Tag: Premium

A reader dissents:

You do yourself and your argument no favors when you refer to industrial pork farms – however cruel they may be – as “America’s Concentration Camps.” These farms may be barbaric, but to refer to them as “concentration camps” is spectacularly disrespectful to the six million people who were murdered at Nazi camps.  Unless you believe that a pig’s soul is the full equal of a human one (and I have never got that impression reading you) the comparison is completely inept.

I should have been more sensitive to that in my desire for a provocative title. I apologize. Hence our new headline above. Another reader:

I just finished reading Dave Warner’s response to your reader’s e-mail and the one thing that stood out was his continuing insistence that the use of gestation cages helped with caring for (and protecting!) their well-being. I’ll let that point aside, but I would have been much more receptive to his point if he’d had the honesty to admit that it also allows for the housing of substantially more pigs for all those concerned hog farmers. Even if he’d tried to pass it off as an unexpected side benefit, I could have given him a nod. To exclude the reason for the incarceration and try to pass it off as the result of medical studies strikes me as the epitome of chutzpah, if that’s the right word.

Another:

In regard to Warner’s comments, not all pork producers agree:

[Bob] Johnson [president of Johnson-Pate Pork Inc.], who has lived on this farm since he was a teenager, saw a business opportunity in getting rid of the cramped crates, as well as eliminating the routine use of antibiotics. So in 2010, his company switched — a big undertaking for a farm that sells 20,000 pigs per year. Traditionalists say that gestation stalls are indispensable because when pigs are housed in groups, they fight — with bigger and fiercer animals injuring smaller ones and getting more than their share of the feed. But that’s not what is on display in the gestation building, a structure about 60 feet wide and 250 feet long occupied by some 625 pregnant sows. They are walking around and lounging quietly in large group pens. Some cool off under sprinklers that go off intermittently, as a few take their turn to eat. When the weather is good, they can go into an outdoor enclosure.

Another:

You quoted the NY Times: “Nine states in the United States have banned the use of these pens …” Everyone should be aware that the farm bill passed by the House, and currently being negotiated by a House/Senate conference committee, contains the King Amendment, which would trample states’ rights and overturn many state protections for animals nationally. It is from, and named for, Rep. Steve King of Iowa. Iowa is the number one pig-torturing state in the USA and the pig torturers are significant contributors to King. From the Humane Society of the United States (pdf):

Rep. King’s amendment takes aim at state laws such as California’s Proposition 2, approved overwhelmingly by voters across the state in 2008 – to ban extreme confinement cages and crates for laying hens, pigs, and veal calves – and a law passed subsequently by a landslide margin in the state legislature to require any shell eggs sold in CA to comply with the requirements of Prop 2. In addition, the King amendment seeks to nullify state laws in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, and Rhode Island dealing with intensive confinement of farm animals.

Two other things to consider: 1) while gestation crates may be among the worst torture inflicted upon pigs, even without them their lives would be non-stop misery; and 2) chickens are intelligent and emotional as well and their abuse is similarly atrocious in the egg and meat industries, and birds are exempt from the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. See this recent Washington Post article:

Nearly 1 million chickens and turkeys are unintentionally boiled alive each year in U.S. slaughterhouses, often because fast-moving lines fail to kill the birds before they are dropped into scalding water, Agriculture Department records show. Now the USDA is finalizing a proposal that would allow poultry companies to accelerate their processing lines …

I didn’t think I could find another reason to despise the politics of King, but I just did. Another also defends fowl:

Your essay “Abatement of Cruelty” was forwarded to me by a person who drew attention to your statement that “There are also types of meat. I think we can make distinctions of degree between, say, the emotional experience of a chicken and a pig.” We cannot knowledgeably make such distinctions at all. They are passé. I respectfully point out that your claim – that the emotional experience of a chicken is inferior to that of a pig – is an assertion without a foundation.

Perhaps you are not aware of the modern cognitive science showing that, contrary to false stereotypes and conventional assumptions, birds, including chickens and turkeys and other ground-nesting birds, are every bit as cognitively complex as mammals including dogs and pigs. (See, e.g., The Development of Brain and Behaviour in the Chicken by Dr. Lesley J. Rogers, 1995).

I grew up with dogs and later worked at a farmed animal sanctuary comprising rescued pigs, chickens, turkeys and other animals, many of whom came from so-called “humane” family farms, where abuses are commonplace and whose traditional practices and attitudes are the very basis for the development of industrialized animal farming in the 20th century, e.g. mutilations including painful debeaking, tail docking and castration. And these examples are far from all.

Chickens and turkeys are complexly emotional and intelligent birds. I’ve kept chickens since 1985 and turkeys since 1990. My experience with them influenced my decision to found United Poultry Concerns in 1990. I ask you please to read this essay, “The Social Life of Chickens”, which evokes and speculates about actual chickens.

Another reader:

The information you have shared on pork processing in the US is appalling. I keep kosher and so do not eat pork, but descriptions of these crates are horrifying. And I am shocked that my soon to be re-elected governor vetoed a bill banning them. I immediately went to Empire Kosher’s website only to learn that they do not crate their birds at all … all are raised to exacting standards on small family farms. No antibiotics and only strictly vegetarian feed is good enough for their birds.  I know many non-Jews who only eat Empire for just those reasons.

Still, the kosher meat industry has had its embarrassments as well. Check out the book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America by Stephen G. Bloom. A group of Hasidic Jews established a kosher slaughterhouse in a remote part of Iowa, only to be shut down several years later for health and immigration violations. The cost of kosher beef skyrocketed after that disaster back in 2011 (not that it was ever cheap). New sources were found in smaller processors here in the US and in Canada.

The incredibly high cost of keeping kosher is a burden on many Jewish families. But at least I can be assured that our meat – chicken or beef – is being handled in a ethical way.

Another:

One of these days one of my emails to you will make it on the blog.

Others have commented that they buy meat they know is ethically raised in order to circumvent the animal cruelty issue.  My family does as well.  We buy a monthly “meat share” from a local farm; it is essentially a meat CSA.  The farmers work hard to preserve agricultural traditions that have existed in New England for generations. All of the animals are all naturally raised; free of hormones and antibiotics.  The pigs and cattle are pasture-raised.  Not only do we feel better about the meat we are eating, but we are also supporting local farming and agriculture (not to mention that the meat is amazing).  And we consume less meat this way; we buy a certain poundage a month and only use that amount; I do not supplement from the grocery store.  We plan on taking our children to the farm when they are a bit older to explain to them where our meat comes from.  If they decide that they cannot support eating animal meat after the farm visit, I will help them become vegetarians if they want.

One more:

I grew up in NC, which is one of the top hog producing states in the US.  My neighbors raised a few hogs for their own table and when I was a little girl I used to go play in the pig pen with the babies.  What Mr. Warner said about family farmers is total bullshit.  The sows back in the day were allowed to roam freely in the pen until they delivered, when they were separated from the other pigs, because pigs being pigs, the others would eat the shoats if they weren’t protected.   The mother would even eat her own babies in some cases in the first couple of days after birth.

My husband used to call me the pork queen because I loved eating pork so much.  Not anymore.  I haven’t been able to eat pork, beef, or chicken, for years since I saw the video found at Meat.org.  My husband has been vegetarian for 7 years now and I only eat chicken occasionally and never mass produced chicken.  Between the cruelty to the animals and what the poor things are fed, including drugs of all kinds, and the environmental costs, I just can’t do it anymore.

I am so glad you are addressing this issue again.  If we would all stop eating meat for even one day a week, we could send a message to these factory farms that what is being done to these animals is no longer acceptable.

Douthat asks:

Think about the map: To beat a candidate with Christie’s profile one on one, either Paul or Cruz would need to win Florida and then at least part of the industrial Midwest — the places where first McCain in 2008 and then Romney in 2012 successfully fended off the challenges from the right. Does Ted Cruz, whose resume is part Ivy League elite and part Texan evangelical, and whose father probably sets off every non-evangelical alarm bell there is, somehow win enough middle class Catholic Republicans to beat an Irish-Italian former prosecutor in Ohio and Michigan? Does Rand Paul, who veers between showing remarkable political savvy and indulging in not-ready-for-prime-time fumbling, really have what it takes to fundraise, organize, and win in big, not-deep-red states? Especially amid polls showing, as they probably would, that neither of them would fare as well as Christie in a general-election matchup against You Know Wh(illary)o?

Larison agrees that Christie has some major advantages:

The best chance of blocking Christie or any other relative moderate candidate is to have one or more other candidates running that can siphon off some of his moderate and “somewhat conservative” support. There are hardly any likely candidates that would fit that description, and they would have little incentive to compete in the same year as Christie. His re-election win will have the effect of discouraging other would-be relative moderate candidates from running. That is the argument for Christie-as-juggernaut in the 2016 race.

Millman adds his two cents:

Chris Christie is now officially the only Republican with broad popular appeal. No, that appeal is not deep – most people know absolutely nothing about him, and they may come to hate him once they get to know him. Yes, he won against an extraordinarily weak opponent – but if the Democrats thought they had a solid chance of beating him, they would have put up someone stronger. And yes, some of the juicy targets he’s aimed at in New Jersey are not nearly so juicy at the Federal level. None of that matters right now. Right now, the Electability Caucus in the Republican Party has a reasonable candidate. And his most plausible opponent for that title is surnamed “Bush.”

Beinart, on the other hand, points out the challenges Christie will face:

I’m not saying Christie can’t get the GOP nomination. But if he does, his path will be more like the one John McCain unsuccessfully pursued in 2000 than the one Bush took. Like McCain, Christie—who probably can’t win in conservative Iowa and South Carolina—instead will focus on states such as New Hampshire, where independents can vote in the Republican primary. That means unlike Bush, who entered the general election with the GOP’s conservative base already sewn up, Christie will have to spend the weeks following his nomination victory mending fences with the Tea Party activists who didn’t vote for him. He’ll have to do so while also significantly outperforming Bush among the young, female, and minority voters who loathe the GOP’s Ted Cruz-wing.

Garance profiles a married couple considering getting divorced because of it:

Any married couple that earns more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level—that is $62,040—for a family of two earns too much for subsidies under Obamacare. “If you’re over 400 percent of poverty, you’re never eligible for premium” support, explains Gary Claxton, director of the Health Care Marketplace Project at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But if that same couple lived together unmarried, they could earn up to $45,960 each—$91,920 total—and still be eligible for subsidies through the exchanges in New York state, where insurance is comparatively expensive and the state exchange was set up in such a way as to not provide lower rates for younger people. (Subsidy eligibility is calculated using a complicated formula involving income in relation to the poverty line, family size, and the price of plans offered through a state’s marketplace.)

Nona and Aaron’s 2012 income was higher than the 400 percent mark, but not by much.

In New York City, that still doesn’t take you very far for two people. If their most recent months of income are in the same range, they will get no help at all with buying insurance through the exchanges if and when they apply, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and eHealth subsidy calculators. Premiums for the two for silver-level plans came in at $9,248 for the year.

But if they applied as unmarried individuals with something like their 2012 income, one of them would get at least $3,964 in subsidies toward the purchase of a plan, or possibly even be eligible for Medicaid, thanks to their uneven individual earnings that year. And if they fall below the 400 percent threshold, which Nona says they might this year, they could get substantial subsidies as a couple that are still worth less than what they’d be eligible for as individuals. These gaps are the marriage penalty.

Felix Salmon sees trouble in the art world:

If you look at this month’s big contemporary art auctions, you’ll see quite a lot of art being flipped, including art being flipped by one of the biggest collectors of them all, Stevie Cohen. According to Carol Vogel and Peter Lattman in the NYT, Cohen is selling a Gerhard Richter which he bought from the Pace Gallery last year, along with “about a dozen other pieces, mostly at Sotheby’s, that he acquired in recent years at art fairs and auctions.”

On top of Cohen’s works, Vogel has found other pieces being flipped this month, including Three Studies of Lucian Freud, by Francis Bacon, which “was purchased by a consortium from a private collector in Italy within the past 12 months”; and Apocalypse Now, by Christopher Wool, which was sold by David Ganek very recently. Between them, the Richter, the Bacon, and the Wool are going to account for a substantial percentage of the total amount of money spent at auction this season, which means that auction totals are increasingly comprised of short-term trades, as opposed to sales from individuals and families who have owned the objects for many years.

Kathryn Tully counters that the bubble has already burst:

Take the big contemporary auctions held in London last month while the Frieze art fair was in town. As ArtTactic reports, combined sales at the main post-war and contemporary evening auctions at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips in London in October were £52.1 million ($82.9 million), excluding buyers’ premiums. The auction houses estimated these sales would bring in a combined £56.5 million to £80.7 million, so £52.1 million was 8 percent below the bottom of that range and 24 percent lower than the total raised during the same sales last year. … There’s no way of knowing how this month’s New York auctions will go, but if recent London sales are anything to go by, the sellers lining up to flip their pricey art works for a profit may have already left it too late.

But Art Market Monitor editor Marion Maneker isn’t wholly convinced:

Felix Salmon has been calling the buyers at the very top end of the art market chumps for many years. So it hardly makes sense for him to claim this is a sign of a qualitative change in the composition of buyers.

(Photo: A member of Christie’s staff walks towards Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucien Freud on October 14. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Following up on his post on young polyglots, Robert Lane Greene explores why some multilingual people associate different languages with different identities:

Significantly, most people are not symmetrically bilingual. Many have learned one language at home from parents, and another later in life, usually at school. So bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages—and they are not always best in their first language. For example, when tested in a foreign language, people are less likely to fall into a cognitive trap (answering a test question with an obvious-seeming but wrong answer) than when tested in their native language. In part this is because working in a second language slows down the thinking. No wonder people feel different when speaking them. And no wonder they feel looser, more spontaneous, perhaps more assertive or funnier or blunter, in the language they were reared in from childhood.

What of “crib” bilinguals, raised in two languages?

Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages. But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism.

Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages. Experiments in psychology have shown the power of “priming”—small unnoticed factors that can affect behavior in big ways. Asking people to tell a happy story, for example, will put them in a better mood. The choice between two languages is a huge prime. Speaking Spanish rather than English, for a bilingual and bicultural Puerto Rican in New York, might conjure feelings of family and home. Switching to English might prime the same person to think of school and work.

Casey N. Cep surveys a history of “literary siblings [who] challenge our assumptions of lonely genius, isolated writers alone at their desks.” On the relationship between Dorothy and William Wordsworth:

Although they lived apart during much of their childhood, the siblings were reunited as adults and eventually cohabited for many years in the Lake District. In an essay on Dorothy, Virginia Woolf wrote: “It was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry.”

Dorothy would copy verses for her brother and assist him with correspondence, but she was also a talented writer. While she wrote little for publication, her journals, travelogues, and poetry are all now in print. It is clear that her writing influenced her brother’s or, as Woolf noted, that “one could not act without the other.”

It was Dorothy who made notes in her journal about a fateful walk the siblings took on April 15, 1802, when they “saw a few daffodils close to the water side … a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.” Dorothy recorded that she “never saw daffodils so beautiful [—] they grew among the mossy stones and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced.” Only a few years later, William would return to that entry and craft from it one of the most iconic poems in the English language. Written in iambic tetrameter, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” captures “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.”

Speaking of William, Amit Majmudar recently invoked the poet when discussing his theory that literary genius is limited to a 20-year window:

The longest-lived English Romantic, William Wordsworth, spent the last few decades of his life writing now-unread political sonnets. Lyrical Ballads was first published in 1798, which was roughly the time he started The Prelude (which he worked on intermittently, and which was posthumously published, and which, incidentally, bores me to death). Poems, in Two Volumes came out in 1807—this is the volume that contained the Immortality ode and the one about the daffodils. The Excursion came out in 1814. After that, something in him shriveled. …

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written a handful of good novels, but his two, universally acknowledged best came out in 1967 (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and 1985 (Love in the Time of Cholera): Again, inside the twenty-year span. He didn’t write poorly before, and he hasn’t written poorly in the decades since—but within those charmed 20 years, he did the work for which he will be remembered. Likewise Flaubert: Between Madame Bovary and Trois Contes lie exactly 20 years. (He wrote a tremendous number of works before Madame Bovary, few or none published then, few or none readable today.) Rimbaud is another 19th-century Frenchman who follows the rule.

(Image of Dorothy Wordsworth via Wikimedia Commons)

An update on the little race with big implications:

In Douglas County, the slate of four Republican-backed school board candidates eked out a victory over the four teachers’ union-backed candidates after a contentious race that divided the community. That division was reflected in the election numbers: The Republican-backed candidates won by a slight margins of just a few thousand votes.

Jeb Bush applauds the results as others shake their heads. Andy Smarick looks ahead:

Though the surface takeaway is that the Douglas affair is one of conservatives and reformers taking over an affluent district, there’s a much bigger story here: We are likely to see many, many more episodes like this in the months and years to come, though there will be variations on the theme. As statewide teacher-evaluation laws, Common Core implementation, tougher assessments, and other reforms really begin influencing suburbia, the ed-reform debate is going to seriously evolve. New fault lines are likely to appear. I’m not sure what this will look like, but if we thought urban ed reform was contentious, just wait.

Also in Colorado, two out of three voters rejected Amendment 66, a proposal to fund public schools with a $950-million income tax hike. Jack Healy describes the outcome as “a warning to Democrats nationally” and “a drubbing for teachers unions as well as wealthy philanthropists” who spent $10 million in support of the campaign. But Joshua Dunn sees a silver lining for those who want more education spending:

While Amendment 66 went down in flames yesterday, Colorado voters – by an almost exactly inverse proportion – approved Proposition AA, which will tax our now-legal recreational consumption of marijuana. Over one-third of the revenue raised from that measure will be dedicated to funding school construction. … [T]o all the marijuana tourists out there: Please come to Colorado and support our schools. It’s for the children.

Update from a reader:

Let’s be realistic here: these races were not that tight.

The closest race was more than a 3.5% margin of victory and the largest margin was about 6.5%. By contrast, Obama beat Romney in the popular vote by 3.9% and no one except Fox News thought it was a close race.

But that doesn’t mean it’s all rosy for the GOP or education reformers.  I haven’t seen any exit polls or reports on turnout, but the GOP has a huge voting bloc advantage in Douglas County.  There are more than 100K registered Republicans and only 43K Democrats.  Assuming the vote went close to party lines (and turnout represented electorate demographics), that means a vast majority of the 73K independent went for the Democratic side.  Independents tend to get turned off by partisanship and negative campaigning, so it could have been more style over substance.  But this type of agenda won’t fly in most places.

Look at Boston.  The labor unions spent nearly $3 million through outside SuperPACs to help the labor machine candidate, Marty Walsh.   This chart on spending is remarkable. Overall, spending per capita on Boston race was 5x that of the NYC election.  Connolly (both are Democrats) did not run an anti-union campaign, but had a reform mentality on education issues in particular. And Walsh is about as reliable a labor supporter as you’ll find anywhere.  So, Douglas County may have a $800,000 school board race, but Boston had a $9 million mayoral contest.  And Walsh “eked out” a 2 pt win.

Ayun Halliday points to footage of a 30-year-old Woody Allen performing on British TV in 1965:

It does a body good to see him at this ‘childlike’ stage of his career. … As [Allen] told journalist Eric Lax in Conversations with Woody Allen:

“…comics are childlike and they are suing for the approval of the adults. Something goes on in a theater when you’re fourteen years old and you want to get up onstage and make the audience laugh. You’re always the supplicant, wanting to please and to get warm laughs. Then what happens to comics — they make it and they become a thousand times more wealthy than their audience, more famous, more idolized, more traveled, more cultivated, more experienced, more sophisticated, and they’re no longer the supplicant. They can buy and sell their audience, they know so much more than their audience, they have lived and traveled around the world a hundred times, they’ve dined at Buckingham Palace and the White House, they have chauffeured cars and they’re rich and they’ve made love to the world’s most beautiful women — and suddenly it becomes difficult to play that loser character, because they don’t feel it. Being a supplicant has become much harder to sell. If you’re not careful, you can easily become less amusing, less funny. Many become pompous… A strange thing occurs: You go from court jester to king.”

For another piece of obscure footage, below is a reel of bizarre ads Woody did for Seibu, a Japanese department store, in 1982:

Amber Frost captions:

From what I can tell from Seibu’s original press statements, Japan wasn’t even particularly aware of Woody Allen at the time! Seibu’s executives said they wanted someone who was an “adult” to represent their brand. One said “being good-looking is not enough.” You’ll note that Allen’s name is never mentioned in the spots. It’s amusing to wonder if he was hired more for being a “funny looking white guy” than for being Woody Allen.