Germany, Corn, Catangui, Monsanto... Mercenaries?

This is my black helicopter post for the week. Consider it just a reminder for the file cabinet rather than an official brief for the court.

Some Twitter-wandering informs me that Germany banned MON 810, Monsanto's genetically modified Bt corn, in April, 2009. As I understand it, this is the same corn that Dr. Mike Catangui's research connects with pest replacement, specifically the recent spread of western bean cutworm and corn leaf aphids. Dr. Catangui was fired this year by SDSU, which is run by a Monsanto executive board member, for using his research as the basis for his advice to farmers.

The German ban has caught heck from various boards and researchers. Germany's own Central Commission for Biological Safety said the Germany's MON 810 ban is not scientifically grounded. Three French researchers published a pretty hefty meta-study in 2009 coming to the same conclusion. But I see no mention of Catangui's research in either of those critiques.

Would Monsanto squelch research that demonstrates negative impacts from its products? Would they go so far as to persuade a university to violate academic freedom to do so?

Well, remember: we're talking about Monsanto, a corporation that hires Blackwater/Xe to spy on activists who oppose its GM products. Monsanto enlisted operatives from the mercenary company to infiltrate activist groups for the purpose of "protecting the Monsanto name."

I'll keep looking for puzzle pieces....

Germany Rejects Phone/E-mail User Data Colletion on Privacy Grounds

In the spirit of the conversation desired by the sponsors of the failed Blog Control Acts, South Dakota House Bills 1277 and 1278, I offer another international note on online privacy:

Rep. Noel Hamiel's effort to muzzle the South Dakota blogosphere would have required anyone maintaining a blog to keep records of who visited and commented on the website. The German Federal Constitution Court has declared that sort of record-keeping a violation of privacy:

The highest court in Germany has suspended a controversial law in Europe requiring phone and e-mail providers to hold customer data for six months in case it's needed by law enforcement.

Germany's Federal Constitution Court called the law "inadmissable" and ruled that changes would be needed to limit its scope, according to a story in Spiegel Online. The court felt that the data was not properly secured or protected and that its use had not been made clear [Lance Whitney, "German court rules against data retention policy," CNet News, 2010.03.02].

The court ordered immediate deletion of all user data collected under the law.The court did not overturn the law completely, but it did say that if the government is going to mandate the collection of such data, the government must specify how that data is going to be used (no fishing expeditions allowed!) and establish very tight security to ensure that data is not used for any other purposes. Keep those standards in mind, South Dakota legislators, the next time you try to dragoon citizens into being online speech cops.

German Health Care Beats U.S.: Less Rationing, Better Coverage... and with Older Population!

My comment section brings Linda McIntyre's concern about rationing. It also brings a useful link from Tony Amert. Even though Tony wrote first, his link responds well to Linda's concern:

From an American perspective, Germany’s health care system represents a nettlesome challenge. Americans now spend 14 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, while Germany spends less than 10 percent. Yet, for all that heavier spending, the U.S. health care system has never managed to provide all Americans with secure, portable health insurance. Evidently, for many low-income Americans without health insurance, the system now rations health care by income and ability to pay.

By contrast, Germans of all ages have long enjoyed fully portable health insurance that provides what is effectively first-dollar coverage for a very comprehensive package of benefits. Furthermore, unlike U.S. patients, who increasingly find their choice of doctor and hospital limited through the technique of managed competition, German patients still enjoy completely free choice of provider at the time illness strikes. In cross-national opinion surveys conducted by the Louis Harris organization in conjunction with the Harvard School of Public Health, both German patients and physicians express relatively greater satisfaction with their health care system than their American counterparts express with their system.

The relatively low level of health spending in Germany is all the more remarkable, because Germany’s population is so much older than America’s: 15.5 percent of the German population is age sixty--five or older, compared with 12.2 percent of Americans. In fact, the United States will attain Germany’s current age structure only in the year 2020 [Uwe E. Reinhardt, "Germany's Health Care System: It's Not the American Way," Health Affairs, 13(4) Fall 1994].

Catch that date: 1994. Little has changed in national differences since then. When Linda and fellow conservatives trot out the word rationing as a reason to oppose health coverage reform, they might as well be arguing that health coverage reform will make morphine addictive and cough medicine taste bad. The United States already rations care. It's been happening since well before Reinhardt's 1994 article. Americans seem to accept rationing completely... as long as it happens to lower-income people, who obviously don't deserve health care if they're poor, since lacking money evidently indicates some punishment-worthy character flaw.

By the way, Reinhardt points out in a 2003 paper that the United States' ration-by-income scheme appears to restrict care even more severely than any of the supposedly socialist dystopias across the pond. According to that paper, Europeans go to the doctor more and get more treatments than Americans do. Compared to the OECD median, the United States has fewer acute care beds available per 1000 population, fewer hospitalizations per 1000 population, shorter hospital stays, and fewer acute care days per capita. In other words, we get less health care than over half of the industrialized world. (Yet we keep spending more.)

This data shows that America already restricts care more than most industrialized countries with public health coverage do. If you're really worried about rationing, you should be clamoring for a European-style health coverage system. After all, spending less and getting more is perfectly... rational.