Central planning is not an economic policy.

Here’s an interesting but misguided study:

A new poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans favor allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices for the Medicare program, suggesting there will be considerable political pressure on the next Congress to do so.

Eight-five percent of the 1,867 adults polled in the Kaiser Family Foundation survey released yesterday said they favored such negotiations, including majorities of Republicans, Democrats and independents.

So people presumably understand that negotiating in the marketplace makes sense. Why include government? Do people not pay attention to results?

Julie L. Goon, special assistant to Bush for economic policy, said that Medicare beneficiaries are saving an average of $1,200 a year on drugs and that the existing program is popular and efficient.

“The government doesn’t do a particularly good job of negotiation,” Goon said. “I think it would be a mistake to open up the political process to what particular prices are available for drugs.”

Success is measured by beneficiaries saving money without noting that the cost is that someone else pays that $1,200. Of course, we could look no further than the stunningly frank admission that government doesn’t do a particularly good job of negotiation. The trade-off for those savings-that-aren’t-really-savings is fewer choices. Well done.

Welcome to government meddling with healthcare. Anyone who wants more is crazy.

Destroying an Admirable History

Many have pointed out that the notion of civil liberties in the United Kingdom is now a sham, but this is ridiculous:

Commander Dave Johnston, giving a personal point of view, said that samples could also be taken from people renewing passports and from migrants.
…

The head of the Met’s Homicide and Serious Crime Unit also suggested taking DNA from dead people might help “cleanse” the database.

He added that blood samples were already taken from babies at four days old to test for genetic diseases but stressed it was important to have a debate over the human rights issue.

A debate? Do you think? A child’s future is unknown, which is just part of life. Are we ready to assume that children are guilty until proven innocent, and that solving hypothetical, unlikely crimes trumps any rights a child has?

DNA samples are retained from those arrested but not convicted and from victims and witnesses who give their consent.

Apparently.

Does the baby Jesus hate Tofurky?

Speaking of science and kooks, too much soy will allegedly make you gay (Source):

The dangerous food I’m speaking of is soy. Soybean products are feminizing, and they’re all over the place. You can hardly escape them anymore.

I have nothing against an occasional soy snack. Soy is nutritious and contains lots of good things. Unfortunately, when you eat or drink a lot of soy stuff, you’re also getting substantial quantities of estrogens.

Estrogens are female hormones. If you’re a woman, you’re flooding your system with a substance it can’t handle in surplus. If you’re a man, you’re suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your “female side,” physically and mentally.

With such claims, a few citations of medical data might help. They’re nowhere to be found. But that’s okay. Proof is unnecessary when a child’s sexuality is at stake:

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

And so it goes. Instead of scientific proof, or even theories with a scientific basis, we get the basic statement that “homosexuality is always deviant.” Note that the author discusses medical blame rather than explanation. Even if soy is as dangerous as the author claims, his real concern is not physical health. Moral health trumps any reality we face here. Of course, a reasonable person might just as easily attribute the alleged rise in homosexuality to reduced stigma that allows gays to come out of the closet rather than pretending to be straight. Incidence and reporting are different.

Finally, I wonder how the author would explain lesbians? I understand that the real disgust is aimed at gay men, but I wouldn’t expect the bigotry to be this obvious.

Afterthought: As a vegan, I have no stance in this argument. Avoid soy or don’t. I eat soy products and I’m fairly certain it hasn’t made me gay. But I’m just one guy. Here is some information about soy that challenges a few claims. I make no claims about it’s accuracy, but there are citations. That’s instantly an improvement over the WorldNet Daily nonsense.

Obvious Headline of the Day

Because we need research to reach this conclusion:

Newborns probably able to feel pain: research

More interesting is the collective denial involved leading up to such a not-stunning finding:

“New measurement techniques show that even premature babies display all the signs of a conscious experience of pain,” the research institute said in a statement, citing a doctoral thesis by Italian-Swedish researcher Marco Bartocci.

“For many years, doctors have assumed that foetuses, premature babies and fully developed newborn babies do not have the cerebral cortical functions required to feel pain,” it said.

“Babies’ reactions to potentially painful stimuli have been explained away as unconscious reflexes and so doctors have felt it justified to withhold painkillers during surgery and the like so as to avoid adverse reactions,” the institute said.

It’s amazing the number of people who will listen to a baby wail during circumcision and believe that only the restraint generates the crying. Silly and indefensible assumptions should not be tolerated.

But Bartocci’s research shows that the brains of premature babies are far more developed than previously thought.

His studies “using infrared spectroscopy … show that pain signals from a pin prick are processed in the cerebral cortex of premature babies in the same way as in adults.”

This should not be used as an excuse to administer pain relief to babies and sweep the more fundamental flaws of the process aside. Again, it’s useful to accept facts but that does not mean assumptions should remain unchallenged. Non-medical circumcision on a non-consenting individual with pain relief is still unacceptable madness.

Sports is a business.

First, with the Phillies’ recent acquisition of starting pitcher Freddy Garcia, we the team now has one too many starters. With many teams in need of a proven starter, a trade will occur before spring training. The odd man out is Jon Lieber, but that’s not what’s important. This quote from Phillies assistant GM Mike Arbuckle explains how to operate in a market.

“If we’re sending Christmas gifts to starting pitchers, we’ll probably only have to send out five,” he said with a laugh. “But we’ll let numerous teams come to us and see what the best offer is. Supply and demand may work in our favor.”

Bud Selig and the other owners in Major League Baseball talk a lot about parity, which can be seen as little more than talent redistribution when carried to the extreme. Yet, it doesn’t work out that way. Some teams seem to build talent in excess of what they need.

In this case, the Phillies and starting pitchers. Would it make sense for Major League Baseball to take one of the Phillies’ pitchers and give him to the Devil Rays, for example, because they need starters? Of course not. The Devil Rays, and every other team, are left to extract that player from the Phillies in exchange for another player. As any reasonable person could predict, the Philadelphia will try to improve its roster (demand) by offering a starter (excess supply). This is logical, so why do so many in our government feel that this does not apply to every other situation in economics?

Next, Senator Arlen Spector has interesting opinions about the NFL and its collectivist bargaining of television rights. Consider:

Whatever his motivation, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., claimed at the end of a Thursday hearing that he will sponsor legislation to strip the NFL of the antitrust exemption that permits the league to negotiate its television contracts for all 32 franchises, rather than have the teams do so individually.

“Wouldn’t consumers be better off if teams could negotiate [individually]?” Specter said. “This is the NFL exerting its power right down to the last nickel.”

..

Specter said the NFL should not use the exemption to negotiate exclusive programming packages such as DirectTV Inc.’s “Sunday Ticket,” which allows viewers to watch teams outside their regional market.

“As I look at what the NFL is doing today with the NFL channel with the DirectTV … a lot of people, including myself, would like to be able to have that ticket,” Specter said.

Among the grievances cited by Specter in what he termed a “fans be damned” mentality demonstrated by the NFL was the relocation of franchises, and decisions like the one that moved Monday Night Football from ABC, an over-the-air network broadcaster, to ESPN, a cable entity.

Using Sen. Spector’s logic, couldn’t individuals better negotiate wage contracts with employers tailored to meet their own needs? Perhaps collective bargaining is a great benefit for those involved. Perhaps not. But those involved should decide how they best wish to negotiate, free of government intervention or protection. The NFL’s structure is a voluntary club in which individuals and corporations transact with known rules. This is not the problem.

I could get behind Sen. Spector’s sabre-rattling about antitrust exemptions, but he’s attacking the wrong beast. He apparently can’t fathom the idea that the government should have little role in the operation of business. Remove/reduce the concept of antitrust and this matter goes away. Sen. Spector doesn’t want that; he is a politician, after all. But he seems to believe that being a football fan also entitles him to manipulate a market because he’d rather get the NFL and DirectTV’s combined product without having to include DirectTV. No. Subscribe to DirectTV or don’t, but leave the government out of it.

On Sen. Spector’s last point, what would he propose regarding Monday Night Football? That ABC receive a monopoly on broadcasting that, even if someone else (ESPN, like ABC, owned by Disney) is willing to pay more? I don’t recall reading anything about a fundamental right to free broadcasts of the NFL in the Constitution.

Finally, the Orioles are getting a new JumboTron, except they don’t want it. They’re not paying for it, so they want a bigger JumboTron.

The Maryland Stadium Authority agreed yesterday to move forward with the purchase of a new Mitsubishi video screen for Camden Yards despite objections from the Orioles.

Orioles officials say the DiamondVision screen is too small and technologically inadequate and plan to file a temporary restraining order in Baltimore Circuit Court today to block the $1.5 million purchase. The restraining order would give the Orioles time to move the dispute to arbitration as is called for in the team’s lease for the stadium.

On the surface, this is little more than a contract dispute. It should be decided as such given the constraints of reality. It’s possible to accept the facts while rejecting the assumptions. The taxpayers of Maryland should not be forced to subsidize the purchase of a bigger video screen for a private business.

Major League Baseball and the NFL are businesses and should be treated as such. Politicians who interfere *cough*Tom Davis*cough*, for whatever reason, are anti-capitalists trying to break fundamental laws of economics. They should not be tolerated.

Hat tip to Baseball Musings for the last item.

“…whether their use should be restricted…”

But we’ve done it this way for a long time; it must be effective.

New drug-releasing stents used widely to keep clogged heart arteries open appear to increase the risk for potentially life-threatening blood clots more than older bare-metal versions, government investigators told an expert panel assessing the safety of the devices today.

But the blood clot risk from the tiny metal mesh struts, known as drug-eluting stents, appears relatively low and it remains unclear whether it translates into an excess risk for heart attacks or deaths, according to the Food and Drug Administration analysts.

Nevertheless, because some studies have suggested the increased risk of blood clots, known as thrombosis, may be causing thousands of excess heart attacks and deaths each year, it is urgent that experts determine whether their use should be restricted and patients who already have them should be treated longer with anti-clotting drugs, the agency officials said.

My opening statement is stupid because it lacks the logic involved in questioning and striving for something better. Yet people do this all the time and think nothing of it. Progress is good, but sometimes it requires a retrenchment to a prior point. Not necessarily with heart stents, but we must be open to ideas.

Why does anyone care?

No doubt this is for the children:

Focus on the Family, a Christian group that has provided crucial political support to President Bush, released a statement that criticized child rearing by same-sex couples.

“Mary Cheney’s pregnancy raises the question of what’s best for children,” said Carrie Gordon Earll, the group’s director of issues analysis. “Just because it’s possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn’t mean it’s the best for the child.”

Of all the issues in the world, this raises the question of what’s best for children? A reasonable person might respond that just because it’s possible to conceive a child inside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn’t mean it’s the best for the child. A reasonable person might also ask Focus on the Family what makes them experts on how to best raise children. What is the ideal situation? Should we find the two most supreme married, heterosexual parents and award them custody of all children? They’re married, they’re straight, so they must be great.

Darwinism is true, but sometimes I wonder if it’s working as fast as it can.

“Ooooh, waffles!”

I don’t have much time right now as I hack away at Rolling Doughnut’s code (dirty business, it is), so now might be the best time to give a glimpse into my less serious opinions. I miss Alias in a bad, bad way. It’s my all-time favorite show, and I can’t imagine something overtaking it. Ever. Which makes me kind of sad because I suspect I’ve already seen the best television show I’ll ever see. At 33, that sucks since I love TV so much. Of course, many are saying that traditional television shows are done anyway. I don’t buy it, but maybe. Either way, I miss Alias.

Just in time to save the day, though, came the best new show on television, and quite likely the best show currently on, ahead of even How I Met Your Mother. I’m referring to Heroes. If you’re already watching, congratulations, you’re in the club. If you’re not, you’re missing out and I’m here to implore you to catch up before the show returns in late January.

I’m a fan of Hiro, as most people are. The joy he takes in discovering his powers is wonderful. But I’m also loving the Peter Petrelli story line for its growth potential. The other Heroes rock, as well. (Greg Grunberg: Felicity, Alias, and Heroes. That’s a body of work!) Every week I look forward to the show and wonder where the story line will go. What’s best is that it’s everything Lost used to be, with a bunch of new, cool stuff included. There are questions, but there are also answers. That’s cool. And I think the show happily answers the question of whether or not a serial can still work on television again. (Yes, Fox, that’s directed at you and Reunion.)

Like I said, if you’re not watching, you’re missing out. Catch up on NBC’s website, where the episodes are free, or on iTunes, where the episodes are portable. Either way, you have until January 22. Get to it.

My sides hurt from laughing.

I’m thrilled with my Xbox 360, even given the supposed fun factor of the Nintendo Wii. I imagine the Wii is fun, but it seems like more exercise than I want. Yet, I’m glad the Wii exists because without it, Wii Have A Problem wouldn’t exist. If you need a laugh, browse through all the stories of people who’ve broken their televisions, cut themselves, or thrown their remote against the wall when the safety strap broke. Consider this today’s lesson in unintended consequences.