10 years ago at the blog – – this one's gotten more relevant along at least a couple of dimensions

Obviously, anything having to do with the Ebola outbreak will take on an added significance given what happened a few years later, but the part that jumps out to me is that this wasn't early example of the Straussian breakdown and other trends in the GOP that would become the dominant features of the party and would go on to have a disastrous impact on the country.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Yes, a Surgeon General would come in handy right about now

For me, one of the most interesting stories in politics these days is the way that information has come to flow in the the conservative movement. And sometimes the most interesting part of that story is the way information fails to flow.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) says Ron Klain is "off to a bad start" in his new role as the president's Ebola response coordinator, and that the U.S. Surgeon General should be the one leading the effort. But what Chaffetz doesn't seem to realize is that there hasn't been a surgeon general for more than a year.

“Why not have the surgeon general head this up?" Chaffetz asked in a Wednesday appearance on Fox News. "I think that’s a very legitimate question. At least you have somebody who has a medical background whose been confirmed by the United States Senate.”

“It begs the question, what does the surgeon general do?" he added. "Why aren’t we empowering that person?”

After this broke, Chaffetz tried to moonwalk his way back from the statement but there is simply no way to frame this so that the man comes off as both well-informed and honest. His problem is that he is trying to follow an official party line that makes consistency almost impossible (you can't block relevant nominations and gut relevant funding while plausibly complaining about the government doing too little to address an epidemic).

I suspect the root of the problem is that the leadership of the conservative movement fell in love with the appealing but doubly flawed idea that you can create optimal messaging by controlling the process. Fox News has always been a hothouse for ideas and arguments crafted to appeal to the base. Conflicting data and effective counter-arguments were largely kept out of the environment.

This approach can work for a while but at some point you lose control. The system is too complex to fine-tune. Eventually you find yourself saddled with a bunch of ideas that the base is committed to even though they can't hope to survive in the outside world.

 

More Mort

Mort Sahl Mocks The Presidential Candidates in The Upcoming 1968 Election

A traditional Republican's case against Dobbs

Highly recommended video from Tim Miller of the Bulwark. There are at least a couple of reasons you should watch this. First, the ads shown and discussed from the Harris campaign are among the most disturbing and provocative you've ever seen, and I mean that in the right way. They provoke entirely appropriate discomfort and anger.

Second, Miller's comments are worth listening to both for their content, and also for who Miller is, someone who, despite having gone all in on opposing Trump and the current state of the party, still views the world as a moderate Republican.

A Littleton, Colorado native, Miller started out in Republican politics as an intern working on the 1998 Colorado gubernatorial election.^[3][4] He later earned a bachelor's degree from the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs.^[5]

Miller was an Iowa staffer for John McCain in the 2008 Republican Party presidential primaries, and later served as national press secretary for the Jon Huntsman 2012 presidential campaign.^[5] In his role with the Huntsman campaign, Miller was credited by Esquire for making its daily email to reporters "surprisingly hip".^[6] After the primary, Miller joined the Republican National Committee as its liaison to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.^[7]

In 2015, Miller was hired by former Florida governor Jeb Bush to be a senior adviser to his presidential exploratory committee, Right to Rise political action committee (PAC), and went on to serve as the communications director for Bush's presidential campaign.^[5][8][9] During the campaign, Miller drew notice as a "vocal critic" of Donald Trump.^[10] Following a 2016 South Carolina Republican primary debate, Miller followed Trump around the spin room heckling him until Miller was "hip-checked" by Trump campaign strategist Corey Lewandowski.^[11]

 Apologies for the formatting, but here are some of the comments that I found worth repeating. 

The essential take away here is that the anti-reproductive rights movement (calling it anti-abortion no longer provides an accurate picture) has gone to a place so dark and misogynistic that many people who consider themselves at least moderately pro-life are appalled by what they're seeing. The Harris campaign has made the smart (and I would say moral) decision to focus on the most indefensible consequences of Dobbs: victims of rape; girls so young we would consider them children; women bleeding out in emergency room parking lots.

The press has been pushing for Harris to take more positions on divisive issues. Personally I think it is both savvy and right to prioritize urgent points of agreement, and I can't think of many issues more urgent than this.

Abortion -- Secondary and Tertiary Effects

One of the points we have been hammering for a long time now is that much, possibly even most of the impact of the Dobbs ruling will come from its secondary and tertiary effects. For the moment, we are keeping the discussion very narrow and leaving out issues like rape and incest or the larger impact on reproductive rights, not because they are unimportant (very much the opposite), but because they are too big to work in here.

Some of this is arbitrary, but this is how we are defining our terms.

The primary effect is that women lose the right to terminate a pregnancy.

Secondary effects include treatments for pregnant women, particularly with respect to miscarriages and other complications. They generally involve healthcare providers refusing to perform necessary procedures out of the fear that these will be incorrectly classified as abortions.

Tertiary effects include the direct and indirect impact on the healthcare and rights of all women including those who are not and in some cases may not be capable of becoming pregnant. If a woman loses access to a drug because that drug can also be used as an abortifacient, that is a tertiary effect. If a woman's Dr. moves out of a state or if new doctors choose not to locate in a state due to antiabortion laws, that is a tertiary effect. If women lose their right to privacy due to things like menstrual tracking, that is a tertiary effect.

The negative impact on postnatal treatment is a tertiary effect, which brings us to Louisiana, which even more than Texas has become Ground Zero for this story.

From NPR's All Things Considered:

A new Louisiana law will re-classify misoprostol as a dangerous controlled substance

Rosemary Westwood | September 27, 2024

 Louisiana already bans nearly all abortions. But starting in October, there will be additional restrictions on mifepristone and misoprostol. These drugs are used in medication abortions but also have other uses in pregnancy care. Under a new law in Louisiana, they will be reclassified as controlled, dangerous substances. WWNO’s Rosemary Westwood in New Orleans explains why doctors there are worried.

If women start bleeding out after giving birth, one of the key drugs doctors can reach for is misoprostol. It’s effective, safe and cheap. And hospitals often keep it immediately available on special hemorrhage carts in labor and delivery rooms.

JENNIFER AVEGNO: You have it either right there in the room, in an easy-to-access cart, or you’ve got nurses who walk around with it in their pocket, going from room to room.

WESTWOOD: That’s Dr. Jennifer Avegno, the director of the New Orleans Health Department. Over the summer, she started hearing that hospitals were pulling misoprostol off the carts and out of the rooms. They’re moving the drug to locked cabinets because that’s what’s required for controlled, dangerous substances.

Most controlled drugs have the potential of being abused, like Ambien and Xanax. Misoprostol doesn’t. But in some hospitals, doctors or nurses will have to go farther to reach it and unlock the cabinet. Avegno says some are even running drills to see how much longer it will take. New Orleans OB-GYN Nicole Freehill says any delay is dangerous.

NICOLE FREEHILL: Somebody’s just bleeding profusely. And at that point, if it takes even two minutes to access that medicine versus 20 seconds that it used to take when it was on the hemorrhage cart in the room, those seconds matter.

Under the category of secondary effects, which have produced dozens of horrifying and heartbreaking stories, Louisiana was also the state where Kaitlyn Joshua suffered her traumatic experience.

WATCH: “This experience helped me see how Black women like me die needlessly… This is government and political interference in private health care decisions…”

Kaitlyn Joshua testified powerfully about how Republican abortion bans almost killed her. #ForcedBirthNation pic.twitter.com/bbD8XL8rTo

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) September 24, 2024

Ten years ago at the blog -- turns out this wasn't nearly the stupidest thing Marc Andreessen was saying.

 A quick google search shows that 2014 was the year that Andreessen went big on Bitcoin. Crypto wasn't on our radar at the time, but had we been paying attention, we wouldn't have been all that surprised that this guy was involved.  

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

"The skeptics are wrong all the time"

Marc Andreessen has a new interview up and it is characteristically packed with silliness. If things had gone better for ViolaWWW, do you think Pei-Yuan Wei would have gotten this annoying?

What did you do?

I just went to college. I did my thing. I came out here in ’94, and Silicon Valley was in hibernation. In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the ’80s, and I got here too late. But then, I’m maybe the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I’m incredibly optimistic. I’m optimistic arguably to a fault, especially in terms of new ideas. My presumptive tendency, when I’m presented with a new idea, is not to ask, “Is it going to work?” It’s, “Well, what if it does work?”
...

But clearly you don’t think everything’s going to work.

No. But there are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.

On the other hand, if there’d been a few more skeptics in 1999, people might have kept their retirement money. Isn’t there a role for skepticism in the tech industry?

I don’t know what it buys you. Let me put it this way. If you could point to periods of time in the last hundred years when everything just stabilized and didn’t change, then maybe yes. But that never seems to actually happen. The skeptics are wrong all the time.

There is a huge survivor bias in the way Andreessen and other creative disruptors compile their case studies. They only remember the lottery tickets that paid off and this leads them to dispense some very bad advice.

When it comes to investing in innovation, skeptics are right a lot -- quite possibly most -- of the time. We've been at this for well over a century, at least since Edisonades started showing up next to the dime Westerns. If you couldn't be a Bell or a Wright, you could at least be the investor who got in on the ground floor.

The trouble was, then and now, that there tend to be more Paige Compositors than light bulbs. Uncritical blanket optimism is a bad way to approach investments. I'd also argue that, if you're setting your sights higher than Snapchat, it's also a bad way to promote innovation but that's a topic for another post.