THE BIGGEST PROBLEMS ARE . . .
HEALTH, MONEY, and EDUCATION
HEALTH
NYT: 1 in 8 New Yorkers now have diabetes
BAD BLOOD Genetic Catastrophe: Diabetes
Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis
By N. R. KLEINFIELD Published: January 9, 2006
More than one in every eight New Yorkers now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as an epidemic. (5 pages)
Begin on the sixth floor, third room from the end, swathed in fluorescence: a 60-year-old woman was having two toes sawed off. One floor up, corner room: a middle-aged man sprawled, recuperating from a kidney transplant. Next door: nerve damage. Eighth floor, first room to the left: stroke. Two doors down: more toes being removed. Next room: a flawed heart.
As always, the beds at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx were filled with a universe of afflictions. In truth, these assorted burdens were all the work of a single illness: diabetes. Room after room, floor after floor, diabetes. On any given day, hospital officials say, nearly half the patients are there for some trouble precipitated by the disease.
An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers - more than one in every eight - now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as a bona fide epidemic. Diabetes is the only major disease in the city that is growing, both in the number of new cases and the number of people it kills. And it is growing quickly, even as other scourges like heart disease and cancers are stable or in decline.
Already, diabetes has swept through families, entire neighborhoods in the Bronx and broad slices of Brooklyn, where it is such a fact of life that people describe it casually, almost comfortably, as "getting the sugar" or having "the sweet blood."
But as alarmed as health officials are about the present, they worry more about what is to come.
Within a generation or so, doctors fear, a huge wave of new cases could overwhelm the public health system and engulf growing numbers of the young, creating a city where hospitals are swamped by the disease's handiwork, schools scramble for resources as they accommodate diabetic children, and the work force abounds with the blind and the halt.
The prospect is frightening, but it has gone largely unnoticed outside public health circles. As epidemics go, diabetes has been a quiet one, provoking little of the fear or the prevention efforts inspired by AIDS or lung cancer.
In its most common form, diabetes, which allows excess sugar to build up in the blood and exact ferocious damage throughout the body, retains an outdated reputation as a relatively benign sickness of the old. Those who get it do not usually suffer any symptoms for years, and many have a hard time believing that they are truly ill.
Yet a close look at its surge in New York offers a disturbing glimpse of where the city, and the rest of the world, may be headed if diabetes remains unchecked.
The percentage of diabetics in the city is nearly a third higher than in the nation. New cases have been cropping up close to twice as fast as cases nationally. And of adults believed to have the illness, health officials estimate, nearly one-third do not know it.
One in three children born in the United States five years ago are expected to become diabetic in their lifetimes, according to a projection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The forecast is even bleaker for Latinos: one in every two.
New York, perhaps more than any other big city, harbors all the ingredients for a continued epidemic. It has large numbers of the poor and obese, who are at higher risk. It has a growing population of Latinos, who get the disease in disproportionate numbers, and of Asians, who can develop it at much lower weights than people of other races.
It is a city of immigrants, where newcomers eating American diets for the first time are especially vulnerable. It is also yielding to the same forces that have driven diabetes nationally: an aging population, a food supply spiked with sugars and fats, and a culture that promotes overeating and discourages exercise.
Diabetes has no cure. It is progressive and often fatal, and while the patient lives, the welter of medical complications it sets off can attack every major organ. As many war veterans lost lower limbs last year to the disease as American soldiers did to combat injuries in the entire Vietnam War. Diabetes is the principal reason adults go blind.
So-called Type 2 diabetes, the predominant form and the focus of this series, is creeping into children, something almost unheard of two decades ago. The American Diabetes Association says the disease could actually lower the average life expectancy of Americans for the first time in more than a century.
Even those who do not get diabetes will eventually feel it, experts say - in time spent caring for relatives, in higher taxes and insurance premiums, and in public spending diverted to this single illness.
"Either we fall apart or we stop this," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Yet he and other public health officials acknowledge that their ability to slow the disease is limited. Type 2 can often be postponed and possibly prevented by eating less and exercising more. But getting millions of people to change their behavior, he said, will require some kind of national crusade.
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MONEY
With these costs taken into account, the total macroeconomic costs may add up to $750bn and total costs to $1,850bn. "We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security."
Martin Wolf is a respectable economist and chief
economics commentator at the Financial Times
Martin Wolf: The failure to calculate the costs of war
Before the Iraq war began, Lawrence Lindsey, then president George W. Bush's economic adviser, suggested that the costs might reach $200bn. The White House promptly fired him. Mr Lindsey was indeed wrong. But his error lay in grossly underestimating the costs. The
administration's estimates of a cost of some $50-$60bn were a fantasy, as were Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and much else.
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So far the government has spent $251bn in hard cash. But the costs continue. If the US begins to withdraw troops this year, but maintains a diminishing presence for the next five years, the additional cost will be at least $200bn, under what Profs Bilmes and Stiglitz call their "conservative" option. Under their "moderate" one, the cost reaches $271bn, because troops remain until 2015.
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With these costs taken into account, the total macroeconomic costs may add up to $750bn and total costs to $1,850bn.
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It is possible to argue that the benefits for Iraq, the Middle East and the world will outweigh all these costs. But that depends on the emergence, in Iraq, of a stable and peaceful democratic order. That has not yet been achieved.
Even those who supported the war must draw two lessons. First, the exercise of military power is far more expensive than many fondly hoped. Second, such policy decisions require a halfway decent analysis of the costs and possible consequences. The administration's failure to do so was a blunder that will harm the US and the world for years to come.
AND
Americans saving less than nothing
Spending could outstrip income in 2005, which hasn't happened since the Depression ~
Given how much red ink households racked up in the first 11 months of last year, Lansing said the nation's personal savings rate could well be negative for all of 2005.
That, he added, would be "the first such occurrence since the Great Depression."
Due to the weakening of contract law by the courts, allowing
companies to shrug off pension obligations and shift them onto the backs of citizens, perverse incentives in our tax code and aided by the Federal Reserve almost all of most middle class family's net worth's are whittled down to their homes. The lack of real savings and the economic cushion it affords means many families will be unable to weather any sustained downturn and, despite assurances to
the contrary by the ever rosy sycophants feeding at the public troughs, trigger a second Great Depression. One of the excesses that proceeded the Depression were zero-down, interest-only, home loans very similar to today. One of the reforms put in place after the depression was a requirement for a conventional mortgage.
The savings situation is made far worse by the enormous balance of trade deficit, public and private debt (and average of $350,000/ citizen) versus their net worth ($50,000). Writing in the spring issue of The National Interest, the venerable Peter F. Drucker asserted: "The U.S. government deficit . . . is fast becoming the sinkhole of the world financial economy. The persistent U.S. deficit creates a persistent deficit in the U.S. balance of payments, which make both the U.S. economy and the U.S. government
increasingly dependent on massive injections of short-term and panic-prone money from abroad."
When the U.S. Treasury reported the official 2004 federal budget deficit at a record $413 billion the hisses and boos in the financial media were unrelenting. Two months later, the Treasury reported the actual 2004 deficit -- using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) -- was really an incredible $11.1 trillion [1], up from $3.7 trillion in 2003, yet nary a word was heard in the financial media, from Wall Street or from any political denizen of that former malarial swamp on the Potomac. An exception, of course, was Treasury Secretary John Snow, who signed the government's financial statements, but the data release was as low key as physically possible. http://www.gillespieresearch.com/cgi-bin/bgn/article/id=596
If events follow their usual course, after the coming financial
debacle has laid waste to most American's dreams of continued prosperity for themselves and their children and a modicum of comfort in retirement and the bread lines return and then recede into history those in authority will once again be successful at deflecting blame from their unwillingness to rein in public spending, the ponzi game of wealth redistribution through taxation and their mismanagement of the currency in pursuit of unwise social programs and the repayment of powerful political patrons.
EDUCATION
NO CHILD'S BEHIND LEFT: THE TEST
New York -- Today and tomorrow every 8-year-old in the state of New York will take a test. It's part of George Bush's No Child Left Behind program.
The losers will be left behind to repeat the third grade.
Try it yourself.
This is from the state's actual practice test. Ready, class?
"The year 1999 was a big one for the Williams sisters. In February, Serena won her first pro singles championship. In March, the sisters met for the first time in a tournament final. Venus won. And at doubles tennis, the Williams girls could not seem to lose that year."
And here's one of the four questions: "The story says that in 1999, the sisters could not seem to lose at doubles tennis. This probably means when they played "A two matches in one day "B against each other "C with two balls at once "D as partners"
OK, class, do you know the answer?
(By the way, I didn't cheat: there's nothing else about "doubles" in the text.)
My kids go to a New York City school in which more than half the students live below the poverty line. There is no tennis court.
There are no tennis courts in the elementary schools of Bed-Stuy or East Harlem. But out in the Hamptons, every school has a tennis court. In Forest Hills, Westchester and Long Island's North Shore, the schools have nearly as many tennis courts as the school kids have live-in maids.
Now, you tell me, class, which kids are best prepared to answer the question about "doubles tennis"? The 8-year-olds in Harlem who've never played a set of doubles or the kids whose mommies disappear for two hours every Wednesday with Enrique the tennis pro?
Is this test a measure of "reading comprehension" -- or a measure of wealth accumulation?
If you have any doubts about what the test is measuring, look at the next question, based on another part of the text, which reads (and I could not make this up):
"Most young tennis stars learn the game from coaches at private clubs. In this sentence, a club is probably a "F baseball bat "G tennis racquet "H tennis court "J country club"
Helpfully, for the kids in our 'hood, it explains that a "country club" is a, "place where people meet." Yes, but which people?
President Bush told us, "By passing the No Child Left Behind Act, we are regularly testing every child and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing." But there are no "better options."
In the delicious double-speak of class war, when the tests have winnowed out the chaff and kids stamped failed, No Child Left results in that child being left behind in the same grade to repeat the failure another year.
I can't say that Mr. Bush doesn't offer better options to the kids stamped failed.
Under No Child Left, if enough kids flunk the tests, their school is marked a failure and its students win the right, under the law, to transfer to any successful school in their district.
You can't provide more opportunity than that.
But they don't provide it, the law promises it, without a single penny to make it happen.
In New York in 2004, a third of a million students earned the right to transfer to better schools -- in which there were only 8,000 places open.
New York is typical.
Nationwide, only one out of two-hundred students eligible to transfer manage to do it. Well, there's always the Army. (That option did not go unnoticed: No Child has a special provision requiring schools to open their doors to military recruiters.)
Hint: When de-coding politicians' babble, to get to the real agenda, don't read their lips, read their budgets. And in his last budget, our President couldn't spare one thin dime for education, not ten cents.
Mr. Big Spender provided for a derisory 8.4 cents on the dollar of the cost of primary and secondary schools.
Congress appropriated a half penny of the nation's income -- just one-half of one-percent of America's twelve trillion dollar GDP -- for primary and secondary education.
President Bush actually requested less.
While Congress succeeded in prying out an itty-bitty increase in voted funding, that doesn't mean the extra cash actually gets to the students.
Fifteen states have sued the federal government on the grounds that the cost of new testing imposed on schools, $3.9 billion, eats up the entire new funding budgeted for No Child Left.
There are no "better options" for failing children, but there are better uses for them.
The President ordered testing and more testing to hunt down, identify and target millions of children too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate.
No Child Left offers no options for those with the test-score Mark of Cain -- no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding.
Rather, it is the new social Darwinism, educational eugenics: identify the nation's loser-class early on.
Trap them then train them cheap.
Someone has to care for the privileged.
No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers.
And so we have No Child Left Behind -- to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner-class on the higher floors of the new economic order.
Class war dismissed. **********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
Read his investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com
Blog feeds may carry security risk
August 4, 2006
LAS VEGAS -- Reading blogs via popular RSS or Atom feeds may expose computer users to hacker attacks, a security expert warns.
Attackers could insert malicious JavaScript in content that is transferred to subscribers of data feeds that use the popular RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom formats, Bob Auger, a security engineer with Web security company SPI Dynamics, said Thursday in a presentation at the
Black Hat security event here.
The problem doesn't affect only blogs--any kind of information feed using any kind of format could potentially be used to transmit malicious content to a subscriber, Auger said. People, for example, subscribe to mailing
lists and news Web sites via RSS, he said, noting "this is about the entire concept of Web feeds." JavaScript is a scripting language that experts say is increasingly causing security concerns.Attackers could exploit the problem by setting up a malicious blog and enticing a user to subscribe to the RSS feed. More likely, however, they would add malicious JavaScript to the comments on a trusted blog, Auger said. "A lot of blogs will take user comments and stick them into their own RSS feeds," he said.
Also, attackers could send malicious code to mailing lists that offer RSS or Atom feeds and commandeer vulnerable systems that way, Auger said.
Auger listed Bloglines, RSS Reader, RSS Owl, Feed Demon, and Sharp Reader as vulnerable.
As protection, people could switch to a nonvulnerable reader. Also, feed publishers could ensure that their feeds don't include malicious JavaScript or any script at all, Auger said. Some services, however, rely on JavaScript to deliver ads in feeds, he noted.
