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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 January 2014

by inurdieproc1965 Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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After her vacation last week, Domino is now tanned, rested, and ready for 2014. And what better way to start the year than with a classic cat-in-a-bag photo? I tried to lure her into a Microsoft bag (yeah, I went ahead and bought that Dell tablet), but she wasn’t interested. Is this a bad sign for Microsoft, or merely a preference for something that crinkles more invitingly? You be the judge.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 10 January 2014

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 10, 2014

by ansonsten Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Private First Class Christopher Greene with Troop O (Outlaw), 4th Squadron, Combined Task Force Dragoon, occupies a security position during a partnership patrol with members of the Afghan Uniformed Police Dec. 30, 2013, at Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Troopers with Outlaw conducted a series of partner missions with the AUP near various security checkpoints throughout the province. (U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Joshua Edwards)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for January 10, 2014

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Why We Should Still Be Worried About Running Out of Oil

by KarolinBraund Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Among the big energy stories of 2013, “peak oil”—the once-popular notion that worldwide oil production would soon reach a maximum level and begin an irreversible decline—was thoroughly discredited. The explosive development of shale oil and other unconventional fuels in the United States helped put it in its grave.

As the year went on, the eulogies came in fast and furious. “Today, it is probably safe to say we have slayed ‘peak oil’ once and for all, thanks to the combination of new shale oil and gas production techniques,” declared Rob Wile, an energy and economics reporter for Business Insider. Similar comments from energy experts were commonplace, prompting an R.I.P. headline at Time.com announcing, “Peak Oil is Dead.”

Not so fast, though. The present round of eulogies brings to mind Mark Twain’s famous line: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Before obits for peak oil theory pile up too high, let’s take a careful look at these assertions. Fortunately, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Paris-based research arm of the major industrialized powers, recently did just that—and the results were unexpected. While not exactly reinstalling peak oil on its throne, it did make clear that much of the talk of a perpetual gusher of American shale oil is greatly exaggerated. The exploitation of those shale reserves may delay the onset of peak oil for a year or so, the agency’s experts noted, but the long-term picture “has not changed much with the arrival of shale oil.”

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Why We Should Still Be Worried About Running Out of Oil

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How to Ensure a Republican Landslide in November

by hrzy86j5 Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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RNC chair Reince Priebus thinks Democrats are playing politics with the poor:

All of this kind of stuff is ridiculous because we’re spending all of our time actually talking and perpetrating what the Democrats actually want. They don’t want this to pass, what they want to do is they want to talk about these things, they want to talk about minimum wage and what they want to do ultimately is create a campaign issue, this sort of rich vs. poor, the same old thing they can do and avoid Obamacare. That’s what they want.

You know what Republicans should do? They should totally call the Democrats’ bluff. They should just go out there and pass an extension of unemployment insurance; pass an increase in the minimum wage; and pass a farm bill that doesn’t cut food stamps. It would hardly cost anything—maybe 0.3 percent of the federal budget—and it would blow away Democratic campaign plans for November. Plus it would be good for the economy!

It’s a win-win-win: good for the poor, good for the Republican Party, and good for America. It would sure teach Democrats a lesson if Republicans sneakily agreed to all this stuff. I say they should go for it.

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How to Ensure a Republican Landslide in November

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VIDEO: David Corn on What Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal Means for 2016

by snorsenaf Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mother Jones DC bureau chief David Corn spoke with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews this week about what some traffic problems in Fort Lee could end up meaning for New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s political ambitions. Watch here:

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VIDEO: David Corn on What Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal Means for 2016

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Chart of the Day: Being Poor Is Bad for Your Health

by Jeff Howard Posted on January 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hypoglycemia is an ever-present threat among diabetics who are being treated with insulin injections. Generally speaking, it’s caused by inadequate nutrition leading to dangerously low blood sugar, and it can usually be fixed by simply eating enough. But what if you’re poor, and at the end of the month you don’t have enough money left to buy adequate food? Adrianna McIntyre passes along this devastatingly simple chart that shows exactly what happens:

Take a look at the top three lines. Among those with high incomes, the risk of hypoglycemia is about the same all month long. But the red line shows the incidence of hypoglycemia among the poor. It goes down at the beginning of the month, when money is available for food, rises a bit in the middle of the month, and then jumps dramatically in the final week when money is tight. As a check to make sure that tight budgets really are at fault, the authors ran the same test on the incidence of appendicitis, which should be unrelated to income. It was.

McIntyre uses this as an object lesson: although policy wonks tend to focus a lot of attention on insurance and health care financing, there are plenty of other things that affect health. What’s more, solutions aren’t simple:

These findings also illustrate the difficulty in finding policy solutions to address health disparities. The authors note that food pantries and soup kitchens already ramp up staffing and resources toward the end of the month. We could explore different ways to distribute existing benefits, but that may have other negative impacts (ie: making it harder to pay rent or bills at the beginning of the month).

Nothing is ever easy.

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Chart of the Day: Being Poor Is Bad for Your Health

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Is Graduate School a Racket?

by CathleenZWLM Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Megan McArdle writes about the grim prospects for graduate students:

Last week, I wrote that collectively, faculty need to deal with the terrible market for professorships by producing fewer potential professors: admitting a lot fewer students to graduate school….There are two criticisms I’ve received that seem worth responding to. The first is that I myself work in a profession that looks a lot like a tournament….The second is: Why not unions? Why not unionize the adjuncts and get them paid on par with the tenure-track professors? Better yet, why not convert all those positions to tenure-track lines?

By chance, I was talking to a professor buddy of mine about this just last week. His take was quite different: he thinks that unions love adjuncts and part-timers and have largely abandoned the interests of full-timers. This is because three part-timers produce three times more union dues than one full-time tenured professor. State legislatures love part-timers too, because three part-timers cost less than one full-time tenured professor. As a result, the number of tenure-track positions in his department has gone down from 22 to 8 in the past couple of decades. This is not because they have fewer students. They have more. It’s because the vast majority of classes are now taught by part-timers.

Now, obviously this might differ between teaching universities and research universities and between private and public universities. It also might differ from department to department and from state to state. But I know that a lot of professor types read this blog, which is why I’m throwing it out. Has the ratio of full-timers to part-timers plummeted everywhere? Is there a reason for this beyond pure cost savings? What role do unions play? Educate us in comments.

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Is Graduate School a Racket?

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Chart of the Day: America’s Health Care System Is Killing You

by KatlynEarnhardt Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Is life expectancy a good measure of the quality of a country’s health care system? I’ve always been pretty hesitant to use it as a primary metric because….well, I’ll just let Aaron Carroll describe people like me:

One of my issues with the arguments people muster against life expectancy is that they are all so small. They attack some individual behavior or factor that might affect life expectancy in some minimal way, but nowhere near enough to cause the big differences we see. It’s smoking. It’s drinking. It’s accidents. It’s immigrants. It’s chemicals in the water. It’s stupidity. It’s suicide. It’s freedom.

It doesn’t matter that tons of these arguments are just plain wrong. It doesn’t matter that even after you eliminate them from the equation, our life expectancy still sucks. People hold on to them like crazy because they don’t want to believe that it could be the health care system.

OK, OK, maybe I should take life expectancy more seriously as a metric of health care quality. It’s certainly true that American life expectancy, which largely tracked other rich countries in the years after World War II, diverged rather dramatically starting around 1990. Why? It’s true that there could be a thousand different reasons related to culture and food and violence and so forth, but most of those things existed all along. So what happened around 1990?

One plausible answer is that it’s related to divergences in health care starting around then. That’s a tricky thing to prove, however, unless you dig deeply into the details. Recently a team of authors did just that in JAMA and produced the chart below. It shows Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL) as multiples of the median for other rich countries. A number greater than one means we’re losing more years than the rest of our peers. Here’s the chart:

The dramatic thing about this chart is that the United States does worse than other rich countries in every single area. Sure, it’s possible that there are 16 different reasons that we’re doing worse in 16 different categories, but it doesn’t seem likely, does it? When something is this widespread, the cause is a lot more likely to be something broadly based, like health care delivery. This isn’t smoking gun proof that our Rube Goldberg health care system is responsible for our lousy life expectancy, but it sure ought to make you sit up and take notice. There’s a pretty good chance that you, your friends, and your family are going to live three or four years less than you should, solely because you live in America.

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Chart of the Day: America’s Health Care System Is Killing You

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Corn on "Hardball": The Debate on Income Inequality Will Continue in 2014

by SFGJrg Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mother Jones DC bureau chief David Corn joins Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC’s “Hardball” to discuss income inequality and the political battle lines being drawn in 2014.

David Corn is Mother Jones’ Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He’s also on Twitter.

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Corn on "Hardball": The Debate on Income Inequality Will Continue in 2014

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We Could Do a Lot More to Fight Poverty If We Wanted To

by Lovell Mao Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today is the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s war on poverty, so we’ll be getting a lot of retrospectives. CBPP has a whole series of charts here, and they’re worth a look. Child poverty is way down since 1963, which is a big win, and elderly poverty is down too, which is a big win for Social Security.

But at the risk of being a buzzkill, I want to reprint a chart I put up last month. It answers a simple question: if you count income from all the welfare programs we’ve put in place over the past half century, how have working-age folks done? The answer is in the red line in the chart below. The Great Society programs of the 60s got the working-age poverty rate down from 20 percent to 15 percent, but then we gave up. Since the mid-70s, the poverty rate has stayed stubbornly stuck at about 15 percent:

This is a chart to really keep in mind as you read the inevitable retrospectives. The overall poverty rate has gone down substantially in the past half century, but that’s largely because of the huge effect of Social Security on elderly poverty. But as much as this is a great achievement, it’s not what most people think of when you talk about “poverty.” Rather, they’re mostly thinking of working-age people who are either unemployed or earning tiny wages. And among those people, we simply haven’t done much for the past 40 years.

It’s probably not possible to eliminate poverty, or even to get it down to 5 percent or so. But we could do more if we wanted. We could make Medicaid more generous. We could raise the minimum wage and the EITC. We could, at an absolute minimum, decide not to cut food stamps. We could do all these things. All we need is a bit of empathy for the worst off among us and the will to do something about it.

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We Could Do a Lot More to Fight Poverty If We Wanted To

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