http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. en-us mark@samefacts.com 2009-07-03T21:45:39-08:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/health_care_/2009/07/obamas_harry_and_louise.php Is Barack Obama about to turn the rhetorical tables on the health insurance industry? Chris Good thinks so. Remember the "Harry and Louise" ads? They claimed that, if Hillarycare passed, your health care would be controlled, not by your doctor, but by some faceless bureaucrat. The terrible thing is, that was the truth. The ads were dishonest primarily in what they didn't say: that if Hillarycare didn't pass, your health care would still be determined by a faceless bureaucrat, but the bureaucrat would be employed by an insurance company rather than the government and your rights of appeal would be limited. Those hundreds of pages of legislative language that made the bill seem so scary were designed in large part to build in some checks and balances to the cost-control process: checks and balances that private insurance largely lacks. Part of the blame for the the industry's capacity to bamboozle the public in that way falls on Bill Clinton. He desperately wanted health care to be the capstone of the New Deal; he fancied himself as the President who finally gave people "health care that can't ever be taken away." So he wanted to present Hillarycare as progress, as movement toward a desired goal. But that was, at best, a half-truth. For those Americans - a majority - with decent health coverage, Hillarycare was going to be a step backwards. But that step backwards was inevitable. Rising health care costs made the then-existing fee-for-service model unsustainable; something was going to start to put some limits on costs, whether it was a public program or managed care. The honest claim for Hillarycare was that it would have made the transition somewhat less painful from the consumer viewpoint. That honest claim wasn't enough to satisfy WJC's grandiosity, so he made the larger, unjustified claim, and had HIAA ram it right down his throat. Obama seems to have learned that lesson. During the campaign, he talked about health care finance reform in terms of covering the uninsured, and whatever plan emerges will do some of that. But now he's talking about what he can actually deliver to the majority of voters: protection from evils that are on their way down the pike. The more the debate over the next few months is about the details of the new system, the better it is for those opposed to any change. The more the debate is over people whose health insurance doesn't insure them, people who have their health insurance taken away once they get sick, and companies increasingly unable to afford to offer decent coverage to their employees, the better it is for those who want to see the current, unsustainable system change in a direction somewhat less unfavorable to consumers (and businesses) than the natural course of events. Many of you may be satisfied with your health care now. What you've got to do is project, if current trends continue, are you still going to be happy with your health care five years from now? Will you have health care five years from now? There's been a lot of liberal unhappiness about the performance of the Obama team over the past few months. But I don't think betting on Obama to fail reflects prudent money management. 7992@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Health Care Mark Kleiman 2009-07-03T21:45:39-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/palin_/2009/07/whateverrrr_dept.php So, instead of being a quitter, Sarah Palin decided to ... quit. I'm trying to remind all my friends that Palin, like Bush, is not stupid, and that calling her stupid offends tens of millions of Americans who know as little about public affairs as she does, or less, don't consider themselves stupid, and are in fact capable of making perfectly reasonable decisions about the things they do know and care about. But I'll certainly concede "incoherent." If there's not a huge bombshell about to explode, then we can only conclude that that woman John McCain wanted to put one unreliable heartbeat from the Presidency is simply a total flake. (Also, of course, a hopless liar: I think, though, much of it for the kids had to do with recently seeing their baby brother Trig mocked and ridiculed by some pretty mean-spirited adults recently. I've seen Sarah Palin mocked for using her baby as a political prop, but who's been mocking little Trig? **** Full text at the jump. It's substantially cleaned up from the audio version. 7991@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Palin Mark Kleiman 2009-07-03T18:42:05-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/literature_/2009/07/the_dancers_vs_those_who_cannot_hear_the_music.php The mystery of the "dancers-seem-insane-to-those-who-cannot-hear-the-music" quotation is solved. Jeremy Paretsky writes: Bergson it is, sort of. James Wood seems to be rewriting Bergson to make him say what Wood wants him to say. As you see below, he either doesn’t know French or chose to stitch together something that sounded more profound than the original. The relevant passage occurs near the beginning of chapter one of Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique ("Laughter: An Essay on the meaning of the comic"). The comment in question takes up just one sentence. And, yes, the bumper-sticker is substantially more profound than the philosopher. Here is the French original followed by my slightly clumsy translation. I include the whole paragraph so that you can see how Wood selectively rewords his own version. Je voudrais signaler maintenant, comme un symptôme non moins digne de remarque, l'insensibilité qui accompagne d'ordinaire le rire. Il semble que le comique ne puisse produire son ébranlement qu'à la condition de tomber sur une surface d'âme bien calme, bien unie. L'indifférence est son milieu naturel. Le rire n'a pas de plus grand ennemi que l'émotion. Je ne veux pas dire que nous ne puissions rire d'une personne' qui nous inspire de la pitié, par exemple, ou même de l'affection : seulement alors, pour quelques instants, il faudra oublier cette affection, faire taire cette pitié. Dans une société de pures intelligences on ne pleurerait probablement plus, mais on rirait peut-être encore; tandis que des âmes invariablement sensibles, accordées à l'unisson de la vie, où tout événement se prolongerait en résonance sentimentale, ne connaîtraient ni ne comprendraient le rire. Essayez, un moment, de vous intéresser à tout ce qui se dit et à tout ce qui se fait, agissez, en imagination, avec ceux qui agissent, sentez avec ceux qui sentent, donnez enfin à votre sympathie son plus large épanouissement comme sous un coup de baguette magique vous verrez les objets les plus légers prendre du poids, et une coloration sévère passer sur toutes choses. Détachez-vous maintenant, assistez à la vie en spectateur indifférent: bien des drames tourneront à la comédie. Il suffit que nous bouchions nos oreilles au son de la musique, dans un salon où l'on danse pour que les danseurs nous paraissent aussitôt ridicules. Combien d'actions humaines résisteraient à une épreuve de ce genre ? et ne verrions-nous pas beaucoup d'entre elles passer tout à coup du grave au plaisant, si nous les isolions de la musique de sentiment qui les accompagne ? Le comique exige donc enfin, pour produire tout son effet, quelque chose comme une anesthésie momentanée du coeur. Il s'adresse à l'intelligence pure." ***** I would now like to draw attention, as a symptom no less worthy of note, the lack of feeling which ordinarily accompanies laughter. It seems that the comic can only shake a person up on condition of falling upon the surface of a truly calm soul, one that is well integrated. Indifference is its natural environment. Laughter has no greater enemy than emotion. I’m not saying that we cannot laugh at a person who arouses, for example, pity in us, or even affection; only that for a few moments it would be necessary to forget affection, to tell pity to be silent. In a society of pure intelligences one would probably no longer cry, but one would perhaps still laugh; whereas souls that are invariably sensitive &#8212 in agreement and at one with life, where every event would be prolonged as a resonance of feeling &#8212 would not recognize or understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to let everything that is said or is being done capture your attention; act, in your imagination, with those who act, feel with those who feel, let your sympathy open up as wide as possible, and as though struck by a magic wand you will see the lightest objects take on weight, and all things imbued with a severe color. Now detach yourself, look upon life as an indifferent observer; even dramas will turn into comedy. It is enough for us to stop up our ears to the sound of music, in a room where people are dancing, in order that the dancers immediately appear ridiculous. How many human actions would be able to resist a test of this type? and would we not see many of them go from being solemn to funny, if we isolated them from the feeling that accompanies them? Therefore, the comic, in order to produce its complete effect, in the end demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. It is addressed to pure intelligence. Yet another proof that blegging beats Googling. 7990@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Literature Mark Kleiman 2009-07-02T22:08:49-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/iran_/2009/07/from_his_lips_to_allahs_ears.php Have the political excesses of the religious fanatics stimulated a secularist backlash in Iran, as they have in the U.S.? A senior Iranian cleric says so. We can only hope. Or, as that's said in Arabic, imshallah ("if it be God's will"). 7988@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Iran Mark Kleiman 2009-07-01T12:22:06-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/climate_change_/2009/07/waxmanmalarkey.php The Waxman-Markey bill may be an impressive political success, but it's still, as Michael implies, a long way from a reality-based policy. Over to Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Ars Poetica, I.129):Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Freely translated: The mountains groan in labour... Congratulations! It's a mouse! Eurasian harvest mice, photo London Daily Mail 7987@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Climate change James Wimberley 2009-07-01T02:54:55-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/literature_/2009/07/bleg_quotation_source.php [Mystery solved: see second update] A friend points me to a website called SportBikeGurls.com which attributes to someone named Mark Kleiman the following gem: Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music. The aphorism seemed familiar, and I could easily imagine having quoted it in a lecture, but I couldn't possibly have come up with anything that good on my one. So I Googled it, and found it attributed to George Carlin. Fine, except it really sounds too profound for Carlin: I would have guessed someone heavier, maybe Blake or Nietzsche. Except that Blake surely would have said "mad." Indeed, it sounds like a translation; any English writer capable of inventing the thought would have had a good enough ear to have written "seem mad" instead of "appear insane." Thoreau might have said it, instead of the "different drummer" line, but he didn't. Googling a subset of the words found zillions of citations to Nietzsche, and a few to Angela Monet (in the form "Those who danced where thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music"), but none with a source. [I found it cited to Milton (!), with a specific reference, but the reference turned out to be wrong, which was just as well for my sanity.] If I had to guess right now, I'd go with Monet, a writer otherwise unknown not only to me but to Amazon.com, on the grounds that a bon mot is more likely to be misattributed to a Nietzsche, or even a George Carlin, than to someone less well known. (Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, and George Bernard Shaw all said many witty things, but not nearly as many as are credited to them.) None of my hard-copy quotation books seems to have anything relevant under "dance" or "insane" or "mad" or "music." OK. I've had my three guesses. I give up. Update A reader writes: I'm pretty sure the quote is from Henri Bergson, though it refers to comedy and not insanity. I came across it in the introduction to a 2004 James Wood book, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. Here's the passage (though I can't find the page cite): The philosopher Henri Bergson said that one definition of comedy was watching people dancing to music through a window, without our being able to hear their music…In the Bergsonian vision, the watcher has an advantage over the dancers. He comprehends them, sees how foolish they look and knows why they are dancing. He comprehends them because he is deprived of their music. His deprivation is his strength. But what if his deprivation was his weakness? What if that watcher did not know that the dancers were dancing to music? What if he had no idea why they were dancing? What if he felt no advantage over them, but felt, with mingled laughter and pity, that he was watching some awful dance of death, in which he too was obscurely implicated? Bergson! Ugh! I think I preferred George Carlin. IIf my reader is right about Wood's report, and Wood in turn about what Bergson said, this is a case where the bumper-sticker is substantially more profound than the philosopher. If anyone finds the actual Bergson quote, please send it in. Second update Jeremy Paretsky has the answer. Yes, Bergson is the source. Yes, Wood misquoted him. Yes, the bumper-sticker version is better. In the course of arguing that lack of sympathetic understanding is a precondition of laughter, Bergson actually wrote: Il suffit que nous bouchions nos oreilles au son de la musique, dans un salon où l'on danse pour que les danseurs nous paraissent aussitôt ridicules. ("It is enough for us to stop up our ears to the sound of music, in a room where people are dancing, in order that the dancers immediately appear ridiculous.") Full text, in English and French, after the jump. 7986@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Literature Mark Kleiman 2009-07-01T00:18:42-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/health_care_/2009/06/insured_but_medically_bankrupt.php The more the health care debate is over the details of the new plan, the better things are for the obstructionists. The more the debate is over how terrible things are right now, the better things are for the reformers. The NYT is doing a series on how terrible things are right now; Tuesday's installment is about a guy who went bankrupt because his health insurance policy, which on its face claimed to cover hospital charges up to $150,000, actually only covered room & board plus $10k. At St. David’s Medical Center in Austin, where he went for two separate heart procedures last year, the hospital’s admitting office looked at Mr. Yurdin’s coverage and talked to Aetna. St. David’s estimated that his share of the payments would be only a few thousand dollars per procedure. He and the hospital say they were surprised to eventually learn that the $150,000 hospital coverage in the Aetna policy was mainly for room and board. Coverage was capped at $10,000 for “other hospital services,” which turned out to include nearly all routine hospital care — the expenses incurred in the operating room, for example, and the cost of any medication he received. In other words, Aetna would have paid for Mr. Yurdin to stay in the hospital for more than five months — as long as he did not need an operation or any lab tests or drugs while he was there. All the health-insurance-industry flacks quoted in the piece keep saying how much better things will get after health care reform. Of course, they're going to be in there pitching to make sure that the reform is as good for them, and as bad for their customers, as possible, but at the end of the day when the Senate has to vote on cloture, stories like this are going to make getting that sixtieth vote a little bit easier. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart now supports mandatory employer-provided coverage. That's not the first crack in corporate opposition to the Obama Administration, but it's a big crack. The biggest miscalculation made by the Clinton health care team was their bet that corporate executives would act out of corporate self-interest rather than class solidarity. If GM and Chrysler execs, and the execs of the other rustbelt companies with big legacy health-care costs, had acted in the interest of their shareholders and employees rather than in the interests of their business-school classmates and fellow high-bracket taxpayers, those two firms might not be bankrupt today, and we'd have a halfway-civilized health care finance system. Maybe Wal-Mart has learned their lesson. 7985@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Health Care Mark Kleiman 2009-06-30T21:57:59-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/barack_obama_/2009/06/common_ground_and_the_political_high_ground.php 1. Barack Obama is strongly in favor of reproductive freedom, including the access to abortion services. 2. But his general principles and political style lead him to seek common ground with people strongly opposed to abortion. 3. The strategy for doing so is to work together on ways to reduce demand for abortion services: (a) reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies by improving access to sex education and contraception and (b) increasing support for pregnant women who decide to carry to term. 4. But the Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention are actually in favor of unwanted pregnancy, as a deterrent to non-marital sex. So the USCCB and the SBC oppose the contraception-and-sex-education part of the plan. They're much more interested in saying "abortion is murder" than in actually reducing the number of abortions at the cost of allowing some people to experience sexual pleasure. 5. They want to split the proposed program into two separate bills, so the administration can make itself unpopular with the pro-choice movement in passing the pregnancy-support bill while the Republicans in the Senate get to filibuster the pregnancy-prevention bill to death. (Of course, Obama and Axelrod would have to take leave of their senses to agree to any such thing.) 6. Atrios thinks this makes a joke out of the search for common ground. 7. Matt Yglesias thinks this is more Obama rope-a-dope: by making an obviously good-faith effort to find common ground, Obama puts his opponents in the position of either supporting stuff they don't like or demonstrating their bad faith. 8. Whether Atrios or Yglesias has the better of that argument is left, as the math textbooks say, as an exercise for the reader. Now things may well be different in areas more subject to detailed bargaining; we might wind up with a worse health bill, for example, because Obama chose to narrow the bargaining range by taking single-payer off the table to start with. If he'd started with that as one of the options, the wingnuts could have had a "victory" by settling for something reasonable. Since instead he proposed something reasonable, they can only satisfy their constituencies by producing a bill that's a lot less than is reasonable. The same may be true of climate and the stimulus. On the other hand, in foreign policy there's every advantage to seeming to be the more reasonable of the two parties to a dispute. How much less support does Ahmadi-hejad have, inside Iran and outside, than he would have were GWB still in office. "In war, politics, and diplomacy, take the high ground." 7984@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Barack Obama Mark Kleiman 2009-06-30T17:14:06-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/election_2008_/2009/06/franken_wins_but_whats_the_remedy.php The Minnesota Supreme Court has unanimously decided that Al Franken won the US Senate election in Minnesota last fall. Good. But my very cursory glance at the decision does not find any ruling on the appropriate remedy. In other words, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who is probably going to run for President and is not running for re-election, will take his orders from the RNC, and might still say that he doesn't agree, and refuse to sign the election certificate. So then there might have to be ANOTHER lawsuit to order Pawlenty to issue the certificate (and I don't know Minnesota mandamus law well enough to know who wins that.). This should be over. The Minnesota voters have decided. The law is clear. None of this has ever mattered to Republicans. UPDATE: Maybe my worst prediction ever, and I am glad about that (although strictly speaking I was talking about Pawlenty). Coleman has conceded, and Franken will become a US Senator. Great! 7983@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Election 2008 Jonathan Zasloff 2009-06-30T11:11:39-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/_/2009/06/idle_query.php What fraction of "resisting arrest" charges reflect a cover-up of excessive use of force by the police? Ten percent? More? If I ran a prosecutor's office, I'd want to give those charges some very serious screening. Instead, some prosecutors allow the cops to use them as bargaining chips: "I'll agree to drop charges if you'll sign an agreement not to sue." Prosecutors need to maintain good relationships with cops; that's just an institutional fact. If I ran a police department, I'd want someone in Internal Affairs to look at every "resisting arrest" arrest, and look harder at officers who generate several of them. In these situations the institutional advantages are all on the side of the police. But those advantages, awesome as they are, become considerably attenuated when (1) the victim of the excessive force is prosperous and well-connected; (2) the victim is surrounded by other similarly-situated people; and (3) the press is paying attention. It would be a shame if the police learned from this only that it's unwise to assault, and then falsely charge, prosperous and well-connected people. Footnotes 1. The fact that the sergeant confronted with questions about his officers' over-reaction decided to make a political attack on the candidate for whom the fundraiser was being held doesn't fill me with confidence in his fair-mindedness. However the probe comes out, those comments were completely out of line and warrant a sharp reprimand. 2. Making a false police report is a crime. The 911 tapes should record the identity of whoever called in the noise complaint. If it can be shown that the intent was to shut down the fundraiser, we're talking about Federal civil rights act violations; the hostess could well wind up owning her neighbor's house. 3. Under California law, there is in fact an obligation to identify yourself to a police officer if the police officer has an articulable suspicion that a crime has been committed. And that obligation can extend beyond providing a name to providing a date of birth or identification document. In this case, though, since the officer was confronting a homeowner in her home, it's going to be hard to make out that he had a justification for physically grabbing her when she tried to walk away from him. 3. I wonder why the LA Times story (at the jump) omitted the fact that someone - the same neighbor who called in the false noise complaint? - was shouting homophobic obscenities over the fence; the party was hosted by a lesbian couple. The UPI story is even shabbier, in the worst traditions of "police-beat" reporting. Reporters, like prosecutors, are dependent on cops, and the result, too often, is credulous and uncritical reporting. 7982@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Mark Kleiman 2009-06-30T08:26:10-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/health_care_/2009/06/best_health_care_system_in_the_world.php It sure is great that the United States relies more than any other developed nation on the private insurance industry for care. Otherwise, we wouldn't get great results like this: Congressional investigators have discovered that large health insurers in every region of the country are relying on faulty databases to underpay millions of valid insurance claims. In a report released Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee said insurance companies nationwide have failed to provide consumers with accurate or understandable information about how they calculate “reasonable” or “customary” charges for out-of-network care. Insurers also signed contracts prohibiting them from disclosing information about the databases to consumers or doctors, the report said. The flawed databases are owned by Ingenix Inc., a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group Inc. UnitedHealth recently settled with the New York attorney general’s office to resolve charges that Ingenix drew up billing rates that underpaid hospitals and doctors for out-of-network care. Patients had to make up the difference. It is unclear how much they have overpaid over the years. ..... Providers and patients have suspected for years that insurers were underpaying for out-of-network care, but they haven’t been able to prove it. Committee investigators found that Ingenix developed its payment models based on claims data provided by its customers, the insurance companies. A committee aide said those companies sometimes would “scrub” the data sent to Ingenix—throwing out outlying high costs. Ingenix then would use questionable statistical models to come to its own rate estimates. So basically, the insurers would set their own rates by lying about it. It's not clear to me how exactly these rates should be set: the article does not mention Medicare and Medicaid, so perhaps they set them in different ways. When you use terms like "usual and customary charges" in a system dominated by third-party providers you're liable to get into some problems. But it's a nice little racket for the insurers: you jam down the "providers" -- aka the doctors -- on rates, and then you jack up the prices for the "consumers". If anyone tries to challenge you, you force them to spend a lot of money in the process. Works quite well. Except for, you know, the public. 7981@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Health Care Jonathan Zasloff 2009-06-29T20:03:15-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/law_notes_/2009/06/the_ricci_decision_a_proposed_deal_for_conservatives.php The United States Supreme Court 5-4 has overruled a decision that Sotomayor joined, concerning affirmative action. Predictably, conservatives are already saying that this shows Sotomayor isn't fit for the high bench. So here's the deal. You might recall Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a decision in which the high court ruled 5-4 that Bush's military commissions and removal of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. That decision overruled an appeals court decision which John Roberts joined. Obama will withdraw the Sotomayor nomination if Roberts resigns. Deal? It's got to be, right? Right? The more important point is that made decades ago by the great Justice Robert Jackson: We are not final because we are infallible, but only infallible because we are final. 7980@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Law Notes Jonathan Zasloff 2009-06-29T09:13:36-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/the_wayward_press_/2009/06/dana_milbank_fiction_writer.php Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the Pitney-Milbank debate is that Dana Milbank simply is unable to read the English language and relate it to his readers. Yes, Nico Pitney was told in advance by the White House that President Obama was probably going to call on him, and the White House phone call seemed to suggest that it was interested in hearing about Iran. Milbank then twisted that into the White House asking for a particular question, a particular phrasing, and (impliedly) a particular frame. Milbank also asserted that Pitney's e-mail to Iranian facebook sites had said that the White House had asked him to contact those sites, when the e-mail said nothing of the kind, and did not even suggest it. As Pitney said at the end of the exchange, it's pretty hard to think that there was collusion when Obama then ducked the question, and even Amanda Carpenter of the Washington Times acknowledged that it a legitimate question (which is more than you can say of Dana Milbank's focus on how Obama looks in a swimsuit.). Milbank raised this issue. He attacked Pitney. He wouldn't let go after several days. And all of it was based upon a fiction that he himself had concocted. I don't know what else you could say that shows the corruption of the White House press corps. 7979@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ The wayward press Jonathan Zasloff 2009-06-29T08:41:19-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/energy_and_environment_/2009/06/don_jorge_charges_at_windmills.php Those comic Spaniards and their silly windmills, what a joke - if you are an ignorant nativist bumpkin. George Will not only gets his economics wrong but his cultural reference. Don Quixote is a tragi-comic prey to his romantic delusions. Not so his longsuffering sidekick and reality check Sancho Panza:"Look, your worship,'' said Sancho. "What we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the vanes that turned by the wind make the millstone go."Credit here La Mancha is a high, dry plateau with next to no rivers, so before the age of steam windmills were humdrum but essential pieces of equipment in its rural economy. A potted history of windmills here, and a glimpse of the sophistication here. (I've seen a restored water-driven grain mill in England, with a clever automatic regulator of the grain hopper.) Quixote mistakes these workhorses for fantasy enemies; and so does George WiIl mistake their equally useful modern replacements. On the practicalities, who would you rather believe: an armchair Beltway ideologue or T. Boone Pickens? Were the railroads, the interstate highway system and the global fiber-optic telecoms grid built by disembodied Walrasian arbitrage or by grubby capitalist rent-seeking? The real, boring story is that with possibly over-generous (but now capped) subsidies for this infant industry, Spain has acquired a nifty 15GW of wind capacity, say 4-5 GW full-time equivalent; and a leading place in a booming world industry. The USA and other latecomers are free riders on the technical progress generated by Spanish and German taxpayers, so the right attitude is "Muchas gracias". The Spanish solar PV investment does look a bit premature and expensive. For a large subsidy, Spain has bought useful expertise in the downstream side of panel assembly, installation and control, but the critical bottleneck - and ultimate opportunity - lies in the still excessive cost of the modules: and few of the people and corporations working to crack this are in Spain. Footnote on jobs For a very different conclusion to Will's Professor Calzada on job creation and green investment, see the CAP report here. (I can't download the full thing, maybe you will have better luck.) The apparent conflict is easily explained. Energy production is very capital-intensive in operation in all its high-tech forms. Even coal doesn't employ many: 83,000 in the USA in 2006. The low-tech "small is beautiful" exceptions - small-scale biomass, solar hot water - are useful but marginal. That being so, it's absurd to evaluate the strategic choice of energy sources on job creation grounds. Even a dramatic shift from coal and oil to wind, solar and nuclear is not likely to have great employment consequences in the aggregate long-term equilibrium. Investment in anything creates jobs, so replacing one form of capacity by another is good for employment. But "pushpin is as good as poetry": liberals should not pretend that the allocation of investment, as opposed to its quantity, makes much difference overall. You can't get round the geographical wins and losses. Culturally, it's important to underline that renewables create proper jobs in real businesses, not part-time hobbies. And some, like wind-turbine repairman, are as macho as anything in mining or oil drilling. Footnote 2 If you really want to know where I've been the last few months, the answer is here. 7978@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ Energy and Environment James Wimberley 2009-06-28T03:36:54-08:00 http://WWW.samefacts.com/archives/the_wayward_press_/2009/06/los_angeles_times_the_nations_worst_newspaper.php Once upon a time, the Los Angeles Times had pretensions to being a real newspaper. Now? Not so much. Today, the only story above the fold is the death of Michael Jackson. That's right; the only story at all. Iran? Health care? Climate change? Bernanke's testimony on financial regulation? Yawn. Oh, and the only three-column story below the fold? The death of Farrah Fawcett. Of course, the op-ed page gives us plenty of Iran coverage. Pieces by John Bolton and Natan Sharansky. One the architect of Bush's disastrous foreign policy, the other whose maunderings about democracy apparently do not include Palestinians. If this is the future of US newspapers, I'm glad that they are going out of business. 7977@http://WWW.samefacts.com/ The wayward press Jonathan Zasloff 2009-06-26T11:37:20-08:00