They say that “dog bites man” is not news.

Au contraire: “Chirac Mauled by Clinically Depressed Poodle.”

Matt Yglesias is befuddled that Michael Bloomberg is ineligible for re-election as NYC mayor:

It really does seem a bit odd that a mayor with a 67 percent approval rating should be forced from office because of a term limits law. I suppose I understand the theory that presidential-level term limits serve as a check on tyranny, but there doesn’t seem to me to be a good reason to worry about that at the local level of government.

One could point to the Daley Machine in Chicago or William “Boss” Tweed and Tamanny Hall as obvious counterpoints.

State and local politics is by no means my expertise; I had one undergraduate course on the subject and have followed it much more peripherally than I have national and international affairs.  My sense, though, is that mayors, especially big city mayors, get re-elected almost automatically and they have far more ability to hand out spoils than do presidents.

Indeed, despite it being theoretically and logically true that local government is closer to the people and therefore more closely watched, the opposite is clearly true.  After all, virtually everyone knows the name of the president, the president’s wife, the president’s kids, the president’s pets, and the names of major candidates for president and the names of their wives.  Not so much their local mayor or city councilmen.

Ezra Klein jumps on a growing meme the home ownership isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and that the government should stop subsidizing it.

He points to Paul Krugman, who argues in today’s NYT that it’s time to rethink our decades-long bipartisan consensus that home ownership should be encouraged. While everyone stresses the advantages of owning your own home, like building equity and creating a stake in one’s community, not enough emphasis is placed on the disadvantages.

• If housing prices fall, you can lose money

• The cost and difficulty of selling a house makes it harder to move for a new job

• If gas prices suddenly double and you live a long way from work, it sucks

That’s really only two reasons, since the last merely restates the third: Owing ties you down.

Not mentioned in Krugman’s column, but more certain than the others:

• When you own your own home, you’re responsible for maintenance and will inevitably spend much more in “upgrades” than if you rent.

Anyway, I see from Ezra’s “link blog” that James Surowiecki wrote almost exactly the same article for the New Yorker back in March. Better yet, Andrew Oh-Willeke wrote all of this in a May 2006 blog post, before the subprime lending crisis hit, putting him way ahead of the curve.

Klein, Surowiecki, and Oh-Willeke all note that easy lending exacerbated these issues, since so many people are now mortgaged up to their eyeballs, buying ever-bigger homes, and now feeling the crunch as the economy has slowed down. Back in the days when one had to put 20 percent or more down to buy a home, people were much more insulated from these effects.

Ezra argues, “[T]oday, owning a home looks a whole lot more like renting. Fairly few homeowners actually ‘own’ anything. Rather, they have a sizable mortgage, and they pay money to a bank. That’s not all that different than paying money to a landlord.” But that’s not right. Having lived a somewhat nomadic existence, I’ve “owned” and rented numerous times. Every time I’ve done the latter, I’ve lost money. The landlord got X dollars a month and, at the end of our relationship, I left with nothing. Conversely, every time I’ve taken out a mortgage, I’ve built sizable amounts of equity which I was able to extract from the house upon selling it and then reinvest later. Indeed, there have been years when my house earned more money than I did.

Since moving into our current house nearly two years ago, my wife and I have “lost” money, in that the house would currently sell for perhaps 5 percent less than we paid for it. Then again, we’re still far ahead of where we would be had we rented all these years. And we went into the current mortgage with open eyes; the housing bubble was already bursting but we wanted to move to a nicer house and neighborhood and figured we’d rather be “stuck” in this house than the one we left.

Beyond the economics, there’s a huge psychic value to owning your own place. You don’t have to worry about your landlord selling the place out from under you or “going condo.” You can paint the walls any color you damn well please, rip out the carpets and put in hardwood floors, have all the pets you want, and just generally live your life with greater autonomy. And I’ve never once raised my rent!

But, yes, it’s more expensive and you’ve got less ability to chuck it all and move to Mexico. And, if you bought into more house than you could afford and suddenly need to move, you risk emerging in worse financial shape if prices plunge.

All told, though, I recommend home ownership highly.

That said, however, I agree with Ezra on the public policy question: “Does it make economic sense for home buyers to be subsidized by renters?” No, it doesn’t.

Now, one could argue the degree to which they are. Home owners pay more property taxes than their renting counterparts, which means we pay much more for the public schools, even if we have no kids going to the public schools. And, since high earners, who pay the lion’s share of income taxes, are also likely to be homeowners, we’re paying a disproportionate amount for public services, even those which subsidize ourselves like the added infrastructure costs of supplying roads, utilities, and whatnot to the suburbs.

Even so, the most obvious subsidy, the ability to write off home mortgage interest, has always struck me as silly. There’s not much doubt that it artificially tips the scales not only in the rent vs. buy calculation but even encourages people to buy larger homes than they could otherwise afford since a portion of one’s monthly mortgage payment is actually “paid for” by the taxpayers. There’s no good rationale for that.

For a variety of reasons, I haven’t heard more than a few snippets of Rush Limbaugh’s show in years. I haven’t figured out yet whether his “Operation Chaos,” where he’s urging the Dittoheads to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary Clinton, is a serious bit of agitprop or camp. Regardless, he’s weighed the latest developments in the Obama-Wright debacle and issued a new set of marching orders: An operational pause.

My gut reaction, after the audio sound bites, was to issue new orders, because I saw, you know, AP/Ipsos poll has Hillary up over McCain by nine points, 50-41. My gut reaction here, after hearing Obama, was to issue orders changing directives, i.e., vote Obama in remaining primaries. But I’m holding back. That’s why I’m calling an operational pause. Because I want to see what the Drive-Bys are going to do and I want to see how the superdelegates are affected by this. You can’t vote in North Carolina and Indiana ’til Tuesday anyway, so there’s really no pause. It’s not as though the election is tomorrow. I just wanted you to know your commanding officers are eagerly, diligently, and effectively planning the next strategy here, based on this speech and the reaction to it.

Aside from moral qualms about interfering in another party’s primary, I’ve believed from the beginning that these sort of things are foolish precisely because there’s no way to know months ahead of time how these things will play out. I continue to believe that Obama will be the more dangerous opponent in the Fall because Clinton is such an unpleasant personality and starts with near-fatal negative ratings. But who knows, really? It’s better to just let these things play out and worry about getting your own team ready to play.

In the shorter term, though, Jim Geraghty’s quip that, “Oddly, potential support from Rush’s listeners may be the best news Obama has gotten in the past 72 hours,” is likely right.

On two separate occasions in the past month, I condemned John McCain for being honored to receive endorsements from Rev. John Hagee and Rev. Rod Parsley. This condemnation was on the basis of statements I read in articles about them, statements I freely admit I do not know the full context of. Additionally, I don’t know if those statements represent the bulk of those men’s religious philosophy or whether they were small matters. For that matter, I have no idea if those ideas had ever been later retracted by the men in question.

In short, I based my comments solely on a couple of hit pieces from John McCain’s political enemies. Because I don’t support McCain’s candidacy (or care much for McCain the man), and because I’m not overly fond of the religious philosophies of a lot of conservative Christian churches, I was pretty eager to jump on and gleefully condemn. This was a philosophic error. It may be that Parsley and Hagee are worthy of condemnation, but I honestly don’t have enough information to make that judgment.

Even worse was my immediate denunciation of McCain’s association with these men, when I’m fairly sure that McCain does not agree with the specific comments that I highlighted in those two posts. Frankly, I should know better.

I also freely admit that I’m only now coming to this retraction because of the association of my own favored candidate and his pastor. I myself was not particularly happy to hear the portions of Rev. Wright’s speeches that have been playing on a constant loop on Fox, and had serious questions about Obama’s association with that church and pastor. My questions about those issues were satisfied both by Sen. Obama his speech yesterday, as well as reading more of Rev. Wright’s sermons in full (especially this one, which this non-Christian found pretty moving), which satisfied me that there was more to the man than the few snippets I was privy to.

On account of that, I will again state that I retract my condemnation of McCain’s association with Hagee and Parsley, because as of this moment I simply lack enough information necessary to form any judgment about it one way or the other. And lacking that information, I’ll give McCain the full benefit of the doubt.

Barack Obama gave his big race speech today. I haven’t heard it, just read the transcripts of the pre-release text and the as-delivered version.

My colleague Dave Schuler observes, “I’ll wait for the overnight polls. Otherwise my remarks would just be a Rorschach test which is what the commentaries I’ve heard so far have been.” I’ll take that risk. Indeed, that we filter our analysis through our personal experience is not only the nature of blogging but a central thesis of Obama’s speech.

I’ll add the additional caveat that analyzing a speech from its text is problematic in two ways. First, it divorces it from the style of delivery; that disadvantages Obama and advantages George W. Bush. On the other hand, it does get to the substance. Second, most people will neither hear the speech nor read it; rather, they will hear and/or see a handful of sound bytes. My impressions will therefore be quite different than those that inform the overnight polls on which Dave waits.

Be that as it may, the speech accomplished what it presumably set out to do. It re-emphasized Obama’s answer to the “Why are you running for president?” question, namely that his background and skills are uniquely suited to healing what’s wrong with the country. And it took on the Wright question in that light.

I chose to run for president at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together, unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction: toward a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

And this belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own story. I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas.

I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and I’ve lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners, an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.

I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins of every race and every hue scattered across three continents. And for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional of candidates. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts — that out of many, we are truly one.

Now, frankly, I find this narrative ridiculously oversold. Lots of black men have traveled and gotten a great education and his ties with America’s history of racial tension are mostly vicarious. Certainly, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell have better stories to tell in that regard. Regardless, people are buying into this message and re-establishing it as the backdrop for what is to come is smart.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy, and in some cases, pain.

For some, nagging questions remain: Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in the church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely, just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagree.

A nice sleight-of-hand, if an incredibly dubious one. How many people who need to be convinced actually sit in congregations where clergy spout things as outrageous as Wright’s bile?

After a few paragraphs talking about how Wright’s words were “divisive” and distracted us from the challenges of terrorism, climate change, and so forth– a rather nonsensical criticism of a local preacher, frankly — he gets to the meat of it:

Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television sets and YouTube, if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor.

He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine, and who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who over 30 years has led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth — by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

This gets to the truth via a lie. Does anyone really believe that the three or four sermons that have been aired repeatedly are the entirety of Wright’s misconduct? That he’s normally sweetness and light but, for some inexplicable reason, channeled Louis Farrahkan one a few occasions? That’s just insulting, frankly.

But I’m inclined to believe — indeed, was so inclined before reading Obama’s response — that the rest of this is right. Wright helped Obama through some hard times, inspired him to do good, and it was therefore easy to overlook his bad conduct.

This, too, is completely understandable:

The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding and baptized my children.

It’s immediately followed, though, with what I believe to be another misdirection:

Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect.

But, surely, he’s heard anti-white and anti-Jewish rhetoric coming from Wright’s pulpit.

He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are part of America, this country that I love.

This is quite powerful and believable. Race is a complicated part of the human equation and decent people have visceral, instinctive reactions to it that coexists — and often competes with — our intellectual understandings.

The speech should have ended there, frankly. That’s a stirring note and a stark contrast with Wright’s infamous “God Damn America” refrain.

Instead, we get many, many paragraphs on Jim Crow and other aspects of America’s history. We already knew that, though; it’s the foreshadowing of this controversy. Hitting us over the head with it detracts from Obama’s appeal. Shelby Steele:

Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against him. And whites love this bargain — and feel affection for the bargainer — because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

[...]

Race helps Mr. Obama in another way — it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America’s tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America’s redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans — black and white — Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America’s very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

Few will hear or read the whole speech and my guess is that the sound bytes won’t come from its dull ending. But Obama should have finished on the uplifting applause line just the same.

Both Bruce McQuain and Publius note the parallels with Mitt Romney’s “Mormon speech.” While that immediately struck me as a brilliant analogy, upon reflection I think it’s not. People had legitimate doubts about Mormonism and Romney’s adherence to its more unorthodox views. Ditto John Kennedy’s “Catholic speech” decades earlier and fealty to the Holy See.

Few seriously thought Obama shared Wright’s crazier views. Rather, there’s a concern that Obama’s carefully crafted transracial, transpartisan appeal is a mask for something more radical. Shelby Steele again:

[N]othing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage (”God damn America”).

Whether this speech will dissuade these fears is beyond my ability to forecast, as I was in the minority that wasn’t all that troubled by the Wright association in the first place. That much, we’ll need to wait for the overnight polls to find out.

Photo credit: Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

UPDATE: The gang at NRO’s The Corner have ginned up more than a dozen posts on this topic already but two of them encapsulate the likely reactions of people not already predisposed to love Obama and capture nicely the dichotomy I was trying to get at above.

Charles Murray* (yes, that, Charles Murray) gushes,

Has any other major American politician ever made a speech on race that comes even close to this one? As far as I’m concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we’re used to from our pols….

Stanley Kurtz, though, sees something more troubling:

Wright could not have taken up so huge a space in Obama’s life unless Obama had let Wright in. And Obama let Wright in because of Wright’s sermons, not in spite of them. Obama may not have agreed with Wright’s solutions, or even with his final judgements, but something about Wright’s anger had to have attracted Obama–had to have seemed tantalizingly “authentic.” From the beginning, Obama had to have been sufficiently attracted to Wright’s excesses to forgive them. Then he sought to draw closer. In this positive attraction to anti-American anger (even if that anger is not quite entirely shared) Obama embodies the sensibilities of the elite academic radicals that are his real heritage and milieu.

*Hat tip to commenter Hal.

I’ve had this stuck in my head for three days since reading UGO’s Top 5- TV Shows of All Time (it gets a shout out in #6, a show my family watched together every week), so I’m sharing it with all of you.

I was 12 the last time I heard this duet. Brought back a lot of memories.

I was a bit (pleasantly) surprised to see this article by Kurt Loder. Loder takes a critical look at Moore’s latest film, ‘Sicko’ and finds it lacking in terms of facts.

Michael Moore may see himself as working in the tradition of such crusading muckrakers of the last century as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair — writers whose dedication to exposing corruption and social injustices played a part in sparking much-needed reforms. In his new movie, “Sicko,” Moore focuses on the U.S. health-care industry — a juicy target — and he casts a shocking light on some of the people it’s failed.

There’s a man who mangled two of his fingers with a power saw and learned that it would cost $12,000 to save one of them, but $60,000 to save the other. He had no health insurance and could only scrape together enough money to salvage the $12,000 finger.

There’s a woman whose husband was prescribed new drugs to combat his cancer, but couldn’t get their insurance company to pay for them because the drugs were experimental. Her husband died.

[...]

Moore does a real service in bringing these stories to light — some of them are horrifying, and then infuriating. One giant health-maintenance organization, Kaiser Permanente, is so persuasively lambasted in the movie that, on the basis of what we’re told, we want to burst into the company’s executive suites and make a mass citizen’s arrest. This is the sort of thing good muckrakers are supposed to do.

Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18,000* people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). There are a number of proposals as to what might be done to correct this situation. Moore has no use for any of them, save one.

As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can’t be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that’s already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles).

And our current health care system/problems by and large. This may not be very popular, but the U.S. system is somewhat like the French system in that it is a hybrid of both private and public health care. For example, the tax exempt status of health care benefits is a direct result of government policy that increases demand and pushes up prices. The tens of billions of dollars in health care subsidies also increase demand by some of the highest consumers of health care. This also pushes up demand and increases prices. The reduced competition that allows doctors to command higher salaries can’t work unless it has the governments blessing.

The problem with American health care, Moore argues, is that people are charged money to avail themselves of it. In other countries, like Canada, France and Britain, health systems are far superior — and they’re free.

I don’t know if Moore claims these other health care systems are free, but if so that is indeed a blatant lie. Nothing is free. These health care systems are funded via taxes (or in the case of France, taxes and fees consumers pay). This disconnection between the service being utilized and the actual costs is not a good thing to most economists. It creates a whole host of incentive problems if not done well, and even still the bureaucratic costs might outstrip any benefit such a system might provide; for example by expanding covereage and getting away from having those without insurance treated in clinic vs. emergency rooms.

That last statement is even truer than you’d know from watching “Sicko.” In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called “Dead Meat,” by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore’s movie would have you believe don’t exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.

Whoopsies. Not surprising at all. After all, the problem the woman above faced was probably deemed non-life threatening and off she goes to the back of the que. This highlights another lie often told by those favoring nationalizing health care like in Canada. The 16 months of pain and suffering and the drug addiction that the woman developed are costs…costs that generally aren’t measured in terms of health care expenditures. Was she able to work? Was her family adversely impacted?

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. “It’s legal to buy health insurance for your pets,” Day says, “but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself.”

Welcome to the world of unintended consequences. The reason why you can’t let people buy private health insurance is that then the government would only be left with those who don’t meet the criteria for private health insurance. Further, most of the people who do would resent having their taxes so high and having to pay for other people’s health care. You might see a backlash sort of like we saw here in the U.S. for welfare.

What’s the problem with government health systems? Moore’s movie doesn’t ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment.

As any economist would say, “No duh.” This is obvious, after all that is what prices do. Prices ration resources (goods and services). By having government run health care you’d no longer use prices to ration health care, but another mechanism…government mechanisms. Long lines, mandantory wait times, simply prohibiting certain aspects of procedures/treatment or even outright banning of the procedure/treatment itself (e.g. vertility treatments–in Canada the selling of eggs for fertility treatments is illegal). Either way the resource will be rationed. Either it will be rationed based on political agendas or via the market and prices. Not surprising that Moore wouldn’t touch on this point.

This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country’s National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts.

I’m from the government and I’m here to help.

And just to reiterate a point Loder (and I myself) made earlier: The U.S. health care system is a mess. It is on a growth path that is completely unsustainable. Still, this doesn’t mean that we should embrace the nationalized health care that we see in England and Canada. Those systems are financial black holes as well and face very serious problems. The French system while better is also facing long terms sustainability problems like the U.S. just with a longer horizon until disaster. To the extent that Moore points out the problems and ugly aspects of the U.S. system it is a good thing. That Moore hides or ignores the problems with the health care systems in other countries and extols only the good aspects of these health care systems transforms his movie from a documentary into propaganda.

Freeman Dyson is excited about the direction of biotechnology. While far from a Luddite, I find his vision rather chilling.

Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction. I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

[...]

There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too.

Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.

[...]

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.

[...]

The domestication of biotechnology in everyday life may also be helpful in solving practical economic and environmental problems. Once a new generation of children has grown up, as familiar with biotech games as our grandchildren are now with computer games, biotechnology will no longer seem weird and alien. In the era of Open Source biology, the magic of genes will be available to anyone with the skill and imagination to use it. The way will be open for biotechnology to move into the mainstream of economic development, to help us solve some of our urgent social problems and ameliorate the human condition all over the earth. Open Source biology could be a powerful tool, giving us access to cheap and abundant solar energy.

Dyson acknowledges that turning the natural universe into a plaything for children might be somewhat problematic but is willing to “leave it to our children and grandchildren to supply the answers.”

Reihan Salam isn’t particular concerned, either, noting that much that social-scientific progress almost always comes against cries of protest.

Bioconservatism has failed. The only questions now are (a) whether we can avoid destroying ourselves, (b) and whether we can shape this biotech future to create a more decent, humane world.

I vaguely recall the “test tube baby” controversy of the late 1970s and the warnings about humans “playing God.” Instead, in vitro fertilization has proven a boon for couples unable to conceive their own children and the downside has been minimal. My guess is that the hand-wringing over stem cell research will follow a similar path.

Still, while I fully admit that I have only cursory understanding of genetic engineering, I find the idea of “housewives and children” creating their own species problematic, to say the least. Indeed, the introduction of existing species into new environments often has massive unintended consequences. I can’t imagine that the consequences of letting people quite literal play around with species creation would have entirely positive consequences.

The town of New Bedford Massachusetts has come up with what is actually a good law in regards to dangerous/vicious dogs. Basically, the law is structured to focus on “the deed, not the breed”. That is, the law is geared to imposing penalties and restrictions on individual dogs that show signs of being dangerous/vicious.

“It goes after the deeds of the dog, the temperament it is showing,” said Mr. Maciel. Drafted by City Councilors Linda Morad and Jane Gonsalves along with Mr. Maciel’s office and various animal control groups, the ordinance avoids being breed-specific.

Instead, said Mr. Maciel, it allows animal control officers to judge a dog’s aggressiveness and actions before slapping restrictions, requirements and increased possible penalties on owners who ignore the rules.

He said a dozen dogs are now on the “dangerous and vicious” list, and only three are pit bull mixes. The others include a boxer, three German shepherds, a Rottweiler, Labrador retriever, “mini-pini” (Doberman)-chihuahua mix “and, unfortunately, a Boston terrier, the state dog,” he said.

This is exactly the right approach. Any dog can be vicious and size and breed are at best questionable guides in that regard. Take for example the chihuahua. Most people think that is an okay dog to own because of its small size. Even a young child could probably handle a chihuahua. However, chihuahuas are some of the most animal aggressive and human aggressive dogs. They also tend to be rather excitable and their small size could make it easier for a small child to injure or hurt the dog. While the latter might look like a possible benefit in terms of the child dealing with an aggressive chihuahua it could also mean that children will be more likely to have problems with this type of dog. Will a chihuahua kill a child? No probably not, but still it could inflict a nasty bite and since children like to do things like cuddle with dogs, that could mean getting bitten on the face or some other part of the body besides the ankle. So in this case, size is not a good indicator as to danger the breed poses.

At the same time a larger dog like the labrador retriever tends to be a stable even tempered dog. This dog passes temperment testing at one of the highest rates (and if we go with breeds that have had more than 200 dogs tested it has perhaps the highest pass rate). But this dog is also a medium sized dog and around infants and toddlers even an accident could send the child to the ground, off a chair or bed leading to injury.

A large part of the problem with dangerous/vicious dogs is that people often do not know how to behave around dogs and make for irresponsible owners. Did you get a cute little puppy that you failed to get neutered, licensed and usually spends the majority of its time alone in the backyard? I don’t care what breed you have, chances are your dog is more dangerous than the person who owns a rottweiler who has neutered his dog, licensed it, and the dog is well integrated into the family strutcture and well socialized around other people. Yet, most people would have the knee-jerk reaction of looking at the rottweiler as a death machine and the other dog as a lovable family pet.

Then there is the issue of training our children how to approach and deal with dogs. Dogs are ubiquitous in our society so it would be prudent for parents to periodically remind their children what do around dogs. Things like,

1. Never approach a loose/stray dog.
2. Never surprise a dog.
3. Always ask the owner for permission to pet the dog.
4. Let the dog sniff you before you try to give a hug.
5. Never surprise a dog (e.g. wake it up by running up to pet it)
6. Never run from a stray dog.

If more owners would spay/neuter their dogs, make sure they had a secure dog run, kennel, crate or back yard, socialized their dogs (and to be sure this is a continuous process), and train them in basic obedience there would be far, far fewer dog bites and maulings.

And for God’s sake treat your dog like a dog. I hate it when I hear peopel say, “They are babies,” or “I can’t help it, I spoil them.” Sorry, but you are a complete idiot. These are dogs and they should be treated as such. Trust me, the dog and you will be happier that way. It doesn’t mean you can’t love your dog, that you can’t buy it treats, or even let the dog sleep in your bed or take it with you when you go on trips. What it means is you should establish yourself as the pack leader, you should be set rules and boundaries for your dog, and when you give a command it should listen and follow the command. And if necessary, you may have to give the dog a job, even if it is something as mundane as carrying some water bottles in a doggie backpack during your walks.

And if you aren’t up for doing all of the above, then don’t get a dog. Get a cat, or even better get some goldfish. When you go out and get a dog you should be prepared for the commitments that such an action entails. Dogs are social/heirarchical creatures. They do well within the family and they languish and suffer outside of it. If you aren’t prepared to have a dog in your life, then you aren’t prepared to own a dog.

Still there are some bad parts to that article, IMO.

Dr. Dodman said any legislation ought to target breeders who purposely develop aggressive dogs. He cited the Doberman pinscher as one example of a dog that had a bad reputation, but has since had the aggressiveness removed through good breeding.

Karen Harght, co-owner along with Joan Hopkins of American Canine in Westport, concurred.

“When I was a child, Doberman pinschers had a horrible reputation. They were very aggressive, like pit bulls were. Then they kind of fell out of favor. And over the course of the last three decades the aggressiveness has been bred out of them. Now I see a lot of Dobermans that are sweet as pie.”

I don’t think that aggressivness has been breed out of the doberman, my guess is that since the breed is no longer the fad breed the many of breeders are responsible/reputable breeders who view themselves as “stewards of the breed”. These breeders are careful in what dogs they breed. First they’ll look at the overall health of the dog, then the temperment and only the best dogs with good marks in both areas will be bred. The rest will be spayed or neutered and placed as pets. Further, these breeders tend to be very rigorous when placing a dog. When the dog is in a fad phase every idiot with an unfixed dog looks to turn a quick buck through breeding their dog(s). They don’t worry too much, if at all, about health, and temperment isn’t even something they can judge. All dogs are placed with people unfixed and there are no conditions about taking the puppy back if things don’t work out. In this situtation you get badly bred dogs, dogs that wind up on the streets because their owners abadon them or lose them, and you have a much larger population of that dog. Hence dog attacks by that breed increase and they show up in the paper and you have the new “demon dog de jure”. This has been seen time and time again. Dobermans were the bad dog. Then german shepherds, St. Bernards, and Rottweilers and now pit bulls.

On the other hand, she said, “If I see an Akita, I turn around and go the other way.”

While the Akita isn’t a dog for your novice/first time dog owner this is just ridiculous. While there are quite a few dog bites every year (several million) there are tens of millions of dogs. And fatalities are even less frequent. Given this, the above attitude is emblematic of people simply not evaluating the risks correctly. If you get so nervous around an Akita that you head the other way, you probably should never go near a car, a pool, or take a bath or shower. Your risks of death/injury with all of these “safe” items probably far outstips any dangers posed by an Akita.

In New Bedford, Mr. Maciel said, the ordinance may require a succession of precautions to restrain and confine troublesome dogs, and fines for breaking the rules can be heavy, up to $600.

Bad dogs will be spayed or neutered and have a microchip implanted under the city ordinance, and annual licenses will cost more, along with the secure enclosures the city will require — and inspect.

Preventing the dogs from reproducing is the most important component, he said. “We don’t want them breeding and the offspring having the temperament of the mother and the father,” he said. “That way our community becomes safer.”

Somebody in the local government of New Bedford is guilty of having a brain.

Megan McArdle was chastised by an insensitive blogger of whom I’ve never heard for posting a poem on her blog mourning the passage of her dog, Finnegan. She is, understandably, perplexed and angry at having the legitimacy of her emotions called into question.

Obviously I do not think that losing a dog is like losing a person; no one sane believes that the two things are the same, though I grant you that some people do make creepy implications (calling themselves their dog’s “mom”) in that direction. Losing a dog or a cat is in some sense sadder, because they don’t understand what is happening to them, because they live such a little time, and because with a pet, you generally have to choose the moment of their death. And in many other ways it is not nearly as sad, because they have no dreams or aspirations to die with them; because one can never be as close to an animal as to (some) sentient beings; and because hey, everyone’s a little bit speciesist. But psychologists will be happy to tell you that we use the same basic mental equipment that loves people to love our pets, even if we can never love them as fully as we love people; and when they leave us, the same basic mental facility that grieves for people helps us scar over the hole our animals leave behind them. It’s not some completely alien process that has no business being compared to human death; it’s a difference of degree, not kind.

For most of us who have had pets, let alone lost them, there is no need to explain.

Our pets, while not people, are part of the family. That’s especially true for those of us whose dogs and cats live in our homes and sleep in our beds. We therefore bond with them and tend to anthropomorphize them. Whatever the felicific calculus for such things are supposed to be logically, most of us take the deaths of our pets much harder than the deaths of all but the people closest to us.

There’s no need to apologize for that. Emotion is, almost by definition, not logical.

UPDATE: Dave Schuler recently wrote a long tribute to Qila, his pet Samoyed, who died recently. Here’s an excerpt:

I don’t know how to explain to you my relationship with this dog. I don’t look on him as my child. He’s not precisely a friend—the relationship is closer and more intimate than any friendship. I have spent nearly every moment of every day of the last ten years with him. During his puppyhood and young adulthood I still maintained an office and took him with me every day.

He has gotten me up every morning and seen to it that I went to bed at night. He made sure I got plenty of exercise. When I was sad, he comforted me. When I was lonely, he was there.

He is my own, personal therapy dog. Or, perhaps, my other self—the better part.

David Grant reports for the Collegiate Times that nationally syndicated talk show host Neal Boortz’ show may be pulled from Pulaski, Virginia’s WFNR AM for some controversial remarks he made in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Boortz echoed a theme expressed by many that the victims were “standing in terror waiting for (their) turn to be executed.” Station manager Scott Stevens was appalled, as were some Democratic members of the Virginia legislature. Delegate Stephen Shannon stated, “I feel (Virginia radio stations) have a sense of public responsibility in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy to exercise some restraint. What they did was let this broadcaster peel off outrageous assertions that somehow it was the fault of the students and the faculty members who were killed or injured…There’s simply no place for this out-of-state radio host to make such claims on Virginia’s airwaves immediately after this tragedy has taken place.”

Now, I find Boortz’ insinuations here outrageous because I don’t expect untrained, unarmed teenagers to do anything other than panic when confronted with such an unexpected and horrifying situation. Still, the point was well within the legitimate sphere of public debate, even if the timing was unfortunate.

I have only heard snippets of Boortz’ show, mostly by accident when scanning for something to listen to on road trips, and have no strong opinion of him as a commenter. Presumably, though, he’s interesting enough to draw an audience consistently not just in his hometown Atlanta but in a variety of stations that syndicate him across the land. And the idea that a show broadcast nationally can somehow be tailored to local sensitivities is just bizarre.

As with the Don Imus situation, it’s absolutely within the right of businessmen to decide what programs to air and hosts to employ. If Grant believes taking Boortz off the air and replacing him with another host is the thing to do, it’s his call. But I find firing people who are hired as controversial commentators for making controversial comments troubling.

Gerard Vanderleun laments the social cost of abortion, wondering, “Of all those babies we destroyed, how many were Einsteins, how many were Mozarts?” Harvey Olson retorts, “Statistically, about as many as there were Hitlers, Dahmers, and Chos.”

A debate ensues about the statistical likelihood that a given aborted fetus would mature into a genius vice a sociopath with a side argument about their relative value. Harvey observes, “I’d give up Jim Henson for Karl Marx. I love muppets, but I *really* hate communism.”

Amusing as that all is, it strikes me that, if the argument for abortion hinges on the exceedingly small chance that a given fetus would mature into a future Einstein or Shakespeare, the pro-choice side wins. Surely, statistically unlikely possibilities are no reason to restrict people’s freedom, especially on such an important matter as becoming responsible for the care of a child for two decades or more.

Either the unborn child is a human being, with certain inalienable rights, or it isn’t. If it is, then it deserves to live regardless of whether it might grow up to discover the cure for cancer.

No, really. Here is a really, really good reason NOT to buy compact flourescent bulbs (CFLs).

On that Tuesday, Bridges was installing one of the spiral-shaped light bulbs in her 7-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Suddenly, the bulb plummeted to the floor, breaking on the shag carpet.

Bridges, who was wary of the dangers of cleaning up a fluorescent bulb, called The Home Depot where she purchased them. She was told that the bulbs had mercury in them and that she should not vacuum the area where the bulb had broken. Bridges was directed to call the Poison Control hotline.

[...]

Upon reaching the DEP the next day, the agency offered to send a specialist out to Bridges’ house to test the air levels. The specialist arrived soon after the phone conversation and began testing the downstairs, where he found safe levels of mercury — below the state’s limit of 300 ng/m3 (nanograms per cubic meter).

In the daughter’s bedroom, the levels remained well below the 300 mark, except for near the carpet where the bulb broke. There the mercury levels spiked to 1,939 ng/m3. On a bag of toys that bulb fragments had landed on, the levels of mercury were 556 ng/m3.

Bridges was told by the specialist not to clean up the bulb and mercury powder by herself. He recommended the Clean Harbors Environmental Services branch in Hampden.

Clean Harbors gave Bridges a low-ball estimate of $2,000, based on what she described, to clean up the room properly. The work entailed removing anything with levels greater than 300 ng/m3, including the carpeting.

One month later, Bridges’ daughter’s bedroom remains sealed off with plastic “to avoid any dust blowing around” and to keep the family’s pets from going in and out of the room.

So much for saving money on her energy bill. Whatever she was going to save she has spent several times over. Not only has she spent quite a bit out of pocket, but also in lost time as well,

One month later, Bridges is still searching for answers. She has contacted staff members from the offices of U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) to tell them about her situation but has received no response.

She has talked with representatives from the CDC and DEP and spent roughly two to three hours a day over the past several weeks, talking on the phone and in person and contacting local papers to get the word out on what she believes are dangerous light bulbs.

Let me see, if we assume it is 2 hours a day Monday through Friday for four weeks that is 40 hours or one entire work week wasted. Assuming say $15/hour that is $600 wasted in dealing with one borken CFL.

Of course, in actuality it is all a big steaming pile of Barvo Sierra.

State Toxicologist Andrew Smith said it would be unlikely that a person could contract mercury poisoning from the levels of mercury found in Bridges’ daughter’s room.

“In this situation, my understanding, was this 1,900 was the sign reading right at the spot of the floor where the bulb broke,” said Smith. “While 1,900 was certainly considered an elevated reading of mercury vapor, it was a very localized level that I would not expect to result in any sign of mercury exposure.”

Smith said mercury is only dangerous with long-term exposure and in this case the person would have to stay right at the spot of the 1,900 reading or there would have to be elevated levels of mercury vapor in the breathing zone — about 3 feet — above the spill. Mercury also dissipates over time.

The air in the bedroom at the 3-foot level measured between 31 to 49 ng/m3 of mercury, depending on the location.

Smith said a CFL light bulb breaking is not in the same category as when a mercury thermometer breaks.

Yay for the Nanny State!

Cleaning up a broken CFL bulb is actually pretty simple. Wear disposable coveralls (or old clothes that can be disposed of), protective eyewear, cloves and a dust mask, and make sure the room is well ventilated. Place the broken glass in a closed container and clean the dust with either two pieces of stiff paper, a disposable broom and dust-pan or a commerical mercury cleaning kit. Dispose of the dust, the glass and cleaning implements as “universal waste” (like a computer and flourescent blubls).

Of course it sounds like the lady in the story, Brandy Bridges, got ripped off and the Department of Environmental Protection was in large part to blame. After all, when somebody shows up from the government with a special device and tells you to get the help of a professional cleaning company that will carry lots of weight with many people.

Part of the blame, in my view, also can be placed on the environmentalists. For years the mantra has been “Mercury bad. Mercury bad. Mercury bad. Mercury bad. Mercury bad.” Now, when there is a minute amount of mercury in something that breaks in the house, get the Hazmat team in there on the double! Afterall mercury causes all sorts of horrible things and even a miniscule amount can do untold damage (not really).

Link coutesy of Debunkers.

Over at my home base, The Glittering Eye, I’ve been posting on the pet food recall obsessively, almost to the exclusion of everything else. This must have puzzled many people. There are a number of reasons for my interest in this story.

First, I’m a committed dog owner, my dogs are an important part of my life, and anything that threatens them, threatens me. But there are larger reasons, too.

If you’re not aware of the story, last month Menu Foods, a major private label manufacturer of dog and cat foods, announced a recall of their “cuts and gravy”-style foods affecting almost 100 different varieties and including some of the best known brands in the country. The recall has expanded to cover some varieties of dog biscuits and a couple of varieties of dry pet food. The toxin remains unknown but it has been determined that wheat gluten imported from China used in the manufacture was contaminated with melamine, a chemical used in dinnerware, countertops, and fertilizer (in Asia).

There have been some important new developments.

Rice gluten concentrate, also bought from a Chinese exporter has also been found to have been contaminated with melamine. The melamine may have entered the human food supply by being fed to pigs in the form of animal feed. And just yesterday a South African company announced that they had detected melamine contamination in corn gluten which they’d imported from China. The FDA has suggested that this contamination may be a deliberate move to boost the apparent protein content of the product.

Consequently, this story not only concerns me through my dogs but through my interest in a number of other issues: China, globalization, corporate behavior, issues of security and preparedness, and the role and performance of government. Here’s how I end my most recent post on the subject:

We’re left with a number of unanswered questions:

1. How did the wheat gluten, rice gluten concentrate, and corn gluten become contaminated with melamine? Melamine shouldn’t be present in these products in any quantity.
2. Is melamine toxic to dogs and cats? Melamine has not been considered a toxin.
3. If melamine isn’t toxic, what is causing the kidney failure and deaths in pets?
4. Is melamine toxic to humans? If so, we’ve got an enormously larger problem before us. Melamine is used in dinnerware, cooking implements, and kitchen countertops both in private homes and commercially.
5. Has melamine entered the human food supply? The FDA says “they have no reason to believe…”, etc., but that’s weaselly bureaucratese. I continue to see no way they can make that determination without knowing the scope of the problem (and, since additional products are being recalled nearly daily, it’s obvious they can’t identify the scope of the problem at this time), how the melamine got into the wheat gluten, rice gluten concentrate, and corn gluten, and where else the contamined products were sold.

Write your congressman. This is a serious problem.