Major Disappointment

As Lexi Thompson walked up the 18th fairway on Sunday at the L.P.G.A.’s first major of the year, she was serenaded by loud chants of “Lex-i,” leading her eyes to well with tears. It was an incongruous moment that reflected an intensely emotional day in which the popular Thompson won new fans because of the way she lost the tournament.

Thompson, 22, appeared to be cruising to her second major championship when she was informed at the end of the 12th hole that she was being assessed a four-stroke penalty. It was a result of an infraction that a viewer had noticed while watching Saturday’s third-round telecast.

Just like that, Thompson’s two-stroke lead at the ANA Inspiration became a two-stroke deficit.

Despite the startling setback, Thompson regrouped well enough to force a playoff with So Yeon Ryu, who won with a birdie on the first extra hole, the par-5 18th. That came after Thompson narrowly missed an eagle putt on the last hole of regulation that would have delivered her the victory.

It was the second major title for Ryu, who also won the 2011 United States Women’s Open in extra holes. Thompson closed with a five-under-par 67 and Ryu a 68 as both finished at 14 under at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif. And yet all those numbers ended up as footnotes to the consternation fostered by the four-stroke penalty.

“I wasn’t expecting what happened today,” Thompson said afterward as tears rolled down her face.

“But I’ll learn from it,’’ she added.

The long-hitting Thompson was told about the penalty as she made her way to the 13th tee after a bogey at 12 had whittled her lead. An L.P.G.A. rules official walked alongside her and explained the four-stroke penalty: two strokes for improperly replacing her ball on the second-to-last green of her third round, which meant she had then played the ball from the wrong spot, and two more for signing an incorrect scorecard.

A television viewer had contacted tournament officials as the final round was underway to bring attention to Thompson’s actions Saturday on the 17th green, when she marked her ball and placed it back down roughly a half-inch from the original spot. Thompson’s initial reaction to being told about the penalty, as captured during the final-round television broadcast, was, “Is this a joke or something?” Shaking her head, she added, “That’s just ridiculous.”

Battling her emotions the rest of the way, Thompson somehow bounced back to play the final six holes in two under par. “I am proud just the way I played coming in,” said Thompson, who told the rules official, Sue Witters, that she had not intentionally placed her ball in the wrong spot on the hole in question.

It did not matter. In the rules of golf, action trumps intent. If not for a rules change last year, Thompson would have been disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard. “For her to come back, I got goose bumps talking about it,” said Suzann Pettersen, who tied for third. “It shows what character she has.”

It was the second time in as many years that a player holding the lead on the final day of a major was assessed a penalty after a television viewer noticed a rules infraction involving the leader.

by Karen Crouse, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Gary A. Vasquez/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

[ed. This is crazy. What other sport allows some random tv viewer to call in and report a missed penalty - from a day earlier!?]

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Mario Wagner
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Gwyneth Paltrow Eats Dumb

I’ve been warning you for about a year now that octopuses are aliens, to be feared but also revered, and only eaten if you’re sure you can live with the concept of eating a very smart hand-brain. Apparently Gwyneth Paltrow has caught on to this, writing to her L.A.-based goop staff on Slack:

They have more neurons in their brains than we do. I had to stop eating them because I was so freaked out by it. They can escape from sea world and s — by unscrewing drains and going out to sea. #tangent.

They do have a lot of neurons, GP, but not more than we do. They also have three hearts and motherfucking SUCTION CUPS on their arms!!! Many widely acclaimed books have been written about these cunning cephalopods, and many of them address the idea of intelligence, consciousness, and a lot of other collegiate-sounding topics.

If you’re going to go down the intelligence road, we should probably talk about pigs. The issue of abstaining from eating animals because is so thorny, because where do you draw the line? Don’t plants have sophisticated lives too? And what about pigeons, a.k.a. squab? Food preferences aren’t really logical or even terribly defensible in a court of law. They can be moralistic, sure, but they won’t be consistent. As Natalie Angier wrote in 2009:

I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don’t have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. And lately, debates over food choices have flared with particular vehemence.

So don’t eat or not eat something because Gwyneth Paltrow does or doesn’t. First off, you probably can’t afford to if it’s like, magic powder that you have to add to your matcha smoothie every morning. And second, you should wade through these decisions and feelings by yourself. I have a hard time knowingly eating factory-farmed meat or dairy, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done it. I realize that an easy way to rid myself of this anxious burden of deciding what is “okay” or “ethically consistent” to eat would be to just never mind about vertebrates entirely, or at least the mammals to start and maybe just keep the chordata because of the omega-3s, but the anxious burden is frankly the thing that makes me feel alive and human.

It is extremely amazing that humans get to sit at a restaurant and be like, “Should I eat this thing that I know is delicious, particularly when grilled to a sweet char, and which I would never make for myself at home because it’s a pain in the ass to handle and prepare plus I don’t even own a grill? Or should I abstain from eating it because I have read literally hundreds of articles about how cool these creatures are, like, is it morally inconsistent to be in awe of something and eat it anyway?” This is the privilege of being a human and I think the only way to not be a monster about it is to stay curious about your motives. At least you’ll have made a conscious choice.

by Silvia Killingsworth, The Awl |  Read more: 

Image: uncredited

[ed. Yes, no problem. They might be one of smartest animals on the planet, but also one of the tastiest, especially with a little wasabi and soy sauce (as they say on Twitter... #respect). It doesn't matter whether they're alien or indigenous (I'm pretty sure they'd do the same to us if they had the chance).]

Walter Becker

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House of Cards

On the first day of March 2017, the combined market capitalization of U.S. nonfinancial and financial stocks reached $34 trillion. Those trillions of dollars in paper wealth filter down to the investment statements of millions of investors, reflected in quotes on computer screens and blotches of ink on paper. Over the completion of the current market cycle, we estimate that roughly half of U.S. equity market capitalization - $17 trillion in paper wealth - will simply vanish. Nobody will “get” that wealth. It will simply disappear, like a game of musical chairs where players think they've won by finding chairs as the music stops, and suddenly feel them dissolving as if they had never existed in the first place.

As I noted in 2015, because equities are correlated with other assets, the total private net worth of U.S. households and corporations tends to change by about $1.50 for every dollar that U.S. equity market capitalization changes. With total U.S. private net worth currently at about $120 trillion, it would currently take an equity market loss of only about 20% to wipe out $10 trillion in U.S. private net worth (0.2 x 1.5 x 34). By contrast, an expected 50% loss of U.S. equity market capitalization over the completion of this market cycle (a decline that would not even bring historically reliable valuation metrics below their long-term historical norms), would produce an expected loss of over $25 trillion in U.S. total private net worth.

To understand how paper wealth vanishes, recognize that market capitalization is merely the product of two objects: the number of shares outstanding, and the price of those shares. For example, there are currently nearly 9 billion shares of General Electric outstanding. If a dentist in Poughkeepsie sells a single share of GE to some buyer, just 10 cents below the price of the preceding trade in the stock, fully $900 million dollars of market capitalization is instantly erased from the U.S. stock market as a result of that one $30 stock trade. Nobody “got” the $900 million. The lost market capitalization didn't "go into" bonds, or real estate, or gold, or cash on the sidelines, or anything else. It just plain vanished. Conversely, if our dentist buys a single share just 10 cents above the preceding trade in the stock, fully $900 million dollars of market capitalization is instantly “created” as a result of that one $30 stock trade.

Because of those fluctuations, investors across the nation imagine that they are actually gaining or losing “wealth” as market capitalization appears and vanishes. They alternately celebrate and suffer because they can’t distinguish wealth from the illusion of wealth. When one understands how ephemeral market capitalization can be, it may become clear why I’m so adamant about the actual claim that investors actually obtain by owning a share of stock.

See, the actual “wealth” inherent in a share of stock is embodied in the very long-term stream of future cash flows that the company will actually deliver into the hands of investors over time. As long as a share of stock is outstanding, somebody has to hold it at every point in time, and that long-term stream of cash flows is actually what’s being traded. Everyone who owns the stock owns a divided claim to those cash flows. Investors don’t get to claim those future cash flows until they actually buy, and they don’t get to claim the market price until they actually sell. Put another way, the only investor who has a reliable claim to the current market price is an investor who is selling at that price.

Let’s pause to recognize the opportunity, and the risk, that investors face at the obscene levels of valuation that have been created by years of Fed-induced yield-seeking speculation, coupled with Wall Street’s enthusiasm over largely imaginary prospects for a sustained acceleration in economic growth (more on that below). The chart below presents the market capitalization of U.S. equities (left scale, $billions). The thin line shows the ratio of market capitalization to corporate gross value added (right scale) to offer an additional valuation perspective. On this measure, current valuations now rival those of the 2000 market extreme, standing at more than double the historical norm (including the bubble period since the late-1990’s), and about 160% above pre-bubble norms. Put simply, the U.S. equity market could lose $17 trillion in value - over 50% of its market capitalization - even without taking reliable valuation measures below their historical norms. (...)

I have no pointed market expectations over the very near-term here. We presently observe further deterioration in equity market internals, but we've also seen a bit of improvement in interest-sensitive measures. Overall, I view valuations as obscene, measures of overextended prices and sentiment as dangerous, and market internals as negative, but short-term narratives about taxes, health care and so forth are wild cards with regard to day-to-day market behavior. My near-term views will become more pointed if we observe fresh deterioration in either equity-market or credit-sensitive measures. On every other horizon - intermediate-term, full-cycle, and long-term (10-12 years), I am thoroughly convinced that the U.S. equity market is a house of cards.

by John P. Hussman, PhD., Hussman Funds |  Read more:

Image: Hussman Strategic Investors

With Floating Farm, New York Looks to the Future of Public Parks

If you always thought Central Park needed more edible plants, you're in luck.

Come April, a farm full of fruit trees and other crops will float to locations in three New York City boroughs, and visitors will be invited to enjoy nature by literally picking, snipping, and sowing to their hearts' content. Located on a 5,000-square-foot barge, "Swale" will include 4,000 square feet of solar-powered growing space, including a perennial garden, an aquaponics area, and an apple orchard sponsored by Heineken USA's Strongbow Apple Ciders atop a large man-made hill. (The hill allows deeper root space for fruiting trees.)

The project will be open to the public, but it’s more interactive exhibit than floating Central Park; only 75 people can board at once, and docents will usher guests around the grounds. Free educational workshops will include “painting with plants” and “dying natural fabrics,” and volunteers will always be on hand to explain how thoughtful permaculture planning can create a virtually self-sustaining farm.

But founder Mary Mattingly’s goals go far beyond providing city dwellers with a high-design place to forage for mushrooms in their next attempt at Beef Bourgignon.

She wants to make people work harder for public spaces, and public spaces work harder for people. She wants to create a model for sustainable urban farming. She wants to create an educational space. And she wants to eradicate the problem of food deserts in blighted urban neighborhoods.

“We don’t have much access to stewardship in New York City,” Mattingly told Bloomberg, “so we wanted to highlight and cultivate opportunities around that idea. People care for spaces that they can pick food from.”

That's exactly what appealed to the approving committee at the New York City Parks Department. "We are trying to prioritize community engagement," said Bram Gunther, co-director of the Urban Field Station, who cited a growing field of study that believes that community involvement, empowerment, and land management must all go hand in hand. "This project will act like a magnet, in a way, and inspire people to civic action," he added.

That's exactly Mattingly's plan. Eventually, she hopes community investment (and city grants) will take the project from floating farm to philanthropic powerhouse. She’d like to use it as a springboard to raise awareness of such food deserts as Hunts Point in New York's South Bronx, where, Mattingly says, “10,000 trucks pass through each day, and everyone has asthma, and nobody has access to fresh food.” In her perfect world, Swale becomes a conduit to a public park in the Bronx, where “people could pick food 24 hours a day.”

Here’s the only issue with that: Public policy in New York makes that kind of project legally impossible—or close to it—as it currently stands. And on a trial run last summer, Swale barely raised enough funds to keep itself going for a second season. Its manifestation this year in the East River was made possible by the partnership with Strongbow, which has made it a brand pillar to conserve and create orchards around the world. Before Mattingly can sustain entire neighborhoods, she’ll need to sustain Swale itself.

There’s reason to believe in the project, though. First, there’s Mattingly’s own record: In 2009, she spent half a year creating and living aboard a fully self-sustained ecosystem on a barge in New York, which partially inspired the Swale project.

Then there’s the success of other so-called “food farms” around the country.

In Hawaii, the Malama Kauai Food Forest supplies several underserved schools and food banks—to the tune of 37,000 pounds of fruit and 1,000 volunteer hours in the last two and a half years. In North Carolina, the George Washington Carver Edible Park anchored a major urban revitalization project near downtown Asheville, replacing a trash-filled lot with a natural source for plums, figs, chestnuts, and pawpaws, among other things. The list extends to Massachusetts, Colorado, Alaska, Seattle, and beyond.

With the exception of a nascent project in London, no other food forest has cropped up in such an urban setting. Certainly, no other initiative has as striking a design. So Swale should drum up interest. And with an advocate like Mattingly at its helm, converting interest into action should be a real possibility. Even if she fails to create her public farm in the South Bronx, she will likely open up a dialogue that can lead to lasting public policy impacts.

by Nikki Ekstein, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: swaleproject

[ed. If this sounds like some kind of New Age wacko deal, imagine massive floating parks along your waterfront providing peaceful contemplation and barriers against storm surges. Might be the future.] 

Eric Kemberlin Bowley // Instagram
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High-Tech Hope for the Hard of Hearing

When my mother’s mother was in her early twenties, a century ago, a suitor took her duck hunting in a rowboat on a lake near Austin, Texas, where she grew up. He steadied his shotgun by resting the barrel on her right shoulder—she was sitting in the bow—and when he fired he not only missed the duck but also permanently damaged her hearing, especially on that side. The loss became more severe as she got older, and by the time I was in college she was having serious trouble with telephones. (“I’m glad it’s not raining! ” I’d shout, for the third or fourth time, while my roommates snickered.) Her deafness probably contributed to one of her many eccentricities: ending phone conversations by suddenly hanging up.

I’m a grandparent myself now, and lots of people I know have hearing problems. A guy I played golf with last year came close to making a hole in one, then complained that no one in our foursome had complimented him on his shot—even though, a moment before, all three of us had complimented him on his shot. (We were walking behind him.) The man who cuts my wife’s hair began wearing two hearing aids recently, to compensate for damage that he attributes to years of exposure to professional-quality blow-dryers. My sister has hearing aids, too. She traces her problem to repeatedly listening at maximum volume to Anne’s Angry and Bitter Breakup Song Playlist, which she created while going through a divorce.

My ears ring all the time—a condition called tinnitus. I blame China, because the ringing started, a decade ago, while I was recovering from a monthlong cold that I’d contracted while breathing the filthy air in Beijing, and whose symptoms were made worse by changes in cabin pressure during the long flight home. Tinnitus is almost always accompanied by hearing loss. My internist ordered an MRI, to make sure I didn’t have a brain tumor, and held up a vibrating tuning fork and asked me to tell him when I could no longer hear it. After a while, he leaned forward to make sure the tuning fork was still humming, since he himself could no longer hear it. (We’re about the same age.) There’s no cure for tinnitus. The ringing in my ears is constant, high-pitched, and fairly loud—it reminds me of the cicadas I listened to on sweltering summer nights when I was a kid—but I’m usually able to ignore it, unless I’m lying awake in bed or, as I discovered recently, writing about tinnitus.

Unlike taste buds and olfactory receptors, which the body replenishes continuously, the most delicate elements of the human auditory system don’t regenerate. The National Center for Health Statistics has estimated that thirty-seven million American adults have lost some hearing, and, according to the National Academy of Sciences, hearing loss is, worldwide, the “fifth leading cause of years lived with disability.” Hearing problems can lead to social isolation and cognitive decline, both of which make getting older—itself a cause of hearing loss—seem worse than it does already.

In recent years, scientists searching for ways to restore hearing have made a number of promising discoveries. There are also increasingly effective methods of preventing damage in the first place, and of compensating for it once it’s occurred. The natural human tendency, though, is to do nothing and hope for the best, usually while pretending that nothing is wrong. (People who notice they’re having hearing problems typically wait more than ten years before doing anything about them.) I recently heard a joke about a man who was worried his wife was going deaf. He told his doctor, who suggested a simple test. When the man got home, he stood at the door of the kitchen, where his wife was at the stove, and asked, “Honey, what’s for dinner?” She didn’t respond, so he moved closer and asked again. She still didn’t respond, so he stood directly behind her and asked one more time. She turned around and snapped, “For the third time, chicken!” (...)

If I could relive my adolescence, I wouldn’t listen to Steppenwolf with loudspeakers leaning against my head, and I wouldn’t have cherry-bomb fights with my friends unless I was wearing ear protection. On the recommendation of James Henry, at the V.A., I now own several sets of so-called musician’s earplugs, which reduce the over-all level of sound but maintain the full sonic spectrum—unlike regular foam earplugs, which disproportionately mute high frequencies. I wear them even while vacuuming (or will the next time I vacuum anything), and if I were a hunter I would buy a pair of microprocessor-controlled earmuffs, which amplify quiet sounds but turn gunshots into muffled pops.

Luckily for those of us who have been careless with our ears, there are hearing aids. Most of them are made by six major manufacturers, only one of which is based in the United States: Starkey Hearing Technologies, whose headquarters are in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Starkey’s greatest marketing triumph occurred in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan revealed that he was wearing one of its products. (The main source of Reagan’s hearing problem was a gun that someone fired near his right ear on a movie set in the early thirties.)

I visited Starkey in February, and when I arrived at the company’s testing department the receptionist greeted me in a voice that she seemed to have turned up a couple of notches—an occupational necessity, I assumed. Another employee told me, as I waited to be examined by an audiologist, that I had been preceded recently by two members of a well-known rock band that’s been around since the early seventies. The rockers, she said, looked “very old and very weathered,” and had hearing problems they’d apparently ignored for decades. “Oh, my gosh, they’ve lived hard,” she said. But they have hearing aids at last. (...)

Based on my audiogram, I was fitted for a pair of Starkey’s Muse hearing aids. Each unit sits behind an ear, as my grandmother’s hearing aid did, but is so small that it’s all but invisible. A coated wire leads to a receiver—red for right, blue for left. Each receiver is about half an inch long and the diameter of a kitchen match, and it goes right into the ear canal. A button on the part behind the ear allows me to choose among settings programmed by the audiologist. Two of them add a subtle tone that’s meant to mask my tinnitus, which during my hearing test she pinpointed at about six thousand hertz. My main reaction when I first put the hearing aids on was mild annoyance at the sound of my voice. I also became more aware of turning pages, creaking doors, and the surprisingly varied noises made by my pants. The audiologist said that people with new hearing aids get used to all that within about a month, as the brain adjusts.

With my hearing aids on, I was given a tour of the premises. Hearing aids that fit snugly into the ear canal, as many do, are custom-made from silicone impressions that audiologists create by injecting goop into patients’ ears. The cured impressions look like miniature Henry Moore sculptures. Laser scanners turn them into three-dimensional digital files, and the images are trimmed, shaped, and manipulated by technicians using an in-house computer program that’s essentially Photoshop for ear canals. I saw test hearing aids being subjected to stresses that were meant to replicate the surprisingly hostile microenvironment of an external auditory canal: baking in an oven suffused with “salt fog”; lengthy exposure to blowing clouds of dustlike talc; submersion for days at the bottom of a metre-tall column of water.

The Starkey line with the most features is Halo, the first version of which was introduced in 2014. Halo wearers can stream music, phone calls, recorded books, television shows, and other audio content via Bluetooth directly into their hearing aids from all current Apple devices. The hearing aids adjust automatically to different environments. They eliminate wind noise and reduce background sounds between spoken syllables during conversations in crowded places, and they can be used with a smartphone app that enables them to do things like switch to a customized automobile mode as soon as the phone’s accelerometer detects that the wearer is moving faster than ten miles an hour. Chris McCormick, who is Starkey’s chief marketing officer, told me, “If you regularly visit a Starbucks, you can fine-tune a setting for that particular environment—the barista grinding coffee beans, other customers talking—and then geotag it, so that when you pull into the parking lot your hearing aids will switch to that mode.”

by David Owen, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Sarah Illenberger

Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell and anime's troubled history with representation. [ed. See also: this review]

Images via: 

PWR BTTM

[ed. See also: Answer My Text (You Dick).]

The Hour of the Attorneys General

On a Tuesday night in early February, not three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, three federal judges in San Francisco heard arguments about whether to halt his first major policy undertaking. Trump had issued an executive order banning hundreds of thousands of travelers from entering the country, including citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, and all refugees. As many as 60,000 individuals had their visas revoked. Almost immediately, a pair of Democratic attorneys general, Washington state’s Bob Ferguson and Minnesota’s Lori Swanson, brought suit against Trump’s executive order, arguing it violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law as well as the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, harmed all Washington and Minnesota businesses and communities, and was “undermining [their] sovereign interest” as welcoming destinations for immigrants and refugees.

More than 100,000 people from across the nation sat glued to a YouTube livestream of the legal hearing. The high-profile courtroom drama unfolded amid massive protests against Trump in streets and airports. Besides Democratic attorneys general, civil rights groups and private lawyers filed dozens of other lawsuits in federal courts across the country. A few days later, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked Trump’s executive order, ruling that it failed to advance U.S. national security. So went the opening round in what will surely be a continuing legal struggle over Trump’s powers.

As millions of Americans steel for years of conflict with a Republican-controlled Congress and an authoritarian president, Democratic state attorneys general—politicians with independent authority to sue on behalf of their states—are expected to take a leading role on the front lines of the mobilized resistance. Though their numbers have fallen in recent years, the 21 Democratic AGs now in office have pledged to work together to use their powers to protect citizens from executive overreach. They will be a crucial source of support in fighting a president who says he will deport millions of undocumented immigrants and deregulate everything from the banking industry to the environment.

The Supreme Court and, ironically enough, Republican state attorneys general have paved the way for the Democratic AGs. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the states have stronger grounds for contesting federal authority than they did in the past, and during the Obama administration Republican state AGs honed the legal playbook for challenging federal laws, regulations, and executive orders. Democratic AGs may now be able to use that same playbook to contain Trump, especially because the Republican Congress shows little evidence of serving as an independent check on the executive branch. Since Democrats at the federal level have no power to conduct investigations, much less bring indictments, state AGs have been propelled into the forefront as a check and balance against one-party national government. (...)

It was in the mid-1990s, though, that state AGs really began to innovate new ways to use the powers of their office. More than 40 states came together to sue the five largest U.S. tobacco companies, charging them with consumer fraud and seeking payment for the Medicaid costs incurred for tobacco-caused illness. The bipartisan effort led to a groundbreaking settlement in 1998 and provided the template for multistate litigation ever since.

“We knew AGs were increasing [their] power back in 1995, when they started to take on the powerful tobacco industry,” says Karen White, the executive director of the Conference of Western Attorneys General, another AG association, which White has worked for since 1991. “This was the first time that AGs had front-page news headlines every day. Their powers were elevated, and people started to understand what they do, and could do. It wasn’t the first multistate case, but it was the most impactful in terms of catching people’s attention and catapulting AGs into a force to be reckoned with.”

Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political scientist who studies AGs, finds that while there were a few multistate cases in the 1980s, their numbers increased during the 1990s and 2000s and reached new heights during the Obama years. Some were bipartisan—particularly around consumer protection issues—but the later years of the last century and early years of the new one saw the birth of party-affiliated AG associations and more multistate, partisan litigation.

Republicans led the way, bolstered by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a group dedicated to electing Republican AGs and litigating cases based on conservative legal philosophy. RAGA launched in 1999, moving under the auspices of the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2002. But the group’s formidable legal efforts did not take off until the Obama years.

And take off they did. Launching a concerted effort to beef up its political power, RAGA began fundraising and spending money on AG campaigns at unprecedented levels. In 2014, the group split off to become its own organization, creating its own super PAC to boot. RAGA raised $16 million that year, nearly four times what it raised in 2010. Pharmaceutical companies, the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Koch brothers were among the group’s largest benefactors. Promises to fight for deregulation in the courts proved to be effective fundraising appeals. In joint actions, Republican AGs challenged President Obama’s policies on immigration, health care, the environment, and the workplace—raking in even more money with each successful court action.

Increased campaign spending paid off. By 2015, Republicans commanded a majority of AG seats, and in the 2016 election, Republican attorneys general increased their numbers from 27 to 29, the most at any time in U.S. history. (...)

Democratic AGs will surely look to the example set by their GOP colleagues as they prepare to oppose Trump’s policies. During the Obama years, Republican AGs took their cases to Texas courts, which are chock-full of conservative judges who are amenable to their arguments. The GOP did not originate “forum shopping”—Democratic AGs won injunctions against George W. Bush’s policies from district court judges in California’s more liberal Ninth Circuit—but the Republicans did increase the practice. Greg Abbott, Republican governor of Texas, says that on a typical day when he was Texas’s AG, he went into the office, sued the federal government, and went home. Abbott sued the Obama administration 31 times, and his successor, Ken Paxton, brought 17 additional legal challenges.

For nearly a century after Massachusetts v. Mellon, a 1923 Supreme Court case, states were treated like any other litigant. They were not allowed to bring lawsuits unless they had “standing” to sue—that is, they could not challenge federal policies they believed were generally bad unless they could show a concrete and specific injury caused by the challenged conduct that could be remedied by a court. A harm affecting everyone was not a sufficient legal basis.

“Otherwise you’d get every state marching into court the second that you do something they don’t like,” says Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas Law School professor. “You’d turn what are really political disputes into court challenges at the outset. Find me a federal policy that all 50 states endorse.”

Under George W. Bush, however, Massachusetts’s AG, joined by 11 other Democratic AGs, sued the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. In a surprising 5–4 decision in 2007, the Supreme Court gave Massachusetts “special solicitude” in the standing analysis, making it easier for states to get into court than it is for individuals and private organizations. The ruling effectively expanded states’ authority to bring lawsuits against the federal government.

Under Obama, Republican AGs pushed open this door even further. In 2014, Obama announced new policies to give undocumented parents and lawful permanent residents permission to live and work for three years without fear of deportation. Twenty-six Republican AGs sued the federal government in response, arguing that the president violated procedural norms and exceeded his constitutional authority.

Abbott argued that Texas had standing to challenge Obama’s immigration program because his state would suffer a financial burden in providing undocumented immigrants with state-subsidized driver’s licenses. A Texas district judge, Andrew Hanen, agreed that this burden constituted sufficient “harm” to bring the case and issued a national injunction to block the order. (Hanen, it should be noted, was no fan of Obama: He had previously been on record saying that the administration worked with drug cartels to smuggle children illegally over the Mexican border.) In a 2–1 decision, an appellate panel on the Fifth Circuit upheld Hanen’s injunction.

Last year saw even more preliminary national injunctions against Obama’s policies, all issued by federal district court judges in Texas. Republican AGs were able to block several Department of Labor regulations, a letter from the Department of Education advising schools about policies regarding transgender students and public-school bathrooms, and a rule interpreting an anti-discrimination clause in the Affordable Care Act.

Some scholars, such as Samuel Bray, a professor at UCLA School of Law, have been speaking out against the trend of issuing national injunctions—a legal innovation that didn’t become commonplace until the latter half of the 20th century. The idea that a single district judge could issue an injunction to block federal policy nationwide, as opposed to just restraining the defendant’s conduct vis-à-vis the plaintiff, was, Bray says, unthinkable for most of U.S. history.

But what goes around comes around, and Democratic AGs intend to use the new legal strategies forged by their Republican colleagues to challenge President Trump.

“Republican AGs engaged in continuous warfare,” says Maryland’s attorney general, Brian Frosh. “Scott Pruitt [the former Oklahoma Republican AG and new EPA head] created a federalism unit in his office and went out and sued the Obama administration repeatedly. Maybe that’s what this evolves into for us. I really hope it doesn’t, but we will engage when necessary.”

Democrats, in short, have no interest in unilaterally disarming.

by Rachel M. Cohen, American Prospect | Read more:
Image:Elaine Thompson

Those Indecipherable Medical Bills? They’re One Reason Health Care Costs So Much.

The catastrophe struck Wanda Wickizer on Christmas Day 2013. A generally healthy, energetic 51-year-old, she suddenly found herself vomiting all day, racked with debilitating headaches. When her alarmed teenage son called an ambulance, the paramedics thought that she had food poisoning and didn’t take her to the emergency room. Later, when she became confused and groggy at 3 a.m., her boyfriend raced her to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in coastal Virginia, where a scan showed she was suffering from a subarachnoid hemorrhage. A vessel had burst, and blood was leaking into the narrow space between the skull and the brain.

During a subarachnoid hemorrhage, if the pressure in the head isn’t relieved, blood accumulates in that narrow space and can push the brain down toward the neck. Vital nerves that control breathing and vision are compressed. Death is imminent. Wickizer was whisked by helicopter ambulance to the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, 160 miles away, for an emergency procedure to halt the bleeding.

After spending days in a semi-comatose state, Wickizer slowly recovered and left the hospital three weeks after the hemorrhage, grateful to be alive. But soon after she returned home to her two teenage children, she found herself confronted with a different kind of catastrophe. Wickizer had had health insurance for most of her adult life: Her husband, who died in 2006, worked for the city of Norfolk, which insured their family while he was alive and for three years beyond. After his death, Wickizer worked in a series of low-wage jobs, but none provided health insurance. A minor pre-existing condition — she was taking Lexapro, a common medicine for depression — meant that her only insurance option was to be funneled into the “high-risk pool” (a type of costly insurance option that was essentially rendered obsolete by the Affordable Care Act and now figures in some of the G.O.P. plans to replace it). She would need to pay more than $800 per month for a policy with a $5,000 deductible, and her medical procedures would then be reimbursed at 80 percent. She felt she couldn’t afford that. In 2011, she decided to temporarily stop working to tend to her children, which qualified them for Medicaid; with trepidation, she left herself uninsured.

And so in early 2014, without an insurer or employer or government agency to run interference between her and the hospital, she began receiving bills: $16,000 from Sentara Norfolk (not including the scan or the E.R. doctor), $50,000 for the air ambulance. By the end of January, there was also one for $24,000 from the University of Virginia Physicians’ Group: charges for some of the doctors at the medical center. “I thought, O.K., that’s not so bad,” Wickizer recalls. A month later, a bill for $54,000 arrived from the same physicians’ group, which included further charges and late fees. Then a separate bill came just for the hospital’s charges, containing a demand for $356,884.42 but little in the way of comprehensible explanation.

In other countries, when patients recover from a terrifying brain bleed — or, for that matter, when they battle cancer, or heal from a serious accident, or face down any other life-threatening health condition — they are allowed to spend their days focusing on getting better. Only in America do medical treatment and recovery coexist with a peculiar national dread: the struggle to figure out from the mounting pile of bills what portion of the fantastical charges you actually must pay. It is the sickness that eventually afflicts most every American.

What’s less understood is the extent to which our current medical-billing system itself is responsible for the high prices patients are charged. There are, of course, many factors that have led to the United States’ record-breaking $3 trillion health care bill: runaway drug prices, excessive testing and sky-high charges for even the most basic medical interventions. But all of those individual price increases have been enabled — indeed, aided and abetted — by the complex system of billing and coding that underlies bills like those sent to Wickizer. That system, with its lines of alphanumeric codes and arcane medical abbreviations, has given birth to a gigantic new industry of consultants, armies of back-room experts whom medical providers and insurance companies deploy against each other in an endless war over which medical procedures were undertaken and how much to pay for them. Caught in the crossfire are Americans like Wanda Wickizer, left with huge bills and indecipherable explanations in languages they cannot possibly understand.

Disease-classification systems originated during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in 17th-century London — epidemiologic constructs to classify and track causes of death and prevent the spread of infections among populations that spoke different languages. In the 1890s, the French physician and statistician Jacques Bertillon further systematized death reporting by introducing the Bertillon Classification of Causes of Death, the first medical-coding system, which was adopted and modified in many countries. It became an official global effort, which was periodically revised by an international commission. During the first half of the 20th century, the number of entries naturally increased with improved understanding of science, and many countries began tabulating not just causes of deaths but also the incidence of diseases.

In the 1940s, the World Health Organization took over stewardship of Bertillon’s system and renamed it to reflect a new, broader focus: the International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Injuries and Causes of Death (ICD). The codes became an invaluable tool, a common language for epidemiologists and statisticians to track the world’s afflictions. But over the last several decades in the United States, codes gradually took on a bedrock financial function as the basis for medical billing. In 1979, the government decided to use what by then were called ICD-9 codes — which specify the patient’s diagnosis — in adjudicating Medicare and Medicaid claims, with some modifications added specifically for that purpose; the United States version was called ICD-9-CM. (The country has recently moved to a new iteration, ICD-10-CM.) For its beneficiaries, Medicare pays a fixed fee for inpatient hospitalization based primarily on the ICD-CM code, which is translated into a DRG (diagnosis-related group) code — which is the immediate basis for reimbursement.

Other insurers followed in making codes the basis for billing. Coding systems begot new coding systems, because few hospitals wanted to be paid according to Medicare’s relatively low DRG standards. And because strategic coding meant increased payment, that begot coding specialists and coding courses and coding degrees. There are now different increasingly complex coding languages that define payment for different kinds of services: CPT codes, for office visits delivered by doctors, as well as HCPCS, ICD-PCS-CM and DRG, for charges that are incurred in the hospital. There are tens of thousands of codes in each lexicon that have become increasingly specific. For example, there are different codes for in-office earwax removal depending on the method used (irrigation or instruments), different codes for delivering different vaccinations and a code for each injection delivered in the hospital. Different insurers also use different coding systems. While Medicare would have most likely considered Wickizer’s brain bleed as DRG 021, if billed to a commercial insurer, it could result in more than a dozen ICD codes and hundreds of HCPCS entries.

Seemingly subtle choices about which code to use can have large financial consequences. If after reviewing a hospital chart of, say, a patient who has just had a problem with his heart, a hospital coder indicates the diagnosis code for “heart failure” (ICD-9-CM Code 428) instead of the one for “acute systolic heart failure” (Code 428.21), the difference could mean thousands of dollars. “In order to code for the more lucrative code, you have to know how it is defined and make sure the care described in the chart meets the criterion, the definition, for that higher number,” says one experienced coder in Florida, who helped with Wickizer’s case and declined to be identified because she works for another major hospital. In order to code for “acute systolic heart failure,” the patient’s chart ought to include supporting documentation, for example, that the heart was pumping out less than 25 percent of its blood with each beat and that he was given an echocardiogram and a diuretic to lower blood pressure. Submitting a bill using the higher code without meeting criteria could constitute fraud.

Each billing decision, then, can be seen as a battle of coder versus coder. The coders who work for hospitals and doctors strive to bring in as much revenue as possible from each service, while coders employed by insurers try to deny claims as overreaching. Coders who audit Medicare charts look for abuse to reclaim money or fraud that needs to be punished with fines. Hospital coders teach doctors — and doctors pay to take courses — to learn how they can “upcode” their charts to a more lucrative level with minimal effort. In a doctor’s office, a Level 3 visit (paid, say, at $175) might be legally transformed into a Level 4 (say, $225) by performing one extra maneuver, like weighing the patient or listening to the lungs, whether the patient’s illness required that or not.

While most hospitals and insurers set their own rates for each level of care, adding a step when interacting with a patient can also bring windfalls. E.R. doctors, for example, learned that insurers might accept a higher-reimbursed code for the examination and treatment of a patient with a finger fracture (usually 99282) if — in addition to needed interventions — a narcotic painkiller was also prescribed (a plausible bump up to 99283), indicating a more serious condition.

Toward the end of the 20th century and into the next, as strategic coding increased, a new industry thrived. For-profit colleges offered medical-coding degrees, and internships soon followed. Because alphanumeric coding languages are as distinct from one another as Chinese is from Russian, different degree tracks are necessary, along with distinct professional organizations that offer their own particular professional exams, certifications and licensing. Hospital systems and insurers — which have become huge, Hydra-like enterprises — now all employ roomfuls of coding-program graduates to perform these tasks. Membership in the American Academy of Professional Coders has risen to more than 170,000 today from roughly 70,000 in 2008.

Individual doctors have complained bitterly about the increasing complexity of coding and the expensive necessity of hiring their own professional coders and billers — or paying a billing consultant. But they have received little support from the medical establishment, which has largely ignored the protests. And perhaps for good reason: The American Medical Association owns the copyright to CPT, the code used by doctors. It publishes coding books and dictionaries. It also creates new codes when doctors want to charge for a new procedure. It levies a licensing fee on billing companies for using CPT codes on bills. Royalties for CPT codes, along with revenues from other products, are the association’s biggest single source of income.

Patients with good health insurance are often blissfully unaware and mostly unaffected by the jockeying that goes on over how to code their bills. But uninsured patients like Wickizer, or (increasingly) those with high deductibles, are stuck with no insurer to argue on their behalf. Her experience with the University of Virginia Medical Center is not unique: Studies have shown that hospitals charge patients who are uninsured or self-pay 2.5 times more than they charge those covered by health insurance (who are billed negotiated rates) and three times more than the amount allowed by Medicare. That gap has grown considerably since the 1980s.

by Elisabeth Rosenthal, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Paul Sahre

BVD / LemonAid Beverages GmbH / LemonAid / Packaging / 2009
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Trolling For Hate

One morning near the end of her long-shot congressional campaign, 25-year-old Erin Schrode rolled over in bed, reflexively checked her cellphone - and burst into tears.

With mounting horror, she scanned a barrage of anti-Semitic emails from anonymous trolls. "Get out of my country, kike," read one. "Get to Israel to where you belong. That or the oven. Take your pick."

Included was a photograph of Schrode digitally stamped with a yellow "Jude" star, the badge that Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust.

Schrode, a Democrat and activist who would come in third in the June primary in her Northern California district, had become the latest target of The Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi website known for orchestrating internet trolling campaigns.

After the site published a post about the "Jewess" and her candidacy, a reader posted Schrode's contact information in the comments section. Over the past 10 months, her email and social media accounts have been polluted with a torrent of slurs and disturbing images.

Her tormentors are faceless. They hide behind screen names, in the shadows.

Andrew Auernheimer says he is not one of them, but he applauds their vitriolic spirit.

A notorious computer hacker and internet troll associated with The Daily Stormer, Auernheimer scoffs at the notion that anyone can be harmed by "mean words on the internet." For him, anonymous trolling is a modern form of a generations-old, "distinctly American" political tactic.

"Being offensive is a political act," he said. "If something pushes up against polite civilization, it's for a purpose."

Auernheimer, whose anti-Semitic rhetoric matches the swastika tattooed on his chest, chuckled at the mention of Schrode's name.

"Why should I have any empathy? What's she ever done for me?" he asked. "I don't feel any empathy for any Jew anywhere."

Trolling is a calling card of the "alt-right" - an amorphous fringe movement that uses internet memes, message boards and social media to spread a hodgepodge of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and xenophobia.

Troll tactics edged into the mainstream with the 2014 birth of GamerGate, an online campaign against feminists in the video game industry. GamerGate arguably provided a blueprint for some white nationalists and other extremists who rallied around Donald Trump's presidential campaign, flooding the internet with "Pepe The Frog" cartoons and other hate symbols.

The Daily Stormer's founder, Andrew Anglin, published a primer in August that attempted to define the "alt-right" and explain its origins. At the core of the movement is a "trolling culture" bred on the 4chan.org website, he wrote. (....)

Auernheimer is known online as "weev." He trolls for the "lulz," a slang term he defines as "the joy that you get in your heart from seeing people suffer ironic punishments."

"The reality is internet trolling is entertaining. People love to watch it. It's become a national sport," Auernheimer said. "It's something that anyone can jump into."

by Michael Kunzelman, AP |  Read more:

Image: Eric Risberg

US Consumers Lose Privacy Protections for Their Web Browsing History

US politicians voted Tuesday to kill privacy rules meant to prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from selling users’ web browsing histories and app usage histories to advertisers.

The planned protections, proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and scheduled to take effect by the end of 2017, would have forced ISPs to get people’s consent before hawking their data.

Republicans in the House of Representatives followed their colleagues in the Senate with a vote – of 215 to 205 – to approve a resolution that uses the Congressional Review Act to prevent the privacy rules from taking effect.

Without these protections, ISPs such as Comcast, Verizon and AT&T are free to track your browsing behavior and sell that data to advertisers without consent. This represents a huge treasure trove of personal data, including your health concerns, shopping habits and visits to porn sites. ISPs can find out where you bank, your political views and sexual orientation simply based on the websites you visit. The fact that you’re looking at a website at all can also reveal when you’re at home and when you’re not.

“Give me one good reason why Comcast should know what my mother’s medical problems are,” said congressman Mike Capuano during the hearing before the vote, explaining how he had researched her condition after a trip to the doctor. “Just last week I bought underwear on the internet. Why should you know what size I take? Or the color?”

“Consumers should be in control of their own information,” added congressman Jared Polis. “They shouldn’t be forced to sell it to who knows who simply for the price of admission to access the internet.” (...)

Those in favor of repealing the privacy rules argued that it levels the playing field for internet service providers who want to get into the advertising business like Google and Facebook. According to ISPs, scrapping the rules will allow them to show the user more relevant advertising and offers, which would give the companies better return on the investment they have made in infrastructure. They argue that web browsing history and app usage should not count as “sensitive” information.

In the run-up to the hearing, privacy campaigners argued that ISPs should be treated differently from Google and Facebook, as in many cases consumers only have one choice of broadband provider. You can choose not to use Facebook or Google’s search engine, and there are lots of tools you can use to block their tracking on other parts of the web, for example, Privacy Badger from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit civil liberties group.

It’s much harder to prevent ISPs from tracking you. To mask all of your browsing behavior you can use a VPN service (which incurs a subscription cost) or try using Tor, both of which make browsing more complicated.

What’s the next step for privacy campaigners? The EFF’s Jeremy Gillula said: “It’s certainly a bit of a Hail Mary, but I think we’d try to convince President Trump that signing a bill that helps big corporate interests by eliminating Americans’ privacy and weakening their cybersecurity isn’t exactly ‘draining the swamp’.”

by Olivia Solon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Tolga Bozoglu/EPA

Selling Water

Bottled water is starting to seem more like soda, and sometimes taste like it, too.

As bottled water surges in popularity, Coke, Pepsi and other companies are using celebrity endorsements, stylish packaging and fancy filtration processes like "reverse osmosis" to sell people on expanding variations of what comes out of the tap. They're also adding flourishes like bubbles, flavors or sweeteners that can blur the lines between what is water and what is soda.

For this year's Super Bowl, PepsiCo even ran an ad for its new Lifewtr, promoting the drink in a spotlight typically reserved for sodas. Also running their first Super Bowl ads were Fiji and Bai Brands, which sell "enhanced waters" made with fruit juice and stevia sweetener.

Michael Simon, Bai's chief marketing officer, says its drinks "give people that healthy profile they're looking for, but now they no longer have to sacrifice on taste with the neutrality of water."

Bottled water has been gaining ground for years, and overtook soda as the No. 1 drink in the U.S. by sales volume last year, industry tracker Beverage Marketing Corp. said. Some of the fizzy, sweetened drinks are considered water by the companies or industry trackers in some cases, as the distinctions between them lose meaning. Companies aren't as interested in the big, economy packs of plain bottled water that have been fueling the growth, says Ali Dibaj, a Bernstein analyst who covers the industry, since those are less profitable than sodas and are a "horrible business to be in."

So Coke and Pepsi are focusing on pricier options that compete with brands like Evian and Perrier. And they're introducing fizzy and fruity varieties to get a better foothold in increasingly crowded marketplace where options like LaCroix and others are gaining popularity. Showing just how blurry the lines are getting, PepsiCo launched a drink last week that it describes as "sorta juice, sorta soda, sorta sparkling water." Such options can capture people looking to cut back on sodas or juices, and may get people who might buy lower-priced waters to upgrade.

by Candice Choi, AP |  Read more:

Image: Matt Rourke/AP

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