Tag: Premium

A well-connected family helps if you want to be in Congress:

Across all Congresses — House and Senate — from 1789 to 1986, nearly nine percent of legislators came from families that had previously sent a member to Congress. The prevalence of these dynastic legislators has decreased over time. “While 11 percent of legislators were dynastic between 1789 and 1858, only 7 percent were dynastic after 1966,” the authors write. And that number has been mostly flat, according to an October 2013 analysis by Chris Wilson of Time, who found that 6.9 percent of current House and Senate members — 37 in total — come from dynastic families.

As for senators, 13.5 percent have come from dynastic families, versus only 7.7 percent of representatives. One of the key findings of the dynasty paper is that political power is self-perpetuating: “Legislators who hold power for longer become more likely to have relatives entering Congress in the future. Thus, in politics, power begets power.”

Aaron Blake notes that ” for everyone who professes to be disgusted with the idea of another Bush or another Clinton inhabiting the White House, there are many more people who are quite fond of the predictability and ease of voting for a name they know”:

Case in point: The new Washington Post-ABC News poll. The poll shows both the Bush and Clinton political dynasties are viewed in quite positive lights, though the Clinton family reigns superior for now. While 64 percent of registered voters have a favorable view of the Clinton family, 56 percent say the same about the Bushes. And in an age in which it’s hard to get a majority of Americans to agree on anything and especially any politician, that level of support is striking.

Amy Davidson is troubled by American support of political dynasties:

We talk so much about the role of money in politics. Why isn’t all that investment yielding us any truly interesting products in the candidacy sector? It is as if our entire political portfolio were put into the same few stocks that had been there forever. Maybe it is money that, perversely or purposefully, stifles political entrepreneurship and innovation; maybe other factors are at work. In either case, the current situation can’t be for the best, if it serves to make politics seem like a deadened realm rather than a place to bring and work out grievances. We are stretched out, paralyzed, in the polls. What hurts the most is that we may be suffering from a national failure of political imagination.

Lydia DePillis checks in on the industry:

[Miguel] Tigre came to America from Ecuador 30 years ago, started driving for one of the hundreds of small trucking companies that serve the port and, by 1993, had saved enough to buy a truck. It seemed like a fair trade: As an owner-operator working on contract, he gave up some stability in exchange for the freedom of working whenever he wanted.

But then, the bargain broke down. Prices started rising, and Tigre’s pay rate didn’t keep up. Diesel used to be 87 cents a gallon; now it’s $3.99. Tolls on some roads are now more than $100 for truckers. There are anti-terrorism identity cards and stricter emissions requirements, and any traffic infraction could send his insurance through the roof.

That’s a great deal for the trucking companies. Unlike employees, owner-operators aren’t entitled to benefits like workers compensation, Social Security contributions, unemployment insurance or the same level of protection by safety and health regulation. And it’s not just the trucking industry: Contractors have emerged all over the economy, from cheerleaders to construction workers.

Rachel Cohen questions why the national conversation has come to focus specifically on college campuses:

There is an indisputable and often cyclical connection between poverty and sexual violence. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that individuals with household incomes under $7,500 are twice as likely as those in the general population to become victims of sexual assault. Ninety-two percent of homeless mothers experience severe physical and/or sexual assault at some point in their lives. Sexual assault is hardly a problem limited to university campuses.

Twenty percent of college women being sexually assaulted is unacceptable. But other groups are at even greater risk. Immigrants, refugees, migrants, those suffering from addictions, minorities, LGBTQ individuals, sex workers, prisoners, the homeless, and the impoverished all experience high rates of sexual assault. And, unlike college students, these groups very often lack the knowledge, credibility, resources, and federal protections to do anything about their attacks.

And Hanna Rosin doesn’t want the conversation to ignore male victims:

Last year the National Crime Victimization Survey turned up a remarkable statistic. In asking 40,000 households about rape and sexual violence, the survey uncovered that 38 percent of incidents were against men.

The number seemed so high that it prompted researcher Lara Stemple to call the Bureau of Justice Statistics to see if it maybe it had made a mistake, or changed its terminology. After all, in years past men had accounted for somewhere between 5 and 14 percent of rape and sexual violence victims. But no, it wasn’t a mistake, officials told her, although they couldn’t explain the rise beyond guessing that maybe it had something to do with the publicity surrounding former football coach Jerry Sandusky and the Penn State sex abuse scandal. Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. …

So why are men suddenly showing up as victims? Every comedian has a prison rape joke and prosecutions of sexual crimes against men are still rare. But gender norms are shaking loose in a way that allows men to identify themselves—if the survey is sensitive and specific enough—as vulnerable. A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator.

The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper involves inmates, who aren’t counted in the general statistics at all.

According to Harry Fisch, author of The New Naked: The Ultimate Sex Education for Grown-Ups, the average hetero “sex session” lasts less than eight minutes:

There have been studies in which couples consented to be scientifically observed having sex, and one of the observers timed each session with a stopwatch to make a fairly accurate assessment about the length of the coupling. Not surprisingly, there is an extremely large variation in the time it takes a couple to have sex, ranging from the excessively short (about two minutes or less, which famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey dryly noted was a “frequent source of marital conflict”) to the “Are you done yet?” (over forty minutes).

An astonishing 45 percent of men finish the sex act too quickly, which is to say, within Kinsey’s conflicted two minutes. That’s pretty speedy. Way too speedy for the average woman to be able to have an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone. At least five minutes, and more like seven, is usually what’s needed for a woman to be able to achieve orgasm. And even though the average length of the average inter-vaginal sex session is about 7.3 minutes, that’s still not particularly long, especially for women who usually take much longer than men to become aroused enough to have an orgasm.

But Alice Robb cautions readers not to conclude that the discrepancy “simply represents more evidence of a male-dominated society’s inherent pleasure inequality”:

As it happens, men may be more bothered by it than women.

For a 2004 paper in the Journal of Sex Research, University of New Brunswick researchers S. Andrea Miller and E. Sandra Byers interviewed 152 heterosexual couples on their “actual and desired duration of foreplay and of intercourse.” Their subjects spanned a wide range of ages—21 to 77 years old—and relationship type—from 6-month to 50-year partnerships. Miller and Byers found that men reported a much longer ideal duration than did their partners.

It’s true that for both sexes, the “ideal” length of both foreplay and intercourse was much longer than the actual. But the New Brunswick results at least suggest that the men are not happy with this status quo.

Previous Dish on sexy time here.

Joseph Stromberg makes it:

This graph [above], from the UN report, shows the greenhouse gas emissions that result from producing a kilogram of pork and beef, compared to a kilogram of insect meat … Because demand for meat is rising around the world, livestock production is going to become an increasingly big reason why the planet is warming — unless we find an alternative.

Then there’s the matter of ethics. Obviously, smart people disagree about the ethics of eating meat, and many argue that the pleasure we derive from eating meat outweighs the pain and suffering experienced by a cow or pig in captivity. But few argue that these animals experience no suffering at all. Many scientists who’ve studied the insect nervous system, though, believe that they don’t feel pain. Raising these insects for meat — instead of cows, pigs, and chickens — would reduce the total amount of suffering that results from our appetite for meat.

But just how does one get Americans on board with entomophagy? Nick Cox interviews the young founders of Six Foods, who are looking to do just that:

[Laura] D’Asaro, who was an African Studies major, says she first “caught the bug” after eating a caterpillar on the side of the street while traveling in Tanzania. A lifelong on-and-off vegetarian who enjoyed meat but struggled with the ethical and environmental issues that came with it, she found insects to be a perfect compromise. She told [Rose]Wang, who was then her roommate, about her discovery.

“I never thought she’d be into it, because she’s more traditional,” said D’Asaro. “[But] she’d just been in China and had eaten a scorpion, and said it tasted a little bit like shrimp without the fishy flavor.”

So Wang and D’Asaro started ordering live insects and experimenting with them. They knew they were onto something when they made a box of fifty green caterpillar tacos for a pitch competition and left them in the Harvard Innovation Lab fridge. “We didn’t think to label them,” she said. “We got back from our pitch competition half an hour later… and there were only five of them left, because people had eaten them, not knowing they were insects, and had loved them, and just kept going back for more.”

And Daniella Martin talks to a nutritionist who is trying to market a cricket-based protein powder:

Bodybuilders and extreme athletes tend to be early adopters of nutrition trends. That’s why they are precisely the demographic Dianne Guilfoyle, a school nutrition supervisor in Southern California, hopes to capture with BugMuscle, a protein powder made up entirely of ground insects.

“If people see bodybuilders taking it, they might accept it more willingly,” says Dianne, whose son Daniel is a cage fighter.

There are many benefits to using insects as a base for protein powder. For one, the main existing sources are soybeans and milk whey, both of which cause health concerns for some people. While insect protein might not be a perfect alternative for those with shellfish allergies, for others it could present an alternative that’s healthier for their bodies and the planet than some of the existing options. Previously, whey protein was the only protein powder source to supply a complete amino acid profile: all nine of the essential amino acids required for human nutrition. But guess what else is a great source of these amino acids? That’s right, insects.

Previous Dish on eating bugs here.

Adam Taylor comments on the latest moves by China’s Internet censors, which included blocking “The Big Bang Theory” from the country’s popular video streaming sites:

In some ways, the removal of the show is not so surprising. China is in the middle of a crackdown on pornography and other unsavory behavior online. The campaign, titled “Cleaning the Web” by the Chinese state, has seen some unorthodox targets, such as the e-books section of Sina.com.cn.

But “The Big Bang Theory” is hardly a scandalous show.

On IMDB’s parental guide, it receives a rating of 15 out of 50. And what’s really odd about the online TV show crackdown isn’t what they chose to take offline – it’s what they allowed to remain on. For example, “House of Cards” is still available online. That HBO political drama, very popular in China, has plenty of scenes of violence and sex. And Sunday, China’s CCTV began airing a translated version of “Game of Thrones,” a fantasy show that frequently shocks even hardened U.S. viewers with profanity, nudity and violence.

Adam Minter suspects this is really about driving more viewers to state TV:

The “Big Bang” ban most likely has less to do with content and more with competition. By licensing popular U.S. shows, China’s privately owned video streaming sites are stealing eyeballs and advertising dollars away from state-owned networks such as CCTV. “The most likely explanation is that ideology is just an excuse,” tweeted Zhou Xuanyi, a philosophy professor in Wuhan, on Sina Weibo. “The real reason is that the censors want some benefit if you’re going to be earning money on their turf.” Indeed, the Beijing News reported Monday that CCTV was already preparing a dubbed “green edition” of “Big Bang Theory” — minus “excessive content” — for broadcast on its own channels.

Stephanie Mencimer calls lethal injection a “terrible way to kill people.” She claims that the “veins of death row inmates can’t handle the needles”:

Many death row inmates were once IV drug users, and by the time they reach the death chamber, their veins are a mess. Others are obese from years of confinement, which also makes their veins hard to find. Compounding that problem is the fact that the people inserting the needles usually aren’t medical professionals. They’re prison guards (in Oklahoma they’re paid $300 for the job), and they’re usually in a big hurry to get it done quickly—an factor that doesn’t mesh well with the slower-acting drugs states are now resorting to.

Sonny Bunch recommends the guillotine as an alternative:

There are other, less dramatic, ways, of course. Hanging and firing squads would probably be quicker and more painless than lethal injection or the electric chair. But the guillotine really seems to solve everyone’s problems: It was designed to deliver an efficient, quick, and painless death. It performs that task admirably. I understand the irony of a reactionary such as myself embracing the Terror’s preferred method of execution, but one must give credit where it’s due.

If we’re going to do something—and a large number of Americans and American states are pretty committed to performing executions—we ought to do it right. And “right” in this case means a quick and painless death. I can’t really imagine any reasonable objections to a widespread adoption of the guillotine.

Dish readers raised several objections to bringing back the guillotine when John Kruzel suggested it last year.

These are just the numbers from three years ago:

So it’s only a matter of time before China overtakes the US as the world’s largest economy – and by one measure, it may be there already:

The World Bank’s International Comparison Program takes account of international prices to give a more accurate measure of real output. The statisticians have just completed the exercise for 2011, and they found that China’s economy back then was 87 percent as big as the U.S.’s — not 47 percent, as output converted at market exchange rates would have you believe. Since 2011, China has grown much faster than the U.S. According to the new numbers, its economy will be the world’s biggest before 2014 is out, if it isn’t already.

But Christopher Ingraham deflates the excitement, noting that Purchasing Power Parity isn’t a useful way to compare economies:

On that measure, China is looking pretty good. … But there’s a reason that standard measures of GDP don’t use the PPP conversion. As the Wall Street Journal’s Tom Wright explains:

China can’t buy missiles and ships and iPhones and German cars in PPP currency. They have to pay at prevailing exchange rates. That’s why exchange rate valuations are seen as more important when comparing the power of nations.

Standard GDP measures take these exchange factors into account. And here, China is doing about as well as one would expect. They’re still the world’s second-largest economy, but their GDP is less than half the size of the U.S. GDP.

Drum also downplays the new numbers:

I don’t want to pretend to some kind of faux naivete here, but can someone tell my why there’s suddenly a big frenzy about whether China is now the biggest economy in the world? China has 1.3 billion people. Of course they’re eventually going to eventually be bigger than the US. If not this year, then next year or the year after. Everyone knows this. Everyone has always known this. It’s no surprise, and it’s no big deal. They’ve still got about the per capita GDP of Albania, and it will be decades before they become even a middle-income country.

In a summary (NYT) of the findings from his new book, Chasing the American Dream, Mark Robert Rank explains that “the 1 percent” doesn’t include the same people from one year to the next:

It turns out that 12 percent of the population will find themselves in the top 1 percent of the income distribution for at least one year. What’s more, 39 percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and a whopping 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent of the income distribution.

Yet while many Americans will experience some level of affluence during their lives, a much smaller percentage of them will do so for an extended period of time. Although 12 percent of the population will experience a year in which they find themselves in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, a mere 0.6 percent will do so in 10 consecutive years.

It is clear that the image of a static 1 and 99 percent is largely incorrect.

After a few celebratory digs at the left, Kevin Williamson uses these findings to urge conservatives to re-focus on poverty:

Professor Rank’s work and the reality of what an optimist might call lifetime income dynamism and a pessimist might call lifetime income instability should have conservatives rethinking their approach to the issue. It is not enough to explain that income inequality does not mean what Paul Krugman wants his readers to think it means, or to keep hammering away at the necessary but not sufficient project of reorienting our welfare programs toward work and the Sisyphean labor of trying to make those programs at least operationally efficient. A deeper appreciation for the lumpy and unpredictable nature of personal income over the course of a working life might help conservatives to deal with the issue of risk aversion, which is a critical factor behind our generally poor record of connecting with women and non-white voters, who lack the economic confidence of traditional conservative constituencies, and not without some reason. Selling an ownership society to people who are terrified of and baffled by the stock market is not a model for success.

But, as Danielle Kurtzleben points out, Rank’s book also addresses the barriers to achieving success in America, of which there are several:

Being smart, white, and coming from a wealthy family may not guarantee a person will achieve the American Dream, but all of those things can help by putting a person at the center of the funnels, the authors write. Falling right through all of those funnels — good primary schooling, getting a higher education, and finding a good job — makes it all the easier to get to the end goal.

Being lower-skilled or growing up poorer, meanwhile, starts a person out at a disadvantage. It means more distance to travel to get to the center of the funnel, meaning more obstacles to be overcome. So having to work harder to even graduate can keep a person out of the middle. And Americans who grow up poor, for example, have a tough time of climbing the ladder — much harder than their peers in other countries. Likewise, SAT scores tend to be higher for kids from higher-income families.

In our first video from the author of The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, Saks explains what it’s like to have a major mental illness:

Her symptoms began as a teenager:

More about Saks:

Elyn Saks is an expert in mental health law and a winner of the Mac­Arthur Foundation Fellowship, which she used to create the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy, and Ethics. She is also Associate Dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould Law School. Saks lives with schizophrenia and has chronicled her experience with the illness in her award-winning, best-selling autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.

(Archive)