A kind reader alerted me to “an article”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/03/health.nhs1 in last Sunday’s Guardian, on the proposal by the Conservative Party to introduce the Dutch system of Kraamzorg in the UK. As I briefly mentioned in “an earlier post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/03/2-weeks-of-birthleave-for-fathers/, under this system a qualified maternity nurse cares for mother and the newborn child at home in the first week after the birth.
The article gives a fair account of what these nurses do, and of the advantages of this system. Yet I’m surprised by the claim that the system would be too expensive to be introduced. Of course the question is ‘expensive in comparison with what’. In the Netherlands, one reason why mothers who give birth leave the hospital so quickly after the delivery (if they go to the hospital at all, that is), is the cost; a maternity nurse at home is much cheaper than the cost of keeping mother and child in hospital (as is the case in Belgium, for example). I don’t know what the kind of care is that is currently provided to newborns and their mothers in the UK – yet it is self-evident that if the comparison is made with no care for the newborn and mother at all, then the system is relatively expensive. But how under a system of no care at all the mothers can take the rest that they need is a mystery to me. The days that this could be provided by family members are, for most of us, long gone. Hence not a bad plan from the Tories, if you ask me.
I’ve got nothing much in the way of predictions (as I’ve noted before, I’m not that kind of political scientist) but feel free to chat in comments as results come in from Super Tuesday …
My long “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/31/delong-scott-and-hayek/ from a couple of months ago on James Scott’s _Seeing Like a State_ and Brad DeLong’s review of it enjoyed a temporary revival when Brad “republished”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/12/delong-smackd-1.html it in his ‘DeLong Smackdown’ series. But I got a bit of grief from one reader, who thought that I had given Scott far too easy a ride. Which is probably true – while I admire the book, I do have many disagreements with it, which I would have gotten into if I had been reviewing the book proper, rather than arguing against Brad’s interpretation. One such disagreement popped up when I was reading it again for class a couple of weeks ago, together with John Brewer’s _The Sinews of Power._1 [click to continue…]
I thought that “delivering people to the labour market” was the principal function of public transport rather than higher education. It seems that the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Britain’s government agency charged with supporting research in this area thinks differently, since that is one of the headings of their most recent strategy document, the AHRC “Delivery plan” (pdf). I won’t go on, since Leiter has already covered the issue and linked to Simon Blackburn’s piece in the THES (and see also the comment by occasional CT-commenter Mike Otsuka under Blackburn’s article). The AHRC headquarters are local to me, so I can fantasize about a re-staging of the 1831 Bristol riots, with AHRC’s plate-glass headquarters being torched by the enraged citizenry. That won’t happen.
There are many reasons to take pleasure in the New York Football Giants’ victory in the Supreme Bowl last night, but none, I think, is more important than the fact that the Northeast Region Patriots did not manage to pick up any points on their first drive of the second half. Here’s why.
For those of you who didn’t watch the game (and what, really, is wrong with you people? are you not sufficiently cosmopolitan to follow every last detail of American sporting contests that run for a mere four hours?), the Patriots faced a fourth-and-two at the Football Giants’ 44-yard line. They punted, and the Football Giants got the ball on their 14.
From “Three Quarks Daily”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/02/selected-minor.html.
Super Tuesday Surprise: Leading Minsk Newspaper Endorses Candidates in US Presidential Race
… From Belaruskija Naviny (translated by the Belarus Information Agency): Minsk (BIA) 1 February, 2008–
In America, there are not strong leaders like Aleksandr Grigorevich Lukashenko, who come into power, and stay in the power. The only president in American history to have held on his power more than two terms was Franklin Roosevelt. And he was cripple! He stayed long because of war-time situation, not strength. But every four years, the parties make their best effort. This year, because of failed war in Iraq and weak leadership of George W. Bush, the American people are going in for politics like never before in their history. … What choices are the Republican and Democratic parties offering them?
At this present, the Republican (“Grand Old”) Party has three candidates in competition: the Christian retail-store magnate and “healthy life-style” advocate Mike Huckabee, whose business practices were subjected to critique already in American independent cinema production “I Heart Huckabee” (2005); Mitt Romney, governor of State Utah and elder of Mormon church, which until Lukashenko’s bold measure against foreign missionary-activity was responsible for the common sight on the streets of Grodno and Brest and Vitebsk of clean and polite young Americans, speaking Belarusian like mother tongue, and promoting their heretical sect to our villagers like we were pagan Indians; and finally, John McCain, senator of City Phoenix and number-one opponent of current president George W. Bush within Republican party.
The Democrats have now only two candidates who stand to chance against this powerful phalanx: Barack Obama, senator of City Chicago and nephew of Saddam Hussein; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, organizer of popular solidarity-building women’s breakfasts for discussion of hair-hygiene and of place of woman in American politics, and only official wife of number-one enemy of Serbs and all Slavic peoples, Bill Clinton.
(for more on Hillary Clinton’s role in creating ‘polyclinics’, Barack Obama’s surprising failure to promote sport, leisure, tourism and patriotic games, and the key question of why _shouldn’t_ Mike Huckabee eat pigs’ legs in aspic and goose-fat on craquelins, go to 3QD).
This video was posted on YouTube just yesterday and has already been watched over 150,000 times.* There’s also a site for a ringtone.
It’s impossible to know at this point how such viral campaigns might influence outcomes, but it’s certainly interesting to watch how people are taking advantage of new tools to disseminate material of this sort. It would be a stretch to suggest anyone can do this easily since this video is filled with celebrities, which likely helped it get coverage on ABC yesterday [source]. Nonetheless, having it available online certainly helps in spreading it widely. I’d be curious to know how most people linking to it found it, but many don’t seem to be pointing to sources, which makes this difficult to decipher.
[*] Note that YouTube’s numbers are confusing as depending on when I click on the link I either get around 153,000 or 84,000 views.
I think if you tried this at Paddington or King’s Cross, security and the British Transport Police would be pushing you around within 90 seconds …. A pretty cool piece of street theatre:
While I realize not everyone is as obsessed with photography as I am, many phones now have cameras and I wonder if people remember to use them for the logistics of everyday life. So this post is just a reminder that all those things you often forget (I certainly forget all sorts of details that would be helpful to remember later) can be captured easily with your pocket-sized camera.
A recurring theme when I go shopping is trying to remember the name of that wonderful cheese I purchased earlier. Good cheese can be expensive so it’s a pity to buy the type that doesn’t work out. Last week after buying some cheese that turned out to be very tasty, I decided to take a picture of its label. Yesterday when I returned to the store I started looking for it. I couldn’t find it, but then I showed the image to the person behind the counter and immediately she had an answer. Although they were out of that particular item, she pointed me to another one that, upon sampling it, reminded me sufficiently of the earlier one that I was happy to find it. The woman mentioned that she wished more people would think to take photos as it’s usually difficult to guess what they want from their descriptions.
This method can work with all sorts of details that are easy to forget: book titles and authors, wines, where you parked your car, what you ordered off of a restaurant menu, bus & train schedules, maps (yup, I’ll just take a quick snapshot of a map instead of printing it out), and lots more. For some of these (like maps) a higher resolution photo where you can zoom in is helpful, but for others a simple camera phone should work just as well.
This “bit”:http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/speaking-truth-without-power/ in the NYT made me wonder whether the writer had any clue what he was talking about.
But notwithstanding this stunning success, this week’s withdrawal by John Edwards, coming a week after the departure of Dennis Kucinich, means that both of the preferred presidential candidates of the liberal blogosphere are now out of the race.
followed by some speculations as to whether
like all outsider movements, [the blogosphere] identifies with the underdog. This year that meant support for Mr. Kucinich and Mr. Edwards in the Democratic race, and Ron Paul in the Republican contest.
Barack Obama’s health care policy has come under a lot of blogworld attacks for not including “mandates”, i.e. fines for people who don’t buy health insurance. Here’s a typical “passage from Ezra Klein”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=health_care_debate_mandates_as.
bq. A central tenet of his proposal is that ” No insurance companies will be allowed to discriminate because of a previous bout with cancer or some other pre-existing illness.” You literally cannot have that rule without some mechanism forcing everyone to buy in, as the healthy will stay out. … A mandate is not how you cover everyone, it’s how you force _insurers to cover everyone_, and discriminate against no one.
I don’t know what the force of that ‘cannot’ is supposed to be, but I know it isn’t historical impossibility. Australia for several decades did just the thing Ezra thinks that you can’t do. It had community rating of health insurance, and it didn’t have health insurance mandates. This was true of the periods 1953-1975, and again from 1981-1984. At other times it had compulsory universal basic health insurance. The system wasn’t perfect, bringing in compulsory public health insurance was a very good thing, but it wasn’t as bad as anything I’ve seen in America, and nor was it somehow an impossibility. [click to continue…]
One answer can be found here, in Lewis and Poole’s Optimal Classification ranking of voting patterns the 110th Senate. Here’s a description of the method. This measure isn’t quite “liberal vs conservative” but it does tell you which senators are most alike, as based on their voting records and boiled down to a single dimension. For the Democrats, Russ Feingold, Chris Dodd and Bernie Sanders are on one side, with Tim Johnson, Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson on the other. In the 110th congress, there are 10 senators who are closer to Feingold than Obama is. (Of course, the 110th session is only half over.) In the 109th, for which there’s complete voting data, there were 20. In the 109th session only three places separated Obama and Clinton — they were ranked 21st and 25th respectively. So far in the 110th session, eight places separate them. It’s Obama who has moved.
The _New York Times_ has a story suggesting that Bill Clinton cozied up to Kazakhstan president Nursultan A. Nazarbayev in order to help out a big donor to the Clinton Foundation.
Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton. … the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent. … Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
… Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects … monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers …In a statement Kazakhstan would highlight in news releases, Mr. Clinton declared that he hoped it would achieve a top objective: leading the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which would confer legitimacy on Mr. Nazarbayev’s government. “I think it’s time for that to happen, it’s an important step, and I’m glad you’re willing to undertake it,” Mr. Clinton said.
At Wikipedia, the fight against pseudoscience and Republican antiscience across a range of articles from global warming to passive smoking to Intelligent design to AIDS reappraisal,to DDT is continuous and bruising.[1]. Editors have learned to detect bogus sources of information almost immediately. One of my fellow-editors at passive smoking pointed me to an interesting letter to Science (paywalled, but I’ve quoted the important bit), shedding unintentional light on the way the disinformation machine operates. It’s from William G. Kelly of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness the front organization founded by legendary Phillip Morris shill, Jim Tozzi (Kelly is employed by Tozzi’s lobbying outfit, Multinational Business Services
Responding to criticism of the infamous Data Quality Act (for more on this see the seminar on Chris Mooney’s Republican War on Science, in the sidebar, Kelly offers a classic non-denial denial, saying
Neither Phillip Morris (a multiproduct company) nor any other tobacco company (or nontobacco company for that matter) played a leadership role in the genesis of the DQA. While working with the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness in Washington, DC, I was personally involved with the development of the DQA, and no industry entity contributed to its formulation.
While we’re at it, can I point out that Henry II was nowhere near Canterbury Cathedral when Thomas Becket met with his unfortunate end. The whole point of having people like Tozzi and Kelly, and groups like CRE is that corporations don’t have to play a leadership role in promoting their own interests in Congress.
There’s a long-standing urban legend about where you meet an attractive person in a bar, they buy you a drink, and the next thing you know you wake up in a bath of ice with a pain in your lower back and a note telling you to get to a hospital. One of the reasons this story is just a story is that in order to usefully extract someone’s kidney for transplant, a whole lot of stuff has to be organized beforehand, and you need to have a lot of skilled people working together against a hard time constraint — too many, really, to quietly and reliably pull something like this off.
Mr. Mohammed was the last of about 500 Indians whose kidneys were removed by a team of doctors running an illegal transplant operation, supplying kidneys to rich Indians and foreigners, police officials said. A few hours after his operation last Thursday, the police raided the clinic and moved him to a government hospital. … Many of the donors were day laborers, like Mr. Mohammed, picked up from the streets with the offer of work, driven to a well-equipped private clinic, and duped or forced at gunpoint to undergo operations. Others were bicycle rickshaw drivers and impoverished farmers who were persuaded to sell their organs, which is illegal in India.
Although several kidney rings have been exposed in India in recent years, the police said the scale of this one was unprecedented. Four doctors, five nurses, 20 paramedics, three private hospitals, 10 pathology clinics and five diagnostic centers were involved, Mohinder Lal, the police officer in charge of the investigation, said. “We suspect around 400 or 500 kidney transplants were done by these doctors over the last nine years,” said Mr. Lal, the Gurgaon police commissioner.
I’d be interested to see how many suppliers were straightforwardly lied to about what they were getting into, or otherwise forced to undergo operations, and how many were offered money first (and paid afterwards). Unlike some other documented cases of organ sales, this seems less like an illegal but functioning market and more like a criminal racket founded on fraud.
