Here in under 4 minutes John Green reviews how much has been made achieved toward an ambitious set of goals created by the United Nations 15 years ago and finds that on most of them the world has made a pretty remarkable amount of progress.
Note that while the goals were established in 2000, the baseline for several of them was 1990, and things had already improved on some fronts. I suppose this could be considered cheating, but it really doesn’t change the fact that a lot of progress was made over that 25-year time frame.
In brief, worldwide advancements in health, education, the status of women and girls, and combatting poverty have been pretty good. The environment is unfortunately another matter, particularly with respect to greenhouse gases. For more on the Millennium Development Goals see the project’s website and the Wikipedia entry.
For the new set of goals for the next 15 years, see this later post.
(Updated 2015 Oct 1 to add links and clarify the time frame of the Millennium Development Goals.)
During the “New Rules” segment of his latest HBO show, Bill Maher talks about the human tendency to keep believing in something we’ve invested in despite evidence that it’s not working. This is a generalization of the “sunk cost” fallacy in economics that too often stops people from cutting their losses.
This, he suggests, is why a lot of people on the far right cling to a belief that Obama had done all manner of horrible things to the country despite the fact that the predicted catastrophes simply didn’t materialize. He catalogs a number of examples starting about 4 minutes into the video.
A caution: This is Bill Maher, so the language and subject matter do get a mite risqué.
Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina (March 2010): “The legacy for Medicare is going to be devastating.”
Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (October 2010): “There will be no insurance industry left in three years.”
Sarah Palin (August 2009): “… my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s death panel …” (Strictly speaking, of course, this wasn’t a failed prediction; it was a lie.)
And on subjects other than the Affordable Care Act:
Mitt Romney (November 2008): If the Obama administration bails out the car companies (which it did most notably for GM, which was about to go out of business), “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”
Newt Gingrich (February 2012): “If you want $10 a gallon gasoline … Barack Obama should be your candidate.”
NRA president Wayne LaPierre (February 2012): If reelected, Obama will “erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights.”
Rick Santorum (November 2011): If gay marriage becomes the law of the land “our country will fall.”
Mitt Romney (December 2011): “If President Obama is reelected, you won’t be able to get a job.”
That last remark reminds me that in May 2012 Romney promised, “I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we’d put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, and perhaps a little lower.” Of course, the Congressional Budget Office predicted in 2012 that based on the economic trends at the time, the headline unemployment rate would fall to 5.3 percent by the end of 2016, so Romney may have had in mind being able to take credit for something expected to happen anyway.
As it turned out, of course, the rate fell as much in two years under Obama as Romney had promised in four. (And no, the books haven’t been cooked; there’s too much independent verification to make that claim credible.) It’s true that workforce participation (the number of people working or actively looking for work) is lower than we’d like to see it, but that’s improving as well, and it would be improving even faster if Congress hadn’t made the mistake of embracing Austerity Lite despite its failure in Europe.
To follow up on a post from Sunday, here’s an even shorter video (about 6 minutes) that provides some additional information about the Syrian refugee crisis.
There is a lot here that might surprise you. (At least it surprised me.) Did you know, for example, that if the European Union alone took in all the refugees from Syria, it would raise the percentage of Muslims in Europe only from 4 percent to 5 percent? Or that there is excellent reason to think it will actually help solve some of Europe’s economic problems?
Seriously, folks, this is easily worth just 6 minutes of your time:
This is way more interesting than you might expect. Some young folks drive to a dry lake bed in Nevada and set up a scale model of the Solar System, that is, with all the planets and their orbits laid out to the same scale. The Earth is the size of a marble, and on that scale Saturn is a mile from the Sun. It ends with Apollo astronauts recalling what it was like to be so far from the Earth that they could hide it behind their thumb.
As you’ve probably heard, Volkswagen,the world’s biggest car maker, was caught cheating on emissions tests. Specifically, its diesel engines had software that turned on anti-pollution features only when it detected signs that an emission test was going on. In normal mode, the vehicles had better performance but emitted something like 40 times as much pollution.
This wasn’t a simple thing to rig. Serious work went into the deception. And it isn’t just a clever amusing hack; the additional pollution almost certainly cost lives. (Update 2015 Sep 25: For one back-of-the-envelope estimate of the number of deaths attributable to Volkswagen’s actions, see this piece from Kevin Drum. He comes up with a conservative estimate of 4000 lives lost.)
The problem was first discovered a year ago, but Volkswagen stonewalled and denied they were doing anything wrong. It was only when they were backed into a corner by irrefutable evidence that they started acting all contrite and apologetic, the same pattern of behavior embraced by street thugs, except that street thugs don’t kill quite as many people.
Corporations caught in criminal wrongdoing are usually hit with fines, often so small that they’re treated as just another cost of doing business. This time the fines will reportedly be much larger, on the order of $18 billion, and VW’s stock has taken a huge hit, falling about $20 billion in market value. Massive lawsuits are almost certain.
But those things hurt shareholders, including institutional investors such as pension funds, who had nothing to do with the deception. (Just over half of VW shares are controlled by the Porsche family and more than a third by the governments of Lower Saxony and Qatar, but that doesn’t mean the drop in value doesn’t hurt some regular people as well.)
The bad guys are software developers, engineers, and managers, very likely high up in the organization. People ought to go to prison, just as people should have gone to prison (and didn’t) for the corruption that caused the financial crisis and the Great Recession we’re still crawling out of.
Just about everybody across the political spectrum from the far right to the extreme left seems to agree with throwing the book at these jerks, and yet it rarely happens except to low-level scapegoats. Partly it’s because people in a giant corporation have a lot of ways to cover their tracks, and corporate regulations needs to be tightened to make that harder to do. Of course, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the corporate wing of the GOP fight like cornered weasels whenever this is proposed.
(To be fair, it does happen sometimes, outside giant corporations and the financial sector, that corporate leaders do get punished. Several executives at Peanut Corporation of America have recently been given lengthy sentences for their role in a salmonella outbreak, for example; see this link.)
What’s funny about this isn’t that the bald guy, a Cleveland Indians fan at a home game against the Kansas City Royals, got bonked in the head by a foul ball when his attempt to defend himself proved inadequate. What’s funny is the reaction of the guy who posted this on YouTube by shooting video of his television screen, recording audio of his own reaction.
That, plus the fact that the victim received a soccer-style yellow card.
Writer John Green does an excellent job of summarizing the current refugee crisis in Europe, covering a remarkable amount of information in under ten minutes. This is well worth your time and will leave you better informed than watching hours of coverage on the average cable news channel.
(Incidentally, if you’re wondering who “Hank” is, John and Hank Green take turns making video blog entries addressed to each other on the “vlogbrothers” YouTube channel.)
Friday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA (link) may be the most remarkable picture yet released of those taken by the New Horizons spacecraft of the distant dwarf planet Pluto. New Horizons shot a huge number of pictures as it flew at tremendous speed past Pluto and its moons July 14 and has since been transmitting them back to Earth.
The mountains are thought to be made of frozen water, what we on Earth usually call just plain “ice” but astronomers refer to as “water ice” to distinguish it from the frozen forms of other substances. In fact, much of the frozen surface you can see above is likely made of nitrogen ice and carbon monoxide ice.
Click on the picture for a larger version, and click the APOD link at the top for more information.
Even his fans, or at least a lot of them, realize that Donald Trump has a habit of spouting nonsense, much of which is soon forgotten and of no particular significance anyway. Who cares that he still claims to doubt that President Obama was born in the United States (which of course he was; see this article and this one)?
But during Wednesday’s GOP presidential candidates’ debate Trump promoted nonsense that actually puts lives at risk, namely the demonstrably false idea that vaccines cause autism. While Dr Ben Carson quickly denounced that claim, even he regrettably backed the vague and unsupported notion that the current standard vaccination schedule is too concentrated.
So I was happy to see that The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement (link) correcting this misinformation. Here’s what it says:
American Academy of Pediatrics Reiterates Safety and Importance of Vaccines
9/17/2015
by: Karen Remley, MD, MBA, MPH, FAAP, Executive Director, American Academy of Pediatrics
“The American Academy of Pediatrics would like to correct false statements made during the Republican presidential debate last night regarding vaccines. Claims that vaccines are linked to autism, or are unsafe when administered according to the recommended schedule, have been disproven by a robust body of medical literature. It is dangerous to public health to suggest otherwise.
“There is no ‘alternative’ immunization schedule. Delaying vaccines only leaves a child at risk of disease for a longer period of time; it does not make vaccinating safer.
“Vaccines work, plain and simple. Vaccines are one of the safest, most effective and most important medical innovations of our time. Pediatricians partner with parents to provide what is best for their child, and what is best is for children to be fully vaccinated.”
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The American Academy of Pediatrics is an organization of 64,000 primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists dedicated to the health, safety and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults. For more information, visit www.aap.org and follow us on Twitter @AmerAcadPeds.
Trump’s comments were also condemned by Alison Singer, president of the Manhattan-based Autism Science Foundation (link), and by many other medical authorities (see for example this link and this one).
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