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Face Of The Day

Radio presenter Dave Lee Travis arrives at Southwark Crown Court in London, England on January 15, 2014. Dave Lee Travis, whose real name is David Patrick Griffin, is charged with 14 counts of indecent assault and one of sexual assault, which allegedly took place between 1977 and 2007 against victims aged between 15 and 29. Dave Lee Travis entered a not guilty plea to the charges in October last year.  Details about today’s trial can be read here and here. By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

Clean Coal, Dirty Water, Ctd

Jedediah Purdy blames the contamination of West Virginia’s Elk River on a lack of oversight:

On the federal level, before the spill, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration hadn’t inspected Freedom Industries, and the E.P.A. seems to have left matters entirely to state officials. Attacking federal environmental regulation is regarded as a safe bet in West Virginia state politics, where the coal industry’s war on the Obama Administration has become a local insurrection. Democratic Governor Earl Ray Tomblin promised, in his last State of the State address, that he would “never back down from the E.P.A.” The state’s junior senator, Joe Manchin, a Democrat, was elected after he ran an ad in which he pumped a bullet into a copy of the (failed) 2010 cap-and-trade bill, to show his contempt for the regulation of coal. His comments on the spill have avoided talk of regulation or responsibility.

The entire crisis is a tableau of abdication: years of privatization and non-regulation followed by panic. It is an emergency, not least because inaction has insured that no one knows enough to say that it is not an emergency. The response thus far—issuing no-use orders for the water supply and mobilizing the national guard to distribute household water—is one of minimal government.

Meanwhile, Republicans have been busy gutting the Clean Water Act:

In a week when the contamination of a major West Virginia river has served as a painful reminder of how little clean water is left in the strip-mined state, Republicans pushed policies that would further endanger water quality. It’s a timely issue right now: The Environmental Protection Agency is in the midst of trying to clarify how much jurisdiction it has over small streams and wetlands, many of which are used for drinking water in rural communities. (In West Virginia, such streams have often been dirtied past the point of use thanks to mountain top removal and mining waste.) The think thank the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) assembled a list of environmental riders proposed by the GOP this summer. Many concern water. One, NRDC warns, “would permanently prohibit EPA from clarifying which streams and wetlands are protected by the Clean Water Act”; another would “block the Department of Interior (DOI) from enforcing safeguards designed to protect streams from pollution from surface coal mining.”

Poverty Is Bad For Your Health

No shit:

The basic idea is that people struggling to make it paycheck-to-paycheck (or benefits-to-benefits) might run out of money at the end of the month—and have to cut back on food. If they have diabetes, this hunger could turn into an even more severe health problem: low blood sugar. So we should expect a surge of hypoglycemia cases at the end of each month for low-income people, but not for anybody else.

That’s what researchers found when they looked at the numbers for California between 2000 and 2008. As you can see in their chart [seen above], low-income people (red line) were <27 percent more likely to be hospitalized for hypoglycemia in the last week of the month than in the first. There was no week-to-week difference for high-income people (orange line). …

Okay, but isn’t it possible that poorer people just tend to be less healthy in general?

Sure. That’s why the researchers also looked at when people go the hospital for appendicitis, which doesn’t depend on diet. So there shouldn’t be any end-of-the-month increase for low-income people if tight budgets are the problem. There wasn’t. As you can see above, appendicitis cases were flat across the month for both high (blue) and low (purple) income people. In other words, poorer people don’t need more care at the end of the month for every kind of condition. Just the ones that get worse when you don’t have enough to eat.

Adrianna McIntyre sees this study as an example of what gets ignored in our health policy debate:

Policy wonks have a terrible habit of focusing on insurance and health system design (and here I count myself, because health care financing is the research I find most interesting, so it’s what I write about). This gives short shrift to the “social determinants” of health—upstream factors related to lifestyle, environment, and socioeconomic status—that cannot be corrected by medical interventions. We’re fond of highlighting how much more the United States spends on health services, but an idiosyncrasy that receives less attention is how much less we spend on other social services.

The View From Your Window

Asheville, North Carolina, 7.55 am

Schopenhauer On The Age Of Sponsored Content, Ctd

Scott Horton recently snagged an interview with the reclusive, ornery philosopher I mentioned today. It’s a beaut. Question 6 is on writing for money. But the questions on Nietzsche, and racism get some fascinating answers.

Quote For The Day

“It all makes sense now. Gay marriage and marijuana are being legalized at the same time. Leviticus 20:13 says that if a man lays with another man, he should be stoned. We were just misinterpreting it,” – CertifiedFunny.com.

Egypt Votes On A New Constitution… Again

Juan Cole takes a look at the contents of the charter that Egyptians have been voting on yesterday and today:

The constitution itself forbids torture and allows citizens to sue the police. If the provision is actually implementing, it seems to me Egyptians would have more rights in these regards than Americans. It gets rid of the clause that makes the al-Azhar Seminary the arbiter of Islamic law incorporated into state practices, which had been a step toward an Iran-style theocracy. It guarantees freedom of belief (the Coptic church is backing it). It is good on the rights of children. While it gives the army 8 years in which the civilian government can’t interfere much with it, that provision was in the Morsi constitution, too.

But constitutions are only as good as their implementation. Some Egyptians have argued that the interim government has overstepped its authority with its anti-protest law and ban on the Muslim Brotherhood, and that the anti-protest law, at least, is unconstitutional by the text of the new constitution. About that, we’ll see.

Manal Omar gauges the mood of voters in Cairo:

The two-day referendum, which began Tuesday, Jan. 14, is widely seen as an opportunity to end — or at least mitigate — the political debates that have been threatening to rip Egypt apart. The country has been deeply polarized since July 3, 2013, when the military deposed President Mohamed Morsi. The previous constitution was suspended, and a new road map for a political transition, led by a military-appointed government, was established. This government, which has banned the previously ruling Muslim Brotherhood and cracked down on street protesters, wrote the newly proposed constitution. The document incorporates more rights and freedoms than the last constitution, but it also guarantees greater autonomy for the military, still affirms principles of Islamic law as the main sources of legislation, limits the establishment of trade unions to one per profession, and leaves room for civilians to be tried in military courts — all causes of popular discontent.

Yet in voting, many people I spoke to said their primary interest is not in enacting a particular government charter; rather, it is in finding a way to move the country forward and to bring attention back to the much-needed social and economic reforms that inspired the 2011 revolution. Which is to say, they just want to get past it. Everyone also seemed to silently acknowledge the elephant sitting in the polling rooms: A no vote is not even an option.

Maher Hamoud doesn’t see any good coming of the referendum:

That this constitution will pass is a foregone conclusion. It is a fact that will not necessarily bring the much-mentioned stability, but it will provide the military, Mubarak loyalists and the business elite with what they wanted: power, protection and a “democratic” mask to show to international players. We have to remember that no ruler in Egypt since the mid-1970s has been able to afford being an enemy of the US or the west in general (and vice-versa).

But stability? The Muslim Brotherhood is not a small faction, and radical Islamist groups will not let bringing down the only Islamist model, which they did not necessarily like, go unpunished. The political roadmap will continue, the military will retain power (constitutionally this time) either directly or behind a civilian façade. But before we know it stability will be advocated again in another campaign, once people have realised for the third time that the revolution’s goal of freedom and social justice is not yet on anyone’s political agenda.

Steven A. Cook, meanwhile, begs Sisi not to run for president:

[L]arge numbers of Egyptians—with the encouragement of elites associated with the old order and important parts of the media—seem inclined toward an al-Sisi presidency. People are convincing themselves that Egypt needs a strong personality, if only temporarily, to put the country back on track.  They are comforted by the fact that the new constitution, which is up for referendum today and Wednesday, sets term-limits for the president to two, four-year terms.  This is an improvement in a country that has had problems with the overwhelming power of the executive, but observers should know that  1) presidential political systems are prone to the accumulation of power in the office of the presidency, and 2) there are reasons to doubt the durability of the term limits   After all, Anwar Sadat did away with them in 1980 when they became inconvenient.  The July 3 coup set a precedent that the political institutions of the state could be ignored, if powerful people and their allies agree that it is convenient to do so. One can easily imagine a scenario in which authorities override term limits in some way—security conditions, for example—to allow al-Sisi to remain in office. Another president for life is clearly not what Egypt needs.

(Photo: An Egyptian man has on his chest a portrait of Egypt’s Defense Minister General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with a slogan in Arabic reading ‘I vote for the loin of Egypt for the presidency’ outside a polling station during the vote on a new constitution on January 14, 2014 in Cairo. By Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images)

Is Richard Dawkins Growing Up?

The FSM slayer turns to essentialism:

If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor, and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant. If you think, following the dictionary definition of essentialism, that the essence of rabbitness is “prior to” the existence of rabbits (whatever “prior to” might mean, and that’s a nonsense in itself) evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.

Paleontologists will argue passionately about whether a particular fossil is, say, Australopithecus or Homo. But any evolutionist knows there must have existed individuals who were exactly intermediate. It’s essentialist folly to insist on the necessity of shoehorning your fossil into one genus or the other. There never was an Australopithecus mother who gave birth to a Homo child, for every child ever born belonged to the same species as its mother. The whole system of labeling species with discontinuous names is geared to a time slice, the present, in which ancestors have been conveniently expunged from our awareness (and “ring species” tactfully ignored).

Phil Burton-Cartledge wonders if this could mark a new direction for the New Atheist:

Dawkins’ contemplative position sets up an opposition, a rigid distinction between believers of whatever creed, and the godless. Being unbelieving is a matter of personal growth, of intellectual and mental maturity, of possessing reasonable and rational-critical faculties. One might observe that this idealist position lapses into essentialist thinking. It’s not that all religious people are unintelligent, but clearly on some level they’re all stupid, or so the assumption goes.

Regardless of what one thinks of Dawkins, whether one hangs on his every dot and comma or takes a more critical stance, his choice to dump essentialism is an interesting one as binning it means breaking with a component of his own philosophical atheism. Hopefully some fresh, more interesting thinking through of religion and atheism is just around the corner.

In thinking about religion in a non-essentialist fashion, I’ve found myself having to be more nuanced than I once was. I now see more clearly that the forms that religion takes can be as important as the doctrinal content, that there are, yes, varieties of religious experience, and that the distinction between faith as a relationship with doubt as opposed to faith as a relationship with total certainty is a real, if still crude one, and that between a lived faith and a neurotic fundamentalism even more critical to understanding our current world.

If Dawkins’ opposition to essentialism is real, he may begin to accept that treating all religion as the same essential thing is far too crude to add much light, rather than heat, to the conversation. For another nuanced take on the varieties of religious experience in modernity, I highly recommend Ross Douthat’s stimulating blog post here.

The Racial Injustice Of The Drug War

Serwer passes along the above chart on marijuana arrests:

Although marijuana use among blacks and whites is about the same, according to a 2013 report by the ACLU, blacks are almost four times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. This startling graph from the report tells the story … As Michelle Alexander notes in her book, The New Jim Crow, the consequences of being convicted of felony marijuana possession can be far more dire than the sentence itself. Former offenders can find themselves deprived of professional or driver’s licenses, educational aid, food stamps, public housing, their right to vote, and they may find themselves fired and unable to find new employment, having been marked by society as little more than a criminal. For blacks caught up in the system it can compound the already considerable effects of ongoing racial discrimination.

Goldblog, in a hilarious and humane column, gets this core issue:

The disparity in arrest rates between white and black pot-users is the most interesting aspect of this debate.

Federal statistics show that in 2010, blacks were almost four times as likely as whites to be arrested on possession charges. For most whites, pot was long ago de facto decriminalized. This double standard is one of the most obvious reasons I know for moving toward comprehensive decriminalization. One might argue that the double standard could be dealt with by enforcing possession laws more stringently in white communities. But good luck with that. In reality, here on Earth, that isn’t going to happen, mainly because whites in power would never allow their children to be exposed to the criminal justice system in that way.

Conor reframes the debate:

There are times when locking human beings in cages is morally defensible. If, for example, a person commits murder, rape, or assault, transgressing against the rights of others, forcibly removing him from society is the most just course of action. In contrast, it is immoral to lock people in cages for possessing or ingesting a plant that is smoked by millions every year with no significant harm done, especially when the vast majority of any harm actually done is born by the smoker.

That there are racial disparities in who is sent to prison on marijuana charges is an added injustice that deserves attention. But if blacks and whites were sent to prison on marijuana charges in equal proportion, jail for marijuana would still be immoral.

I couldn’t agree more. So far, now that the debate has finally crept away from the blogosphere and into the boomer pundit organs, the debate has not been exactly even, has it? The Prohibitionists have got close to nothing in their defense.

The Beat Of A Different Drummer

Killian Young captions a inspiring short film, Drummer Wanted:

Rick Abbott, bandmate of drummer Dean Zimmer, says their band has opened for Thin Lizzy, Foghat and Styx. But Zimmer is no ordinary drummer. Zimmer has arthrogryposis, a rare congenital disorder that makes it difficult to move his joints, according to the Los Angeles Times. Despite being restricted to a wheelchair, Zimmer pursued his dream to be a drummer. In fact, due to his limited range of motion, his drumming style maximizes efficiency.