Decline of the Empire

How F**ked Up Is Health Care In The United States?

It is very hard to answer the question posed in the title of this post. No matter how fucked up you think health care in the United States is, it is even more fucked up than that. In this regard, it's a lot like the size of the observable Universe. No matter how mindbogglingly large you think it is, the Universe is even bigger than you imagine.

The fucked-up-ness of health care in the United States is effectively infinite in extent.

If you still doubt that the United States is a joke—that hardly seems possible if you are awake—you might read Steven Brill's Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us. It is a very long article because Brill is dealing with infinity.

Brill seeks to answer a few simple questions—

Why do health care services in the United States cost so much?

Why do costs keep going up and up?

I've added a chart for your further edification.

From Doug Short's What Inflation Means to You: Inside the Consumer Price Index (February 21, 2013). The red line shows medical care inflation. If you go back to 1980, health care cost increases are about 500-600% of official CPI inflation.

What are the answers to Brill's simple questions? Well, the answers are pretty simple, too.

The price of health care services are arbitrary, and set by the provider.

Annual price increases in health care services are automatic and arbitrary.

Let's read one of Brill's examples.

One night last summer at her home near Stamford, Conn., a 64-year-old former sales clerk whom I’ll call Janice S. felt chest pains. She was taken four miles by ambulance to the emergency room at Stamford Hospital, officially a nonprofit institution. After about three hours of tests and some brief encounters with a doctor, she was told she had indigestion and sent home. That was the good news.

The bad news was the bill: $995 for the ambulance ride, $3,000 for the doctors and $17,000 for the hospital — in sum, $21,000 for a false alarm.

Out of work for a year, Janice S. had no insurance. Among the hospital’s charges were three “TROPONIN I” tests for $199.50 each. According to a National Institutes of Health website, a troponin test “measures the levels of certain proteins in the blood” whose release from the heart is a strong indicator of a heart attack. Some labs like to have the test done at intervals, so the fact that Janice S. got three of them is not necessarily an issue. The price is the problem.

Stamford Hospital spokesman Scott Orstad told me that the $199.50 figure for the troponin test was taken from what he called the hospital’s chargemaster. The chargemaster, I learned, is every hospital’s internal price list. Decades ago it was a document the size of a phone book; now it’s a massive computer file, thousands of items long, maintained by every hospital.

Stamford Hospital’s chargemaster assigns prices to everything, including Janice S.’s blood tests. It would seem to be an important document. However, I quickly found that although every hospital has a chargemaster, officials treat it as if it were an eccentric uncle living in the attic.

Whenever I asked, they deflected all conversation away from it. They even argued that it is irrelevant. I soon found that they have good reason to hope that outsiders pay no attention to the chargemaster or the process that produces it. For there seems to be no process, no rationale, behind the core document that is the basis for hundreds of billions of dollars in health care bills.

Because she was 64, not 65, Janice S. was not on Medicare. But seeing what Medicare would have paid Stamford Hospital for the troponin test if she had been a year older shines a bright light on the role the chargemaster plays in our national medical crisis — and helps us understand the illegitimacy of that $199.50 charge. That’s because Medicare collects troves of data on what every type of treatment, test and other service costs hospitals to deliver.

Medicare takes seriously the notion that nonprofit hospitals should be paid for all their costs but actually be nonprofit after their calculation. Thus, under the law, Medicare is supposed to reimburse hospitals for any given service, factoring in not only direct costs but also allocated expenses such as overhead, capital expenses, executive salaries, insurance, differences in regional costs of living and even the education of medical students.

It turns out that Medicare would have paid Stamford $13.94 for each troponin test rather than the $199.50 Janice S. was charged.

Janice S. was also charged $157.61 for a CBC — the complete blood count that those of us who are ER aficionados remember George Clooney ordering several times a night. Medicare pays $11.02 for a CBC in Connecticut. Hospital finance people argue vehemently that Medicare doesn’t pay enough and that they lose as much as 10% on an average Medicare patient.

But even if the Medicare price should be, say, 10% higher, it’s a long way from $11.02 plus 10% to $157.61. Yes, every hospital administrator grouses about Medicare’s payment rates — rates that are supervised by a Congress that is heavily lobbied by the American Hospital Association, which spent $1,859,041 on lobbyists in 2012. But an annual expense report that Stamford Hospital is required to file with the federal Department of Health and Human Services offers evidence that Medicare’s rates for the services Janice S. received are on the mark. According to the hospital’s latest filing (covering 2010), its total expenses for laboratory work (like Janice S.’s blood tests) in the 12 months covered by the report were $27.5 million. Its total charges were $293.2 million. That means it charged about 11 times its costs.

As we examine other bills, we’ll see that like Medicare patients, the large portion of hospital patients who have private health insurance also get discounts off the listed chargemaster figures, assuming the hospital and insurance company have negotiated to include the hospital in the insurer’s network of providers that its customers can use. The insurance discounts are not nearly as steep as the Medicare markdowns, which means that even the discounted insurance-company rates fuel profits at these officially nonprofit hospitals. Those profits are further boosted by payments from the tens of millions of patients who, like the unemployed Janice S., have no insurance or whose insurance does not apply because the patient has exceeded the coverage limits. These patients are asked to pay the chargemaster list prices.

If you are confused by the notion that those least able to pay are the ones singled out to pay the highest rates, welcome to the American medical marketplace.

You do not have to be rocket scientist to see the point—if health care providers can set prices and raise prices arbitrarily, they will do so, to their great benefit. They do so because they can, just like universities and colleges do. And as Brill says in the video below, if the health care "reform" bill (aka. Obamacare) had done anything to rein in costs, it probably would not have gotten through Congress.

As Brill points out over and over again, the health care industry constantly strives to deflect attention away from the question

why are costs so high?

in an always successful attempt to get people to focus on the question

who will pay those high costs?

This is not surprising, of course — there are a lot of animals feeding at the health care trough. Some of them have gotten quite fat.

In fact, the American economy would be far, far worse than it already is if the health care monster had not been permitted to grow arbitrarily large and ever more expensive. Job creation in health care runs very far ahead of any other industry.

So don't look for the health care monster to be dismantled anytime soon.

Let me spell it out for you. The United States economy is a

J. O. K. E.

 

The Coming Mass Extinction In The Oceans

I must have been having a particularly cynical day on August 24, 2012 when I wrote the original post. I wrote this when presidential election hysteria was reaching a crescendo. We all know how that turned out. So I cleaned this post up a bit, and added some detail from the scientific paper the post is based on — Dave

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Earlier this week a story surfaced about the threat of a future mass extinction in the oceans. A Google news search reveals that this story appeared at phys.org, scienceblog.com, sciencealert.com.au (Australia) and sciencedaily.com, and nowhere else, at least not here in the United States.

We see, then, that this story was confined to the science ghetto. It was not reported by the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, or any of the rest. The story was based on a research paper called Extinctions In Ancient And Modern Seas (pdf) which recently appeared in the journal Trends In Ecology And Evolution.

I'll quote from the Science Daily story called World's Sea Life Is 'Facing Major Shock', Marine Scientists Warn.

Life in the world's oceans faces far greater change and risk of large-scale extinctions than at any previous time in human history, a team of the world's leading marine scientists has warned.

That's a stunning lead. You might think the world would pay attention to a story that starts off like that.

The researchers from Australia, the US, Canada, Germany, Panama, Norway and the UK have compared events which drove massive extinctions of sea life in the past with what is observed to be taking place in the seas and oceans globally today.

Three of the five largest extinctions of the past 500 million years were associated with global warming and acidification of the oceans — trends which also apply today, the scientists say in a new article in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Other extinctions were driven by loss of oxygen from seawaters [anoxia], pollution, habitat loss and pressure from human hunting and fishing — or a combination of these factors.

"Currently, the Earth is again in a period of increased extinctions and extinction risks, this time mainly caused by human factors," the scientists stated. While the data is harder to collect at sea than on land, the evidence points strongly to similar pressures now being felt by sea life as for land animals and plants...

Marine extinction events vary greatly. In the 'Great Death' of the Permian 250 million years ago, for example, an estimated 95 per cent of marine species died out due to a combination of warming, acidification, loss of oxygen and habitat. Scientists have traced the tragedy in the chemistry of ocean sediments laid down at the time, and abrupt loss of many sea animals from the fossil record.

"We are seeing the signature of all those [Permian] drivers today — plus the added drivers of human overexploitation and pollution from chemicals, plastics and nutrients," Prof. Pandolfi says.

"The fossil record tells us that sea life is very resilient — that it recovers after one of these huge setbacks. But also that it can take millions of years to do so."

The researchers wrote the paper out of their concern that the oceans appear to be on the brink of another major extinction event.

"There may be still time to act," Prof. Pandolfi says. "If we understand what drives ocean extinction, we can also understand what we need to do to prevent or minimize it.

Here are two figures and some text from the paper, but this material may be hard to understand out of context. There is no substitute for reading it.

An increasing number of marine species are currently threatened by extinction [Figure 2c, Box 1, reproduced below]. At least 830 marine species have been classified as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable and at least 1538 as data deficient. Overall, the assessment of marine species lags behind that of terrestrial species: out of the 41,500 assessed species in 2007, only 1500 were marine, with another 1500 marine species added by 2008. This included complete assessments of sharks and rays, groupers, reef-building corals, seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles.

Since then, assessments for all mangroves, seagrasses, and tunas have been completed, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) aims to have 20,000 marine species assessed by 2012. Nevertheless, assessments for many groups are incomplete or entirely lacking.

A comparison of Cenozoic extinction rates, historical rates, and currently endangered species. Click to enlarge.

The degree to which current extinction threats differ from past extinction drivers is an important question when considering the utility of fossil and historical records for understanding current and predicting future extinction risk. Even if the ultimate drivers of extinctions have changed over time, the proximal effects experienced by organisms might be similar. For example, ultimate sources of elevated atmospheric CO₂ differ between the late Permian (volcanic activity) and present day (burning of fossil fuels), but in both instances marine organisms have had to contend with the proximal effects of acidification and warming [Table 1, reproduced below].

Similarly, large changes in the area of shallow benthic habitat have occurred throughout geologic time (e.g., via sea-level fall due to the growth of continental ice sheets), which might bear similarities to human-driven habitat degradation and loss today. Below, we compare the similarity and relative importance of current threats and ancient drivers of marine extinction, and consider synergistic effects among multiple drivers.

Past drivers of marine extinctions and current threats. Click to enlarge

I used to worry about this stuff more than I do now. Years ago, I would have gotten all bent of shape about the fact that only a few people seem to care about the very real, looming possibility of a mass extinction in the oceans. I believe the probability of such an event occurring in the next 200 years is near unity (= 1). Trends in the oceans are well-established, and to the extent these trends are based on characteristic human behavior, there is little reason to believe the ongoing destruction of marine ecosystems will be reversed.

Nonetheless, given that grim prognostication, I do want our collective descendants to know there were a few people in 2012 who thought such probable catastrophes were worth noting and reporting on.

In the United States, the media are too preoccupied with Hopey-Changey versus The Mittster to notice that there is a coming mass extinction in the oceans. I want our descendants to know that, too. Few people will remember in 2070 who ran for president in 2012, but those hapless folks will remark frequently on the fact that humans are dying left and right because the oceans have turned to shit.

 

Sequester Week In America

Last week was Oscar Pistorius Week in America, but time has passed, and February 25-March 1 is Sequester Week in America. It's important that Americans not be given too many things to think about at once.

After doing extensive market research in a nation in which half of college freshmen can not find Ohio or New York on a map, the elites who run this phony glorious enterprise called the United States decided that "consumers" of news could handle exactly 1 (one) major topic per week, as opposed to 2 (two) or 3 (three). Moreover, it was clear that you can not have 0 (zero) major topics because Americans require a major weekly distraction to make sure they do not accidently notice, albeit ever so briefly, that the United States is complete joke.

In an effort to get into the swing of things, and knowing that going along is always the key to getting along, DOTE is devoting this post to the budget cuts due on Friday, which are called "the sequester."

Now, it may surprise you to learn that this year's sequester amounts to only 85 billion dollars ($85,000,000,000), which is approximately 2.4% of the annual federal budget. That sounds like a lot of money to you and me, but it is a mere pittance, a veritable drop in the bucket, in the general scheme of things.

But you would not know that if you are following this week's major media topic. You would think, if the slew of stories appearing in the press are anything to go by, that our world is going to end on Friday.

Seeking to raise alarm among a public that has not paid much attention to the issue, the White House on Sunday released 51 fact sheets describing what would happen over the next seven months if the cuts go into effect.

I hope you will forgive me if I do not cover all the scary consequences of the sequester as detailed at the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, Time, Yahoo Finance, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, and all the rest. After all, the sequester is merely this week's news.

Let's get to the bottom of this sequester hysteria. It's really very simple — actual government spending cuts will spell the end of economic Extend & Pretend, which has been going on for almost 4 years now.

When government spending falls, even a tiny bit, GDP will fall with it. As GDP falls, it will become more and more difficult to pretend that an economic revival is just around the corner. If an economic revival is not right around the corner because GDP is falling instead of being propped up by borrowed and printed money, citizens will get discouraged or depressed. Suicide attempts will soar. Americans everywhere will be forced to face the Awful Truth—

Oh my God — we thought we were OK, but it turns out we're full of shit!

Needless to say, nobody likes finding out that they're actually full of shit when all along they thought they were OK.

Such a devastating revelation will inevitably cause many people to give up altogether on this phony glorious enterprise called the United States of America. Only chaos, and perhaps total collapse, can follow

To prevent this unpleasant scenario, the mainstream media, as directed by the White House and other interested parties, have created a media blitz this week which is designed to get Congress to change its mind about these indiscriminate, across-the-board spending cuts so the world doesn't end on Friday. The media's preferred method in this blitz is to scare the shit out of Americans so they will apply the appropriate pressure on recalcitrant Republicans and otherwise support liberal "growth" policies.

I just thought you would like to know what's going on during Sequester Week.

 

I'll Have The Red Snapper!

Waiter:  How are you folks this evening?
Woman:  How's the fish tonight? Is it fresh?
Waiter:  Oh, yes. Right off the boat.
Woman:  I'll have the tuna, with a vinegarette salad to start.
Waiter:  Very good. And you, sir?
Man:  I'll have the Red Snapper, also with a salad, with ranch.
Waiter:  Coming right up.

Unfortunately, there is an 87% chance that the Red Snapper the man ordered is not Red Snapper. And there is a 59% chance that the type of tuna the woman ordered is not the type listed on the menu.

As humans destroy life in the oceans, some predictable things happen. We've got one of those today, from Oceana Study Reveals Sea Food Fraud Nationwide.

From 2010 to 2012, Oceana conducted one of the largest seafood fraud investigations in the world to date, collecting more than 1,200 seafood samples from 674 retail outlets in 21 states to determine if they were honestly labeled.

DNA testing found that one-third (33 percent) of the 1,215 samples analyzed nationwide were mislabeled, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines.

Of the most commonly collected fish types, samples sold as snapper and tuna had the highest mislabeling rates (87 and 59 percent, respectively), with the majority of the samples identified by DNA analysis as something other than what was found on the label. In fact, only seven of the 120 samples of red snapper purchased nationwide were actually red snapper. The other 113 samples were another fish.

Our findings demonstrate that a comprehensive and transparent traceability system — one that tracks fish from boat to plate — must be established at the national level. At the same time, increased inspection and testing of our seafood, specifically for mislabeling, and stronger federal and state enforcement of existing laws combatting fraud are needed to reverse these disturbing trends.

Our government has a responsibility to provide more information about the fish sold in the U.S., as seafood fraud harms not only consumers’ wallets, but also every honest vendor and fisherman cheated in the process—to say nothing of the health of our oceans.

I had the TV on the other day, and overheard a Wendy's commercial which made sure to mention (more than once) that the fish in its sandwiches was "100% North Pacific Cod." It wasn't this commercial, but it was one just like it.

 

That reference to authentic cod fish struck me as so telling that I went on the internet to see if North Pacific Cod (Gadus macrocephalus) is fished responsibly, and indeed it is. Apparently, Pacific Cod is one of the best managed fisheries in U.S. territorial waters. One wishes we could say the same for the beleaguered cod in Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine in the Northwest Atlantic . (I'll have more on that subject in the near future.)

Now, together with this Oceana study, Wendy's insistence that it serves up real, sustainably caught cod fish makes total sense. Well, they didn't say the fishery was well managed. They were more concerned that if you ordered cod fish, you were getting cod fish.

So it has come to this — overfishing the oceans has so depleted the sea of popular eating fishes that suppliers are substituting any fish they can catch for those tasty species and lying about what you're getting. What a piece of work is Man! (etc.).

And this reminds me of Oceana's call for more government oversight to address the mislabeling problem, which I repeat here for you convenience.

Our government has a responsibility to provide more information about the fish sold in the U.S., as seafood fraud harms not only consumers’ wallets, but also every honest vendor and fisherman cheated in the process—to say nothing of the health of our oceans.

To say nothing of the health of our oceans — Ah, there's the rub, for if fish were correctly labeled, "consumers" would soon find out that overfishing is depleting the oceans of the fish they want to eat. Suddenly, Red Snapper would become very expensive and sometimes hard to get. And so on for other popular fish.

In so far as humans are now "fishing down" the oceans, and fishing in previously unexploited areas, we have reached the point where you have to take what you can get. But rather than acknowledge this grim situation, humans prefer to lie about the fish they're catching to keep up appearances.

Nature is not fooled, and neither are we.

 

Possible Planetary Tipping Point Requires More Study

This reprint was originally published on June 18, 2012 — Dave

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With all the excitement in Europe, the upcoming Rio+20 Earth Summit is getting short shrift. Today's cheerful message is a follow-up to my recent post The Rio Earth Summit — A Litany Of Failure. In preparation for the June meeting, which begins this week, the journal Nature published a set of papers on the state of the Earth, including Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere by lead author Anthony D. Barnosky and a host of other scientists representing a number of different disciplines. Here's the abstract.

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence.

The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions. It is also necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing biological changes.

Nature 486, pp. 52–58 (June 7, 2012)

Note that addressing the "root causes" of a disastrous, human-caused transformation of the biosphere is secondary (an afterthought) in this abstract. Studying the problem takes precedence.

A "state shift" is more commonly understood as a "tipping point" at which the Earth's living systems shift to a different and no doubt less human-friendly state after a "critical threshold" is breached. As the abstract says, such shifts are abrupt and irreversible. Science Daily had the low down for the layman in Evidence of Impending Tipping Point for Earth.

A group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation.

"It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point," warns Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of a review paper appearing in the June 7 issue of the journal Nature. "The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations."

That sounds bad! And all this could happen within a few generations (in the next 40-50 years).

And now, here's the cure.

... The paper by 22 internationally known scientists describes an urgent need for better predictive models that are based on a detailed understanding of how the biosphere reacted in the distant past to rapidly changing conditions, including climate and human population growth.

In a related development, ground-breaking research to develop the reliable, detailed biological forecasts the paper is calling for is now underway at UC Berkeley. The endeavor, The Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology, or BiGCB, is a massive undertaking involving more than 100 UC Berkeley scientists from an extraordinary range of disciplines that already has received funding: a $2.5 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and a $1.5 million grant from the Keck Foundation. The paper by Barnosky and others emerged from the first conference convened under the BiGCB's auspices.

"One key goal of the BiGCB is to understand how plants and animals responded to major shifts in the atmosphere, oceans, and climate in the past, so that scientists can improve their forecasts and policy makers can take the steps necessary to either mitigate or adapt to changes that may be inevitable," Barnosky said.

"Better predictive models will lead to better decisions in terms of protecting the natural resources future generations will rely on for quality of life and prosperity." Climate change could also lead to global political instability, according to a U.S. Department of Defense study referred to in the Nature paper...

"We really do have to be thinking about these global scale tipping points, because even the parts of Earth we are not messing with directly could be prone to some very major changes," Barnosky said.

"And the root cause, ultimately, is human population growth and how many resources each one of us uses."

Yes, those are the root causes.

However, if you are a little confused at this point, I understand. This story reads like a promotional flyer for Earth science research at the University of California at Berkeley instead of an urgent, blunt warning to humankind that if we don't change our reckless ways, we may be looking at a planetary disaster within a few generations.

I note in passing that

1. identifying critical thresholds in Earth's natural systems which lead to tipping points
2. doing so in advance of the actual state shift

are goals which are almost certainly impossible to achieve.

But that's a minor quibble, really, in view of the fact that acquiring more funding appears to be the main goal of this press release. Only me and a few other folks will understand that the stated research goals are pure fantasy.

To be fair, I should also include this quote, which is a bit more to the point—

Coauthor Elizabeth Hadly from Stanford University said "we may already be past these tipping points in particular regions of the world. I just returned from a trip to the high Himalayas in Nepal, where I witnessed families fighting each other with machetes for wood — wood that they would burn to cook their food in one evening. In places where governments are lacking basic infrastructure, people fend for themselves, and biodiversity suffers.

We desperately need global leadership for planet Earth."

Yes we do! And our tireless, hard-working "leaders" will be meeting this week in Rio de Janeiro, where they will decide nothing and do nothing, regardless of how many grants we give to the comfortable Berkeley scientists who study these problems. After all, neither Anthony Barnosky nor any of these other scientists are fighting each other with machetes for the wood they need to cook dinner.

Here's the video.

 

Remedy du Jour -- February 23, 2013

Today's remedy features the great jazz pianist Bill Evans, whom some of you heard last week playing with Miles Davis in 1958 (for example, on On Green Dolphin Street).  Evans needs no introduction for those who know his music, and perhaps some of you who don't will get to know it after listening to this wonderful set. Enjoy.

• Elsa — Bill Evans Trio, part 1 of a live program recorded in March, 1965 (here's the whole thing)
• Days Of Wine And Roses — recorded live at the Village Vanguard, June, 1980
• Some Day My Prince Will Come — from the trio album Portrait In Jazz, 1959
• Piano Jazz session — part 1 of Bill's appearance on Piano Jazz with Marion McPartland (1979)
• Waltz For Debbie — the final tune of the 1965 program

 

 

 

 

 

Signs Of The Times

This post is actually a cleverly disguised open thread. For your delectation, I present three distressing signs of the times below.

Your job today is to find other telling signs of these troubled times. Please include links in your responses. And now...

Jack's Revolving Door Bonus

I wrote about Obama's appointment of former Citigroup executive Jack Lew to be his chief of staff in It's Jack Lew And Screw You. This choice quote comes from Senator Orrin Hatch Drops a Bombshell at Jack Lew’s Confirmation Hearing.

This was the bombshell dropped by Senator Orrin Hatch yesterday in Jack Lew’s confirmation hearing for one of the highest offices in the land – Secretary of the U.S. Treasury who will also head the body that makes critical decisions impacting Citigroup – the Financial Stability Oversight Council. (Lew held an executive position with Citigroup at the time of its collapse.)

Hatch made the disclosure as follows:

“First, could you explain what you did in 2008 for Citi that warranted payment to you of close to $1 million, most of which was a bonus. Second, what was it about your performance that merited your bonus from a company that was being propped up by taxpayer money and are there any records of your performance assessment – or are there any assessments of your performance.

Third, your employment agreement included a clause stating that ‘your guaranteed incentive and retention award’ would not be paid upon exit from Citigroup but there was an exception that you would receive that compensation ‘as a result of your acceptance of a full time high level position with the United States Government or a regulatory body.’

Now is this exception consistent with President Obama’s efforts to ‘close the revolving door’ that carries special interest influence in and out of the government?”

The article goes on to say—

Public shame has clearly lost its utility as a deterrent to repugnant behavior when it comes to Wall Street.

Jack Lew proved the point yesterday. Without offering an apology or the return of the $940,000 bonus paid with taxpayer’s funds, the unflappable Lew calmly and politely answered the question.

Public shame doesn't work anymore? I'm flabbergasted

We Can Not Grow The Nation's Economy Until...

We're seeing more and more stories like CNN Money's Crunched consumers are cutting back. What's the problem?

Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they were cutting back to cope with tax changes this year — including dining out less, limiting travel plans and skipping everyday indulgences, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF), which sponsored the survey...

Consumers are seeing smaller paychecks after a two-year payroll tax "holiday" expired this year. The rate returned to 6.2% on the first $113,700 of annual income, up from 4.2%. For workers earning $30,000 a year, that means about $50 less in their paychecks each month. For those earning $100,000 annually, it's about $167 less a month.

Americans also are facing higher prices at the pump, potentially delayed tax refunds and fears about forced federal budget cuts that could mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

"We cannot grow the nation's economy until consumers consume," said NRF chief executive officer Matthew Shay in a statement.

Who could disagree with this reasonable statement of the problem?

That's what "consumers" are supposed do, is it not?

Let's Go To Mars!

Despite these cautionary signs of the times, Americans are very enthusiastic about sending a manned mission to the Red Planet, as we learn in Americans Support Humans to Mars.

A new national poll released two weeks ago helped to characterize the level of American support for Mars exploration. In these complex times, are Americans in favor of human exploration of the Mars? The answer is an unequivocal YES.

Basically over 70 percent of Americans believe that we should send humans to Mars to explore the planet, and that it is ok to spend up to one percent of the federal budget on NASA (over twice the agency's current budget) to do so.

The Mars Generation National Opinion Poll shows strong support for human space flight to Mars and other destinations. As the lead organization that launched this poll, we at Explore Mars were hopeful for positive results, but we were also fully prepared to hear less than favorable responses to the questions. After all, we are living through tough economic and budgetary times. But as it turns out, Americans are very optimistic about the future of human space exploration.

After being told for years that "the general public" had lost interest in human space flight, the results were quite enlightening:

• 71 percent of respondents believe that we will land on Mars by 2033
• 67 percent of respondents believed that we should send both humans and robots to Mars.
• 83 percent believe that we should strengthen and expand partnerships with the private sector to send humans to explore Mars.
• 75 percent of respondents thought that the NASA budget should be increased to one percent of the federal budget if we committed to a human mission to Mars.
• There was very little difference between men and women or among different ethnic or economic backgrounds.

Well, does NASA have plans to send a manned mission to Mars? Indeed they do! Here's Eric Berger describing those plans at ExploreMars.

I’d love nothing more than to see a human walk on Mars within two decades, but to believe this suspends reality in a couple of ways.

First of all, under the very best of scenarios, ones in which NASA delivers a rocket and space capsule on time and on budget, the space agency will launch humans into an orbit around the moon in 2021.

Alas that’s probably a date that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Officially, NASA has a goal of sending humans to Mars by the 2030s, but that’s not actually to the surface, just into orbit around the red planet.

In other words, even from an optimistic, eyes-wide-shut to reality point of view, NASA is not planning to send humans to the surface of Mars in the 2030s.

That's very disappointing! I guess that's another sign of the times

Have a nice weekend.

 

Reptiles On The Brink

It was only a matter of time before conservationists got around to evaluating global reptile populations. And when they did—surprise, surprise!—the news was not so good. Science Daily provides the details in Slithering Towards Extinction: Reptiles in Trouble.

Feb. 14, 2013 — Nineteen percent of the world's reptiles are estimated to be threatened with extinction, states a paper published February 14 by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in conjunction with experts from the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC).

The study, printed in the journal of Biological Conservation, is the first of its kind summarising the global conservation status of reptiles [link below]. More than 200 world renowned experts assessed the extinction risk of 1,500 randomly selected reptiles from across the globe.

Out of the estimated 19% of reptiles threatened with extinction, 12% classified as Critically Endangered, 41% Endangered and 47% Vulnerable...

Dr. Monika Böhm, lead author on the paper: "Reptiles are often associated with extreme habitats and tough environmental conditions, so it is easy to assume that they will be fine in our changing world.

"However, many species are very highly specialised in terms of habitat use and the climatic conditions they require for day to day functioning. This makes them particularly sensitive to environmental changes," Dr. Böhm added.

Extinction risk is not evenly spread throughout this highly diverse group: freshwater turtles are at particularly high risk, mirroring greater levels of threat in freshwater biodiversity around the world.

Overall, this study estimated 30% of freshwater reptiles to be close to extinction, which rises to 50% when considering freshwater turtles alone, as they are also affected by national and international trade.

The image accompanying the text is taken from the Turtles In Trouble, a 2011 report by the Turtle Conservation Society which focuses on the world’s 25+ most endangered tortoises and freshwater turtles.

You can read the study itself here (pdf, Biological Conservation 157 (2013) 372–385).

I do not feel like beating around the bush today.

Life on Earth is in the early stages of a rapidly accelerating mass extinction due to the rapacious activity of a bipedal, big-brained primate which can neither control its own population size, nor curb its bottomless appetite for greater convenience and more stuff, including other animals.These primates are only peripherally aware that their actions are wreaking such great destruction, as I shall demonstrate with this quote from The Guardian—

But the risk of extinction was found to be unevenly spread throughout the extremely diverse group of animals. According to the paper, an alarming 50% of all freshwater turtles are close to extinction, possibly because they are traded on international markets.

Possibly because these freshwater turtles are traded on international markets?

You get my point.

We are entitled to ask some simple questions about the future trajectory of this mass extinction, to wit—

What will a survey like this one find 40 or 50 years from now? That 50% of  the world's reptiles are on the verge of extinction? That almost all of the world's tortoises and freshwater turtles are gone?

Will conservationists even be doing such surveys 40 or 50 years from now? Maybe they won't be able to carry them out, or maybe they'll be saying "what's the point?"

The first video below (reptiles) has had 954 views on youtube. The second one (mass extinctions) has had 7 views.

Justin Bieber's As Long As You Love Me has had 113,827,555 views.

So please remind me now in 2013 — what's the point?

 

 

Authentic Versus False Hope

Today's Wednesday reprint is a double-feature. The first, shorter post was written on September 28, 2011, and introduces (in passing) the idea of authentic hope. The second post was written on October 15, 2012. This essay explains the difference between false, obligatory hope and authentic hope. It was a rant because I was pissed off when I wrote it, so I toned it down a bit. — Dave

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Will The Human Species Grow Up?

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

I have a message for future generations. And that is "please accept our apologies."
   —Kurt Vonnegut

When I consider the big questions, I read and speculate about astrobiology, which might be defined as "the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe." Outside the fundamental laws of physics and cosmology, that just about covers everything as far as I'm concerned. Studying astrobiology gives one the gift of perspective. Life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere, can be viewed from the proper distance and in the proper time frame. Astrobiology straddles the dance of Chance and Necessity.

I ran across a passage from a book about astrobiology which I would like to share with you today. The book is Beyond UFOs by Jeffrey Bennett. I'll comment after the excerpt.

A couple of chapters back, I offered you words from Christiaan Huygens and Carl Sagan, each explaining how new perspectives on our place in the universe should help us grow up as a civilization. But we have not grown up yet, a sad fact that we are reminded of everyday in the news, as we read about terrorists, hatred, wars, and abject poverty. A grown-up civilization would have learned to do better.

In fact, there's no guarantee that we'll ever grow up. We constantly discover new ideas and develop new technologies that could make the world a better place, but we seem as likely to put them to work for destructive as for constructive ends.

Sometimes, when I'm feeling down, I despair that as a species, we just don't care enough to realize our potential, and that centuries from now, archaeologists will sift through the ruins of our civilization and wonder what went wrong. In even deeper moments of angst, I fear that we'll do so much damage to our planet that we'll go the way of the dinosaurs, and it will be millions of years before the Earth sees another set of intelligent beings.

In these moments, I think of the art, the music, the dance, the literature, the sports, the science, and the other great things that humans have created...and I'm overcome with sadness at the thought that all would be lost forever.

I share these unhappy thoughts because I think they are important for everyone to contemplate. We need some global guilt. We need for everyone to look at the faces of children, and think about how we'll feel if they grow up in a world in which our civilization is collapsing because we, as individuals and as a society, made the wrong choices.

Sometimes, I picture future generations looking back at us, putting us on trial, and judging us for our sins. But then I remember that if we don't change, if we don't learn to grow up, there may be no future generations. There will be no one left to judge us-except perhaps God, who surely would not be pleased-so we must judge ourselves.

I think if we all take a hard look at our society today, we'll judge ourselves failures, not because we haven't done a lot of things right, but because we still do too many things wrong. It's only once we recognize our failures that we'll be able to turn them around, and prove ourselves worthy stewards of the incredible good fortune that we have inherited from generations past on this remarkable planet.

Think hard about those words—it's only once we recognize our failures that we'll be able to turn them around. In this message we find the only authentic hope the human species has. I'm well-known among the relative few who know me in life and on this blog as a pessimist, though I prefer the term realist. I often ridicule those who hold out false hopes in the face of overwhelming, relentless disasters caused by humans themselves, or as the Bennett put it, humans making the "wrong choices."

I am a realist (pessimist) because I don't think those "wrong choices" are choices at all. As I've said in the past,  Homo sapiens is a species, albeit misnamed, so what you see is what you get. And that is why in my view the one and only true Hope is very tenuous indeed. For example, will we humans stop our destruction of life in the oceans, and finally, the health of the oceans themselves? I find little convincing evidence that we will. I believe the growth urge is innate, and "harvesting" the oceans for all the animal life contained therein follows from that imperative, as does warming (and acidifying) the oceans by burning fossil fuels. Bennett refers to our "potential," but I believe that we are seeing that "potential" being played out right now in the 21st century.

Bennett says we need a sense of "global guilt." My preferred term is humility. We humans need to get realistic about our true powers and limitations pronto. Humbleness is required because, let's face it, Homo sapiens thinks it's pretty hot stuff. Our comeuppance is fast approaching, and it won't be pretty. We need to grow up, to mature as a species. I have a private visual joke I'll share with you. There's a group of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis, left) and a group of paleolithic modern humans squared off, it's a lot like high school, as so much of human life is, and the human cheerleaders are out front, chanting—

    Our team is red hot
    Your team is diddly-squat!

And of course that's precisely the way it turned out—our team won. Homo sapiens came to dominate the planet. The Neanderthals are gone. Hot stuff.

Will the human species grow up? I doubt it, but there's always that one true but very slim Hope.

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Authentic Versus False Hope

Last weekend I ran across a reference to a new PBS series called Saving The Ocean. I frequently write about human destruction of marine species and ecosystems, so I was eager to take a look at it. The first video I tried to watch was the trailer for the episodes Shark Reef and The Sacred Island. Here's the opening voice-over, the very first words I heard—

Saving The Ocean — a new kind of TV series featuring good news stories about the environment.

Stories of hope, endurance and innovation.

Oh My God! Then I watched the first few seconds of the episode Destination Baja. Host Carl Safina is narrating—

On this edition of Saving The Ocean, we're petting whales in a Mexican lagoon.

Did that man say we're petting whales? I could see immediately what we were dealing with here. Saving The Ocean is the Greatest Whitewash In Human History, the Biggest Snow Job Ever Conceived. I went over to Carl Safina's website. I found the Saving The Ocean page, where I read the following—

Join host Carl Safina as he chronicles the unsung heroes who are hard at work inventing and implementing solutions to save the world’s oceans.

Most of us have heard about the effects overfishing, pollution and industry are having on the world’s oceans.

It’s time for some good news.

Join Carl as he introduces us to marine biologists, fisheries scientists, conservationists and activists who are helping fish populations to rebound, bringing endangered species back from the brink and… creating hope for today’s oceans.

There is no hope for today's oceans! Or rather, there is no authentic hope, as I will explain. I anticipated today's post in yesterday's post Hot, Sour And Breathless. I discussed the meaning and dire implications of a prediction made by Jean-Pierre Gattuso.

By the end of the century, said French biological oceanographer Jean-Pierre Gattuso, "The oceans will become hot, sour and breathless."

I am going to assume you read that post, and my previous writings on the perilous state of the world's oceans. Yesterday's post contains tips for finding those articles.

In a word, this PBS series is despicable. The intention is to pump people full of hot air, to inflate them with what I called false hope. It is a cover-up, an attempt to preempt, downplay or undermine the urgent, alarming messages of real scientists like Jeremy Jackson and Daniel Pauly who agonize over the rapid degradation of marine ecosystems. It is a heinous lie, a whitewash.

Here's the Big Lie in Safina's text—

Most of us have heard about the effects overfishing, pollution and industry are having on the world’s oceans.

No we haven't! Americans, for whom this PBS series is surely intended, are almost completely unaware that the oceans are being destroyed to foster the endless growth of populations and economies which support unconstrained human consumption. Based on this false premise, the series will create hope for today's oceans because it's time for some good news!  In short, clueless Americans will be reassured about a problem they hardly know anything about!

I've often talked about obligatory hope on this blog. Well, Saving The Oceans is obligatory hope on steroids. This is where false hope seamlessly morphs into Pure Denial. This is why some people think Homo sapiens doesn't deserve a future, that our species will get the fate it has asked for, that our species will get its just desserts.

Let us contrast false hope with authentic hope. First off, authentic hope is the rarest thing in the world. Authentic hope demands self-knowledge from us. It demands from us that we acknowledge what we are doing to the world's oceans and all the rest of this wonderful planet. Authentic hope demands a level of self-awareness which forces us to look at our behavior and change it. Authentic hope asks us to recognize and do the right thing. In short, authentic hope seems to make impossible demands.

In the context of the oceans, we have what Garrett Hardin called A Tragedy Of The Commons. Everyone sees it as being in their best interest to exploit ocean resources before others do the same. If a few people like the Mexicans Safina interviews have figured out that it's in their best interest to preserve whales in the Mexican Baja in order to exploit them for tourism dollars, then you can be sure that untold billions of other people have "figured it out" the other way—they will take from the oceans what they want or need, heedless of the consequences. They will consume energy which emits CO₂ as a byproduct, which is absorbed by ocean waters, thereby acidifying them.

Authentic hope requires that everyone—I mean every human being, from every nation on Earth—get together or at least be faithfully represented, figure out what they are doing, recognize the destruction being wrought, and make a genuine, concerted effort to put a stop to it. Every single human being on Earth must buy into this effort to save the oceans from increasingly certain death. Those who won't buy in must be forced to cooperate.

When we put it like that, we immediately see the near impossibility of authentic hope, for the very qualities which make hope authentic are also the qualities which make it rare, if not non-existent. Humans naturally lead unexamined lives, just like the other animals. That's simply who they are, as I said in John Gray In Conversation—

What is important for our purposes is the idea—I would say the observation—that human beings live in a self-constructed world of illusions. And they will fight to the death to maintain those illusions. Gray seems to be saying that we can distinguish between the essential illusions which make human life possible and less crucial illusions we can do without. Well, let's see. Is the illusion that humans can endlessly grow populations and economies on a finite planet an essential illusion? Or is it a subsidiary illusion we can identify and do without?

I know what my answer is: it is an essential illusion because the urge to have babies and increase our material comfort is an essential part of the human animal. That's why I believe our species is doomed, regardless of whether our self-destruction occurs sooner or later...

Clearly human beings are conflicted at their core. They won't acknowledge what they are—they seem to reject it as Gray says—but more importantly for me, at all times and places human beings are being exactly who they are, regardless of what they are pretending to be. This is the one jail from which there is no escape. Or as I like to say, with Homo sapiens, what you see is what you get.

You will recognize the source of the false hopes this Saving The Ocean whitewash raises in the last paragraph.

Carl Safina and those who produced this PBS atrocity, standing in for all of humanity, want to pretend that a few "unsung heros" here and there on our troubled planet are somehow "saving" the oceans. Nothing could be further from the truth. Petting whales doesn't cut the mustard.

If false hope obliterates painful, unacceptable truths, authentic hope requires us to acknowledge those truths in order to move forward. But sad to say, authentic hope is the rarest thing in the world. Authentic hope has never been spotted in the wild, although it surfaces occasionally on the printed page.

Mysteries Of The Human Brain

Studying the human brain has been much in the news lately due to Barack Obama's mentioning it in his 2nd state of the union address. John Markoff of the New York Times gives us the details in Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain.

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness...

Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in artificial intelligence.

The project, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars, is expected to be part of the president’s budget proposal next month. And, four scientists and representatives of research institutions said they had participated in planning for what is being called the Brain Activity Map project.

The details are not final, and it is not clear how much federal money would be proposed or approved for the project in a time of fiscal constraint or how far the research would be able to get without significant federal financing.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama cited brain research as an example of how the government should “invest in the best ideas.”

“Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar,” he said. “Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.”

Well, this project is long overdue! The Brain Activity Map is yet another government-funded Big Science  project, and thus it is yet another form of stimulus designed to lift our depressed economy out of the doldrums. But that quibble aside, there are many brain mysteries to be explored, including, for example, this one—

Indeed, after the speech, Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, may have inadvertently confirmed the plan when he wrote in a Twitter message: “Obama mentions the #NIH Brain Activity Map in #SOTU.”

The mystery here is why humans continue to believe they can communicate something of importance in 140 characters or less, including spaces (" ").

But that is a trivial example. Far deeper mysteries remain to be explored. Let's look at some of them, shall we?

In this typical example, and in millions of other "zombie" cases just like it, the same neural networks—the "economic growth" circuits, the "blame the Republicans" circuits—keep firing over and over again. It's as if all the other brain circuits are dead or never used. To paraphrase Einstein, insanity is saying or doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It's as though this poor man (and many others like him) are in the grip of an overwhelming, uncontrollable obsessive-compulsive disorder. Colloquially speaking, such people are said to be "stuck in a rut".

The blind optimist presents a genuine conundrum for brain science. Although humans are generally optimistic, even in the face of overwhelming evidence confirming that Obligatory Hope is a form of self-deluson, some humans, like Matt Ridley pictured above, are so optimistic that no bad news of any kind can be countenanced. Let me put it this way—if Ridley were aboard the Titanic shortly after it collided with that iceberg, and the ship was already listing at an alarming 45° angle on its way to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, Matt would be singing the praises of Human Ingenuity, confident that the screaming people sliding off the boat might still find a way to get it upright again.

In this disturbing, profoundly mysterious example, the "higher" brain functions embodied in the cerebral cortex are entirely subservient to the reptilian/early mammalian "lower" parts of the brain, which results in an endless, insatiable, rapacious desire to fuck over other humans for personal gain. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, pictured here, is archetypal in this respect, but unfortunately, this creepy (and very dangerous) brain malfunction is more common than generally supposed. Why such people are not quickly diagnosed and subsequently locked up is another profound mystery yet to be plumbed. On the contrary, they are accorded great respect!

Here we have the most profound brain mystery of all. In this extraordinary specimen, we observe all sorts of physical activity—writing, reading, traveling, eating, drinking, you name it—but there is no discernable brain activity of any kind, as measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG) or using any other method. We can only hope that the Brain Activity Map project will eventually explain how this is possible.

These are only a few of the many examples where there is clearly a deep brain mystery to be unraveled. Perhaps we can look forward to the day—perhaps it will be their last day on Earth—when some wise members of Homo sapiens can assert with great certainty exactly why it is that humans are such astonishing fuck-ups.