Hope is not a plan

General Wesley Clark, speaking from his position as co-chair of Growth Energy, has proposed Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) for fuels within the United States. Growth Energy has put up the Label My Fuel web site to promote this concept as well.

While this clearly supports Growth Energy's position as an American ethanol company, it is also an entirely reasonable suggestion. As Label My Fuel notes, we have COOL on most products that surround us, including our appliances, clothing, cars, and food. In contrast, gas remains a magical commodity that mysteriously arrives at our local gas station in trucks, without much additional consideration (we happen to have an actual refinery here in the Bay Area, which may make the concept of petroleum refining more real for some of us in the area). It seems entirely reasonable to have COOL in place on our gas pumps as well.

For reference, your gas COOL might look like this:

(Probably without the pimping for ethanol, though.)

Although I don't buy into current corn ethanol or current generation cellulosic as fuel solutions, the general concept of fuel COOL, no matter what fuel solutions we settle on, seems not only reasonable, but rational, positively transparent, and fundamentally helpful.

Pfizer was recently pegged for fines to the tune of $2.3 billion (that's billion) following their admission of guilt in misbranding drugs with an intent to defraud or mislead. The Federal investigation came with whistle blowing by John Kopchinski, a former Pfizer sales rep who (quite naturally) could not reconcile his personal ethics with the requirement by Pfizer that their sales reps promote untested, off-label uses of their drugs, as well as uses above the tested doses - up to eight times higher than those doses.

Kopchinski, a Gulf War veteran and West Point grad cited his military background, and West Point specifically, in discussing how he was unwilling to be a "team player" and push doctors to prescribe Pfizer's drugs inappropriately and in large quantities. You can read more about his personal experience here.

Compare and contrast the official Pfizer line with, well, reality:

Amy Schulman, the senior vice president and general counsel of Pfizer, said: "We regret certain actions taken in the past, but are proud of the action we've taken to strengthen our internal controls."

Authorities called Pfizer a repeat offender, noting it was the fourth such settlement of government charges in the last decade.

Of course, it's not all down to Pfizer committing fraud. It's also down to doctors accepting free handouts and more from pharma reps. For a front against this kind of "close collaboration" between sales reps and doctors, check out the American Medical Student Association's PharmFree program, which includes this pledge:

I am committed to the practice of medicine in the best interests of patients and to the pursuit of an education that is based on the best available evidence, rather than on advertising or promotion.

I, therefore, pledge to accept no money, gifts, or hospitality from the pharmaceutical industry; to seek unbiased sources of information and not rely on information disseminated by drug companies; and to avoid conflicts of interest in my medical education and practice.

Seems good.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

As we've moved from a culture of religious faith in the superiority of private industry over government in all areas to one in which we actually critically evaluate both sides and decide which is actually better, it's becoming increasingly apparent that blithely handing certain tasks, especially security tasks, over to private contractors has not always led to either cost savings or an improvement in our national defense. One would imagine you'd want at least one of those, if not, ideally, both.

The GAO has already pointed out to us that contractors often cost more than equivalent government employees, which seems as if it should surprise no one, although it does. We may not have had such a good handle on this, however, as the belief that private industry would "do it better" meant that we frequently didn't track private contractor performance. Of course, as is the way with GAO, these are largely cost-based analyses. What about, say, national security?

Certainly, past contractors such as Blackwater, now rebranded as Xe, have not particularly helped our efforts in areas such as Iraq, where they appear to have been fine with killing a lot of random people in a way that our professional military actually is not. Or, to put it another way, private contractors have been under significantly less pressure to act in a manner that is helpful to our national defense as a whole than members of our military.

Now, the American embassy in Kabul has fired a number of employees of Armorgroup, a subsidiary of G4S, after they were caught carrying out lewd and unpleasant hazing rituals amongst themselves. This latest nonsense was turned up by the Project on Government Oversight. To the current State Department's credit, they tossed the contracted guards immediately on learning of the problem, but again this suggests that we might prefer to have people there with a patriotic interest in America's national security priorities rather than a financial interest in clocking in every day.

Certainly, it's upsetting to pay more money for services that are less effective, just because someone has a religious belief that the free market is better than patriotic citizens.

BBC article

The BBC is reporting that after two decades of being lobbied to do so, the German parliament has finally revoked the "war traitor" status of a number of men who deserted from the Wehrmacht during the second world war.

Ludwig Baumann joined Hitler's Wehrmacht when he was 19, but he became a pacifist and in June 1942, he deserted, along with his friend Kurt Oldenburg, while they were deployed in France.

Despite his fearlessness, Mr Baumann was caught by the Nazis and sentenced to death for desertion. He was tortured, taken to concentration camps, and was lucky to avoid being executed.

So why wouldn't a post-Nazi Germany simply go ahead and pardon these men who clearly didn't want to be involved in a totalitarian government that ultimately harmed their nation? Part of it is a sort of generational issue, as you can see in John Keegan's Intelligence in War, where he expresses a sharp distaste for "traitors," even when they turned against genocidal governments run by insane dictators. This falls in line with the idea that government is the state, rather than an underlying ideology - as if, for example, America were not defined by its ideology but rather by whoever happened to be in power at the time.

There may perhaps be object lessons in that sentiment.

A contrasting view would hold that much as "being American" has more to do with an idea of freedoms and democracy than, say, being white, "being German" had more to do with ideas that did not involve large-scale genocide and domination of Europe (I'm punting a bit here, as I have no idea what the fundamental core of German-ness is as a national identity, but they seem to have done well for most of their history not exterminating minority groups, so that's clearly not it).

Mr Baumann says the men who were described as "wartime traitors" were not traitors at all.

"This is a great day for Germany - finally the last sentences handed down by Nazi courts will be lifted," he said.

Absolute loyalty to a nation is not the same as absolute loyalty to the state, or any one incarnation of the state.

BBC article

Hugo Chavez, proud resident of the 70s is now venturing into the 80s by supporting ethnically based independence in some areas but not others.

Specifically, he's announced that Venezuela will officially recognize the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations, following in Russia's footsteps. He similarly follows in Russian footsteps by liberally failing to recognize the ethnically based independence of Kosovo, Ingushetia, and Chechnya. It's unclear why Chechens, Kosovars, and Ingushetians don't merit independence, but perhaps we can ask Chavez to go on about it in one of his extensive television rambles.

New York Times article

A frequent discussion I have with friends concerns the difficulty people have in evaluating risk. Consider, for example, your relative risk of ending up on an airplane that terrorists attempt to hijack versus your risk of randomly picking up flu from another traveler on that airplane. We estimate the influenza-induced death rate in the U.S. as ballparking at around 30,000 people per year, which is rather higher than the death rate from terrorism of any kind. Naturally, there are other reasons why the United States maintains a policy of terrorism prevention, but at the personal scale this suggests your risk mitigation behaviors should focus significantly more on avoiding disease transmission and rather less on reprising Kurt Russell's role in Executive Decision.

Do you wear a mask to avoid flu? Should you? Does it work?

As it happens, many public health agencies have policies requiring the use of surgical masks as an infection barrier, but until this month there were no randomized, controlled trials on whether that policy makes sense.

As reported at the 49th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a randomized, controlled trial of nearly 2,000 health care workers in Beijing has given us our first real information on the value of masks in blocking transmission of respiratory infections. The upshot? Surgical masks are bunk, but there are real benefits from N95 masks.

The first randomized controlled clinical trial comparing surgical masks to fit-tested and nonfit-tested N95 masks in at-risk healthcare workers has found that the respirators were "clearly superior" in guarding against viral and respiratory infection, lead author of the study, C. Raina MacIntyre, PhD, from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, told meeting attendees.

"Given the logistic difficulties of fit testing, particularly during an infectious-disease emergency, this is an advantage for public-health control," the authors say in their abstract.

This is good news from many standpoints. First, it's always useful to know that your current policy directives don't have any evidence, as that lets you discard them and spend your resources more effectively. Second, it means that off-the-shelf N95 masks work just as well as custom-fit ones, which means you can get the full benefit during a pandemic using pre-stockpiled inventory.

The benefits from the N95 masks are fairly significant, and provide clear direction for future pandemic policies as well as personal decisions about wearing masks on airplanes and in other situations where it's hard to avoid respiratory contacts.

Note that this study was supported by 3M, which manufactures one brand of N95 mask. That said, the results are so significant and clear-cut that I'm not very concerned about conflict of interest (presumably they would have declined to report on the results if the N95s had turned out not to be effective).

From this Medscape article (free signup required for access)

Edited to add: Unfortunately this study has been retracted, with no word on why. The only remaining study does not show increased efficacy for N95s.