I spent a lot of time on The Incidental Economist recently—it was wonderfully informative. One fact from Dr. Aaron Carroll’s excellent How Do We Rate the Quality of the US Health Care System—Population Statistics [1] stood out to me, although it wasn’t mentioned in the article or the comments: the trend lines make the US look even worse. Population statistics are usually dismissed as indicative of the quality of a country’s healthcare system because so many things affect them. I can understand this: there might be some genetic or lifestyle causes for one country’s being better than another. But looking at the trends tend to remove this objection. Over the last 20 years, most of the countries have improved more than the United States.

Take, for example, the “Life Expectancy” chart:

All of the countries have had fairly linear increases, yet the increase for the US is smaller. Thus we see two countries that had roughly equal life expectancies in 1990, now have values over two years greater than the US. (The colors on the chart make it difficult to determine which country is which—especially Italy and UK.) Even Japan, which starts 3.5 years ahead, ends almost 5 years ahead. I don’t see how this can be brushed off as genetics or lifestyle.

We see much the same thing with infant deaths, but it is more interesting to look at the changing trends:

In this case, it is stark. The US (along with Canada—I think) looks very much like it is bottoming out. Virtually all of the change occurred between 1990 and 2000. Any change since then looks like noise. Again: I can’t think of anything but our healthcare system to explain this.

The number of maternal deaths speaks for itself. Other than France, all other nations look like random noise about the 5 death mean. There are some small trends before 2000, but since then: zip. The US looks as if some fundamental change occurred in the system (again) around 2000.

The “Potential Years of Life Lost” chart seems the most damning of all the charts, just on its face:

The trends make it even worse. The only country with a smaller trend is Japan, and it isn’t by much. Most of the countries have lowered the number of deaths by roughly one graph line (1750 deaths); the US has lowered it 2/3; Japan, 3/5. As seen before, most of the change for the US was in the first half of the period. After 2000, there is the smallest of trends.

Although population statistics may not show that the US is doing a poor job regarding healthcare, the trends certainly do. Life is getting better in other countries at a faster rate than in the US.

[1] All the charts in this article are from Dr. Carroll’s article.

From time to time, Paul Krugman reminds his readers not to use naughty words in comments:

I couldn’t stop myself from providing the following cheeky comment:

David Schwartz writes about The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths:

I quite agree, but to really understand what is going on in present-day America—where we have nothing short of a protofascist state—you must read two books:

Conservatives Without Conscience

John Dean’s excellent book about authoritarianism in the Republican Party.

The Psychopath Test

Jon Ronson’s disturbing look at the psychopaths who run our world.

Ronson presents statistics that show that 1% of the population are psychopaths while 4% of the CEOs of major corporations are. I think we can assume the same can be said of politicians. Dean’s analysis looks at authoritarian leaders and followers and finds much the same thing. It doesn’t matter what system you use to describe it: the world is not run by the good. Much less great:

I’ve been editing the first act of the Post-Post Modern Comedy Hour this evening. It involves an old man (someone like me) racing a college sprinter. I was going to use the 50-meter dash, but there doesn’t seem to be much of that, so I changed it to the 100-meter dash. In my research, I came upon the current world record holder in this event, Usain Bolts. He ran 100 meters in just 9.58 seconds. Watch his performance in the video below. He is third from the right and the interesting thing is that he doesn’t seem graceful at all. In fact, at the beginning of the race, he almost seems like he is going to fall down. Then he just powers past the other racers. It is amazing to watch.

I could provide better video, but the two best don’t allow embedding. What is going on here! But if you like Queen, you’ll like this one the best anyway.

Update

This is not the event when Bolts beat the world record at 9:58—although I think it is one of the several times he’s beaten the world record. You can see that on the Universal Sports Channel if you want to see it. The race here is actually more exciting—probably because he is racing against a better field on the video I’ve linked to.

When reading the likes of Paul Johnson, William F. Buckley, or even David Brooks, it is easy to get so caught up in the eloquence of the writing and ostentatious erudition, that one misses the distortions (and sometimes plain lies) and specious arguments. It doesn’t take much of a leap to conclude that the well-written, pointedly erudite presentation is intended as a smokescreen for what are almost always poor arguments.

I was in San Francisco today, so I grabbed a copy of The San Francisco Examiner. My reason for picking it up was the hope that it contained a Sudoku puzzle. It did. But before I got to it, I read the whole paper.

The Cover Story

The cover story was about a court’s finding that Judge Walker—who overturned the intolerant Prop. 8 banning gay married—needn’t have recused himself from the trial. Gay rights opponents claimed that Walker could not be impartial because he was gay. How a heterosexual person would be any more even-handed is not clear. But many things are unclear from the article. Most of it puts forth the anti-Walker case: fags can’t be objective about fag things. The article spends much more time presenting and sanitizing this objection. It ends with two paragraphs about how two different groups are planning to appeal the ruling. (To be fair, the article does describe the pro-Walker argument. It is done well, but isn’t the core of the article.)

The rest of the issue is typical local news and the usual AP stories you would think would be written locally: an article about the California budget and a surprisingly thoughtful article about Schwarzenegger’s sex scandal. It is only when we get the editorial page that things take on a very bad turn.

The Editorial Page

Of the four major editorials, all but one written by people on the staff at The Weekly Standard. The first, unattributed article is, “Four Pivotal Questions for Tim Geithner.” The article is riddled with Republican talking points designed to scare rather than enlighten. The author makes the argument that since bond prices haven’t gone up in the face of threats not to increase the debt ceiling, there must be no problem—preposterous. He also slams Obama for saying Chrysler paid back the bailout when they have not yet paid back money Bush loaned. Not really the same thing, right? Just a commentator going out of his way to find fault? You bet.

Then we get to the Weekly Standard guys. David Gelernter writes, “Ryan must get to the point.” From the title you would think the article is critical of the Representative. Instead, it says what Ryan has said ad nauseum, that people don’t like his program because they don’t understand it. Quite the opposite is true; the better people understand his plan, the more they hate it. It is, after all, a way of taking benefits away from the poor and middle-class to give giant tax-cuts for the wealthy.

Lee Smith ends his article, “Israel may be drawn into the turmoil of violent Arab spring.” Here he presents a surprisingly clear statement of the racism in the USA that defines Israel as good and Palestine as bad: “The problem is the character of the societies that gives rise to these regimes.” Additionally, he finds we can only refer to the peace process by putting the phrase itself in scare quotes: “peace process.”

Finally, we get to the big guns of William Kristol and Jamie M. Fly (of the Foreign Policy Institute). They wrote an article called, “Panetta’s duty to the Constitution.” I find it ironic that Kristol only seems concerned about the Constitution when Democrats are in charge. The article itself has little to say other than to warn Panetta to uphold the Constitution. What does that mean? Give defense as much money as they want.

I’m not surprised to find The Examiner nothing more than a mouthpiece for the right wing. It has taken me this long to read it in its current form because its covers are visually obnoxious: what I would expect from the New York Post or the National Enquirer. They are clearly going after the lowest instincts of the public.

Not a Total Loss

But then, I wasn’t after news. Unfortunately, the Sudoku puzzle I sought was also disappointing. It was very easy, as one might expect. It did, however, offer an interesting moment. I got a good ten minutes out of it. So the experience wasn’t a complete loss.

Yesterday, I wrote a short article about how his name ought to be pronounced, Anthony Weiner Pronounces Name Wrong. I did not talk about the political aspects of the sexless sex scandal he is now in the middle of. There isn’t much I have to say on the subject, except this: the scandal is over. The continued interest in the case (it is the number one story on Google News, as I write this) is disgusting. Unless reporters can show that Weiner did something other than what he claimed in his press conference, they are only showing their own lewdness. There is no news in publishing the private conversations with these women. Even the information that Weiner’s wife is pregnant is irrelevant to the scandal.

The fact that reporters are allowing the Republicans to get any traction on this issue is itself lewd. The only story here is the unabashed hypocrisy of this cult masquerading as a political party. They are allowed to push this story above the fold on the first page, and thus take attention off their dangerous antics over the debt limit. If this is what we get from the fourth estate, perhaps we are better off without it.

I read the most amazing thing in The Chronicle today, “Six percent of Americans over 18 have sent a nude or near-nude image of themselves to someone else and 15 percent have received one, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.” I’ll have to think about this more, but off hand, it would appear that on average, every person who sends a naked (or nearly so) picture of themselves, sends one to 2.5 people. Does this mean people are 2.5 times as likely to be voyeurs (perhaps unwilling ones) as exhibitionists?

First, check out this segment:

I think her rankings in the “Post-Bill Clinton Modern American Political Sex-Scandal Consequence-O-Meter” are wrong. In particular, she seems to have a real problem with prostitution and thinks that it alone makes something creepy and prosecutable. For example, she finds David Vitter and Eliot Spitzer, who only had adulterous, consensual sex with prostitutes, very creepy and prosecutable—far more creepy and prosecutable than Larry Craig, who was trying to have sex in a public restroom. Personally, I find people trying find sexual partners in airport bathrooms far more creepy than a man paying a prostitute for sex—and this has nothing to do with the homosexuality Craig’s act. I can see that Vitter deserves to be higher on the creepy scale than Spitzer (and he isn’t), given the great hypocrisy of his behavior. But Craig shares this hypocrisy with Vitter—in fact, Craig’s hypocrisy is probably worse.

And there is the case of Mark Sanford. I understand that the guy cheated on his wife and it shows hypocrisy. But the man was in love. Screwing around behind your wife’s back is bad, but it is hard to find a man falling in love with another woman all that creepy. As creepy as Larry Craig? I don’t think so. She also places him far lower on the prosecutable scale as the details of his misuse of funds shows. They are far worse than anything John Edwards did, who she maxes out on both scales. I disagree with her about how creepy his affair was, too. I don’t think that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sex scandal is all that creepy. I guess I just don’t find guys having affairs all that creepy. They do it all the time.

Finally, we come to Anthony Weiner, who Maddow places low on the prosecutable scale, but rather high on the creepy scale. I do think it’s a little creepy. It is more creepy than Spitzer, surely. But it is certainly less creepy than a married, anti-gay rights politician actively seeking gay sex in a public bathroom. Let’s not forget here that Weiner did not actually have any sex. This is basically all about online flirting. Much ado about nothing? Very little anyway. I’m not really sure what the whole point of this segment was, except to bring up all the major sex scandals of the past few years. So it isn’t just that Maddow is wrong; she is also disappointing; she is better than this.

Update

On the next day’s broadcast, Maddow claimed (rightly) that Mark Sanford’s and John Ensign’s transgressions were worst than Anthony Weiner’s. But the day before, she placed Sanford below Weiner on her creep scale. Ensign was only slightly higher. What’s with that?

Rachel Maddow is a very silly woman. I don’t know how she ever got a news show, but I’m glad she did.