Monday AM further

Monday May 13, 2009

. . . .Further on Monday A.M.

. . . .Good morning, playlist and podcast are activated again this AM. If you want to watch the videos that I put up over the weekend whilst everyone was having a Saturday night and doing Mother's Day, go up to the upper left hand side of the page you're on here, look at the little podcast player called Podbean, and in the narrow bar near the top there are 3 small green buttons, click the middle one to pause the podcast, and that way you can either read in silence or play the videos below without crossfeed. And remember just subscribe to this column as an RSS feed, and you get the music that I play every day and capture it as an MP3 file. And remember that the previous 30 days worth of columns is all available down below, so you can get caught up.

. . . . .From this morning's New York Times, Paul Krugman, one of the economists who has been right all along and a progressive, liberal critic of the Administration weighs in with his opinion of the news announced yesterday and today about the policy work being done on health-care. His opinion? Solid praise for the Administration, Orszag, the budget director and the health care industry trade associations that are trying to hammer out a policy.

The signatories of the letter say that they’re developing proposals to help the administration achieve its goal of shaving 1.5 percentage points off the growth rate of health care spending. That may not sound like much, but it’s actually huge: achieving that goal would save $2 trillion over the next decade.

How are costs to be contained? There are few details, but the industry has clearly been reading Peter Orszag, the budget director.

In his previous job, as the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Orszag argued that America spends far too much on some types of health care with little or no medical benefit, even as it spends too little on other types of care, like prevention and treatment of chronic conditions. Putting these together, he concluded that “substantial opportunities exist to reduce costs without harming health over all.”

Sure enough, the health industry letter talks of “reducing over-use and under-use of health care by aligning quality and efficiency incentives.” It also picks up a related favorite Orszag theme, calling for “adherence to evidence-based best practices and therapies.” All in all, it’s just what the doctor, er, budget director ordered.

. . . .More on the developing policy here.

. . . .And of course, the nutjobs on the extreme Right who want to see America fail, so they can become a ruling class have stepped into this one too already. Click here to see this one from The Washington Post describes how the same folks who "swiftboated" John Kerry are stepping it up on health-care reform already.

. . . .Former National Security Adviser Richard Clarke this morning on a subject near and dear to my heart, how to operate as a Nation and a National Entity in the cyber-world:

The reasons that this decision is important have been spread across the media this last month. Among the facts revealed are that foreign intelligence services have penetrated the control systems of the US electric power grid and have left behind "logic bombs" and "trap doors;" data about America's latest fighter aircraft, the F-35 Lightning II, has been copied off the networks of defense contractors and sent overseas; the Pentagon plans to appoint a new four star general to run a new Cyber Command based on the National Security Agency (NSA); and a National Academy of Sciences blue ribbon panel has urged caution about the US engaging in offensive cyber war.

. . . . .Gary Sargent, over at Who Runs Gov, a Washington Post cybersite puts this one up this morning, and it appears that the White House will release the "holy grail" of torture memos, thus granting Dick Cheney his wish, and I don't think this is going to turn out the way Mr. Cheney envisions it:

Government officials familiar with the CIA’s early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the “top secret” May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents. The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month’s release of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos…

Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks,” according to the Justice Department’s declassified summary of it.

. . . . .From the Daily Beast today, this one here that breaks news of a new study, a respected one that suggests that those with disorders in the autism-specturm do not lack empathy, but in fact, the root cause of what goes on with them may be the fact that they empathize with others too much, feel others emotions too deeply to cope.

. . . . .4 very different visions of an alternate reality: Wolverine X-Men Origins - Star Trek - Terminator: Salvation - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Which one would you choose, which one is more "real" to you, which is the one that you'd wish the world would be. All 4 are actually quite different in their vision of reality, and the answers you give are quite telling.

. . . . .From Nicholas Ciarelli, a new search engine launching this month, may well kill Google, and is one of those unique singularities (see my earlier entries this month on chaos theory, nodal points and unique points that change everything) that may completely change the way we use the Internet and World-Wide Web

Step away from your Google search for a moment and consider the following scenario: What if a search engine, instead of giving you a long list of Web pages, simply computed the answer to whatever question you threw at it?

. . . . Part 3 of the NPR Series on upgrading the national electrical grid:

To create a new energy economy using much more solar and wind power, the Obama administration needs to build thousands of miles of new transmission lines. Despite the promise that these are needed to get more green energy from solar and wind generators, the proposal faces a host of obstacles.

Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council and an advocate of renewable energy, points out that new transmission lines may not be dedicated just to "green" electrons.

"There is a real potential that what you are expanding is the capacity to move coal-fired electrons," says Miller, "and that the cheapest power supplies, which are the dirtiest plants, will have access to markets they didn't use to."

And here's something else to consider: Does everyone really want renewable energy brought in from distant producers over power lines subsidized by the federal government?

Maybe not, says Ian Bowles, the energy secretary for Massachusetts. Bowles says that might undercut homegrown wind projects in New England. "When you decide upfront [that] transmission is the problem, you've put your hand on the scale and said, 'We want to help out particularly those remote sources of wind and green electricity.' "

The man picked by President Obama to resolve these questions is Jon Wellinghoff, the new chairman at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

"I think everybody has to play ball," Wellinghoff says. "I think that we have to realize that we're all in this together, and that nationally, we do have a huge problem."

In Whose Backyard?

Wellinghoff says local and state politics can be daunting. "You have to do siting. Where are they going to go? And that's where you get very contentious," he says. "In whose backyard are you going to run the line?"

For a power line to cross 10 states, each of those states must approve that siting.

Wellinghoff hopes he'll soon have the authority to overrule states if they balk. FERC had that power until recently when a federal court took it away, and now the Senate Energy Committee is writing a bill that would give it back to FERC. The bill has strong support from members of Congress who want to see a new grid built quickly.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu says that no matter how much authority it has, the Energy Department shouldn't play the bully by simply declaring eminent domain when it wants to build a new line. He says states and citizens have to be partners, and enjoy some of the benefits.

"If you just go in and say, 'I'm going to pass a law that has a huge stick,' " Chu says, "what will invariably happen is that you end up in lawsuits."

Among these uncertainties, one thing is sure — making the grid smarter and greener will cost a huge amount of money. Chu says that could be well over $100 billion over several decades.

Reid Detchon, director of the Energy Future Coalition advocacy group, says Americans have paid big money for a collective benefit before.

"If you accept that there's a national objective here, just as we did with the national highway system, then you create the national authority to expedite that at the federal level," Detchon says.

Eventually, that national authority will have to decide who's going to pay for the new grid.

. . . . .What I hope that the recent, (and still current) fears and warnings about the H1N1 virus really tell us is that it just isn't a good damn idea to cram birds or pigs in together so closely in our factory farming in an effort to increase our "efficiency" at food production. Did some research and pulled this "old" Rolling Stone investigative piece out from 1998:

We have been living in a tenuous stasis with influenza for 30 years. Every 12 months or so, a slightly new variant of the flu virus circles the globe, bringing illness and death to a relative few. That's because most of the population is already immune to enough of what remains, genetically speaking, of the previous year's strain. During this "interpandemic" phase, as scientists call it, about 10 to 20 percent of the population contracts the illness each flu season, which reaches its peak in January and February in the Northern Hemisphere. One percent of those who get the flu are hospitalized; 8 percent of all hospitalized flu patients die — about 20,000 Americans annually, most of them elderly. The cause of death is typically flu-induced viral pneumonia.

Eventually, however, an "antigenic shift" will occur, producing a superflu — a strain to which no one has immunity — and initiating a pandemic with unknown consequences. The passage of 30 years without a pandemic suggests to some experts that we are long overdue.

"We all have the emotional sense that we've been lucky so far," says Stephen Morse, director of the Program in Emerging Diseases at Columbia University's School of Public Health. "And I think everyone feels that, you know, it's there — it's brewing. What's tragic is that we cannot predict it?. We're all waiting."

One of the more remarkable aspects of the influenza virus is the way it jumps between species, often from the world's waterfowl population — which is considered by many scientists to be influenza's primary reservoir — into other animals and human beings, forming new recombinant viruses along the way. For this reason, influenza will never be eradicated. And given the speed with which dangerous new flu strains can evolve, most scientists consider existing flu surveillance, which includes 110 sites in 79 countries, to be grossly inadequate.

. . . .That's why I consider the CDC's refusal to accept disease surveillance data from this company, Veratect, almost criminally negligent. This is cutting edge stuff these guys are doing, monitoring almost 10,000 news feeds simultaneously, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc and doing data-mining, then analysis, all based on what people are putting out into cyberspace, kind of a macro iReporting, like CNN's effort, only a larger scale.

. . . .Saw the new Star Trek, way, way over the top and incredibly geeky cool. I cried at the end when You-Know-Who's voice did the ageless "These are the voyages. . . ." voiceover. Can't give away any plot for those who haven't seen it, but trust me, Zachary Quinto will never need to be Sylar again in his life. Just as Leonard Nimoy became Spock, Zachary is a worthy replacement, and it's the part he was born to play.

. . . .Outta here, I'll continue to update throughout the day. Kiss you kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do, seize the precious moments before they slip through your hands, this rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one gets out alive, so it's not about yesterday or tomorrow, but right frickin' here and now, this ain't no dress rehearsal, so get up off your butt and go do something.

The Desolation Angel
[where: Hell, Michigan]