America's biggest serial killer

The Gosnell movie that Kickstarter tried to censor is in its final fundraising push on Indiegogo. The promo video does an excellent job laying out the issues. 

America's biggest serial killer is not something to overlook. Thanks to crowdfunding, it looks like it won't be.

HT: National Review

Tech Crassness

At the time Dr. Kermit Gosnell was caught, prosecuted, and convicted for removing live children from women and then killing them, the line went out that Gosnell's moral confusion was an outlier, that the pro-choice side stood as one with the pro-life side in condemning Gosnell and that there would be nobody trying to whitewash or minimize Gosnell's crimes.

Kickstarter has demonstrated that this was aspirational at best and that the pro-choice side has a problem. Slate's not exactly a right wing news source but they see the problem of a discriminatory review process just fine. For those who are unfamiliar with Kickstarter, a successful fundraising project might have dozens of short videos talking about details of the project. Kickstarter pretty clearly laid down the line that talking details about Kermit Gosnell could get the entire project pulled, or at least pulled from the internal search engine. In a time limited process like Kickstarter, getting pulled from the search engine can mean the difference between getting funded and getting nothing. The filmmakers were right to seek a different platform where they would not have to pull their punches in their crucial communications during the fundraising campaign out of fear that a reviewer with the same sort of moral confusion that led to Gosnell's life sentence would pull their project.

Update: The film was successfully funded via Indiegogo

The feds are overregulating poop

Clostridium dificile bacteria is a minor normal component of your gut flora but when antibiotics kill the rest of your normal balanced population, out of control C diff is nasty problem to have. You can even die of it. It kills about 14,000 people in the US and 110,000 globally every year and the trend is going up.

Medically we've found a way to cure the problem and for once, it's a relatively cheap, if disgusting to contemplate, fix. It's called a fecal matter transplant (FMT) and it is exactly what it sounds like. You get a stool sample from a volunteer, make sure that their sample isn't going to make you sicker because they have a disease, parasite, or infection (CPT 44705 costing $500-$1500) and then get a GI guy to insert the sample from either end depending on where the problematic infection is. A colonoscopy is covered by multiple codes and can run from $740 to $8,500. That's an absurdly large variation but it's pretty clear that cash patients will not be going to the more expensive doctors. Whether a colonoscopy is even necessary or a simple enema is sufficient is under investigation.

Compared to surgery that yanks out sections of your colon, the major alternative when things go really bad with this sort of infection, this is getting off light. And even at the beginning phase, the transplant option outperforms vancomycin 94% to 27%. A study comparing the two options was terminated early because it was considered unethical to keep half the study population on the antibiotic.

The cash price for the "low dose" variant of 125mg vancomycin 4 times a day for 10 days is approximately $1000 to $1700 and for the "high dose" variant of 500mg 4/10 is $3900-$4300 so the cost of transplants is competitive.

Unfortunately, the FDA has decided to regulate poop as medicine instead of as a transplant. More specifically, everybody was going to have to go through a month long process of getting each FMT individually approved through the Investigational New Drug (IND) process but the benefits of FMT were so obvious over alternative therapies in the case of c-diff that for that purpose and only that purpose, the process is virtually unregulated. For everything else, the IND process rules and people are actually going the DIY route with poop slurry enemas because of a lack of doctors willing to go through the hassle and expense to go through the IND paperwork hoops.

This is politicizing medicine which is a lot more disgusting that poop transplants. The IND process shouldn't be used for something that isn't a drug. People are suffering and even dying because this area of medicine is being held up by paperwork. 

Watching Al Jazeera

My father and I watched Al Jazeera America for the first time today. It was a pretty effective bit of brainwashing whose subject was cartoon journalism but whose purpose was all about promoting emotion over thought, emotion over reason. During a commercial break they advertised an upcoming show on immigration. It offended the both of us but, as is usual in our case, for different reasons.

My father saw one more rerun of the nasty propaganda machine he had to suffer under in communist Romania. He knew the truth because he had known witnesses. The witnesses told simple stories that revealed simple truths. The Soviets, for 20 years on the Nistru river would shoot attempted border crossers in the water and the Romanians would collect the bodies and the wounded as they drifted into Romanian territory. Later, they started shooting them before they got to the river as they hardened the border. My father's witnesses were Romanian border guards who, in peacetime, had to pick up the dead and wounded at a pace fit for a small war.

In those days, a Soviet border guard would get a bonus and 20 days vacation for shooting a would be crosser. If they were in need of funds or a break in routine, they would sometimes threaten a local peasant with death if they didn't walk into the no-go zone. The guard would then proceed to shoot them and collect.

It's not a story you hear too often. I knew at least one of those men as a child. He never mentioned this story to me, though he told me others.

Usually I don't pass on the really brutal stories but today I've overloaded on Soviet apologists claiming moral superiority. We do not have the moral filters to weed out these evil degenerates for mass murder as we do for their Nazi cousins. It's a shame that we don't.

The dead weep.

Ugly labor force participation trends

You can hide a lot in plain sight in a simple graph. Here's one that has volumes hidden in plain sight.

By original estimates we were supposed to peak out in 2012 on labor force participation. Instead we're almost 4% under that figure and looking to fall further. That's a huge difference in how the US works, akin to the 1960s jump in participation but with the direction reversed. It points to a United States less able to pay its debts, less able to innovate, lead, and less able to support its military position which has historically been supported by the country's economic power. In essence it's a country that is rather short of hope for the future.

We're moving to a society with similar to 1940s labor participation rates but with a much more confused set of social expectations, something that is inevitably leading to less happiness in general. There are no convincing narratives out there why this very large secular trend should reverse. It might happen but nobody seems to have a good tale as to why. This year will see another 10 year labor force projection release. So far it is looking like the 2014 10 year estimate will be another "surprise" where the curves drop even further, even faster. December's rate was 62.8% after all. We weren't supposed to hit that until much later in the decade.

Absolutely, positively don't do this

It's like the XKCD reached deep into my collection of technical nightmares and fished out the big one. 

Off the charts pollution in Beijing

Literally, the city of Beijing's air was so bad last night that it went off the chart. The US embassy has a sensor measuring PM 2.5 in Beijing. That's particulate matter of 2.5 micron size or less. Here's the screen shot of how bad things are over there.

All the grey bars are off the scale and the red ones are merely "hazardous" and you should stay indoors. Grey means stay indoors in a room with filtered air, and try to breathe as little as possible.

HT: Zerohedge

Something in the news today

It's mostly depressing reading the news today though on the bright side, the idea of chucking the text of the Constitution in favor of historical practice apparently only has 2 votes on the Supreme Court. These days, the apparently limited size of the Supreme Court minority ok with chucking the idea of Constitutional government entirely counts as good news.

Etiquette question

What is the appropriate conversational response at a party to "the suicide bomber almost got me"?

Discuss.

Going to war for John Boehnor

Discussion over at ChicagoBoyz went pretty dark in my cross post Obamacare, the Scrooging. The Spanish Civil War came up and an episode of history that struck me, the assassination of José Calvo Sotelo. He was the leader of the opposition and the day after a bitter confrontation in the Spanish parliament, was taken away by a left wing death squad and assassinated. It was a horrifying moment and apparently significantly influenced the start of the Spanish Civil War, pushing things forward much faster. The argument was that speaking of violence prior to such an event is counterproductive and afterwards, speaking is countersurvival. After all, you might be next.

If the country were changed to the US, and the leader of the opposition were assassinated, what would happen here upon the murder of John Boehnor? It seems unthinkable.

Would there be a different response if it were Ted Cruz or Rand Paul that fell to an assassin's bullet?

Obamacare Scrooged

People signing up for Obamacare are being robbed by the government. This time it's not metaphorically, like when your perfectly satisfactory insurance plan is made illegal and all the compliant plans are more expensive and have worse terms but literally. People are having their accounts debited improperly during the Christmas season. And because it is being done by the government, there is little recourse to sue due to sovereign immunity and, of course, those most injured haven't the money to hire representation anyway. I think Pope Francis calls it 'despoliation of the poor'.

Double debits, wrong day debits, wrong amount debits, these are all standard hazards with any sort of Electronic Funds Transfer (ETF) system. There's nothing particularly new about these issues. It's all part of the back end errors that those dastardly Republicans have been hyperventilating about and Democrats have been pooh poohing for weeks now.

You never know when Tuttle will turn into Buttle in one of these systems. But what's in a name?

Merry Christmas Cross posted: Chicagoboyz

California abomination

Normally California allows you to fall behind 5 years on your property taxes before they will foreclose. California also has a type of special district called a lighting and landscape district that, well, pays for local lighting and landscaping. Each district sets up a formula for how much you benefit and that's the fee you pay. If you get behind on your payments and they've issued bonds in the district, they are allowed and obligated to start foreclosure in as little as 3 months.

Don't pay for police? You've got 5 years to make it good. Don't pay for the public space lawn service and look out. The landscape police will have you out of your house in no time. I'm sure that California communities with these things have impeccable lawn care.