Henry Kissinger Has Died

> One such theory is that health and longevity are related to differences in medical care. The present analysis provides limited support for this theory. Life expectancy for low income individuals was not significantly correlated with measures of the quantity and quality of medical care provided, such as the fraction insured and measures of preventive care. The lack of a change in the mortality rates of individuals in the lowest income quartile (Figure 1) when they become eligible for Medicare coverage at the age of 65 years further supports the conclusion that a lack of access to care is not the primary reason that low-income individuals have shorter life expectancies.

(for 40 year old men, unadjusted by race): 100th inc. prct : ~ 88 years: 75th inc. prct : ~ 84 50th inc. prct : ~ 82.5 25th inc. prct : ~ 79 5th inc. prct : ~ 76 1st inc. prct : ~ 72.5 (had to infer the values visually from charts because I wasn't to find a table including all the groups...)

However (I assume the data is very limited though) there is almost no difference in life expectancy (for men or women) when your household income is above >$200k (back in 2014, so probably quite a bit higher now). So I don't think there are any efficient treatments available only for the ultra-rich, just being rich or upper-middle class should be enough to get access the best(ish) treatment there is.

For the bottom income quartile when comparing local areas: the % of people with not insurance, medicare spending per enrolled person and 30-day hospital mortality rate seem to have the highest correlation with life expectancy. Which all should be trivial to fix for a relatively extremely-rich country like the US...

Looking at the appendices one interesting point I noticed (assuming I understood it correctly) is that people at the 50th percentile are more likely to reach 77 years than those in the top 75th or 100th prcts. But after that point income seems to matter a whole lot more.

Another seemingly very weird correlation (page 43): higher inequality in local area seems to be correlated with lower life expectancy for all income quartiles except the bottom one (so basically poorer people tend to liver longer in high inequality areas even though the difference in years is not very big).

In other words, everyone would probably live to ~110 in a perfect, stressor-free world.

Is there anything or anyone Americans can't sue?

It doesn’t matter if “well it’s not technically illegal because it’s not the government”, people don’t like censorship either way.

If your only defense of [corp/group] is that “well technically their suppression isn’t against the law” you’re probably on the wrong side.

How would lawsuits work without the government being involved?

The bar is especially high for defamation of public figures like Nixon. For something to be defamation against a public figure, it not only has to be provably false; it has to be intentionally and maliciously false. They would have to prove that the author intentionally was spreading false information to hurt the subject. That is so difficult to do that defamation suits regarding public figures are almost never successful.

It doesn’t prevent them from suing,

It does, within its scope, prevent the US or (because the same rule is incorporated against the states under the 14th) any state government from giving them a legal basis for winning a suit, though, which the target of a suit is free to point out to the court to get the case dismissed. This is why the scope if defamation is much narrower in the US then in the British law it inherited.

And, in some US jurisdictions, the target mught also be able to recover damages from the filer of the original suit under anti-SLAPP. laws.

Israel is blatantly violating international laws

Thus I'm suggesting that it can be justifiable to bomb a hospital or school in which enemy combatants are launching attacks from, yet also justifiable to do an act of violence on enemy taxpayers + potential conscripts in general.

By this reasoning, my personal opinion is that if we can use less force to get the same goals, or if we can avoid causing as much collateral damage via longer term planning decisions, it's probably a better choice.

In this case they've had an on-and-off military occupation + extreme restrictions on travel and trade and even foreign aid packages. That's a huge source for anger, and it makes it hard to justify often cutting the strip off from the world as much as possible but then bombing first rather than simply admitting they should either give them agency and self determination or make this occupation total and send boots on the ground to go stop Hamas terrorists in a way that might just kill a few less innocents along the way.

Is this what you want to use your time for?

It's easy to judge history in hindsight. USA bombed the crap out of Japan during WW2, and Japan had amazing recovery.

Not to say that Cambodia was at all justified (or Japan for that matter), but that it's more complicated.

It's a lot easier to judge a person on objective things, like how effective they were at executing their policy.

Maybe every so often a conversation within a podcast episode contains some extraordinary analytical insight not found elsewhere, but to expect an entire series of episodes to average out to anything close to that is too high of an expectation.

That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.

Well worth a listen imo, I ended up binging every episode over the course of a year or two.

There's a ton of distance between the author and the subject, it's about something they deeply enjoy and decided to dedicate more than a hundred episode to, and I'm not sure how much being Marxists matters here, when Marx started becoming famous after Napoleon died.

That's a lot different from discussing a politician of your own country who's still alive and untried at the time you do your podcast series.

Note: I can’t verify facts in the field, but I can read the statement and see how it is reported. So, samples:

1. After pro-Russian forces achieved a major victory in August 2014, the Russian president issued a rather consolation-seeking statement, between other thing “asking” pro-Russian forces to release prisoners.

This was reported as a belligerent statement.

2. At approximately the same time the Ukrainian president issued a statement basically justifying war crimes as means to win the war, on the lines: “our children will go to schools, and separatists’ children will be hiding in basements - that’s how we will win this war”.

This was not reported at all.

Again, these things are easy to check - just read / listen to the original. Still, the media are lying about them. What do you think they are doing reporting things that are not that easy to check?

Frankly, you have a pretty good deal. We provide your protection, you can do your Dutch things, and we don't bother you too much other than the occasional McDonalds garrison.

No, because the US controls the "free media" and politicians in those countries. It's funny how almost all Kissinger article today were positive in this country.

False hope for the downtrodden, if they just keep playing the game - that was an age-old feature of human society, back when they were stuck building pyramids for their dear departed betters.

OTOH, a number of nations which seemed hopelessly stuck at the bottom of the pyramid back in 1952 are now doing pretty well, some even by First World standards.

> According to Haldeman’s notes, Kissinger alerted the Nixon campaign in late September, and again in early October, that something was up. Johnson was willing to halt the U.S. bombing of the North, and with the Soviets applying pressure on Hanoi to meet certain American conditions, the odds were never better for an early settlement of the conflict, which had already claimed 30,000 American lives and torn America apart.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vie...

No, that doesn't mean that the responsibility is entirely his – Nixon in particular shouldn't have been ignored after impeachment – but it does raise the question of how many people would have lived had Kissinger not bought his way into the National Security Adviser. He must, after all, have delivered something of value to have not only switched sides (he'd previously been affiliated with Nixon's opponents) but done so moving into a prestigious position without any prior government service.

This is a good point. Can we really say for certain that “bombing noncombatant countries both during a war and after a treaty was signed” is a war crime, and even if it were would “coming up with the whole idea” even count as contributing to something like that? It is confusing stuff like this that has led to no person ever being convicted for war crimes — the concept is too nebulous and complex to nail down.

Surely if Kissinger were a war criminal he would have said so in the books that he wrote

Should a country delay a peace process with an enemy nation for several years for the sake of optics over peace? (Vietnam)

Should a world leader meant to promote peace and de-escalation of armed conflict intentionally snub and antagonize their chief political rival with nukes, for the sake of optics? (USSR regarding wars in the mideast)

From my brief reading in the past few hours, it seems he decided a number of US policy positions that not only killed a large number of humans, but did so by expressly ignoring the stated principles of liberalism, self-determination and human decency and honor.

So I guess if people were to fully support him and his actions, I would at least ask them to be consistent and say "I do not believe in a rules-based world order and I do not believe the US has any obligation to advance human rights worldwide".

There are times the US has done things that were horrific, but were deemed absolutely essential to saving more lives than they cost - such as the bombing of Japan. Kissinger's difference is that none of the moves he endorsed seem to have been necessary to the survival of the "West" or the US, but it cost more lives than the bombings.

One thing of note in the spew of bile aimed at Kissinger in the HN comment thread is that it appears to emanate from people who were children or not even born during the cold war, and who seem to base their opinion on the comments of rock n' roll stars, cooks, leftist journalists/activists (sometimes turned neocon in their later life, surprise!).

I lament the decline of comment quality on HN whenever a somewhat controversial figure is brought up. It's almost as bad as Ars Technica in those cases, and closely resembles the what comes out of the comment section of the worst right wing news cloaca.

I'll order biography by Niall Ferguson in the meantime.

It's obvious that "realpolitik" makes some nations winners and others losers-- while the lives of real human beings hang in the balance. I think anyone who thinks they should determine the winners and losers needs to be heavily criticized. Regardless of which side they are on.