wanted for about a decade now: the right to speed up some traffic and degrade others. (With broadband, there is no such thing as accelerating some traffic without degrading other traffic.)

We take it for granted that bloggers, start-ups, or nonprofits on an open Internet reach their audiences roughly the same way as everyone else. Now they won’t. They’ll be behind in the queue, watching as companies that can pay tolls to the cable companies speed ahead. The motivation is not complicated. The broadband carriers want to make more money for doing what they already do. Never mind that American carriers already charge some of the world’s highest prices, around sixty dollars or more per month for broadband, a service that costs less than five dollars to provide. To put it mildly, the cable and telephone companies don’t need more money.

T.C. Sottek accuses the commission of cowardice and complicity with the ISP industry:

The government is too afraid to say it, but the internet is a utility. The data that flows to your home is just like water and electricity: it’s not a luxury or an option in 2014. The FCC’s original Open Internet rules failed precisely because it was too timid to say that out loud, and instead erected rules on a sketchy legal sinkhole that was destined to fail. As the WSJ reports, the FCC has once again decided against reclassifying broadband as a public utility. To declare the internet a public utility would go against the wishes of companies like Comcast and AT&T, which don’t want to be “dumb pipes.” There’s too much money to be made by charging everyone who uses the internet far more than what it actually costs to provide service.

Peter Weber offers more nuanced criticisms:

There are legitimate concerns that this rule, if enacted as envisioned, will turn the internet into a reflection of how the world works, with the rich and powerful using their clout and dollars to maintain their advantages and keep the smaller, newer players in the second tier or lower. But as long as no ISP can throttle or discriminate against traffic of any legal content, as promised, the biggest short-term impact to consumers will probably be higher fees for services that pay for the fast lane.

Net neutrality proponents are understandably skeptical of [FCC Chairman Tom] Wheeler, a former top lobbyist for the cable and telecom industries. But this weak-tea neutrality is neither fully his fault — the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. circuit, bears most of the blame — nor is it necessarily the death knell for an open internet. It’s just the beginning of a slightly stratified one.

Previous Dish on net neutrality here, here, here, and here.

Eastern Ukraine Descends Into… What, Exactly?

This doesn’t look good:

Ukraine has sent in troops to clear out occupied government buildings in the city of Sloviansk, sparking a new round of violent clashes in the eastern part of the country. The fighting comes one day after President Oleksandr Turchynov announced that Kiev would move forward with “counter-terrorism” efforts in the east. Some outlets are reporting that a number of Russia separatists have been killed in clashes with Ukrainian soldiers. …

Russian President Vladimir Putin, not surprisingly, appears to be seizing on the event as justification both for the previous annexation of Crimea, and a pretext for further incursions into Ukraine. He said using the army against the Ukrainian people is “a very serious crime” that would have “consequences.” The Russian army claims they’ve been “forced” to launch news military drills along their border with Ukraine as a response.

Civil war expert James Fearon of Stanford tells Zack Beauchamp why he wouldn’t call this a “civil war”:

What we’re seeing is not so much civil war as an intervention by a very powerful neighbor who’s interested in annexation, but now there’s an interesting question as to what’s sort of path there will be towards actual annexation or will they be content with something formally short of that. The Russian Army is so strong that, relative to anything Ukraine could put up against them, I don’t see them starting a war against the Russian forces. And since that appears to be who’s there in the east, I don’t see what the fight would be.

If [Putin] extends this program further west, you could imagine the development of a terrorist or violent guerrilla movement that could someday get to civil war levels. There just isn’t much evidence right now that, at the core, this is a conflict between Ukrainians.

Quote For The Day

“I would absolutely concede that, while I find [Cliven] Bundy’s case completely unsympathetic, it is 100 percent possible to agree with his views on grazing rights without being racist. Where we differ is that, I’d argue, it’s not exactly a coincidence that Bundy also turns out to be a gigantic racist. Just like Ron Paul’s longtime ghostwriter turned out to be a neoconfederate white supremacist. And like the way Rand Paul’s ghostwriter also turned out to be a neoconfederate white supremacist. Presumably all these revelations have struck Tuccille as a series of shocking coincidences. Why do all these people with strong antipathy toward the federal government turn out to be racists? Why do all these homosexuals keep sucking my cock?” – Jon Chait.

The War Over The Core, Ctd

Jennifer Rubin sighs over growing right-wing distrust of the Common Core:

The rationale for Common Core is that state standards, even the best of them, are far too low, leaving our kids in the dust behind international competition. (“A 2009 study by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found no state had reading proficiency standards as rigorous as those on the highly respected and internationally benchmarked NAEP 4th grade exam. Only one state, Massachusetts, had an 8th grade test as rigorous as the NAEP exam. Worse still, a large number of states had reading proficiency standards that would qualify their students as functionally illiterate on NAEP.”)

At a dinner with a group of journalists a year or so ago, [Jeb] Bush explained to us that while middle-class families in good school districts may think they are getting a good education, a significant percentage of their kids are not college ready and, in any case, match up poorly against foreign competition.

Jamelle Bouie, who doesn’t agree with Rubin very often, describes the opposition from conservatives as “near-senseless”:

Common Core was a bipartisan initiative, with support from the vast majority of governors, including Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, who has since reversed course as he preps for a potential 2016 presidential run. What happened to make Common Core an object of hate for conservative activists? The answer is easy: “The Republican revolt against the Common Core,” noted the New York Times on Saturday, “can be traced to President Obama’s embrace of it.” This near-senseless Republican reaction is just one part of a growing tribalism that’s consumed the whole of conservative politics.

Steve Benen points out:

It’s become so bad that in January, Common Core supporters practically begged the White House not to mention the standards in the State of the Union address, fearing it would necessarily push Republicans further away.

“It’s imperative that the president not say anything about the Common Core State Standards,” Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said at the time, adding, “If he cares more about the success of this initiative than credit-taking, he will skip over it.”

Obama obliged, but it didn’t help.

But as Catherine Gewertz observes, the Common Core is a fait accompli in most states, “all but a handful” of which are set to administer exams based on those standards for the first time next year:

The two state consortia designing new tests for the standards – with the help of $360 million in federal aid – have sought to fundamentally reshape the way learning is assessed. And yet, over time they have scaled back some of their original testing plans in the face of political, economic, and technical constraints. Those realities have led consortium officials – who once made lofty promises about the revolutionary nature of their forthcoming tests—to represent them more humbly as “version 1.0” of assessments that are a vast improvement over what most states currently use, and will keep getting better in the coming years.

Meanwhile, Stephen Sawchuck reports that college education programs are not all on the same page when it comes to integrating the Core standards into their teacher training:

Teacher education has been under many pressures of late, including calls to improve student-teaching, classroom-management coursework, instruction, and program outcomes. The addition of the Common Core into that mix promises to be especially volatile, because it stands to reshape teacher education curricula to a greater degree than the other efforts. And that fuels concerns about academic freedom, as well as long-standing debates about whether programs’ main duty is to prepare teachers capable of carrying out specific, state-approved courses of study – or, as others argue, to prepare teachers to be knowledgeable about competing theories and to be critical actors in education policy.

Update from a reader:

Not only right-wing people are opposing Common Core. I am a former public school teacher and as liberal as they come.  I put my kids into school this year, after home schooling them for many years. I have to say that the Common Core math instruction is truly insane.  Parents can’t even help their child with homework half the time because getting the right answer is not enough.  You have to do it the “right way”. And the right way is often crazy and filled with multiple steps well beyond anything needed to get to the answer. I have friends who are teachers or just parents and vote Democrat or even Green that feel the same way. I am waiting to see if it gets better or improvements are made, but we might be going back to home schooling in the future.

Previous Dish on the Common Core here and here.