Month: June 2014

1,700 Slaughtered? Ctd

140627_hrw1crop

In what Elias Groll calls “an incredible piece of detective work”, Human Rights Watch has partly verified ISIS’s grisly claim from earlier this month that it had killed over 1,700 people during its campaign through northern and western Iraq:

In a report released Friday, Human Rights Watch pinpointed the exact location in which the images were taken. Corresponding satellite images show ground disturbance that apparently matches what the area would look like if mass graves had been dug and heavy vehicles — as seen in images posted by ISIS — had been driven there there.

Human Rights Watch determined that the photographs were taken a stone’s throw from the Tigris River and a former Hussein palace. The group’s analysis picks out individual captives and militants who appear across the photographs, seemingly bolstering the photos’ authenticity. The analysis suggests that between 160 and 190 men were killed between June 11 and June 14, though the actual death toll from ISIS executions in Tikrit could be significantly higher. The slides documenting the analysis are reproduced at the bottom of this post.

Meanwhile, Mona Mahmood and Mark Tran report, ISIS isn’t the only militia that has Iraqis scared for their lives:

[A]trocities are also being carried out by Shia militias, who have been summoned by the highest Shia authority in the land, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to defend Shia holy shrines. The old Mahdi army, rebranded as Peace Brigades, can be counted on to stand and fight the insurgents, unlike the military. But their zeal is feared by those they target.

Hani Sa’aeed, 24, disappeared three days ago when he went to a shopping centre with a friend in Mahmoudiya, a town south of Baghdad. “After a few hours, his friend contacted us to say that Hani was taken by the Righteous League militia who are in control of the town,” said Ibrahim Abdul Majid, Hani’s cousin. “The militia were so furious after four explosions rocked the centre of the city during the day and killed many people. They were busy picking up young men based on their IDs. Hani’s friend advised us to act quickly to save him but we did not know what to do.”

Adbul Majid eventually rang the police, who said they had found the body of a young man in a compound near the shopping centre.

The Picture Of Controversy, Ctd

A reader brings some firsthand perspective to a recent post on the notorious photographer:

I knew Terry Richardson in high school, when he was an angry young punk. It has been fascinating watching his transformation into superstar and cultural lightning rod. Here is some context I don’t ever see in the press:

His mom, Annie, a successful rock ‘n roll photographer in her own right with lots of very famous and creative friends, suffered a brain injury when he was a kid, resulting in unpredictable anger, short-term memory loss, and colorful, loud, often inappropriate, over-the-top behavior. She was a town character, riding around with wild hair on her adult tricycle. When we were hanging out at his house, her raspy voice would screech out from the other room, “Terrrrrrry!” – often calling him to do some chore that he’d already done.

In this context, nothing I read about him really surprises me. The perviness, the megalomania – it all just seems a natural outgrowth of the bizarre childhood he had.

Not that it would matter if he were wagging his boner in my face! But it is an interesting case study into what turns a guy into a talented raging asshole.

Meanwhile, Eleanor Margolis compares Richardson to Dov Charney, the recently ousted CEO of American Apparel who had been battling sexual harassment suits and an overall seedy reputation:

Charney and Richardson represent an uncomfortable truth about our current conception of coolness.

The two men are emblematic of a hipster veneer that’s so often used to cover up the mistreatment of women. In the name of cool, we so often make allowances for men like these. With their 70s porn star aesthetic seems to come this notion that they’re only subjugating women ironically: we’ll carry on buying clothes from people who look like the result of Ron Jeremy humping a copy of Vice. Misogyny is OK, as long as it pastiches a bygone era of kitsch female subjugation; as long as it’s retro. These bizarre double standards are only serving to blur the lines (sorry…) between sexism and chicness.

A more detailed look at Charney’s persona:

Charney appears in several of the ads, including one with two women, all three of them fully dov-charneyclothed, titled “In bed with the boss.” He is known for walking around in his underwear in front of his employees. His messianic, provocative persona has been a large part of American Apparel’s image; with his often extravagant facial hair and retro clothing, he resembles a character in “American Hustle.” …

The reporter Claudine Ko, who recorded Charney repeatedly masturbating in front of her in an article for Jane magazine in 2004, rejected the idea that she was a victim of his behavior. “Who was really exploited?” she writes in a follow-up article. “We both were—American Apparel got press, I got one hell of a story. And that’s it.” But Charney didn’t control Ko’s salary; he couldn’t fire her.

Veronique Hyland thinks American Apparel should “build on the goodwill from the Charney firing and completely re-brand itself’:

American Apparel truly has some bona fides to emphasize in this area: It makes its clothing in the U.S., and pays its employees well 20121126-215406above minimum wage (and offers them an array of benefits). The company has spearheaded goodwill-generating campaigns in favor of immigration reform (Legalize LA) and LGBT rights (Legalize Gay). It has fabric re-use initiatives and sustainable lines. It has worked with charities like GLAAD, donated shirts to the victims of the Haitian earthquake, and held a sale to benefit homeless youth. (It has even been endorsed as an exemplar by the author of Ethical Chic!)

The curse of American Apparel’s original branding is that it worked too well — and now we can’t get it out of our heads. The key for whoever takes over from Charney will be to make a completely new message stick.

Medicaid Can Keep You Out Of Prison

Judy Solomon makes the case that the program reduces prison recidivism:

States considering whether to expand Medicaid should consider the growing evidence that connecting the jail-involved population to treatment for mental illness and substance abuse can lower the rate at which they return to jail or prison.

For example, a study of a Michigan program to help recently released prisoners obtain community-based health care and social services found that it cut recidivism by more than half, from 46 percent to 21.8 percent.  Similarly, a study that the Justice Department funded in Florida and Washington found that “in both states, 16 percent fewer jail detainees with serious mental illnesses who had Medicaid benefits at the time of their release returned to jail the following year, compared to similar detainees who did not have Medicaid.”

Misjudging A Book By Its Cover

William Jordan of YouGov found that Republicans and Democrats are both bad at guessing a book’s politics from its title alone:

We tested the titles of 17 political memoirs from potential 2016 candidates, both Republican and Democrat, asking which book people would be interested to read without saying who had written which book. It turns out that the overall favorite book amongst Republicans is by the Dennis Kucinich (A Prayer for America), a liberal, and the overall favorite amongst Democrats is by Ben Carson (One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future), a conservative.

No Place To Sleep, By Design, Ctd

grate

A reader notices another way that architects are deterring homeless sleeping:

Glad to see this trend getting some air, and some criticism. When we were living in Astoria, I noted the appearance of some curious structures above the M/R subway lines. I assumed they were combination vents and benches, but it turns out they are effectively cowlings or battens placed above the existing tunnel vents, designed to keep floodwaters from penetrating the tunnels and disabling the trains.

They are undeniably elegant – and I appreciate the MTA’s choice of elegance over mere utility – but the undulating vanes were also deliberately peppered with raised sections that don’t affect sitting but make lying down painful. For the homeless – and Astoria has many, including for a time Cadillac Man, who wrote about his life for Esquire – the typical flush-to-the-sidewalk vents had for decades been a source of warmth in the winter months. These new structures struck me then as bitter symbols of the new New York: increasingly wealthy and stylish – but in equal measure increasingly hostile, by choice, to those who didn’t catch the cresting wave.

Update from a reader:

In that picture, those metal bumps are used to prevent skateboarders from grinding the benches. Maybe they also prevent sleeping, I am not sure, but where I live they were installed as anti-skateboard devices. I bet if there are handrails near those benches they also have metal caps on them to prevent grinding.

(Photo by Sean Hopkins)

Our Mountains’ Majesty Is Melting

photo(1)

John Upton considers what climate change means for the snow-topped mountains of the American West:

New research has painted a vivid picture of the global warming-induced fate of what currently are snow-peaked mountains across the region. Within 50 years, University of Idaho scientists concluded, the lower-elevation peaks could be wholly rained upon instead of receiving mixtures of snow and rain. And across much of the region, the snow season is expected to contract from five months every year to just three months. Those were some of the findings of an attempt to model how global warming will shift rain-snow transition zones upward throughout a vast swath of the United States. It’s a swath of the nation where farmers and residents rely heavily on melting snowpacks for water supplies during the warmer months. That means the change from wintertime snow to rain could worsen both winter floods and summer droughts.

(Photo: A Dish reader’s airplane window view of Mt. Rainier, southeast of Seattle. More VFYAWs here)

Bad Omens For Obamacare

Many small ones have popped up recently. First up, Adrianna McIntyre explains why ACA enrollees might have to switch plans next year:

The federal subsidies used to offset the cost of insurance are based on income, but they’re also pegged to the second-cheapest silver plan on each state exchange, which is called the “benchmark plan.” When people choose something cheaper than the benchmark plan (the cheapest silver plan, or one of the bronze plans), they will spend less money out of their own pocket on the insurance premium. If a person chooses a plan that’s more expensive than the benchmark plan, he’s responsible for the extra cost.

But annual changes to insurance premiums aren’t uniform across plans. That means the “benchmark plan” can change from year to year — with financial consequences for those with subsidies. These consequences will be most acutely felt by low-income enrollees.

Speaking of subsidies, Sarah Kliff wonders how states will pay for the upkeep of their exchanges when the federal money runs out next year:

The Affordable Care Act provided federal grant funding for states to get their new web portals up and running.  The Obama administration doled out $4.6 billion in grants to states launching their own marketplaces. But Obamacare also requires state exchanges to become self-sustaining by the start of 2015. That means every state exchange that will operate next year now needs to figure out how to pay their bills. …

“There won’t be any big pot of federal money,” says Elizabeth Carpenter, a director at health research firm Avalere. “When you think about being able to run an exchange without the federal backstop, it will take awhile to forecast and figure out what money is needed.”

Next, Adrianna McIntyre warns that the next ACA open enrollment period is at the worst time of year:

Open enrollment for 2015 will last from November through February. The Obama administration probably picked late fall for open enrollment because that is when Medicare and most employers permit insurance enrollment changes. But between Thanksgiving and Christmas, late fall is also incredibly stressful, both financially and emotionally.

According to a new study in Health Affairs, people’s capacity for decision-making is stretched especially thin during the lead up to the holiday season. And when people are stressed, behavioral economists have found that decision-making is done with a sort of tunnel vision: people focus only on their most pressing short-term problems, sidelining long-term issues.

Suderman digs into another new study, from Kaiser, that “suggest[s] the potential limitations of Obamacare’s coverage scheme”:

It’s not a precise instrument: More than 40 percent of exchange enrollees were already insured, suggesting that while Obamacare is expanding coverage to the uninsured, it’s also resulting in a fair amount of subsidized coverage going to people who already had coverage (the vast majority of exchange beneficiaries got subsidies). Digging a bit deeper into the survey also hints at the difficulty in measuring who, exactly, counts as previously uninsured. If someone had health insurance up until a month prior to getting new coverage under the law, should that person count as uninsured? Probably not. What about six months before? Or a year before? These questions are legitimately difficult to answer.

Kaiser’s survey finds that the majority of previously uninsured lacked coverage for two years, and that 45 percent reported not having coverage for five years. Which means that more than half of the previously uninsured were covered at some relatively recent point.

Jason Millman looks at other surveys that don’t bode well for Obamacare:

Just how much will people buying their own coverage shop around for a better deal on health insurance year-to-year? By creating a marketplace where plans have to compete for business under the same rules, Obamacare is supposed to facilitate the shopping experience. Some recent studies throw cold water on that idea, though.

Just 13 percent of seniors enrolled in Medicare’s prescription drug program changed plans during the annual enrollment period, according to an October 2013 Kaiser Family Foundation survey that reviewed the first five years of program enrollment. Those facing the highest premium increases were the most likely to switch plans — anywhere between two and four times of the average rate of all enrollees who switched plans. Still more than two-thirds of enrollees who faced the highest premium increases stuck with their plans.

And last but not least, Lanhee Chen argues that “data published in the Wall Street Journal suggest that [the possibility of an ACA death spiral] may not be so far-fetched after all”:

At its base, the data show that people insured through the law’s exchanges have higher rates of serious medical conditions. Of the enrollees who have seen a doctor or other health-care provider in the first quarter of this year, 27 percent have significant medical problems, including diabetes, cancer, heart trouble and psychiatric conditions. That rate is substantially higher than that for patients in nonexchange market plans over the same period. And it’s more than double the rate of those who were able to hold onto their existing individual market insurance plans after President Barack Obama was forced to allow them to keep them.

This outcome should not surprise anyone. The law’s one-size-fits-all regulatory regime, which requires insurers to offer coverage to all comers and prohibits pricing of coverage based on an applicant’s health status, was bound to increase the number of relatively sicker people purchasing insurance through the exchanges. Moreover, Obama’s executive action, which effectively allowed many people who had individual market plans to remain in them through at least 2016, bifurcated the insurance markets such that healthier people remained in the plans they already had, while relatively sicker patients were left to acquire coverage through the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges.

Some of the bad risk in the exchanges has been offset by the enrollment of relatively healthy people who acquired coverage because of the law’s generous subsidies. Yet the numbers make clear that the exchanges remain a haven for those who may consume more medical services than others.

Update from a reader:

I found a few of the “bad omens” really rather business as usual and left me scratching my head thinking but this is how free markets, even ones that have some controls in place work.

For example, the lead off that the benchmark plan could change from year to year. So frigging what, I say. Most of my adult life, I’ve had my insurance provided by my employer, the state. We are fortunate in having many insurance options (including several managed care options and a more traditional [and more expensive] health insurance option) … um, sort of like the ACA market place. Employee premium costs for these have ALWAYS been tied to a benchmark plan, with the state usually paying some percentage of the lowest cost plan (all plans have to meet a uniform set of benefits, by the way, again sort of like ACA). It has been the case for all the years I’ve gotten my insurance through my state employer that the cheapest plans change from year to year.

When I was young, and not a big consumer of healthcare, I changed plans almost every year to take the cheapest plan. Now that I have a family, I’m older and use more healthcare, and have developed relationships with my various doctors, I am willing to suck up some price increases (although competition among the various insurers who provide plans to the state really has appeared to minimize very much price fluctuation) to maintain the status quo. I probably would change insurance plans if, for me and my family, the costs of not switching started to outweigh the benefits. And, it seems to me, the marketplace will make it relatively easy to shop for a better price the next year. Whether people take advantage of this will be up to them.

Not sure, but is the Medicare demographic mentioned in Millman’s piece really going to be the same as people enrolled in ACA? I don’t know. It might depend too on how this is marketed to enrollees. Can we “force” people to shop for cheaper insurance plans. Oh, the threat to our liberty!

Oh, and really? People might be too stressed to buy insurance during November through February? Sorry, this seems sort of lame to me!

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

700th Anniversary Of The Battle Of Bannockburn

I’d start with this hoop video and this sublime Michigan window view.

Breaking news: Neanderthal poop suggests some early veg with their meat; casual sex is one of the most joyful things in life if you are not conflicted about it; and it’s even better if you keep your socks on.

Things to make you nostalgic: Bill Buckley going off on Ayn Rand; and Edmund White’s account of the Stonewall Riots in a letter written just a couple weeks after.

Things to make you go hmmmm: what a cocktail looks like under a microscope; and what a parasite in your body’s face looks like too. The poetry of John Clare, while in a lunatic asylum. And don’t worry about death; everyone who’s been there briefly and back says it’s lovely.

The most popular post of the weekend was Jesus vs John Galt; followed by Dudes With Beards Eating Cupcakes.

Many of this weekend’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 16 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Stuart Milne of Clan Ranald holds a buzzard raptor bird at a display during the Bannockburn Live festivities on June 28, 2014 in Stirling, Scotland. It was the 700th anniversary of the historic battle that saw the outnumbered Scots conquer the English led by Edward II in the First War of Scottish Independence. By Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images.)

Book Club: A Conversation With Alexandra And Maria, Ctd

In our latest audio sample, the two women discuss the email from the reader on the autism spectrum who senses too much of the world around her:


You can listen to the entire conversation from Alexandra and Maria below. Follow the whole book club discussion here, and email your thoughts and observations to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com. One reader writes:

I just finished the wonderful read of Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking. Thanks for such a great selection and I’ve already bought many copies for family and friends.

So I paged through the chapter Sources and on the last page of Acknowledgements, Ms. Horowitz mentions her editor, Colin Harrison. She states that he has many theories about the gummed up spots on the sidewalk. Unless she plans to write the sequel of the Gummed Up Spots on the Sidewalks – will Mr. Harrison share his gummed up theories with The Dish Book Club? I’m dying to know. Living downtown Chicago, I look for Wrigley’s gum falling out of pedestrian mouths every hour and never see it happening. I look for pedestrians with sticky gum strands sticking to shoes while walking and never see it happening.  What are these gummy blobs all over our city sidewalks? I love a good conspiracy theory …

Another:

As a photographer –  someone who “looks” professionally – I’d actually downloaded the book before it became a book club choice, but I couldn’t get through it.

It’s mostly just a collection of different people observing different objects, people, sounds and smells (do sounds and smells even count in a book about “looking”?) – yes, there are a lots of objects, people, sounds and smells in the world, and no, they’re not always interesting. It seemed to me that most of the experts in the book were looking at stuff in a similar way; they just happen to be looking at different stuff.

Why wasn’t a photographer included? You can’t get more of a “professional observer” than that. As I’ve learned my craft, I realise that learning photography has very little to do with mastering all the knobs and dials on your DSLR and everything to do with learning to look, really look, and get beyond the endless collections of different objects and people. My love of photography is in direct proportion to how much I am learning to look, really look, by practising it.

To observe how the light falls on the side of someone’s face or on the pews of a church; to see interesting textural juxtapositions or beautiful colour palettes; to notice the fleeting stories conveyed in a look or a gesture or an old piece of furniture; to see the pleasing bend in the road, the interesting compositions created by unrelated shapes and colours, or the interplay of light and shadow through the trees. It’s a totally other way of looking, so very different from being yet another observational collector of stuff and facts, and it seemed a pity that this perspective wasn’t included at all.

Malkin Award Nominee

“Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen? I think so, but that debt is best discharged through memory, because the slaves are dead and their descendants are better off as a consequence of their ancestors being hauled from Africa to America,” – Dinesh D’Souza.