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Yes, Antibiotic-Resistant Bugs Can Jump from Animals to Humans

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| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
virus and sheep kaktuzoid/Shutterstock and ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock

For decades, the meat industry has denied any problem with its reliance on routine, everyday antibiotic use for the nation's chickens, cows, and pigs. But it's a bit like a drunk denying an alcohol problem while leaning on a barstool for support. Antibiotic use on livestock farms has surged in recent years—from 20 million pounds annually in 2003 to nearly 30 million pounds in 2011.

Over the same period, the entire US human population has consumed less than 8 million pounds per year, meaning that livestock farms now suck in around 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the United States. Meanwhile, the industry routinely churns out meat containing an array of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

As former FDA commissioner David A. Kessler recently put it in a New York Times op-ed, "rather than healing sick animals, these drugs are often fed to animals at low levels to make them grow faster and to suppress diseases that arise because they live in dangerously close quarters on top of one another's waste." And feeding antibiotics to livestock at low levels may "do the most harm," Kessler continued, because it provides a perfect incubation ground for the generation of antibiotic-resistant microbes.

The meat industry's retort to all of this is, essentially: And the problem is? The websites of the major industry trade groups—the American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council, the National Pork Producers Council—all insist current antibiotic practices are "safe." The main reason they can claim this with a straight face is that while scientists have long suspected that drug-resistant pathogens can jump from antibiotic-treated animals to humans, it's been notoriously difficult to prove. The obstacle is ethics: You wouldn't want to extract, say, antibiotic-resistant salmonella from a turkey and inject it into a person just to see what happens. The risk of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention politely calls "treatment failure," i.e., death, would be too great.

But this decades-old industry fig leaf is fraying fast. The latest: a gene-sequencing study from Denmark that documents two cases of the movement of MRSA, an often-deadly, antibiotic-resistant staph infection, from farm animals to people. The excellent "scary disease" reporter Maryn McKenna recently broke down the science in lucid detail:

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The Drought Is Drying Up All Our Ethanol

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| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Bill Pracht has bad memories of last summer. "The drought was so bad here that the corn was just decimated," he recalls of the farm country around Garnett, Kan., where he oversees East Kansas Agri-Energy, an ethanol plant. "Many fields were zero."

In August, corn prices hit their highest level ever, driven mainly by the severe drought that crippled America's corn belt. By October, Pracht could see that he was spending more on corn than he could make with ethanol, and with no relief in sight, he began to have doubts about keeping the plant open.

"We knew we'd be wasting money," he says.

So, he pulled the plug, shuttering the plant and laying off twenty employees until conditions improve enough to make churning out what was until recently one of the nation's fastest-growing fuel sources profitable again. And as the EPA nears a final decision on new regulations that would require oil companies to use more ethanol in their gasoline mixes, Pracht's story illustrates a risk of increasing reliance on corn-based fuels in a warming world.

Pracht isn't alone: Over the last year, nearly 10 percent of the nation's ethanol plants have shut down. Annual corn yields came in almost a third lower than projected, according to the USDA, driving record-high corn prices that are likely to continue to rise into 2013, up to 19 percent higher than 2011-2012 averages. Overall, 2012 was the first year since 1996 (another drought year) in which total ethanol production decreased (by 4.5 percent), reversing a trend of exponential growth that's lasted almost a decade, according to the federal Energy Information Administration:

drought ethanol
Tim McDonnell

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Film Review: Girl Model

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| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
girl models standing in a row

Girl Model

American Documentary/POV

78 minutes

In an industrial Siberian village, underwear-clad girls parade around a gymnasium as Ashley Arbaugh, a dead-behind-the-eyes model-turned-scout, recruits talent for a Japanese market ravenous for youth. One hot prospect is Nadya, a 13-year-old fawn of a girl who is uprooted to Tokyo and left to fend for herself. The unsettling film is made intimate in close-ups and confessionals by the obviously troubled Arbaugh, who lives in a nearly literal glass house and is frightened at night because anyone can peer in at her. Likewise, her models, lacking autonomy, never know where their pictures might end up, and just who might be looking at them.

More Education Just Teaches You How to Steal More Efficiently

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| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 8:40 PM PDT

Lant Pritchett on why improved education doesn't always improve the performance of poor countries:

His research has shown that countries whose education system improves actually grow slower on average. He suggests that one reason for this may be that putting more educated people into a corrupt bureaucracy may result in more sophisticated corruption.

This sounds disturbingly plausible. And not just for poor countries, either.

"Illegal Immigrant" Is Now Out, But AP Doesn't Tell Us What's In

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| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 4:31 PM PDT

The Associated Press has announced that it will no longer use the phrase "illegal immigrant" in its stories. Here's the new entry in the AP Stylebook:

Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. Acceptable variations include living in or entering a country illegally or without legal permission.

Except in direct quotations, do not use the terms illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented.

AP's announcement explains that they've been "ridding the Stylebook of labels," and that "this discussion about labeling people, instead of behavior, led us back to 'illegal immigrant' again. We concluded that to be consistent, we needed to change our guidance."

I've used "illegal immigrant" before, and I've always had a hard time buying the argument that it's an inherently insulting term. But times change, and I generally adhere to AP style since that's what I learned many decades ago. Cranky stubbornness aside, I certainly don't have any reason to make an exception here, so I won't. Illegal immigrant is now out.

But I do still have a problem. AP apparently now feels that there's no acceptable way to refer to people who are in the country illegally. Neither "undocumented immigrant" nor "unauthorized immigrant," is acceptable, and neither is anything else. Labels are flatly not allowed, despite the fact that we label people all the time. Kevin Drum is a blogger. Barack Obama is a politician. Etc.

This leaves us with constructions like "John Doe is a person who immigrated to the United States illegally." Or: "A bill pending in Congress would bar immigrants who are in the country illegally from receiving Medicaid." Clunkiness aside, I guess we can all get used to that, but I'm not sure how it especially serves the cause of accuracy.

Jose Antonio Vargas, who has been at the forefront of this battle, apparently thinks that "undocumented immigrant" is fine. Other campaigners against "illegal immigrant" seem to agree. I've never been too keen on that formulation, but I can live with it. Unless I get further guidance from the MoJo copy desk, that will probably be my usual descriptive phrase in the future.

Procreation and Gay Marriage: A Followup

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| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 2:15 PM PDT

I generally dislike back-and-forth exchanges in the blogosphere because they inevitably—and surprisingly quickly!—degrade into tedious semantic quibbling. Once both sides have had their say, I figure it's best to call it quits and just let readers decide for themselves who they believe.

But I think I really do need to respond to Ross Douthat today. Douthat originally wrote that for the past ten years, the liberal side in the gay marriage debate has been "pressing the case that modern marriage has nothing to do with the way human beings reproduce themselves." I objected that the procreation argument had been originally injected into the debate by conservatives, not liberals. Here's Douthat today:

The notion that nobody would have entertained what Drum later calls the “esoteric” idea that marriage has an essential link to the way that human beings procreate if desperate social conservatives hadn’t grasped at it is apparently quite a popular view, judging by the fact that other writers raised it on Twitter over the weekend, and its popularity testifies to the way that the gay marriage debate has encouraged a strange historical amnesia about the origins of marriage law.

If gay marriage opponents had essentially invented a procreative foundation for marriage in order to justify opposing same-sex wedlock, it would indeed be telling evidence of a movement groping for reasons to justify its bigotry. But of course that essential connection was assumed in Western law and culture long before gay marriage emerged as a controversy or a cause.

The reason I'm responding is that I think there's just a misunderstanding here. There's no question that marriage has been associated with procreation and child rearing for thousands of years, and I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. I certainly wouldn't.

But I wasn't talking about thousands of years in my post, and neither was Douthat in his original column. We were talking about the past ten years. And I wasn't talking about the general connection of marriage with procreation, I was talking specifically about the notion that permitting gay marriage might cause straight couples to view the procreative functions of their own marriages differently.

My contention is that (a) this is indeed a fairly esoteric argument that few people would contrive on their own, and (b) it was indeed injected into the debate by the right. Liberals never mentioned it unless it was first brought up by a conservative as an argument against gay marriage. And while Douthat is certainly right that it didn't spring out of nowhere, it wasn't common to hear it in the 90s outside of activist circles. By the aughts, as other arguments began to lose their force, it started to become more mainstream.

I might be wrong about this, of course. But that's all I'm saying. I just wanted to clear that up before it becomes conventional wisdom that Kevin Drum is a nitwit who denies that marriage has ever had anything to do with procreation. (For example, here and here.)

I do have some other issues with Douthat's response, especially as it relates to the legal view of marriage, but if I indulge them I'll just be proving my point about back-and-forth arguments drifting quickly into tedious extraneous issues that few people care about. So I'll just shut up instead.

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John McCain Flashback: The Gun-Show Loophole is "Wrong"

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| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 1:39 PM PDT

At the Washington Post, Greg Sargent takes a look at Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) previous support of gun control measures, which included ads he cut in October 2000 in support of successful ballot initiatives in Colorado and Oregon to close gun-show loopholes on background checks.

Behind the scenes of Senate Democrats' efforts to strike a compromise on background checks, McCain is seen as a potential key ally who could make a bipartisan bill more tenable for House Republicans.

"I'm John McCain with some straight talk," McCain says in the ad. "Convicted felons have been able to buy and sell thousands of guns at gun shows because of a loophole in the law. Many were later used in crimes. That's wrong."

So far, Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) is the only Senate Republican to publicly express support for legislation that would require private sellers to run background checks. Along with McCain, senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) are seen as the best bets for a broader bipartisan compromise. Talks between Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who authored the original background check bill that cleared the Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote, and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) fell apart in February. Coburn, however, says he is still open to a limited expansion of the current law.

Sargent points out how McCain's moderate past on gun control speaks to just how far to the right the debate has since lurched:

What's particularly interesting here is that McCain was staking out what was then the moderate middle ground. At the time, the left pole of the gun control debate was defined partly by opposition to the idea of a gun ownership right, with some arguing that it only existed on Constitutional grounds in the context of militia membership. McCain's position put him squarely in the middle between gun control groups and gun rights forces.

Since then, the Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller — which struck down D.C.'s handgun ban — upheld a Constitutional right to gun ownership for traditionally lawful purposes. With that Supreme Court precedent set, it should theoretically be even easier for Republicans to accept the middle ground position of universal background checks, which don’t threaten rights that are now enshrined by the Court. But neither McCain nor any other Republican Senator (except for Mark Kirk) has so far proven willing to take the step McCain did back in 2000, underscoring how far to the right the debate remains, even in the wake of the massacre of 20 children.

Is Demand for High-Skill Workers Declining?

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| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 12:19 PM PDT

I've written before about my belief that something happened to the economy around the year 2000. A whole bunch of different measures seem to have inflected right around then, and although the subsequent declines were partly masked by the housing bubble of the aughts, they were happening all along. When the Great Recession hit, a decade's worth of decline was telescoped into a couple of years.

Via Arnold Kling, a trio of researchers have a new paper out that points to yet another thing that appears to have suddenly inflected right around 2000: the demand for high-skill workers. Here's their key finding:

In Figure 12 we plot the fraction of individuals aged 18-65 employed in occupations that require substantial cognitive skills....This ratio increased substantially from 1980 to 2000, and then it appears to reach a plateau over the period 2000-2010. On this figure, we also report a (per capita) supply index for cognitive occupations.

....There are two key features of Figure 12 that we wish to highlight. First, from 1980 to about 2000, employment in cognitive jobs grew faster than the supply index, suggesting that demand for cognitive tasks outstripped supply. In contrast, after 2000, the supply index continued to grow at a similar rate as in the pre-2000 period, but cognitive employment stalled. We interpret these trends as suggesting that demand for cognitive jobs likely decreased over this second period.

The authors explain that the college premium for workers remains high regardless of this, because educated workers are simply getting pushed down the employment ladder, where they're performing more routine jobs. But many routine jobs are disappearing too, so workers in these occupations are getting pushed down too. A degree may not be as valuable as it once was, but relative to not having a degree, it's still pretty valuable.

But back to the original point: what happened starting around 2000 that could have dampened our previously growing demand for high-skill workers? The authors don't try to guess, but I will: steadily improving automation. More on this later.

The War On Drugs Is Still Not Working

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| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 12:17 PM PDT
Mexico military war on drugs

Four decades ago, President Nixon launched the US-led global War on Drugs. It has cost the nation over a trillion dollars. 50,000 people have lost their lives to shootouts, bombings, torture, and execution, and that's only counting six years in Mexico.

And it is still not working. Here's an excerpt from an AP investigation released on Monday:

Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world's most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits.

If left unchecked, authorities say, the cartels' move into the American interior could render the syndicates harder than ever to dislodge and pave the way for them to expand into other criminal enterprises such as prostitution, kidnapping-and-extortion rackets and money laundering.

[...]

"It's probably the most serious threat the United States has faced from organized crime," said Jack Riley, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago office..."People think, 'The border's 1,700 miles away. This isn't our problem.' Well, it is. These days, we operate as if Chicago is on the border."

The nonprofit Chicago Crime Commission recently named Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel, the city's "Public Enemy No. 1," even though Guzman has never even been to Chicago.

The AP investigation notes recent cases indicative of cartel expansion in suburbs and cities of non-border states like Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

On a related note, here's a chart, courtesy of filmmaker Matt Groff:

This is your tax dollars on drugs. Read the whole AP report here.

Solar and Fracking: They Go Together Like Ham and Eggs

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| Tue Apr. 2, 2013 10:30 AM PDT

David Roberts has an interesting post today summarizing a new report from Citi Research about renewable power and natural gas. Basically, it turns out they go together like ham and eggs.

Here's the nickel summary: Renewable energy tends to be sporadic (solar only during the day, wind only when it's windy, etc.), so if you rely heavily on renewable energy you need a secondary source that can be brought online and offline quickly to provide "peaking power." It turns out that gas-fired plants fill this bill nicely. What's more, as renewables expand even more, they start to eat into baseload power, and since baseload plants can't switch on and off off quickly, they'll no longer be economically viable and will get retired. That means even more natural gas.

The bad news here is that this means an ever expanding role for natural gas fracking. The good news is that it will mostly be replacing coal, so it's a net benefit. What's more, in the longer term, as renewables get ever cheaper and finally reach critical mass, there are ways to eliminate even most of the gas-fired plants:

The need for natural gas to play these two supporting roles [i.e., baseload and peak power] could be reduced and eliminated through a combination of wide geographic dispersion of renewables, a more robust grid, more energy storage, and more non-intermittent renewables like geothermal or biogas. But given how fast renewables are ramping up, and how far those other pieces are from being in place, natural-gas peakers are likely to play a key role for several decades to come.

....The message here is simple: take heart. Shale gas will not swamp and displace renewables, it will help them. Renewables will become cheaper than fossil fuels in the medium- to long-term. It’s happening now in some places, it will happen in others soon. Obviously the rise of renewables could be accelerated by policy, and should be. It won’t happen fast enough to avert the worst of climate change without a policy boost.

But it will happen. History is on the side of clean energy.

There's much more detail at the link. It's worth a read, because if this analysis is correct, it's going to provide some major heartburn for environmentalists. Fracking, for all its dangers, may turn out to be the least of our various fossil fuel evils.