Tag: Premium

Pondering the case of Robel Phillipos – one of the friends of the Boston bombers who faces charges of making false statements to the FBI – Harvey Silverglate encourages us to “withhold judgment not only as to what Phillipos did or did not do, but also as to what he did or did not say when questioned by FBI agents”:

FBI agents always interview in pairs. One agent asks the questions, while the other writes up what is called a “form 302 report” based on his notes. The 302 report, which the interviewee does not normally see, becomes the official record of the exchange; any interviewee who contests its accuracy risks prosecution for lying to a federal official, a felony. And here is the key problem that throws the accuracy of all such statements and reports into doubt: FBI agents almost never electronically record their interrogations; to do so would be against written policy. …

[S]uch interview tactics seem virtually geared toward establishing as fact what the FBI wanted to hear from the witness. Frightened and confused interviewees, who, if they deny they said what any 302 report claims they uttered, can then be indicted for making false statements. The FBI is thus able to put words into a witness or suspect’s mouth and coerce him to adopt the FBI’s version as his own. The FBI thus establishes the official version of what a witness said, and the pressure on the witness to adhere to the 302 version is enormous. Any deviation, after all, raises the question: “Were you lying during your FBI interview, or are you lying now?”

New research strengthens the connection:

The research, published online [Tuesday] in Molecular Psychiatry found that people with PTSD have a greater number of CB1 receptors, cannabinoid protein receptors, and a lower concentration of one of the neurotransmitters that binds to them, anandamide. This provides empirical evidence for the theory that marijuana, which also binds to the cannabinoid system, can help alleviate some of the symptoms of PTSD, although the paper doesn’t recommend it as a treatment option. …

“There’s a consensus among clinicians that existing pharmaceutical treatments such as antidepressants simply do not work,” [researcher Alexander Neumeister] said in a press statement. “In fact, we know very well that people with PTSD who use marijuana — a potent cannabinoid — often experience more relief from their symptoms than they do from antidepressants and other psychiatric medications.”

Neumeister isn’t pushing for smoking pot to combat the symptoms, though. “I’m very much an advocate against smoking pot as a treatment for PTSD,” he says. That’s partially because chronic marijuana usage has been found to a decrease the amount of CB1 receptors in the brain, in effect mimicking PTSD, increasing anxiety and irritability. Instead, he’s focusing on developing a medication that could block the degradation of anandamide, balancing the endocannabinoid abnormality in the brains of people with PTSD.

There’s also a new study that correlates marijuana use with better health and lower weight:

The research, published in the American Journal of Medicine, shows that people who reported regularly using marijuana had a lower risk of insulin resistance and had lower fasting insulin levels, compared with people who never used marijuana. Researchers also found an association between using marijuana and having a smaller waist circumference and higher levels of “good” HDL cholesterol, compared with non-users. The research was conducted by scientists from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the University of Nebraska and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Previous Dish on PTSD and marijuana here.

Dish alum Gwynn Guilford reports that Vietnam’s demand for rhinoceros horns – considered both a cure for cancer and a hangover remedy – has exacerbated a brutal campaign of poaching across Asia and Africa:

Some conservation groups, however, don’t think rhino horn’s newfound popularity in Vietnam has much to do with the cancer cure-all rumor (pdf, p.2). The more likely reason, they say, is that the horn powder is increasingly seen as a cocaine-like party drug, virility enhancer and luxury item—”the alcoholic drink of millionaires,” as a Vietnamese news site called it. … In fact, rhino horn is now more expensive than cocaine, which has helped build its cachet. It’s also ideal for greasing palms for business deals (pdf, p.36). That could be partly because newly affluent Vietnamese don’t have that much to spend their money on. The government has issued just 10 licenses for distributors of luxury goods. And its small size means Vietnam is still off the radar for many luxury brands. …

Paradoxically, the world’s dwindling rhino population threatens only to make this worse, as diminished supply makes prices climb even higher.

While the Dish has previously looked at horn farming as a partial solution to the demand, Martin Angler details another tactic – injecting an indelible dye into the horns of living rhinos:

The liquid dye is not just dye. It is actually a mixture between the bright pink dye and an ectoparasiticide, which normally is used for protecting rhino against ticks. In this case, however, the purpose is not to protect the rhino against ticks but to poison rhino horn consumers. The purpose: Discouraging the (typically) Asian clients to buy the horn and to prevent poaching in the first place. If they consume [the] treated horn powder, they will heavily suffer from nausea, stomach-ache and diarrhea. The effects are non-lethal but harmful to humans, which sparked off a debate on the ethical correctness of the procedure.

National Geographic recently chronicled the poaching epidemic with this heartbreaking gallery.

(Photo: Indian forest officials stand near a one-horned Rhinoceros that was killed and de-horned by the poachers at Karbi hills near Kaziranga National Park, some 250km east of Guwahati the capital city the northeastern state of Assam on September 27, 2012. By Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images)

Ann Silversides explores opioid abuse in Canada and the US, and the failure of drug companies and government in curtailing abuse:

When OxyContin was approved—1995 in the United States, the following year in Canada—Purdue Pharma began to aggressively market the drug for chronic-pain patients. In the US, alarm bells went off within a few years. In 2003, the US General Accounting Office, at the request of Congress, published a report on OxyContin abuse and diversion that noted the company’s marketing campaign. Four years later, the US Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations announced that Purdue had agreed to pay more than $600 million “to resolve criminal charges and civil liabilities in connection with a long-term illegal scheme to promote, market and sell OxyContin, a powerful prescription pain reliever that the company produces.”

One thing worth noticing: the suicide rate from prescription drugs has soared in the last decade or so. For eleven consecutive years, drug overdose deaths have risen in America, from 4,000 in 1999 to 16,000 by 2010, according to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control. An increasing proportion of the suicides are due to prescription drugs – opiate pain-killers like Oxycodone leading the way, but often combined with anti-anxiety medications. 60 percent of all drug overdoses now contain legal drugs. And yet we criminalize a plant that cannot kill anyone.

Ron Unz, who strongly objects to the treatment of Jason Richwine, nevertheless disagrees with the substance of Richwine’s dissertation:

First, he argues that the large IQ deficit of impoverished Hispanic immigrants is likely to inflict a long-term social disaster upon American society. However, it is well known that nearly all previous immigrant groups—southern and eastern Europeans—who came here in poverty similarly scored very low on IQ tests in the decades after their arrival, with results that were sometimes far below those of today’s Mexican immigrants. Yet after a generation or two their tested intelligence had almost invariably converged close to the American mean. Evidence of the past does not necessarily predict the future, but such a strong historical pattern should leave us cautious about assuming it will not continue.

In fact, Richwine specifically discusses the famous study by Carl Brigham, who concluded on the basis of the tests taken by WWI recruits that southern and eastern Europeans were drastically inferior in innate mental ability to America’s mostly northwestern European population and argued that their continuing immigration would produce a national disaster. Richwine rather cavalierly dismisses this historical analysis as having been based on poor testing methods and probably motivated by a belief in “bizarre … racial categories.”

But Brigham was a highly regarded psychometrician and his careful research was widely accepted by nearly all the leading experts of that time. Having carefully read his book, I cannot find any serious fault with his methods nor any indications of unscientific bias on his part. Brigham may have been mistaken in his conclusions, but they seem to have been based on the best evidence and theory of his day.

Furthermore, Richwine chooses to ignore a vast amount of additional evidence from that same period, much of which was collected in Clifford Kirkpatrick’s important 1926 academic monograph “Intelligence and Migration.” Kirkpatrick provides page after page of separate studies demonstrating that during the 1920s the tested IQs of American schoolchildren of Greek, Slavic, Italian, and Portuguese ancestry were usually in the 75-85 range, and that Jewish schoolchildren sometimes performed just as poorly. These results are hardly obscure since they have been cited for decades by Thomas Sowell, and I think it is a serious scholarly lapse for Richwine to have essentially ignored them. Perhaps he simply believes that all IQ experts of a century ago were frauds and their empirical work should be dismissed, but if so, he should explicitly make that argument. Otherwise, we must accept that southern and eastern European immigrant groups had very low IQs a century ago and have average ones today, which is an extremely important finding. In fact, I have demonstrated that there is overwhelming evidence that various other group IQs have risen rapidly over time, and I also provided some strong indications that this exact process is already occurring among today’s Hispanic immigrants.

On another matter, Richwine must be aware that Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck rank as two of the greatest figures in twentieth century psychometrics. Yet decades ago both these scholars reviewed the structural evidence of Mexican-American IQs, and reached conclusions almost identical to my own, namely that the acknowledged gaps to white intelligence scores were largely perhaps almost entirely due to environmental factors and would steadily disappear as the population became more affluent and acculturated. Scientists should not argue from authority and Jensen and Eysenck might certainly have been mistaken, but it seems unreasonable for Richwine to never mention their contrary analysis.

This is the kind of criticism that is far more serious and cogent than cries of racism.

Ambers adds some vital context to the debate:

Why was this leak so bad, then? Why pursue these leakers so aggressively?

Because Brennan might have been implicated and may have spoken off the cuff or too hastily in his briefing, and because he was slated to be the president’s next CIA director (everyone assumed this in Washington but it hadn’t been confirmed), and because Congress demanded an investigation of this particular leak, and because (I’ll grant) the information released could well have been harmful, a perfect storm arose, and the Justice Department found it had the political backing to aggressive and unflinchingly pursue the leakers.

Hence the GOP’s reluctance to take this one on. They wanted an investigation in the first place. And the question of harming national security in this case was a real one:

On May 7, 2012, the AP ran its story; the perpetrator was in custody over the objections of the White House. Other parts of the national security machine were attempting to pursue the loose ends of the plot to see whom it might ensnare, and that effort was apparently cut short.

Greenwald’s column notes that the investigation was legal, but way too broad:

What makes the DOJ’s actions so stunning here is its breadth. It’s the opposite of a narrowly tailored and limited scope. It’s a massive, sweeping, boundless invasion which enables the US government to learn the identity of every person whom multiple AP journalists and editors have called for a two-month period. Some of the AP journalists involved in the Yemen/CIA story and whose phone records were presumably obtained – including Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo – are among the nation’s best and most serious investigative journalists; those two won the Pulitzer Prize last year for their superb work exposing the NYPD’s surveillance program aimed at American Muslim communities. For the DOJ to obtain all of their phone records and those of their editors for a period of two months is just staggering.

Still we have been told that the AP email search came after 500 field interviews, did not include all AP emails from April and May 2012, and was trying to protect future anti-terrorist actions from premature public scrutiny, after being told to by the Congress. I find the whole thing troubling – but not outrageous. There’s a trade-off here, as Ambers fairly notes, that Glenn doesn’t acknowledge. Massimo Calabresi notes that Obama promised more transparency:

Obama came into office offering Americans a deal on secrecy. On the one hand, he promised to shrink the number of secrets created by the government, ending the problem of “overclassification” which produces so many secrets that few are well protected. At the same time, he said he would aggressively defend the secrets the government did need to keep by going after leakers and making them pay. Obama has delivered on the crackdown–he’s prosecuted twice as many leakers as all his predecessors combined–but he hasn’t delivered on the secrecy reduction.

Agreed. The administration’s abuse of the state secret loophole has been off the charts. While I’m at it: release the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the Bush-Cheney torture program!

(Photo: US President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder (R) attend the National Peace Officers Memorial Service, an annual ceremony honoring law enforcement who were killed in the line of duty in the previous year, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, May 15, 2013. By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.)

The full Inspector’s General report on the IRS scandal came out late yesterday. Drum peruses it:

I was hoping there might be some interesting tidbits now that we can see the whole thing. Not really, though. Mainly, it paints a drearily predictable picture of bureaucratic FUBARism, with various groups in various places either misunderstanding each other; not responding to each other; or assuming that stuff was getting done that, in fact, wasn’t getting done. Anyone who reads Dilbert regularly gets the picture.

Weigel passes along the above chart from the report. Earlier, he looked at the hoops Tea Party groups had to jump through:

A typical letter looked like the one sent to the Ohio-based Liberty Township Tea Party—35 questions, most of them with multiple sections. Question 3: “Provide details regarding all of your activity on Facebook or Twitter.” Question 5 asked for biographies of “each past or present board member, officer, key employee, and members of their families,” to check whether any of these people might run for office, or might have filed a 501(c)(4) request for somebody else. Question 12 asked for a tally of all activity ever engaged in by the group, by percentage, adding helpfully that the “total of all activities should equal 100 percent.” Question 34 asked for “copies of articles printed or transcripts of items aired” if the Tea Party had been covered by the media.

Yesterday, Josh Marshall pinpointed one reason this story has legs:

If you wanted create a scandal to have maximal appeal to GOP base freakout, this is it. And it has the additional advantage of not creating the same sort of off-putting crazy as hitting other bugaboos beloved by base Republicans. It’s not about Obama’s ties to the Muslim brotherhood or his foreign birth. It’s about taxes, something everyone has an experience with and understands. And it’s at least rooted in something that’s true. Something really did happen. And it’s not good. It shouldn’t happen. It even has unexpected knock-on effects like the IRS’s supposed connection to the dreaded ‘Obamacare’.

That’s why you’re seeing Mitch McConnell go so full bore on this. He’s not particularly well-liked in his state and he’s not particularly well liked by Tea Parties or base Republicans. But now he can bang the drum on something that appeals deeply to these folks. He can now be with them cheek and jowl. And that is a very, very big deal. As can basically every other national Republican elected official.

And Tim Murphy, calling the 2012 IRS audits “depressingly normal,” compiles a list of organizations that have gotten similar treatment under past presidents.

According (pdf) to the CBO – in a truly dramatic turn-around. Barro throws some cold water:

This is great news about this year. But it doesn’t say very much about the long-term fiscal outlook. CBO’s revisions cut this year’s deficit by 1.3 percent of GDP, but they only shrink the next 10 years’ projected deficits by 0.3 percent of GDP.

That’s because the main factors cutting this year’s deficit are one-time effects. Half of this year’s deficit reduction comes from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants that have been under federal conservatorship since 2008. They will make unexpectedly large dividend payments to the government this year, but that won’t happen again. The other half of this year’s change comes from higher-than-expected revenues, which are also mostly a one-time spike.

That’s a teensy bit too much cold water when you see the impact of growth on government revenues which underlies some of the data (growth that would not have happened if the GOP had adopted the premature austerity measures favored in Europe). What all this says to me is that we have a breathing space to move on longer-term spending, i.e. entitlements and defense. My own view is that Republicans are throwing away the chance of a lifetime to get a Democratic president to sign off on real entitlement reform. That would give them more cover for unpopular cuts than they will ever have if they get back into the White House. John Harwood has an excellent summary of the incentives here. Derek Thompson focuses on healthcare spending:

Here’s the story I wish more people would talk about: Our incredible shrinking Medicare projections. Since August, CBO has now revised down its projections of mandatory health care spending by nearly $500 billion, as Michael Linden pointed out. Since the 2010 CBO report, projected Medicare spending between 2013 and 2020 has fallen by just over $1 trillion … or 16%.

Among Ezra’s takeaways:

If this report clarifies anything it’s that our debt problem, insofar as we have one, is a long-term problem, not a short-term problem.

But sequestration disappears in 10 years. The policies in a deficit deal, by contrast, continue to grow. If you care about the long-term debt you should see a world in which sequestration replaces a debt deal to be a disaster. The calm of the Republican Party on this point either bespeaks a disinterest in debt or a misunderstanding about sequestration.

And Yglesias thinks long-term:

The author explains how she and her therapy dog Pransky have been received while working at a local nursing home (with one awesome anecdote):

John Ensminger recently went through some new research into the effectiveness of therapy dogs, including what the experience is like for the dog:

[My dog] Chloe and I have been a therapy dog team for nearly five years.  Indeed there can be stress for the dog. In a visit to a cerebral palsy facility, one child locked a hand onto Chloe’s back.  I kept her calm while two attendants gradually unlocked the vice grip of fingers. Fran Breitkopf encountered a similar situation in a memory care unit:

“Although [my dog] Casey loved to visit people he was not able to sustain visits to deep dementia sections of Golden Hill. It exhausted him and he was only able to deal with the confusion that he felt for a short time.  I did have to pry a woman away from Casey in one of his visits to that section. She grabbed him and hugged him too hard. His eyes pleaded for help and we did have a nurse come in to help us. He was okay after that, not reluctant. When we left the facility, Casey would fall into a deep sleep by the time we got down the driveway to the main road, probably just 800 to 1,000 feet.  I ended up not taking him to that section after a time. On the other hand he loved going to Ten Broeck Elder Care Facility and was good for at least an hour. He just wanted to deliver kisses and sat on everyone’s laps and gave them many. He did not want to sit on laps of people who had wet themselves. I always thought he didn’t want anyone to think it was he who had peed.”

Nevertheless, negative incidents are rare and [researcher Dr. Dawn A.] Marcus describes a study in which visits to humans “resulted in significant positive changes (P≤0.01) in endorphin, oxytocin, prolactin, phenyl acetic acid, and dopamine levels in dogs.”  Corstisol levels have been shown to rise in dogs, however, indicating that there is a “need to limit visit frequency.”  Although my experience with Chloe has not been monitored for chemical changes in either of us, I do believe that the stress level varies with the assignment and that some assignments are actually fun for the dog.

Mental Floss has put together a gallery of therapy dogs in action. Sue’s new book, A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher, comes out tomorrow. Our Ask Anything archive is here.

It hasn’t been a good month for the armed services – first the Air Force, now the Army:

In the latest incident, the Department of Defense revealed on Tuesday a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army stationed at the Ft. Hood, TX military base is under investigation for sexual assault. Along with allegedly sexually assaulting two of his peers, the the sergeant is being investigated for possibly forcing a subordinate into prostitution. Making matters even worse, the soldier under investigation was assigned as the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) program coordinator for an eight-hundred person battalion stationed at the base.

Adam Martin notes:

The officer ran the sexual assault prevention program at the battalion level, for about 800 people, so it’s not quite the same as the Air Force lieutenant colonel who ran the program for the entire branch. But the accusations, if true, speak to an apparently more premeditated crime.

The latest scandal will surely fuel the reform effort from Congress:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is set to introduce a particularly drastic bill on Thursday in response to increasing military sexual assaults. Her bill would completely remove the decision to prosecute all major criminal cases from the military chain of command.

More in the Dish thread here.