Strategic options for climate change mitigation

One of my favorite graphics of climate change solutions:

A party line vote on health care IS a political consensus

NYTimes.com:

"WASHINGTON — A party-line Senate committee vote on legislation to remake the nation’s health care system underscored the absence of political consensus on what would be the biggest changes in social policy in more than 40 years."

Actually, a party-line vote is reflective of a political consensus - that 72% of Americans (and 50% of Republicans) support a health care plan with a publicly-run option to compete with the private sector.

When one party is completely out of touch with America, you can have a political consensus on a party line vote.

Open a Banana Like A Monkey

Watch what you watch

Lifehacker: "One test found that children aged 7 to 11 who watched a half-hour cartoon that included food commercials ate 45 percent more snack food while watching the show than children who watched the same cartoon with non-food commercials."

If this holds true for other things advertised, I must buy an unholy amount of home improvement material and carpet when I watch baseball.

Government already pays the plurality of medical bills

For those who hate "socialized medicine," there seems to be An unknown country:

It’s a country where there is, indeed, a substantial private health insurance industry, which pays 35 percent of medical bills. But the government pays a larger share — 46 percent. (Most of the rest is out-of-pocket spending.) The country is called the United States of America.

An army of $

MinnPost:

"When, why, and how did the United States of America become the land of mercenaries?"

This is a great essay that looks at the challenge of meeting our military goals with a volunteer army (conclusion: we don't, but we pay a lot of mercenaries to fill the gap).

Speaking of public > private

Paul Krugman once again illustrates how government kicks the private sector's ass on health care Administrative costs.

the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found that administrative costs under the public Medicare plan are less than 2 percent of expenditures, compared with approximately 11 percent of spending by private plans under Medicare Advantage. This is a near perfect “apples to apples” comparison of administrative costs, because the public Medicare plan and Medicare Advantage plans are operating under similar rules and treating the same population.

And in case that simple-yet-true explanation is insufficient, Krugman provided more context for his comparison in a later blog post.

Might private, not public, be the dirty word?

An interesting look at the knee-jerk love of the private sector, even when the public sector cleans its clock, from David Morris:

"Today 'private' has become a positive, even boosterish word, while 'public' carries a shady undertone. 'Private sector' has become synonymous with efficiency and innovation, while 'public sector' connotes bloat and unresponsiveness, even corruption"

...Everywhere we look it is the private, not the public, that has proven bloated, inefficient and corrupt.

July 4th Air Quality alert

Judging by the air in my town, thisState Advisory Issued in Advance of July 4th Fireworks Displays would have been warranted here, too.

Seriously, folks, just go watch the city display and give it a rest.

Why its time for the EPA to look at endocrine disrupters

Or, as Kristof puts it, It’s Time to Learn From Frogs:

In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip.

Click for more on endocrine disrupters.

Supreme Court finds discrimiation against white firefighters

This decision could have long-lasting impacts on the ability of public and private entities to use affirmative action or other techniques to keep their workforce diverse. Check out the excellent analysis from the SCOTUSblog

This is no time to balance budgets

That ’30s Show: Paul Krugman is noting that during the depression, hints of recovery led FDR to cave to budget hawks, leading to a plunge back into depression.

"just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda."

Krugman's analysis is that we not only need to stay the course, but increase the stimulus. The math makes sense. The first stimulus saved 3.5 million jobs, but we're in an 8.5 million job hole. There's a lot of ground left to cover.

Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week?

A fascinating study reported on in the Well Blog, examining how short bursts of intense activity can have as much of a physical health improvement (by some measures) as long activity.

I thought it interesting what they said about running:

There’s a catch, though. Those six minutes, if they’re to be effective, must hurt. “We describe it as an ‘all-out’ effort,” Gibala says. You’ll be straying “well out of your comfort zone.” That level of discomfort makes some activities better-suited to intense training than others. “We haven’t studied runners,” Gibala says. The pounding involved in repeated sprinting could lead to injuries, depending on a runner’s experience and stride mechanics. But cycling and swimming work well. [emphasis mine]