The Quintessential Knowledge

Catching Up with the News

thequintessential — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:31:05 +0000

La Republic bananier: Jean Sarkozy, the French President’s 23-year-old, undergraduate son is appointed to a powerful post as the head of the Epad, the public agency which runs La Défense, the big business district on the west side of Paris. (An internet petition is calling on Jean to get his degree before rising to high responsibility.) La Défense is the heart of Sarkoland, the President’s fiefdom. His son was elected to a seat on the notoriously sleaze-ridden departement council there last year. The president also orchestrated a public media trial of his bitter rival, former Prime Minister Dominic de Villepin for allegedly abetting an amateurish and ineffective scheme to smear Sarkozy Also, the fact remains that Sarkozy appointed (and stood by) a senior minister who had written about his exploits as a Bangkok sex tourist. Gay activists are also angry, because the minister in question, Mitterrand has tarnished homosexuality by at least appearing to associate it with paedophilia and prostitution.

IndeoChinese Cold War: Beginning in August, stories about new Chinese air incursions into India have dominated the news: China claims some 90,000 square kilometers of Indian territory–around Tibet, and of semi-independent kingdoms that paid fealty to Lhasa. Ever since the anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet last year, progress toward settling the border dispute has stalled. To add to the drama, many yonger Tibetans, many born outside Tibet, are growing impatient with the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” approach—a willingness to accept Chinese sovereignty in return for true autonomy—and commitment to nonviolence. If these groups were to use India as a base for armed insurrection against China, as Tibetan exiles did throughout the 1960s, then two nuclear powers will be brought to the brink of war. (Beijing will at least seize important Tibetan Buddhist monasteries that lie in Indian territory close to the border).

Beijing has launched a diplomatic offensive aimed at undercutting Indian sovereignty over the areas China claims, particularly the northeast state of Arunachal Pradesh and one of its key cities, Tawang, birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama in the 17th century. Tibet ceded Tawang and the area around it to British India in 1914. China has recently denied visas to the state’s residents; lodged a formal complaint after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the state in 2008; and tried to block a $2.9 billion Asian Development Bank loan to India because some of the money was earmarked for an irrigation project in the state. In India’s 1962 war with China, the latter launched a massive invasion along the length of the frontier, routing the Indians before unilaterally halting at what today remains the de facto border, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC). They are fearful of China’s expanding naval presence in the Indian Ocean. Bharat Verma, editor of the Indian Defence Review, predicted in a widely publicized essay this summer that China would attack India sometime before 2012.

Give Nukes a Nobel: The world wars were the hideous expression of what happens when the human tendency toward conflict hooks up with the violent possibilities of the industrial age–the Nazi death machinery, and assembly line murders. The truth is that industrial killing was practiced by many nations in the old world without nuclear weapons. Soldiers were gassed and machine-gunned by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of World War I; by World War II, countries on both sides of the war used airplanes and artillery to rain death on battlefields as well as cities, until the number killed around the world was so huge the best estimates of the total number lost diverge by some 16 million souls. The dead numbered 62 million, or 78 million — somewhere in there. Then came a world with nuclear weapons. As bad as they are, nukes have been instrumental in reversing the long, seemingly inexorable trend in modernity toward deadlier and deadlier conflicts. Major powers find ways to get along because the cost of armed conflict between them has become unthinkably high., and thus began the age of globalization and global economy. If a world with nuclear weapons in it is a scary, scary place to think about, the industrialized world without nuclear weapons was a scary, scary place for real. But there is no way to un-ring the nuclear bell–instead of fantasies about a nuke-free planet where formerly bloodthirsty humans live together in peace, what the world needs is a safer, more stable nuclear umbrella.

Haut-Karabagh Question: Azerbaijan is the only country criticiseing an agreement to normalize relations between Turkey and Armenia, saying it raises doubts about regional stability.The Azerbaijani foreign ministry said Turkey should not have normalised ties without a deal over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. During the war there in 1993, Turkey closed its border with Armenia out of solidarity with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s government wants Armenia to withdraw troops from Nagorno-Karabakh, the Aremenian enclave in Azerbaijan, and return land. (There was a chance that the Turkish-Armenian protocols might never be ratified by Turkey’s parliament). A timetable for normalising relations between Turkey and Armenia was agreed in April, after a century of hostility between the two neighbours.

News Roundup 18/09/09

thequintessential — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:29:42 +0000

Controversy over the Thames: ‘Furious’ London Mayor Boris Johnson has ordered the River Thames to be reinstated on the London Underground map after Transport for London decided to redesign it. Tfl’s decision to remove zone boundaries will also now be reviewed. The redesign caused so much outcry from politicians and passenger groups and fears that people could end up paying higher fares by accident. Tfl decided to remove the fare boundaries and river because it said some passengers had complained that the map, based on Harry Beck’s 1933 design classic, had become ‘too cluttered’. However, the Harry Beck map has been voted a British design icon alongside Concorde and Spitfire. ‘TfL treated it as an operational decision but clearly it’s much more significant than that,’ the City Hall announced. [Many people in London, this author being one, still use the Thames River to get their bearings]. One of the latest revisions also is that passengers entering Zone 1 – which covers much of central London – pay premium fares, while those who use circle line that circumvent the area gets a cheaper fare.

Berlin Wall, 20 years on, Divided They Stand: Twenty years on, there has been no grand new mission, no ambitious vision of remaking Germany — or Europe, or the world. As the continent’s largest economy, Germany could have taken a lead to ensure that the European Union came together to weather the worst economic downturn in 70 years; it did not. Germany has contributed 4,000 troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, but there is deepening unease in Germany about the nation’s involvement in the war there. The strongest impulse in German politics is to avoid big changes, to hold the country steady as she goes. The electoral system supports this by producing consensus-driven coalition governments. Ossis — Easterners earn less, produce less and have higher rates of unemployment than Wessis — Westerners . One in every 10 Ossis wishes he or she were still living in the G.D.R., something that will be reflected in the rise of Die Linke, a hard-left party formed by Western socialists and remnants of the G.D.R. communists in the East. This division that Germans call “a wall in the head” is more evident outside Berlin, where the physical Wall has been all but expunged.

There’s also been a striking geographical reversal–the poorly paid, the unemployed, the migrated East Berliners were shunted into the high-rises of West Berlin while the rich West Berliners swooped on the elegant 19th century housing of Prenzlauer Berg, left to crumble in the East during the Cold War. Today East Berlin is cooler than West. That’s where people with money want to live. After World War II, both the G.D.R. and West Germany resisted serious examination of their collective culpability for Nazism–denial infused Germany’s student and counterculture movements with an anger not matched in other countries. A similar failure to confront the truth about the G.D.R. — its violent repression and the extent to which East Germans accepted and sometimes aided the regime — expresses itself in ostalgie, the rose-tinted nostalgia for a G.D.R. that never was. Ostalgie inspired the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! and underpins the renaissance of iconic East German brands. [There used to be a blank space on maps of East Berlin where the Hohenschönhausen jail stood. Germany's secret police, the Stasi, employed one officer for every 180 G.D.R. citizens and had a network of 180,000 informers..]

If that why Thatcher opposed German Unification? A strong unified Germany looks where??? Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher told President Gorbachev that neither Britain nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany and made clear that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it. She noted the huge changes happening across Eastern Europe, but she insisted that the West would not push for its decommunisation. She asked that her remarks should not be recorded, and the part of the conversation is reproduced from memory. She assured Mr Gorbachev that President Bush also wanted to do nothing that would be seen by the Russians as a threat to their security. The same assurance was later spelt out in person to Mr Gorbachev at the Soviet- American summit off Malta. Back then, the French were also puzzled at Moscow’s refusal to intervene in East Germany and questioned whether “the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it. This has caused a fear approaching panic.” An adviser to social President Mitterrand noted “France by no means wants German reunification, although it realises that in the end it is inevitable,” and that he would “fly off to live on Mars” if this happened. Gorbachev’s relaxed attitude to reunification later hardened. At his summit with Mr Bush, he accused the West of trying to “impose” Western values on Eastern Europe, and launched a ferocious attack on Helmut Kohl,the German Chancellor, for hurrying the unification.

News Round-Up

thequintessential — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:50:57 +0000

How Berlusconi survived his scandals: “In some ways, Berlusconi is the Italian political equivalent of Bank of America or AIG: he is simply too big to fail. Too many who have carved out their slice of power would risk losing it all in the monumental shakeout that would follow Berlusconi’s exit from politics. And even in that unlikely scenario, the Prime Minister would have his ownership of the nation’s major private television networks to fall back on” [We doubt his statement that he is the best Prime Minister in Italy's 150-year history, but we have to agree that he is the most influential Italian of his generation.]

Tom Friedman is (again) on alternative energy: Applied Materials is one of the most important U.S. companies you’ve probably never heard of. It makes the machines that make the microchips that go inside your computer, and it maintains a real-time global interaction with all 14 solar panel factories it’s built around the world in the last two years, none in the U.S.: five are in Germany, four are in China, one is in Spain, one is in India, one is in Italy, one is in Taiwan and one is even in Abu Dhabi. Germany now generates almost half the solar power in the world today and, as a byproduct, is making itself the world-center for solar research, engineering, manufacturing and installation. With more than 50,000 new jobs, the renewable energy industry in Germany is now second only to its auto industry. AM’s biggest U.S. customer is a German-owned company in Oregon. [Usual Friedman Soundbite: So, if you like importing oil from Saudi Arabia, you’re going to love importing solar panels from China.]

…meanwhile, environment gets ignored (again): Carbon cap-and-trade bill, the legislation to limit national greenhouse-gas emissions, passed the House in June. However, Senate majority leader Harry Reid told reporters that the Senate might have to wait to act on cap and trade until after tackling health care and banking reform. Given how controversial cap and trade remains (the bill was weak but a bill nonetheless) even among many Democrats in the Senate — Republicans remain almost unanimously opposed — action in the election year of 2010 might be even tougher. The White House has taken unilateral steps— like the move to place the first-ever national limits on greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles — but that might not be enough.

Why the Illegal Immigrants should have healthcare: Insuring undocumented workers is ethically murky and politically impossible. If we’re hiring illegals, we have a moral obligation to care for them. Given that illegal immigrants have broken our laws, it makes sense that large numbers of upstanding citizens oppose any measure that would encourage more foreigners to sneak into America or make their lives easier once they’re here. However, American Journal of Public Health, contends that immigrants typically arrive in America during their prime working years and tend to be younger and healthier than the rest of the U.S. population. As a result, health-care expenditures for the average immigrant are 55 percent lower than for a native-born American citizen with similar characteristics. So if you add cheaper people to cover to the pool, you reduce the average cost. If illegals were covered, this hidden tax (on free emergency and charitable care) would decrease. Employers have an incentive to hire undocumented immigrants because they don’t require coverage, thus giving illegal immigrants an unfair advantage in competing for jobs. Also, many undocumented workers leave the country before they’re old enough to require much medical care.

A Hope for Peace in Somalia? President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who became president in February, is a former high school teacher, who became president in February. His moderate Islamist government is widely considered to be Somalia’s best chance for stability in years, which included 21 years of dictatorship and the 18 years of chaos that followed. Ahmed has both widespread grass-roots support inside the country and extensive help from outside nations, who are counting on Sheik Sharif to tackle piracy and beat back the spread of militant Islam. After years of ambivalence about Somalia, the United States is playing an increasingly active role here, and recently shipped 40 tons of weapons to Somalia to keep Sheik Sharif’s government alive. This week, American commandos killed a Qaeda agent in southern Somalia in a daylight helicopter raid. However, Ahmed has a disarrayed armed force–many of his commanders still have ties to the Shabab, the Islamist insurgents working with Al Qaeda. If not for the 5,000 African Union troops guarding the port, airport and Villa Somalia–the presidential villa–his government would quickly fall. (The Shabab and their insurgent brethren now control most of Mogadishu and much of the country).

Meanwhile, we continue to exploit Africans: A British oil trading giant, Trafigura, has agreed to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge damages claim from thousands of Africans who fell ill from tonnes of toxic waste dumped illegally in one of the worst pollution incidents in decades. Trafigura, one of the world’s largest oil traders, allowed contaminated sludge from a tanker ship was fly-tipped under cover of darkness near Ivory Coast in August 2006. The incident caused at least 100,000 residents from the west African country’s most populous city, Abidjan, to flood into hospitals and clinics although Trifigura has always insisted the foul-smelling slurry, dumped without its knowledge by a sub-contractor, could not have caused serious injury or illness. [Trafigura, a privately-owned multinational which has 1,900 staff working in 42 offices around the world, last year claimed a turnover of $73bn (£44bn), a figure double the entire GDP of Ivory Coast]. Internal Trafigura emails, obtained by Greenpeace, show that Trafigura struck a series of bargains on the international markets in 2005 and early 2006 to buy cheap and dirty petroleum, called coker gasoline, and rather than send the oil to a refinery, Trafigura used a tanker as a floating processing plant creating toxic sludge on the high seas.

And the French won the Cold War for us? In new documentary movie, L’Affaire Farewell, the French claims that a French mole in the KGB leaked information so devastating that it hastened the implosion of the Soviet Union. The CIA’s website still carries a compelling essay, declassified in 1996, by Gus Weiss, who wrote, “[The] Farewell dossier… led to the collapse of a crucial [KGB spying] programme at just the time the Soviet military needed it… Along with the US defence build-up and an already floundering Soviet economy, the USSR could no longer compete.” The French taupe, or mole, was Colonel Vladimir Vetrov of Directorate T (codename Farewell), the industrial spying arm of the KGB. In 1981-82, he gave French intelligence more than 3,000 pages of documentss, the names of more than 400 Soviet agents posted abroad and the successful Soviet strategies for acquiring, legally and illegally, advanced technology from the West. His expose of the abject failure of the Communist system to match rapid Western advances in electronic micro-technology influenced President Ronald Reagan’s decision to launch the “Star Wars” programme in 1983: a hi-tech bluff which would drag the USSR into an unaffordable, and calamitous, attempt to keep up with the democratic world. Vetrov never asked for money or for a new life in the West. He was an “uncontrollable man, who oscillated between euphoria and over-excitement”, who was later executed for stabbing his mistress and killing a policeman in a Moscow park in February 1982.The detractors, however, say that the whole affair, they said, had been concocted by the CIA to test the loyalty to the West of the Socialist president, François Mitterrand, after he was elected in May 1981 and to sound out jealousy among competing French spy services. Farewell was “run” – at the mole’s own insistence – by a relatively small, French counter-espionage agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which was not supposed to operate abroad.

Debutantes debut again in London: For the first time since 1997, young women dress in virginal white, curtsey to a minor royal and partake of a giant cake at Queen Charlotte’s Ball. Queen Charlotte’s Ball – originally started in 1780, as a birthday whim for George III’s consort – acted as the starting point of the Season for centuries. Once held in May, it began the Season, a six-month whirl of parties and events to launch young ladies, aged 17 to 18, of certain wealth and/or breeding on to the marriage market. Before 1958, the debutantes (debs as they were called) were presented to Buckingham Palace too, but Queen Elizabeth halted the practice not because it was anachronistic but because, as Princess Margaret put it, “every tart in London was getting in.” Today, the ball is held in September, rather than May – which is considered too close to exam time, but it, as it always has, now raises funds for the west London maternity hospital and research centre that bears Queen Charlotte’s name.

Still talking about healthcare?

thequintessential — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:30:49 +0000

I guess we are. I have totally zoned out of the topic, but people haven’t yet. At least the late night shows are on August recess and we are spared of some uncalled for jokes.

But you don’t been Jon Stewart to create soundbites. This weekend, one soundbite got prevalent that it even reached me. The soundbite, the Facebook status that could change the world (according to ever sensational TIME magazine), read as follow:

“No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, join us in posting this as your status for the rest of the day.”

Despite the fact that that message concerns only the Americans with their shithole healthcare, I now see it everywhere. Someone who wrote a little too extensively on the healthcare, I find such oneliners extremely disturbing to the real debate about the healthcare. This morning, I replied with my own soundbite, 139 letters, Twitter-style.

“No one should die because NHS won’t foot their medical bill. No one should go broke because the others get sick. If you agree, repost this.”

Sorry, that statement doesn’t make sense but the statement to which i am responding make little sense too. People die because they cannot afford healthcare, and they sometimes go broke because of their sicknesses, but the healthcare reform won’t change that–if the politicians are more sincere about the reform, what they should be talking about is the subsidies on the medical operators, so that an affordable healthcare can materialize.

Who Lost Japan?

thequintessential — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:39:00 +0000

Recent developments in Japan may dramatically change the country and the region, but for better or for worse?

Last week, Japan elected Democratic Party, ending the ruling party (Liberal Democrats)’s virtually uninterrupted reign since the end of the Second World War. In the West, the story was not paid much of an attention because in Japan, the prime ministers change faster than their car models (and boy, they do upgrade the latter a lot). However, the 300+ seat majority in the parliament means that the DPJ will be here for three or four years. In the United States, we love to think that U.S.-Japan relations are shaped in Washington D.C. (and the lobby offices). However, throughout the post World War history, it is the Liberal Democratic Party that defined the U.S. relationships. Now, with LDP gone, who knows where this relationship will end up.

But we can venture a guess. The newly elected Democratic Party’s policies put a big question mark upon the Japanese contributions to the war in Afghanistan and the redeployment of American troops in Asia. That sentence sounds like something a talking-head on the television would say but it has deep implications–all US ships and aircraft carriers crossing the Pacific to patrol South China Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea are currently being refueled at Japan. A US Marine airfield in Okinawa and additional troops on Japan are deterrants to North Korea. This new government can jeopardize everything. This may be the first real foreign policy crisis President Obama faces.

The party’s leader (and soon-to-be Prime Minister), Yukio “The Alien” Hatoyama, whose speeches are boring as hell, droned against the American-led globalization and urged a greater Japanese focus on Asia. “A Bloc of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western powers?” For some of us this sounds eerily familiar to Japan’s pre-WWII Empire dreams, Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

To add insult to injury, Mr. and Mrs. Hatoyama are not quite there in the upstairs department. Mrs. Hatoyama, former actress Miyuki, said that she flew in a UFO to Venus and that in a previous life she met Tom Cruise. The First Couple are intensely ’spiritual’ and eat the sun, whatever that means. (Mr. Alien and Mrs. UFO should get on like a house on fire).

So the question is Who Lost Japan? The Democratic Party wining 308 seats out of 480-seat parliament is no accident. In Japan, a younger generation strives for a move away from its long-time dependence on the United States. Last year’s financial crisis also undermined the entire financial system in place since WWII. Hatoyama (the scion of the family hailed as Japan’s Kennedys) called for high taxation to the rich–the first attempt in decades to tap into Japan’s plentiful private-sector wealth. His message apparently resonated.

For now, Mr. Hatoyama will have to wade through Japan’s extremely bureaucratic, patriarchal political system, a system he detests. He has a mandate from the Japanese people, who voted for change and progress’ sake. Whether he will be a strong prime minster, or a good one remains to be seen. Always a minor political party, the DPJ is a fractious party, ranging from socialists to disgruntled former members of the LDP. Good Luck helming that herd.

A Temporary Transition

thequintessential — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:35:07 +0000

To follow me to Russia, go to cynicaltravels.wordpress.com. Caveat Emptor–it is not PC and extremely cynical.

The World We Ignored

thequintessential — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:11:40 +0000

The Top Foreign News We Missed:

Objectification of Women in Italy. Except: “Conservative ideas in Italy die hard because of patriarchal culture and the Catholic Church, whose interference become even stronger since Mr. Berlusconi first became prime minister in 1994. The church, for example, has threatened to excommunicate doctors who prescribe the abortion pill as well as patients who use it. Italy ranks 67th out of 130 countries in the Global Gender Gap Index. Under half of Italy’s women have jobs, compared with the world average of nearly two out of three. Italian men have 80 more minutes of leisure time per day, the greatest difference in the 18 countries compared. Women had to devote extra time to unpaid work, like cleaning the house and are therefore unwilling to take on an additional burden of raising children. Italy has an extraordinarily low birthrate”.

Things We Need To Know: Why Elections and Bipartisanship are overrated, and other controversial answers, answered by Newsweek.

Belgian Justice. Except: “Most buildings are from the 19th century and not very functional in terms of security. There are 44 entrances to the huge Palace of Justice, many of them with little or no significant surveillance, almost no few metal detectors here. The minister of justice, Stefaan De Clerck, is now in the hot seat. Most of the escapees have been foreigners, given that roughly 57 percent of Belgium’s prison population is foreign-born. Almost all the recent escapees were serving time or facing trial for violent crimes.”

Where Ted Kennedy Mattered: He guided US policies in Vietnam, South Africa, Chile, Northern Ireland and Iraq, but let’s not forget his game-changer for East Pakistan.

Who are we robbing this week?

thequintessential — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 03:27:52 +0000

Something is wrong about (modern) pop-culture, and how it had been wrong for a millennium.

Every time I watch a superhero movie, I feel disgusted by this ‘end justifies the means’ attitude that these masked vigilantes hold. I know I sounded like someone denouncing the superheroes from the movie Watchman (Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?) but we usually hold high esteem for those who work on the fringes of the society, don’t we? Let’s us plunge into that cesspool of misfits:

It didn’t start with Robin Hood (there was probably some Cro-Magnon man who clubbed the better hunters and give their goods to poorer gatherers) but he helped romanticizing this phenomenon. From Scott’s Ivanhoe to Green Arrow, there were parodies and pastiches of the famed robber and his Merry Men. Libertarian Ayn Rand made fun of this with a character in Atlas Shrugged. A pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld, a Robin Hood-like character, considers himself the complete negative of the Medieval outlaw. (Rand viewed the idea to rob the rich and give to the poor highly pernicious). Ragnar, a libertarian like his creator, attacks on government property and never touch private property.

Literature was especially permitting to these lawless activities. Dumas’ Edmund Dantes (better known as the Count of Monte Cristo) has a moral compass that is misguided if not entirely broken. He was on a personal vendetta, which made things a little different, but among the swashbuckling gentleman-thieves (fashioned after Rt. Hon. Mr. Hood) that I read and misguidedly admired during my youth include: Hornung’s Raffles, LeBlanc’s Lupin, and Charteris’ The Saint. Even that Victorian staple of moral uprightness, one Sherlock Holmes, Esq., permitted the murder of a serial-blackmailer in The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.

Some will say that Citizen Vigilantes like The Scarlet Pimpernel in fiction and gut-toting sheriffs of the American West in real life balanced (and reflected) the culture of the day, but what separate them from becoming monsters like Fantomas or various outlaws of the American West. They can justify their missions but saying those mail-wagons and rail-cars carried the bourgeois society’s riches but the bottomline is that they disturb the social order of the day. An unfair social order can be revolutionized through reforms and political awareness, not through assassinations and fermentations. I am looking at you, Captain America, Batman and the CIA assassination squads–which eventually served the same purpose.

Then, the worst of all–or the king of this misfit hill–is Dexter. Serial-television character and serial killer Dexter Morgan was the primary inspiration for this blog post. (real-life John Dillinger, who has been glamorized of lately is another inspiration; Dillinger stole from the rich and gave to the whores). In his show, whose opening sequence is a masterpiece, Dexter kills people who the justice system let go on technicalities with what wikipedia calls ‘a strict moral code’. It sounded like something from Michael Douglas’ Star Chamber. Well, no matter how hard we root for Hannibal Lector or those fighting against killer-on-the-loose Fred Krueger, even killing those who deserve is wrong. I feel funny saying that, being a proponent of death penalty, but no citizen should take law into his own hands. [A tangent clip about Michael Dukakis and death penalty here.]

Dexter is worse: he is a serial killer with a mission–to get rid of the bad guys. Who decides who is good and who is bad? In the real life, these mission-oriented killers exist, “ridding the world” of “undesirables” (read, homosexuals, prostitutes, minorities or Catholics). We should not be glorifying them; it is akin to glorifying Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”, who had a modus operandi too, in targeting universities and the airline industry.

I don’t usually agree with Parent Television Council, but here I will have them the last say: “The series compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn’t get discovered”. It is about Dexter, but substitute ‘thief’, ‘robber’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘murderer’ instead of ’serial killer’ and you will have accurate description of my sentiments about above fictional and non-fictional people. It is one thing rebelliously admiring their carefree lawless life (you hippies) but it is another idolizing them.

Whose lobotomy am I paying this week?

thequintessential — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:14:27 +0000

Probably those of Washington politicos and 24/7 cable news anchors. But debate over healthcare continues:

Government Care is at least efficient, right?

Umm, can’t tell unless we try it. The president’s misguided analogy with post-office said as much: “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems,” not the smartest thing he said, considering that U.S. post lost $4.7 billions last year, another indicator of inefficient government bureaucracy. On the other hand Medicare, medicaid and veteran’s health administration run quite efficiently.

Two reasons are behind this: (1) not as many people use medicare, medicaid or veteran’s health administration as private health care, and patient-doctor ratio is reasonable. (2) they don’t have to keep an eye on profits as private health providers have to. (Public health options don’t need to advertise, therefore they also gain a little unfair advantage when it comes to competition). However, during the enrollment increases in those programs (changes based on population growths, etc.), there were signs of fiscal stress on the system, showing that this combination is precarious at best.

As footnotes, there is efficacy through competition: tragic-comically, insurance companies arrive on scene before FEMA during Katrina. There are back-and-forth arguments over whether the efficiency of medicare is just a myth: here, here. Also, medicare, medicaid or private insurance never cover 100% of the bill, making this efficiency a bare mirage.

What is the current government healthcare spending like?

Indecipherable. Let’s break down Obama’s healthcare spending. The expansion of Schip (state children’s health insurance program) which subsidizes insurance for 6 million low-income children (twice vetoed by President Bush) cost $5 billion-a-year. It will be funded by increased tobacco taxes ($35 billion for next five years).

Medicare Advantage, insurance for the elderly cost around $100 billion dollars to taxpayers a year. If the government provide the coverage directly, instead of private insurance companies, the taxpayers will save 12%-15%. Where does that $15 billion go? The president said insurance companies just took it as profits. Insurers say they take it as a buffer for government’s inadequate reimbursements, which shifts the costs to the privately insured. The insured blame the uninsured for this loss. Economists, however, blame everyone for allowing excessive treatments.

To put the government spending (and potential spendings) into perspective, the U.S. spends $2 trillion a year for health care. President Obama’s proposed public option will cost around $1 trillion dollar over a decade to bring the 50 million uninsured into the tent, and $250 billion of such spending will be put on the federal deficit. However, in practice, the figure may not be as high because (1) it includes illegal immigrants, stubborn young adults who don’t think they need insurance and poor people who are eligible for Medicaid, (2) only those without affordable employer-provided insurance and those in small businesses not offering employer-provided insurance will qualify to Obama’s ‘public option’.

Does financial crisis have any bearing on the healthcare reform?

Definitely. On one hand, it makes current healthcare companies less willing to take risky customers and yielding way for a government-run system. A lot of people lost their jobs and employer-paid health-insurance. As many as 14,000 people are losing their health insurance every day because of job cuts, according to left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund. On the other hand, it will further strain the national debt already stretched by the bailouts. A better lesson will be about risk.

In both financial and medical sector, insurance companies insure against risk. By taking on those risky health care coverage, the government (or insurance companies) are forced to take on risk and thus needs to diversify the potential damage. They do so by raising everyone else’s health care coverage. That was how the housing babble began and AIG/Lehman Brothers/Merrill-Lynch all ended by with risky asserts that turned into defaults. Dieu merci.

So health insurance companies are naturally lobbying against Obamacare?

No. They are against a government agency providing ‘healthcare’; that is why there is so much hot air against Britain’s NHS which employs hospitals and doctors. However, in the U.S., the reform will greatly benefit health insurance companies. They will gain tens of millions of new customers because Americans would be required by law to carry health insurance. Pharmaceutical companies would sell more prescription drugs because more people would have coverage for drugs. Hospitals and doctors wouldn’t have to provide as much free care as they do now.

Their profit margins would go down a little, but unlike with the Clinton care, the healthcare lobby is currently for the reform. However, so much political backlash (in town-hall meetings, ha) currently comes from small-businesses with low-income workers, which will now have to provide some insurance. [In Obamacare, small business is defined as an establishment whose annual payroll is over $250,000 annually, so most small businesses will be directly effected].

What is wrong with legalizing euthanasia?

Nothing really, but must be heavily regulated? It depends on how you frame legalizing part: assisted suicide is one way to interpret it, while mercy-killing (a noble concept pioneered in those benighted Crusader days and still used on dying horses) sounds a sunny idea. However, regulating this euthanasia will be a logistical, theological, and political nightmare. Suppose we impose a minimal age before which one cannot seek state-sponsored euthanasia. What will happen to those with incurable diseases under that age?

Tragically termed ‘easy way out’, legalized euthanasia can easily mark the beginning of this slippery slope. However, on the other hand are precipitous laws banning suicide. The assisted suicides of terminal patients are legal in Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands; Oregon requires two doctors to confirm that the patient has less than six months to live to conduct euthanasia. A Swiss group Dignitas is currently in the news for ending the life of an ailing (but not dying) British composer in a suicide pact with his dying wife. Everywhere in the world, the debate rages more violently than ever: in France, Je Vous Demande le Droit de Mourir, a 2005 book by Vincent Humbert, who a car crash left “unable to ‘walk, see, speak, smell or taste”, became a bible for people supporting euthanasia; in the Netherlands, a Dutch doctor is underfire for assisting the death of a Catholic nun, who he assumed refused euthanasia for religious reasons. No case is black and white when it comes to euthanasia.

Whose rhinoplasty am I funding this week?

thequintessential — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 07:09:18 +0000

The above title is misleading. I am not an American and have no wish to fund anyone’s rhinoplasty this week, but seeing everyone’s anger and angst compelled me to write about this debate, which is not as black and white as partisan politics made it out to be:

National Heathcare leads to long lines.

True and false. There are stories (anecdotes, fear mongering) about long waits for health-care services. Currently, 25% of Americans wait 6 or more days for an appointment with their primary-care physician, as opposed to 15% of Britons, 13% of Germans, 10% of Australians and just 3% of New Zealanders. Still a sweeping generalization cannot be made about these countries with strong public-health care: 2/3 of Canadians had to wait longer than six days, and they too have a national health care system.

Only 26 percent of Americans and Canadians reported being able see their doctor on the day they called, compared with 60 percent in the Netherlands and 48 percent in Britain according to the Commonwealth Fund. However, specialized care is a different story: 8 percent of Americans have to wait four months or more for specialized procedure, and 62 percent wait less than a month. In Britain, 41 percent of patients have to wait four months or more. All these stats are not reflections of private or public healthcare system, but of the disparity in earnings between physicians and specialists in North America. In the U.S., there is already a shortage of primary-care doctors, which means this Obamacare can put another strain on primary-care.

Massachusetts healthcare system works, so can we apply it to the entire nation?

No. It does work, but lamely. The Bay State’s system is a brainchild of Senator Ted Kennedy and his 20-year campaign for healthcare. It is based on the Swiss model, perhaps the most integrated private-public healthcare co-pay systems in the entire world. The government uses regulations and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered: everyone is mandated to buy insurance, insurers can’t discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies. However, the system is very costly.

Current prevailing health insurance in America (employer-assisted coverage) is already like Massachusetts model (actually, it was vice versa). Middle-income families are not being covered, and people who lost their jobs during the recession lost their insurance too.

Will socialism ever work?

Not in America. Healthcare-socialism connections (or connection) stop at the fact that the government will take over the entire healthcare system. Obamacare will not lead to this, but in Scandinavian countries, at least, the public healthcare systems make up the major portion of the healthcare coverage. There, even the hospitals are publicly owned institutions. It is one of the milestones of a social welfare state to provide a government-run healthcare system to its citizens. The system worked in those Scandinavian countries because of a selection entry-and-exit model. America with its freedom to move within states and bad immigration problem will never embrace socialism.

Yes, in Scandinavia, it work thanks to the citizens who pay 50%-60% income and property taxes–another aspect of a welfare state. The state makes everything in life (from milk to education services) subsidized and therefore makes it impossible to immigrate from or emigrate to the said country. Emigration laws were tight and a person has so much to lose by leaving his society. That was the premise of socialism (and some futuristically-imagined self-sustaining societies); people hail this as a novel, revolutionary and even reactionary idea. No, it isn’t. Socialism is the bastard son of feudalism, where manor lord oversees every aspects of his peasants’ lives (birth, education, employment, marriage, health, infirmity, death); it is hard to leave because he owns you. In modern socialism, instead of literal droit de seigneur, the state figuratively rapes you.

Will this lead to dead panels?

No, but maybe in the future. Somewhere, William F. Buckley Jnr. is smiling. In 2007 novel on babyboomers, Boomsday, Bill’s son, Christopher wrote about a bunch of politicos spinning euthanasia as ‘voluntary transitioning’, and providing incentives (tax breaks for golf carts and segways) so that these 65 and older take government’s ‘voluntary transition’ pill. No. Obamacare won’t lead to this, but if Obamacare were to be successful, the dependence of the system can eventually lead to so-called dead-panels.

In England, a treatment is only approved if it adds the value of one additional year (which was valued around 30,000 pounds). If you are a penniless 80-year old depending on government-subsidized pills, what will happen if the government (or a new doctor) deems it should not be giving out pills to you anymore. It is not an unreasonable fear, but considering that if you are a penniless 80-year old under the current system, you will die anyway so why not trust the government for once. The worst it can lead to is … bad teeth.

Or certain bad body parts for that matter. The classic stereotype, the British bad teeth, comes from the expensive and inaccessible dental care under their NHS system. This combined with indifference (of 60 million Britons, only 14 million are entitled to dental care, and only 7% of the eligible people actually apply for the care), lead to the horrific dental appearance. The same goes for every body part (eyes, ears, etc.) not entirely covered by the public health care.

Everyone can use and abuse health-care statistics.

True, for all kinds of statistics. Don’t trust me; go on and read here. Read here about NHS in Britain.

(To be continued…)