Month: August 2014

Fact-Check Those Insults, Mr. President

In an interview with The Economist published over the weekend, Obama got in this little dig at Russia:

Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking.

But as Mark Adomanis points out, none of these statements is factually accurate. So why, then, did the president make them? Zenon Evans wonders:

It’s bizarre that Obama criticized Russia on these fronts when there’s plenty of legitimate issues – like Moscow’s crackdown on civil rights, the pro-Western political opposition, and independent media – that he could have addressed instead. These, of course, don’t have much bearing on the war Russia is waging against Ukrainian sovereignty or the mass killing of civilians on a Malaysian plane, but whether it’s due to a lazy team of fact-checkers or deliberate rah-rah nationalism to boost the U.S. by comparison, dubious talking points don’t help the Obama administration resolve the current crises.

Hearing the president say “Russia doesn’t make anything” will only inflame anti-American sentiment among Russian civilians, thereby reinforcing Putin’s own ballooning cushion of popular support. And, there’s need for healthy debate about the U.S.’s actions against the Kremlin throughout this war, but by spouting some easily-debunked information, Obama effectively invites skepticism of the accuracy of other White House claims about Russia.

But Dylan Matthews figures he was playing up the overall idea that Putinist Russia has no future:

[T]he fact that Obama felt compelled to say this — inaccuracies and all — is interesting. The implicit argument being countered here is the idea that, as TIME magazine recently put it, a “Cold War II” is afoot and Russia might present a real rival to the US. But one crucial thing that made the Soviet Union a plausible rival was that, for much of the world, Communism was an extremely attractive ideology, one embraced by guerrilla and resistance movements across the globe and thus capable of pulling numerous countries into the Soviet orbit. As Obama points out, there’s nothing so attractive about 2014′s Russia, which profoundly limits how successful it can be as a world power.

“The Non-Inhaler, The Twelve-Stepper, And The Roof-Hitter”

That’s Rick Hertzberg’s priceless description of our last three presidents and their relationship to weed. Rick thinks that Barry O has been playing the long game on marijuana sanity (as do I) but thinks it’s time for something a little more expeditious:

When it comes to executive orders, the roof-hitter has a long way to go before he catches up with Carter (320), Reagan (381), Clinton (364), or George W. Bush (291). At last count, Obama had issued a hundred and eighty-three. One more he could issue—and should, without delay—would remove marijuana from the government’s list of Schedule I drugs, which includes heroin and LSD, and demote it to, say, Schedule V, down there with codeine cough syrup—or, at the very least, to Schedule II, with cocaine and methadone. It’s time for Obama to get out in front of the parade.

Dissents Of The Day

Several readers jump on this quote of mine:

“Clinton’s developing a new formula for politics: stand for nothing but winning power. And the Democrats seem perfectly happy with it.” Perfectly happy? No. Accepting of reality? Trying to be.

There’s no new formula here. It’s just Machiavellian. Ask yourself: Why on earth would Hillary stake out a position in favor of some philosophy, doctrine, or model that she plans to sell us on?  One that already has its legions of paid detractors?  A nice, book-length box into which she can spend 8 years cramming the world?  Instead she takes on the unsexy and, obviously, less academically palatable task of judging the world as it is: a 3D chess game where the rules change constantly.

Labeling and categorizing reality based on something you read is just another ideology. I don’t think Hillary stands for “nothing” because she’s not into that game. I think she stands for enlightened self-interest, as expressed through a desire to see America win those games in which she chooses to engage, to the greater glory of, of course, herself.

The question should not be, “Is Hillary Clinton a moral leader?” The question should be, “Is Hillary Clinton America’s best bet to lead in a post-moral world?”

It’s not craven, cynical, or even strictly selfish of her.  It’s her acknowledgement that we live “after history.”  It’s intuitive, I think.  It’s that bedrock Clinton talent of fingering the wind.  Is she right?  She’s a better bet than Ted Cruz, or some other deluded hack.

Another:

While I’m personally horrified by the prospect of Hillary Clinton running for president, her policy vacuity may be the only thing I don’t hold against her. You write, “Clinton’s developing a new formula for politics: stand for nothing but winning power. And the Democrats seem perfectly happy with it.”

In other news, the sun rises in the east and the sky is blue. Vacuous standard-bearer candidates are the norm, not the exception, in American history. And rightly so: Prior to WWII, the president had so little real power that his personality only mattered in the most unusual of crises. (Which is to say, Washington and Lincoln.) People usually voted the party, not the man. And since WWII, the executive branch has become so large that while the more powerful president’s personal gifts and faults matter more than formerly, the hundreds of appointed bureaucrats drawn from his party’s activists matter much more to most policy questions than does the president himself. Or herself. So people today should vote the party, not the man, and public opinion research suggests that in the main they do so.

Historically, a candidate who stands for something usually loses his party’s nomination to a candidate whose policy vacuity makes him an empty vessel for voters to fill with their own preferences. American parties usually nominate Zachary Taylor, not Henry Clay. “Availability” was once the polite term for the virtue of being a supposedly electable policy cipher. Abraham Lincoln was “available,” as were Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland, Dwight Eisenhower, and Bill Clinton. As were Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman when nominated for vice president.

In the modern era, only Goldwater, McGovern, and Reagan stand out as true policy candidates (Obama had much the effect of a policy candidate, but his stated policy disagreements with Hillary in 2007-08 were minuscule. Perhaps call Obama a “biography” candidate, alongside Kennedy.) All other major nominees were “available” – to the extent that they had any known strong policy commitments, they were nominated in spite of them, not because of them.

So, Hillary Clinton. Vacuous? Yes. Troublingly so? Not in the context of American politics and history.

The trick, ultimately, is not demanding that every presidential candidate be a policy genius. The trick is reducing the reach of executive authority so that the vacuous mediocrities we tend to elect can do less harm. If we had given George W. Bush the powers and duties held by Rutherford B. Hayes, the world would barely have noted his time in office.

Another piles one:

I was a very strong supporter of Obama from as soon as he gave that speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, and now I’m perfectly happy with electing Hillary Clinton as a Democratic President who stands for nothing. Why?

Two reasons: first, because I just want Hillary to maintain what Obama has achieved. I don’t believe she could have passed the stimulus or the ACA or even Dodd Frank, but he did. Now she can keep the Republicans from dismantling those and flushing the country down the toilet like they did under the Bush administration. She also doesn’t need to stand for anything to elect liberal justices to the Supreme Court who will begin to undo the current court’s disastrous decisions on guns, corporate speech, and women’s rights. He didn’t get immigration reform or cap-and-trade, and neither will she against a group of Republican Know Nothings.

Which brings me the second reason I want her: the first female President will probably win big, and losing three (or four!) consecutive elections against rising demographic odds and twelve (or sixteen!) years of obstruction and no new ideas will eventually bring about the implosion of the current Republican party, which is focused only on taxes and abortion, and the recreation of a Republican party that can compromise again. Obama did the heavy lifting on the liberal agenda as much as can be done, and frankly I don’t want the Democrats to go all Elizabeth Warren off the deep end, with post office banks and $15 minimum wages. All I want is someone to put liberals on the Supreme Court and wait for the Republicans’ own bile to wear them down to nothing. And who better to do that than Hillary Rodham Clinton?

A Cure For Ebola?

Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, the American ebola patients now being treated in the isolation unit at Emory University Hospital, received an experimental treatment while still in Liberia that may have saved their lives. James Hamblin looks into just what this “top-secret serum” is:

[It’s] a monoclonal antibody. Administration of monoclonal antibodies is an increasingly common but time-tested approach to eradicating interlopers in the human body. In a basic monoclonal antibody paradigm, scientists infect an animal (in this case mice) with a disease, the mice mount an immune response (antibodies to fight the disease), and then the scientists harvest those antibodies and give them to infected humans. It’s an especially promising area in cancer treatment.

In this case, the proprietary blend of three monoclonal antibodies known as zMapp had never been tested in humans. It had previously been tested in eight monkeys with Ebola who survived—though all received treatment within 48 hours of being infected. A monkey treated outside of that exposure window did not survive. That means very little is known about the safety and effectiveness of this treatment—so little that outside of extreme circumstances like this, it would not be legal to use. [Sanjay] Gupta speculates that the FDA may have allowed it under the compassionate use exemption.

John Timmer has more on the treatment:

Fortunately, Mapp [Biopharmaceutical, the drug company working on zMapp,] has been publishing papers describing its progress on an Ebola treatment as it went along, so it’s possible to understand how the therapy was developed and how it operates.

Despite its fearsome behavior, Ebola is a fairly simple virus, with only seven genes. The gene that is essential for the virus to attach to human cells, called Ebola glycoprotein, has been identified previously. Antibodies that stick to this protein would be expected to block infection of new cells and target any virus circulating in the blood stream for destruction. The problem appears to be that an effective antibody response comes too late for the patients. (The virus also takes steps to tone down the immune response.) Mapp decided to do the immune system’s job for it by making antibodies that can then be injected into infected individuals to perform the same function. The challenges are making the right ones and making enough of them.

Shirley Li notes that zMapp isn’t the only experimental ebola treatment out there:

So why ZMapp, of all the experimental solutions to Ebola, of which there are many? Perhaps it comes down to Mapp’s recent successes: The NIH included Mapp in its $28 million five-year grant awarded to five companies to research Ebola further in March. A press release dated July 15, 2014 revealed that Defyrus, a private life sciences biodefense company based in Canada, had partnered with Mapp’s San Diego-based commercialization partner firm Leaf Biopharmaceutical Inc., to push the ZMapp serum’s clinical development. And just last week, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency announced it awarded a contract to Mapp to continue development of the serum.

Still, fighting Ebola means a multi-pronged attack. While Mapp’s method focuses on eradicating the disease after infection, the NIH has been working on preventing it in the first place. In the NIH’s case, it’s working to promote development of antibodies within the subject, instead of injecting them from an outside source that survived Ebola.

Steven Hoffman and Julia Belluz blame the lack of an effective ebola treatment until now on the way pharmaceutical companies prioritize their R&D:

Ebola will continue to move through Africa — this time, and again in the future — not only because of the viral reservoirs and broken health systems specific to the continent. There are much larger issues at play here. Namely, the global institutions we designed to promote health innovation, trade, and investment perpetuate its spread and prevent its resolution.

This shouldn’t be news. Most all of the money for research and development in health comes from the private sector. They naturally have a singular focus — making money — and they do that by selling patent-protected products to many people who can and are willing to pay very high monopoly prices. Not by developing medicines and vaccines for the world’s poorest people, like those suffering with Ebola. Right now, more money goes into fighting baldness and erectile dysfunction than hemorrhagic fevers like dengue or Ebola.

Follow all of our ebola coverage here. Update from a reader:

In the past I have been very critical of your coverage and thoughts on scientific matters; it’s incredibly frustrating to see published opinions littered with “rookie mistakes” from people who lack scientific training. As someone who is highly educated in these matters and has to compete for diminishing public funds, I have no tolerance for the long history of scientific inaccuracy from the media.

Having said that, your coverage of the Ebola epidemic has been pleasantly accurate and appropriate. I especially appreciate you highlighting Steven Hoffman and Julia Belluz’s article. They highlight a searing problem in our current research system; research priorities go towards profitable markets. The federal government is supposed to offset that, but thanks to the current batch of Republicans, worthwhile funding opportunities are going unfunded.

A colleague of my boss recently received a perfect score on a federal grant, but it did not get funded. There was nothing wrong with the grant scientifically, conceptually, or practically; they just ran out of money. The big problem is that funding opportunities aren’t growing while the scientific community is expanding. This has led us to the current ultra-competitive environment where there is no lack of sound ideas, projects, and causes that can directly be addressed and make real, lasting impacts on people’s lives.

But there’s no profit there, so Big Pharma researches ED, makes boner pills instead, and sleeps on beds of cash while poor people die of Ebola. “And the beat goes on…”

The Creatures From The Green Lagoon

Toledo, Ohio Contends With Contaminated Tap Water For Third Day

Life in northwest Ohio is returning to normal after the mayor of Toledo lifted a drinking-water ban that affected some half a million metro-area residents. Ben Richmond offers a recap of the past days’ events:

On Saturday, Toledo officials issued a warning not to drink the water after they discovered high levels of the toxin microcystin in the water, coming from a huge bloom of the cyanobacteria (or “blue-green algae”) microcystis in Lake Erie’s Maumee Bay, where the city of 284,000 draws its drinking water. Boiling tap water only concentrates the toxins further, so residents were left emptying store shelves of bottled water and lining up at water distribution centers, as their water supply turned a sickly shade of Satanic vomit-green.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “the presence of high levels of cyanotoxins in recreational water and drinking water may cause a wide range of symptoms in humans including fever, headaches, muscle and joint pain, blisters, stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, mouth ulcers, and allergic reactions.” It gets worse: Microsystin has also been linked to liver inflammation and hemorrhage, kidney damage, and “potential tumor growth,” the EPA adds.

The restrictions were lifted Monday, although the long-term outlook for the area’s water system remains uncertain. Agricultural pollution appears to have be the culprit, Richmond notes:

Nature might provide the sunshine and warm weather that allows the cyanobacteria to flourish, but its farms and towns near waterways that give the blue-green algae their super-food: phosphorus. High use of phosphorus-based fertilizers and the presence of livestock near water supplies, combined with waste-water and run-off from towns and cities near the waterways has raised the levels of phosphorus in the lake, leading to record-breaking blooms in 2011, and above average blooms since.

Brad Plumer adds that climate change may bear some blame:

The number of heavy rain events in the Midwest has increased some 37 percent since the 1950s. That’s significant, since it’s the really heavy storms that wash away the most phosphorus from farm soil and cities into the watershed. … One 2013 study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences predicted that algae blooms in Lake Erie were likely to increase in the years ahead — even if farming practices stay the same. That’s because, as the planet warms, the atmosphere will be able to hold more moisture and heavier rainfall events in the Midwest will become more and more common.

Meanwhile, Gwynn Guilford registers the national scale of the problem:

Lake Erie is notorious for its algal blooms. But it’s hardly the only body of water in the US that sees these ecological catastrophes in the summer of 2013 alone. For instance, Oregon had to commute its Midsummer Triathalon down to a biathalon in Aug. 2013 due to toxic slime clogging Blue Lake. Kentucky reported its first toxic algae problems in the state’s history only in 2013, after visitors to four lakes complained of rashes and stomach pain; the blooms are back again this year. In Florida, toxic algae in Indian River Lagoon killed more than 120 manatees in 2013, say some scientists.

Mark Berman zooms out:

The water issue in the US pales in comparison to the clean water shortages in other parts of the globe. There are 783 million people without access to clean water around the world, according to the United Nations. But the Toledo ban still speaks to the sensitivity of water systems in the US, which are relied upon by hundreds of millions of people and can be severely affected by natural occurrences or outside contaminants.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Leber observes that there’s little in the way of regulatory oversight when it comes to such issues:

Testing for microcystin isn’t federally mandated, nor is it required in the state of Ohio. As a result, many towns don’t have emergency response plans in place and vary in how often they test water samples for the toxin. The Toledo Blade reported that water treatment officials across Ohio have asked the EPA for additional guidance on testing for microcystin. That lack of guidance can result in confusion, even risk to the public’s safety: State officials had assured Toledo residents that the water plant had enough sophisticated “safeguards in place to neutralize the toxin and remove it before it can get into the water supply.” The tap-water ban was announced eight days later.

The Bloomberg editors concur:

Lake Erie, which was known as “North America’s Dead Sea” in the late 1960s, was saved mainly by the Clean Water Act of 1972, which required sewage-treatment plants and industry to limit how much pollution they discharged into US streams and rivers. It was an enormous undertaking, with the federal government spending more than $60 billion nationwide to improve treatment facilities. …  What’s clear is that today’s regulations aren’t up to the job of safeguarding the US’s drinking-water supply. Rules that mandate stricter rules for fertilizer application should be adopted. Lawmakers also should tie the availability of federal subsidies to farms, such as crop insurance, to farm-management practices that reduce runoff. In the meantime, cities like Toledo will be stuck paying the bill as they spend more money to monitor, test and filter water.

(Photo: Algae from Lake Erie washes ashore at Maumee Bay State Park in Oregon, Ohio, on August 4. By Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)

The GOP vs Pope Francis

Here’s something I didn’t know: a banal Congressional resolution to congratulate Pope Francis on his elevation to the papacy and praise for his “inspirational statements and actions” cannot muster enough bipartisan support to be passed. The reason?

An unnamed Republican backer of the legislation told The Hill newspaper last week that the pope is “sounding like [President Barack] Obama” because he “talks about equality” and he has blasted “trickle-down economics,” a favorite theory of many conservatives and “politically charged,” as the GOP official said. Even though the bill has New York Rep. Peter King, a reliably conservative Republican, as a chief co-sponsor (along with Democrat John Larson of Connecticut, also a Catholic), it has failed to catch on with the GOP. The resolution has 223 co-sponsors altogether, but just 20 are Republicans.

I’ll say this for the Congressional Republicans. They know who they are, and who they oppose.

What’s Your Favorite Place To Read? Ctd

IMG_0238

Sending the above photo, a reader answers:

This spot (so I can get high).

Another in Boston:

My favorite place is the MBTA’s Red Line. I get on at Alewife (the end of the line) so I always get a seat, and I read all the way to Downtown Crossing.  I’ve been doing this commute for twelve years and I think I’ve read more in this fifth of my life than in the other four-fifths combined.

Another can’t pick just one:

My number one most favorite place to read is in the bathtub.  For a while, I had a water-proof protective case for my i-Pad, because I was afraid I would drop it in the tub, but then decided that it was too annoying, so now I just take my chances.  So far, so good.  A bonus is that, unlike books, which get a little waterlogged just from little drops of water on my hands even when I don’t actually drop the book in the tub,  the i-Pad is amazingly impervious to water.  My screen often looks like it is quite dirty, though, when in fact, it is just streaked with soap.

My second most favorite place to read is on the train.

I hate commuting, it sucks, but the one good thing about it is that for 70 minutes a day, 35 minutes each way (plus whatever time I am on the train waiting for it to leave) I am stuck sitting in one place, and can read uninterrupted, without guilt that I should be doing something else.  I try to sit in the quiet car, all the way in the back where no one bothers me.

Finally, I like to read in restaurants, while I am having lunch on a work day usually.  Even when I’m very busy at work, I will usually find time to grab a bite to eat, and will read while I do so.  The i-Pad also has increased my reading efficiency in this regard.  When I am reading a physical book (which I still do regularly, although not nearly as much as I read on my i-Pad) the book will flip shut if I have to let go to pick up a sandwich or cut something, so I may have to put the book down between bites, or balance a ketchup bottle on it to keep it open.  With the i-Pad, I just prop it up, and read hands free.

More reader responses here. Update from another:

I have lots of favorite places to read, but I’m also the mom to 19 month old, so life is not as flexible as it used to be. So right now, my favorite place to read is on my couch, after the boy has gone to bed, with a glass of wine on the side table and the sweet silent hiss of the baby monitor in my ear. It’s heaven when I can stay up late enough to get through a chapter.

I’m loving this thread, which is a nice break amidst all the heartbreak.

Can You Relate?

Rebecca Mead tut-tuts those who, like Ira Glass, would relate to art rather than identify with it:

Identification with a character is one of the pleasures of reading, or of watching movies, or of seeing plays, though if it is where one’s engagement with the work begins, it should not be where critical thought ends. The concept of identification implies that the reader or viewer is, to some degree at least, actively engaged with the work in question: she is thinking herself into the experience of the characters on the page or screen or stage.

But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.

But Freddie suggests that Mead’s concerns about contemporary self-absorption are misplaced:

Selfies are the opposite of solipsism; they are the creation of a perspective that is entirely alien to the person taking them. None of us can naturally see our own face. We build mirrors precisely to get outside of our own perspective. We use the camera to put ourselves in the position of other people. Call that what you’d like, but it isn’t solipsistic.

Complaints that we’re all self-obsessed are evergreen, but I think that they badly miss the point in our current technological moment. Rather than being obsessed with our own point of view, I think we are instead in an era in which we are obsessed with the gaze of others. Yes, we are watching others watch us, and so there’s a second order sense in which we are still the subject of our own drama. But rather than being uninterested in the point of view of others, I think we have constructed an immense digital apparatus to focus on little else.

Meanwhile, Alan Jacobs wonders just how much “relatability” differs from “identification,” asking, “Is wanting the work to be a mirror really so different from wanting it to be a selfie?”:

People, especially young people, used to say, when explaining their dislike of a book, “I just couldn’t identify with it” or “I just couldn’t identify with the characters.” Now they say, “it just wasn’t relatable.” Both of these are just shorthand ways of saying “This work bored me and I think it’s the work’s fault, not mine.” …

I think what the language of relatability and the language of identification typically, if not invariably, connote – and they do this whether used positively or negatively – is weakness of response. And this is why the terms remain so vague, maddeningly so for those of a verbally critical bent. When people really love a work, or really hate it, they enjoy explaining why. When they sorta kinda like it, or sorta kinda dislike it, they say that it was or wasn’t relatable, or that they could or couldn’t identify with the characters. “Relatable” and “identify” are words that ought to come with a shrug pre-attached.

On a skeptical note, Derek Thompson warns, “If you don’t like relatability, you’re going to hate the history of American theater”:

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is nearly autobiographical and, famously, scarringly relatable to any family that has suffered from a form of addiction; Angels in America and The Normal Heart took on the AIDS crisis at the height of the AIDS crisis. A Raisin in the Sun? Death of a Salesmen? These aren’t exactly Mesozoic dramas. The Crucible might be the most famous American play that isn’t about contemporary American life, but as a metaphor for America in the Cold War, its politics couldn’t be any more current for its contemporary audience.

The point isn’t that great art has to be about contemporary life. I’m not sure great art has to be anything. But so much wonderful theater has served, historically, as an exaggerated mirror held up to a country at a specific moment in history that it’s shocking to see a writer blast the idea that “[a play] be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer.” Ira Glass did not invent the idea that great plays ought to reflect their times.

Meanwhile, Alyssa Rosenberg makes sense of “relatability” in light of the politics of representation:

For certain classes of people, consuming mass culture is a constant exercise in empathy. If you’re anything but a straight, white man, action movies are an opportunity to exult in the strength and persistence of people who look nothing like you. Cable television has taken people of all backgrounds into a journey through the troubled mind of the middle-aged man that is well into its second decade.

Demands for “relatable” stories or characters can, in these circumstances, be a cry of “enough!” If traveling into someone else’s mind and experiences through fiction is meant to be morally improving work, we must acknowledge that sometimes that work can be tiring.

Face Of The Day

Justice Manjula Chellur Took Oath As First Woman Chief Justice Of Calcutta High Court

Justice Manjula Chellur on her way to take oath as the first woman Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court in Kolkata, Indiaon August 5, 2014. Born on December 5, 1955, Justice Chellur was appointed as acting Chief Justice of the Kerala High Court in November 2011 and was sworn-in as the Chief Justice on September 26, 2012. By Subhendu Ghosh/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.