Let those old people die

Should our Medicare dollars be going to keep old people alive? No, says Slate's "Human Nature" columnist, William Saletan, in a post yesterday called "Age, Wealth, and Medicare." Basically, Saletan complains that taxpayer money is being spent to put pacemakers in people over 90 years old, and that, he says, is wrong. His conclusion could not be more clear:

If you make it to 100 and can fund your own surgery, that's terrific. But Medicare should focus its resources on people who haven't been as lucky as you. Living to 99 is no tragedy. It's a blessing.

This, of course, is the same William Saletan who last year fell naively into the arms of "scientific racists" and managed to convince himself that some races were genetically inferior in intelligence to others. He then had to backtrack in a series of followups in which he finally admitted that he had failed to adequately check out his story, and particularly the context in which this debate takes place (the entire series is reproduced at the link provided.) So one would think that Saletan would be a bit more humble and think his columns through just a little more before putting his fingers on that keyboard.

The Medicare budget for 2008 fiscal year is about $465 billion. Total spending so far on the war in Iraq is $650 billion, as I pointed out in an earlier post. And yet Saletan, like so many who speak piously about the need to carefully allocate our precious taxpayer funds as if they were wise sages grappling with difficult ethical questions, seems to accept without a second thought the idea that Medicare spending should be tightened despite the aging of the population he himself mentions: "The population of U.S. centenarians (people 100 or older) has nearly doubled since 2000. Trends suggest that within 40 years, it could exceed 1 million."

Shouldn't those who talk about allocation of resources look at the entire picture before drawing conclusions about which expenditures constitute waste or are excessive? The Bush administration has made cuts in Medicare spending a central plank of its fiscal policy, but they don't blink an eye over requests to pour ever more money into our Iraq misadventure (neither does Congress, much, these days.)

God forbid that those who have managed to live a long life should be allowed to continue living it. Perhaps we should start asking for volunteers to be euthanized so we don't have to grow the Medicare budget to take care of all these malingerers who refuse to die at a reasonable age. Saletan, how old are you now? You are never too young to die for your country!

Photo: A 100-year-old woman paraglides off a mountain peak in Cyprus. Reuters.

Update: What do I see on the New York Times home page today? The Bush administration wants to divert $230 million in anti-terror funds to upgrade Pakistan's F-16 jets, which are not used in the "war on terror" but rather are on standby for war with India. I wonder how many pacemaker operations that money would fund?

Hiding in plain sight: Radovan Karadzic

Much is being made of how dramatically Karadzic changed his appearance so that he would not be "recognized" while he was hiding from war crimes investigators as well as the Serbian police, who were supposedly looking for him all these years. According to today's New York Times: "Dejan Anastasijevic, a reporter who specialized in war crimes and followed his case closely for Vreme, a political weekly in Belgrade, said that based on the photograph at the press conference on Monday he would not have recognized Mr. Karadzic even if he had walked right by him."

Well, that's what good disguises are supposed to do. But strangely enough, the Serbian police have yet to brag about the years of dogged and skillful detective work that allowed them to find him anyway. As the Times also points out:

Despite what seemed to be the completeness of his disguise, it was not publicly known whether, as war crimes prosecutors have often alleged, the Serbian government had long been aware of Mr. Karadzic’s location and was only waiting for a convenient moment to apprehend him.

The arrest, nearly 13 years to the day after his indictment in connection with the massacre of nearly 8,000 Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica, seemed aimed at strengthening Serbia’s ties to the European Union. A condition for membership remains the capture of Mr. Karadzic’s wartime ally, Gen. Ratko Mladic, who is also being sought for trial in The Hague on genocide charges.

Some analysts saw the arrest of Mr. Karadzic as an indication that General Mladic would soon be seized. Over the years, there were many reports that Mr. Mladic wandered around downtown Belgrade without hiding his identity.

Perhaps the Serbian police are at this moment regaling reporters about how they found Karadzic, and we will soon be reading all the fascinating details. Or perhaps they don't want to compromise their hunt for Mladic and will wait until he is captured to tell all. But they will tell us how they found these war criminals soon--won't they? I am sure that Serbian officials would not want to leave us with the impression that they have known all along where they were and that no detective work was actually required.

Or perhaps they figure no one will really care once the criminals are in The Hague and Serbia is a respected member of the European Union.

PS--If you think that a companion piece in today's Times entitled "Serbian Officials Provide Details on Arrest of Karadzic" sheds any light on this question, dream on. The article is entirely about the political changes in Serbia that made the arrest possible. Could the reporters on these stories have the courtesy to let us know that they have at least asked the right questions? But the Times' editorial page strikes the right tone of irony about Serbia's "investigative breakthrough."

Photo: Agence France-Presse — Getty Images/New York Times

Afterthought: As a skeptical journalist, I don't give much credibility to rumors that Ratko Mladic is disguised as the head chef at a well-known gourmet restaurant in Belgrade.

In memoriam: Philippe Plailly

The world of science has lost one of its most talented chroniclers. Last Friday evening, photographer Philippe Plailly, founder of the Paris-based scientific photo agency Eurelios, was killed in the Dordogne region of southern France when the ultralight airplane in which he was a passenger crashed for reasons that are not yet clear. The pilot was also killed.

Philippe was working on a documentary about the Magdalenian period of the Western European Upper Paleolithic, which stretched roughly from 18,000 years to 12,000 years ago and produced some of the greatest examples of prehistoric art (including the Lascaux Cave.) The accident happened just south of Les Eyzies de Tayac, often called the "capital" of French prehistory because of the density of prehistoric sites in and around the town.

I had known Philippe and his partner, hominid reconstruction artist Elisabeth Daynès, for many years. Philippe's photos occasionally appeared in Science, including this cover for a special issue on hominid migrations that featured his rendition of Elisabeth's reconstruction of two hominids from the Georgian site of Dmanisi.

Philippe's death is a terrible tragedy, but at least he died doing what he lived for: Using his photographic skills to bring science to a wide public. He will be buried in Paris' Père-Lachaise Cemetery on July 24.

Cover photo: Philippe Plailly/Eurelios and AAAS.

PS--I did not have access to a photo of Philippe when I posted this but here is one from a photographer's Web site.

$656,000,000,000

That's how much U.S. taxpayers have been tapped so far for the Bush administration's war of choice in Iraq. Remember that number the next time someone tells you that there isn't enough money for _________ (fill in the rest of this sentence yourself; sample answers include universal health care, hospitals, schools, mass transport, social security payments, veteran's benefits, etc. etc.)

Gaudi, Barcelona, and science

We're still blogging from the Euroscience Open Forum meeting in Barcelona, be sure to check out our posts at this link right here. Lots of good stuff from my Science colleagues (and one of two items of my own that you might find of interest.)

Our Science Careers colleagues are also blogging from the meeting, click here for more.

Last evening the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science, held a reception at Antoni Gaudi's masterful Batllo House. This is a photo of the exterior; I will be posting some photos of the beautiful interior in a day or two.

Photo: Shawn Lipowski/Creative Commons

Neandertals and moderns may not have mated

That, at least, is the implication of a new ancient DNA study my partner on Science's anthropology beat, Ann Gibbons, reports about today on our ScienceNOW online news service. The link is free for four weeks from today, so please click on it right away. The gist of the story is that an Italian team has sequenced mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from 28,000 year old Cro-Magnon bones, and that it does not show any similarities to Neandertal mtDNA previously analyzed. Cro-Magnons were modern humans, Homo sapiens, and lived in Europe around the time that Neandertals were on their way to extinction. Nevertheless, there were thousands of years of overlap between the two groups (most experts today consider them separate species), and it is possible that some of them interbreeded. While Neandertal DNA does not resemble that of people living today it is always possible that Neandertal sequences in the modern human genome were lost over time.

Here is the key paragraph:

In the new study, Caramelli's group isolated mtDNA from a different set of Cro-Magnon remains that had been found in the same cave in 2003. This time, only seven people handled the fossils, and the researchers verified that their DNA did not match that of the purported Cro-Magnon sequence. "In this case, we knew all the people that touched the bones," says team member Guido Barbujani, a population geneticist at the University of Ferrara, Italy. The team also had the work independently replicated, asking a lab in Spain to extract and analyze mtDNA from different splinters of skull and long bones. The upshot is that the Cro-Magnon mtDNA matches that of modern humans and does not contain patterns found in Neandertal mtDNA, the team reports online today in PLoS ONE. That result argues against the inbreeding hypothesis, says Barbujani. [[Note that the paper is available free at the "team reports" link]]

But the jury is still out, as Ann says. She quotes an ancient DNA expert who is still concerned about the pervasive problem of modern contamination in ancient DNA sequences.

Credit: Illustration by Knut Finstermeier; Neanderthal reconstruction by the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum Mannheim

Science is Barcelona bound!

Beginning Thursday, the entire European news team of Science, including yours truly, will be descending on Barcelona for the Euroscience Open Forum. In addition to eating lots of tapas and generally hobnobbing with Euro-scientists and fellow journalists, we will also be blogging from the meeting. You can follow our adventures at this link. And when and if I get time away from this very arduous assignment, I will post tidbits here as well.

Photo: The Torre Agbar, by architect Jean Nouvel.

McCain cover for the irony deficient

Okay, I hope all the Obama people are happy now. Liberals and progressives love it when Bush, Cheney, McCain et al. are sharply satirized, but lay a finger on Obambi and everyone is fuming with self-righteousness. And the New Yorker cartoon was meant to illustrate a story about fear-mongering against Obama! See previous post.

Cartoon: David Horsey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Update (July 16): There's a nicely done commentary on the flap over the cover by Timothy Egan in the New York Times today, entitled "They Get It." It turns out they have irony in other parts of the country too, not just New York. And Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten weighs in as well.

That awful New Yorker cover is just so unfair to Obama!

Memo to all Obama supporters so outraged about the cover that they are spending hours blogging, commenting, and otherwise fulminating about it:

Please put your computers on standby, get up out of your chairs, and go spend the time instead campaigning or registering voters. But if you insist on sitting there, read editor David Remnick's interview on the Huffington Post or Andrew Hunt's blog post on the subject. And THEN get off your asses and do something constructive rather than whining over every little perceived insult to poor Obambi.

Addendum: I elaborated a bit on my attitude in the comments section in response to a post from Anne, but some readers might not see that--so here is what I said:

I fully understand why bloggers and other Obama supporters are complaining. My point is that true free speech requires that anyone be able to publish and express themselves in any way they wish, satirically, offensively, or otherwise, and nowadays people spend just too much time telling other people what they should and should not say. It leads to huge hypocrisy, because everyone ends up dishonestly apologizing for saying what they really mean (the Jesse Jackson episode is a good example.) Let everyone say what they want to say, and move on, rather than all this finger wagging and scolding nonstop.

Update: The New York Times publishes a piece today about how difficult comedians are finding it to make jokes about Obama. Here are a key couple of grafs:

Why? The reason cited by most of those involved in the shows is that a fundamental factor is so far missing in Mr. Obama: There is no comedic “take” on him, nothing easy to turn to for an easy laugh, like allegations of Bill Clinton’s womanizing, or President Bush’s goofy bumbling or Al Gore’s robotic persona.

“The thing is, he’s not buffoonish in any way,” said Mike Barry, who started writing political jokes for Johnny Carson’s monologues in the waning days of the Johnson administration and has lambasted every presidential candidate since, most recently for Mr. Letterman. “He’s not a comical figure,” Mr. Barry said.

The truth is, Obama supporters don't realize how good they have it. Their candidate weathered Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and all sorts of other setbacks to beat Hillary Clinton decisively, and their candidate is polling 4-12% (depending on the poll) ahead of McCain despite the much ballyhooed and much repeated claim that 10% of Americans think he is a Muslim (racists don't usually vote for Democrats anyway, remember?) Frankly, too many people are just too thin-skinned these days, and that goes for some of the Obama supporters who are screaming the loudest about this New Yorker cover. Meanwhile, their candidate, while not happy, is keeping a stiff upper lip and carrying on. Isn't that the kind of president we want? If so, we need his followers to be just as tough.

More on the New Yorker cover: From James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times, who says that Obama supporters are suffering from an "irony deficiency." Please read it.

Obama and Afghanistan: The New York Times also carries a sobering story about the Taliban attack on a NATO outpost that caused the death of 9 American soldiers. The article makes clear that U.S. and Afghan troops are being deployed out in isolated areas where they are very vulnerable. The U.S. is in big trouble in Afghanistan, the kind of trouble that sending thousands of additional troops is not necessarily going to solve. Just ask the Russians. At the moment, Obama has no good ideas about what to do in Afghanistan other than draw down troops from Iraq and send them into this new brewing quagmire. His supporters, and all Americans, should be very worried about this.

More on Afghanistan: And the wisdom, or lack of it, of shifting the war effort there from Iraq, in a commentary by Tom Hayden in The Nation.

Bastille Day--La Fete Nationale--July 14 parade in Paris

Today is the "national holiday" (Fete Nationale) in France, and as every year, there was a parade this morning down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. This year we had the good luck of watching it from the 4th floor balcony of an office building right on the avenue, thanks to some of my wife's clients who have their offices there. What follows is the best of the photos that I, far from a professional, was able to get from our vantage point.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the parade is always military in character, with marching soldiers, tanks, Humvees, jet planes, helicopters, and the grand finale--impressive to be sure--parachutistes who managed to land right in front of a beaming President Nicolas Sarkozy. I asked one of my wife's colleagues why the parade is so military when July 14, known to anglophones as "Bastille Day," actually marks the storming of the Bastille prison on July 14, 1789. Why not, I asked, include a little truck with the original of the Declaration of the Rights of Man? He didn't really know, although he thought that the holiday focused on patriotic tradition rather than revolutionary values. Another idea, I suggested less seriously, would be to allow First Lady Carla Bruni to organize a squad of super-models in between the military men. That got a laugh from everyone, because the French seem to be both proud of and embarrassed by a president head over heels in love with a model turned singer (and not that good a one, to be honest.)

One interesting aspect, at least to me: A couple of brigades of firemen were in the march, and they received the biggest applause from the crowd lined along the avenue when they passed. I would hate to think that the French are more appreciative of those who protect their individual houses than those who defend the entire country, but one never knows.

I am too novice a blogger (or Google's Blogger is too clumsy) to get the text aligned properly with the photographs, but watch out for the following: Police up on a roof watching for snipers (and ready to snipe themslves); the tiny figure of Sarkozy on the far side of the head of the Army in a jeep; the blue, white and red trails of jets as they pass overhead; and a couple of white United Nations vehicles stuck somewhat sadly between big green French tanks. Enjoy!