Playing poker with a pair of 3s

In another example of how private sector unions benefit their members, Axa UK employees are threating to strike over an end to defined-benefit pensions:

Unite's national officer, Dominic Hook, said: "The move to end the defined benefit pension scheme at Axa is appalling and unjustified. Long-serving staff now face the prospect of having to work an extra five years to get the same level of pension and [the move] puts all the investment risk on to the staff."
He added: "The decision by Axa is unacceptable and industrial action will be among the options being discussed with members if Axa refuses to reconsider its proposals."

There's one slight problem with Mr. Hook's threat. The final salary scheme has been closed to new members since 2003 - ten years ago. The only employees still on this scheme have been with the company for over 10 years. Axa reports that 2300 staff are affected, which looks to be about 30% of employees.

If I were a newer member of staff at Axa, on a defined contributions pension, I'd imagine that my sympathy for staff on a massively superior defined-benefit scheme would be rather limited. Note that they keep any benefits accrued to date, this proposed downgrade would only affect the benefits they earn from now onwards. Just why I should strike, and lose a day's pay, for the benefit of someone earning much more than I do, is not entirely clear to me. I'd imagine the company would also secretly be happy to have an excuse to performance-manage expensive staff if they strike for any significant length of time. After all, what are they going to do if Axa don't give in? Quit? Where are they going to find a job with even vaguely comparable benefits?

I'd respect Dominic Hook more if he were honest about the situation:

"Our members recognise that they have very little leverage in this situation, but nonetheless feel betrayed by Axa.. mumble, mumble, fat cat executive salaries and the bleeding lips of the starving poor, mumble, mumble, ... they can impose this change but they can't make us like it."

I suspect, though, that such a declaration would make Unite's impotence clear, and lead many members to wonder exactly what their union dues are buying them. If Unite actually had the interests of the majority of Axa workers at heart, they'd be lobbying the Government to up the Bank of England's inflation target and make it stick to it, in order to give savers (and hence yields) an income more than derisory.

Reflections on uptime

A couple of conversations this week have made me realise how "uptime", and its unloved stepchild "downtime" are misunderstood in today's world of the always-on Internet. I thought I'd blog a little about this and see where it went. First, the case of fanfiction.net.

This conversation was with a buddy in NYC who is an avid fan-fiction reader. She (and fan-fiction readers are disproportionately "she") was complaining about the site fanfiction.net being down for an hour or two, during which time she was going cold-turkey being deprived of new chapters from her favourite authors. When quizzed further, she admitted that the site was down some time between 1am and 3am NYC time, so perhaps she actually got more sleep than she would have otherwise... anyway, her complaint was "why is fanfiction.net always going down?". So here's my attempt at an answer.

fanfiction.net is hosted by Tiggee, so costs real money to run. The site has some ads - Google's AdChoices - but they seem to be tastefully done and not in-your-face. Neither reading nor uploading fanfic costs anything, so ad income has got to cover the entire cost of running the site. As well as Tiggee's fees for hosting this also has to cover the time and trouble of the site maintainers. Downtime means a loss of ad revenue as well as readership, so the owners are going to want to minimise the downtime but not spend too much money doing so. Assuming 5TB of storage and 30TB/month bandwidth, a sample hosting company like Cloud Media will charge you about $3700/month. Let's assume then that it costs $4000/month to host the site as it stands, and that ads bring in a steady $8000/month in revenue (about $7 / hour).

My friend reports an informal estimate of fanfiction.net being down maybe 4% of the time she checks (ignoring rapid re-checking in the 15 minutes after she sees that it has gone down). This would be costing them $320/month in lost ads. This isn't worth getting out of bed for.

Not all hours of downtime are equal, however. Web browsing follows a roughly diurnal curve: working in GMT - note that summer times skew these results due to some nations not observing daylight savings time - at GMT midnight, which is the trough, people are coming in to work in Japan. If you have some control over your downtime (e.g. for system upgrades) you can schedule it in the window of 5am - 8am GMT when virtually none of your likely audience in English-speaking countries is awake except for die-hard nerds. The opportunity cost of your scheduled downtime is probably halved, or more, so that $320/month loss drops further.

Is it even worth trying to stop unscheduled downtime like this? Your hosting company is already taking care of what outages are in their control (bad hardware, network misconfiguration etc.) and mistakes on their part will result in a refund of your hosting fees for outage time outside their Service Level Agreement. You can probably assume that they'll give your hosted machines something like 99.9% of uptime, which is a little bit less than 1 hour of downtime per month. All you have to worry about is misconfiguration or performance problems of the software you run on their hosted machines, which most often happens after you - the site owner - have made a change. There are occasions when your site falls over spontaneously (e.g. because you've run out of storage space) but they are few and far between. Setting up an alerting system which pages you if your service goes down outside your normal working hours would require a substantial technical and financial investment, and probably wreck your sleep patterns.

The usual way out of this corner is delegation, but here the information economy prices work against you; even a spotty part-time sysadmin who has no idea what he's doing would cost you $2500/month to have on-call. Unless you can pool him with a number of other sites to amortise his cost and increase his utilisation, there's no point parting with your cash. This is why people tell you that adding each "nine" of reliability (going from e.g. 90% to 99% or 99% to 99.9% uptime) increases your costs exponentially - you need new layers of people and systems to a) prevent downtime occurring and b) react extremely quickly when it happens. For situations when your downtime losses are close to your uptime income and costs, it's far better to accept the downtime, fix it during your normal working hours, and be extremely conservative in operating your site within its allocated storage and bandwidth limits. Only make changes when you have to, and ensure you're around and watching closely for several hours after the upgrade.

The conclusion? The reason most "free" websites have a somewhat unreliable uptime (between 1 and 2 "nines" i.e 90-99% update) is that it's simply not economically worth their while to pay the additional costs to be down for shorter durations or fewer occasions. You get what you pay for. Of course, there are situations when downtime costs are not close to operating costs - I'll be addressing that in my next blog.

When it's time to grow a pair

My sympathies are (to some extent) with Nathan Graziano who has an 8 year old son occupying the marital bed space where he should sleep:

There's already a dude sleeping in my spot.
The dude is my 8 year-old son sprawled out beside his mother, his small mouth open as he enjoys his slumber on my side of the bed.
"Shit," I'll mutter as I make my way back, blanket in hand, to the couch.

He makes a mistake, however. It's not your side of the bed, Nathan. By any reasonable assessment, it's your son's side of the bed. Possession is 9/10ths of the law, but the other 1/10th is the willingness to enforce your rights. Nathan, you are making no attempt to enforce the natural rights you have to the company of your wife and the marital bed. You have voluntarily given away all this to your son, in exchange for not having to put your foot down.

His excuse for this pusillanimous behaviour?

I'm the father, and I should take care of the situation, lay down the law and tell the boy, "No more." But I don't. I’ve never been good at being The Heavy.
It is not unusual for sons to grow up with a healthy fear of their fathers, and I don't believe this is a particularly bad thing. For many boys, they learn to respect authority through fearing their father's wrath.

Right. This is what a "father figure" is supposed to do - provide guidance to his children, and providing an eventual sanction against the children going off the rails. When it's absent - well, we've seen what happens to areas where a high fraction of children do not have fathers present. Nathan Graziano, if you are not prepared to be a father to your son, I assure you that you will revise this opinion when he starts looking for someone who can be. Revelling in his status of "useless with tools, only recently learned to put air in a tire, and I write poetry" is not doing his testicular fortitude any good whatsoever.

Hat tip to Amy Alkon who notes in the comments:

Being "the heavy" is called "parenting."
I believe my parents' willingness to do this is what helped me grow up to be somebody who makes her deadlines and pays her taxes and is generally personally responsible.
If you can't do this, you should have used birth control.

Not nice. Not subtle. But, you know, she's on the money.

A car crash of a commodities broker

It's with no little schadenfreude that I read that Jon "where's my seatbelt?" Corzine (past co-head of Goldman Sachs, New Jersey state governor, head of collapsed financial firm MF Global) is finally facing some legal demands for compensation as a result of the MF Global collapse:

[ex-FBI director Louis] Freeh said the officials breached their fiduciary duties to shareholders and failed to act in good faith, wiping out more than $1 billion in value by the time of MF Global's October 31, 2011, bankruptcy.
"The company's procedures and controls for monitoring risk were lacking and in disrepair," Freeh said in the lawsuit, filed on Monday night in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. "Corzine engaged in risky trading strategies that strained the company's liquidity and could not be properly monitored."

I find it interesting that Corzine - a Democratic politican and fund-raising bundler for the Democrats - has not faced any public inquiry or admonishment for the MF Global collapse. There's certainly no reason to think him involved in criminal wrongdoing, since it sounds as if MF Global's commingling of client funds as it tried to stay afloat happened a fair way down the management tree, but he certainly seemed to be pursuing a reckless course of investment. Betting the farm on European sovereign debt back in 2011 was an "interesting" choice of investment. Did Corzine and his board actually realise that a realistic shift in risk could wipe out their firm? If so, they were reckless. If not, where in the name of all that is holy were their risk controls?

Corzine is supposed to know how to manage risk. His alma mater, Goldman Sachs, is famous for being scrupulous about risk which is presumably how they avoided going down the bad mortgage debt plughole back in 2008:

Our first question was direct: Who’s the best risk manager on Wall Street? Hands down the answer was Goldman Sachs.

Either Corzine wasn't paying attention in all the Goldman Sachs board presentations on risk, VaR etc. and relied on someone else knowing what was going on (Hank Paulson, perhaps?), or he understood risk but didn't think it applied to MF Global, or he understood risk, knew it applied to MF Global, but didn't care to act on this.

The New York Times for one thinks that Corzine may end up having to pony up some dough:

That [Delaware law] means Mr. Freeh can seek to recover for a breach of the duty of due care by showing gross negligence on the part of the leaders of MF Global.
That is still a high standard, requiring something akin to proving recklessness by Mr. Corzine. But unlike a suit against the directors, which would probably be dismissed quickly, this claim has a reasonable chance of surviving a motion to dismiss that would allow it to proceed toward a trial. A public airing of MF Global's plunge into bankruptcy is probably the last thing Mr. Corzine wants, so the settlement value of the case is higher.

Corzine's 2011 testimony to Congress appears to lean towards option 2 ("I understood risk but got it wrong") but I would agree that probably the last thing Corzine wants is his decisions being aired in detail in court. Freeh is probably in with a good chance of a settlement. Sadly this means that we the public will be denied the chance of a financial post-mortem on exactly how someone as experienced as Corzine could screw up risk so badly.

Mind you, it may explain why he didn't properly assess his personal risk from not wearing a seatbelt.

About that Scandinavian welfare model

It seems that even the Scandinavians have realised that cradle-to-grave welfare can't be as comprehensive as people might like. Witness what happens when a member of the Danish Parliament spent time with a welfare recipient to see how hard her life was. Joachim B. Olsen, a politician from the Liberal Alliance skeptical of welfare payments, surprisingly found that many of his concerns were actually founded in fact:

The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym "Carina" in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country's full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.

Even the famously tolerant Danes ended up raising an eyebrow at this and similar stories. It turns out that Denmark has a high fraction of the working-age population on long-term disability, a similar situation to the UK. The government has raised the proposal to remove that life-time status guarantee for under-40s unless they really are completely physically or mentally incapable or working. Does this sound familiar to UK readers?

The trigger for concern over cases like this is the remorseless progress of adverse demographic changes in Denmark: 18% of the population is over 65, and not enough people are working:

In 2012, a little over 2.6 million people between the ages of 15 and 64 were working in Denmark, 47 percent of the total population and 73 percent of the 15- to 64-year-olds.
While only about 65 percent of working age adults are employed in the United States, comparisons are misleading, since many Danes work short hours and all enjoy perks like long vacations and lengthy paid maternity leaves, not to speak of a de facto minimum wage approaching $20 an hour. Danes would rank much lower in terms of hours worked per year.

From the article, it seems that the Danes don't mind their relatively high tax rates, but they are simply not enough to cover the ever-increasing costs of welfare when sourced from a flat or declining tax base.

When working full time gets you less income than being on benefits, why work? So far the Scandinavian countries have managed because of a good work ethic, where people work because they think they should. In P. J. O'Rourke's "Eat The Rich", a Swede points out to O'Rourke that the hostile weather conditions have effectively eliminated the genes of the lazy. This is less true in Denmark than in Sweden, but Denmark should be regarded as a bellweather - it's a short drive over the bridge from Copenhagen, Denmark to Malmö, Sweden. I wonder how much longer political pundits in the UK will hold up the Scandinavian countries as a welfare model to emulate?

Curiosity doesn't just kill cats

In the wake of the shoot-out with the alleged Boston bombers in the streets of Watertown, Esquire has some timely advice from Lt. Col. Robert Bateman who actually knows a thing or two about bullets:

If you are in a place where you hear steady, and sustained, and nearby (lets call that, for some technical reasons, anything less than 800 meters) gunfire, do these things:

• Go to your basement. You are cool there.
• If you don't have a basement, go to the other side of the house from the firing, and leave, heading away from the firing. Do not stop for a mile.
• If you do not think that you can leave, get on the ground floor, as far from the firing as possible, and place something solid between you and the firing. Solid is something like a bathtub, a car (engine block), a couple of concrete walls (single layer brick...nope).
• If you are high up (say 4rd story or higher) just get away from the side of the building where the firing is taking place. You will, mostly, be protected by the thick concrete of the structure.

But for cripes sake, do not step out on to your front porch and start recording a video on your iPhone, unless you actually have a death-wish, or are being paid significant amounts of money, in advance, as a combat journalist/cameraman.

He points out that nearly everything you see in movies and TV about gunfire and bullet impacts is completely wrong. Bullets don't just get absorbed by walls; anything with a reasonable amount of gunpowder behind it will smash multiple bricks with ease, and sheetrock (plasterboard) will barely slow it down. This is why, when EMS crews pull up to the scene of a shooting, they are very careful about positioning the engine block of their vehicle between them and anyone holding a gun (civilian or police).

Remember the Empire State Building shooting last year? Nine bystanders got nailed by bullets fired (16 rounds in total, from handguns) by the responding police officers, and the associated ricochets and fragments when those bullets hit walls, pavement and street furniture. That only the two Boston gunmen and one police officer were hit in the exchange of over 100 rounds of gunfire at Dexter and Laurel is a minor miracle:

David LaRocca, a local sculptor, was in the kitchen of his Laurel Street studio, where he lives and works, when he heard the first series of pops.
Instead of ducking for cover, he went outside to see what was happening, certain that he was too far away to be hit.
"I heard the pop, pop, popping. I could see the activity," LaRocca said, who stood on the sidewalk outside his house while looking down the street to site of the action. "I heard whizzing sounds. But then I later figured it was bullets going by me that I was hearing."

David LaRocca has hopefully learned how much he didn't know about gunfire, and he's lucky that it wasn't the last lesson he ever learned.

The sound of gunfire should be a cue to anyone to get low, get behind cover, and get the heck out of Dodge.

The White House is insecure!

The online version, anyway. If you attempt to visit https://www.whitehouse.gov/ (i.e. a secure web connection) and your browser is any good at all, it will warn you:

You attempted to reach www.whitehouse.gov, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as a248.e.akamai.net. This may be caused by a misconfiguration on the server or by something more serious. An attacker on your network could be trying to get you to visit a fake (and potentially harmful) version of www.whitehouse.gov.

Looks like the White House is using Akamai Edgesuite to handle their traffic - which must be substantial - but someone has misconfigured their Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) setup. The Akamai load-balancing server a248e.akamai.net should normally know that the Internet address (IP) 69.22.158.X means that the user is trying to connect to www.whitehouse.gov, and therefore it should give the user a copy of the digital certificate showing that it is allowed to serve requests for www.whitehouse.gov; unfortunately, it doesn't yet seem to have that information.

While I'm here, I note that the White House is acutely aware how difficult people find it to spell President Obama's name correctly, as evidenced by the "keywords" list on the site's home page:

"President,Barack Obama,White House,United States of America,44th President,White House history,President Obama,Barck,Barek,Barak,Barrack,Barrak,Obma,Barack"

If the White House IT team is reading this blog - please fix this. Go talk to Akamai, they can tell you how to generate the right certificate with appropriate settings and get it installed on their servers. While you're listening, stop sticking UTF-8 encoded characters on your page when perfectly valid HTML entities exist.

Unforced errors

For an alleged political genius, President Obama sure has been making political errors recently. One can only surmise that he's not actually that good at politics.

Exhibit one: Margaret Thatcher's funeral. The funeral of a major statesperson of one of the USA's traditionally close allies, but no official White House representative was sent:

Normally, that would prompt attendance by a high-level figure in the US government — if not the President or Vice-President, a high-ranking Cabinet official. For instance, why not send John Kerry, the Secretary of State tasked with maintaining good relations with close allies like the UK? Instead, the US delegation will consist of two men who would be traveling as private citizens to the funeral already [James Baker and George Schulz from the Reagan administration], essentially giving an official policy of ignoring the event and snubbing the other world leaders attending it.

There's certainly no reason to expect Obama himself to have travelled to the UK for the funeral, but there's no shortage of administration officials he could send. Instead: zip, nada. The Republicans aren't so dumb: the Republican House speaker Boehner sent a delegation of Republicans to represent Congress:

"Margaret Thatcher was one of the greatest champions freedom has ever known, and her funeral gives Americans and friends around the world an opportunity to pay final respects," Boehner said. "I'm pleased that Congressman Blackburn will lead a House delegation to Baroness Thatcher's funeral to communicate our prayers and condolences to her family and the British people."

The Boston marathon bombing would have been a perfect excuse to avoid sending anyone - except that these decisions were taken before Monday's explosion. Oops. This is a serious snub to the UK government, and it's a politically stupid decision. Regardless of your feelings about Thatcher's politics, she was one of the dominant politicians of the late 20th century. It would cost nothing to send Kerry (or, heck, Biden) to the funeral. Instead, Obama - rightly or wrongly - appears to be letting his well-publicised dislike of the UK rule his political pragmatism. Machiavelli would have chastised him, and rightly so.

Next, let's look at his focus for the past 4 months: gun control. This hasn't turned out as he hoped, as his gun control bill got shot down in the Senate:

Due to procedural steps agreed to by both sides, all the amendments considered Wednesday required 60 votes to pass in the 100-member chamber, meaning Democrats and their independent allies who hold 55 seats needed support from some GOP senators to push through the Manchin-Toomey proposal.
The final vote was 54 in favor to 46 opposed with four Republicans joining most Democrats in supporting the compromise. With the outcome obvious, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, cast a "no" vote to secure the ability to bring the measure up again.
Meanwhile, four Democrats from pro-gun states voted with most Republicans in opposition.

Obama couldn't persuade 8% of his own party to go along with his gun bill, failing to pass it in a Senate nominally under Democrat control. I mean, what the heck? His team must have know that those (gun-affectionate state) Democrats weren't going to vote for the bill as is - three of them have elections coming up within a year - what was it that made him try to push it through regardless? Hope that the Senate Republicans would come to his rescue? Good grief.

The common factor in both these issues appears to be Obama's belief that he is above the grubby business of politics; he doesn't have to negotiate, compromise, or schmooze with people he doesn't like in order to get things done. Unfortunately, politics doesn't work like that. His Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, would never have made these kind of mistakes. Bill was (and is) one of the great political animals, friendly to everyone no matter what their politics or interests. He knew that doing something for someone was a favour which he could later call on when he needed it. He would never have let a state funeral of a major ally go by without ensuring his administration was represented. Heck, as Yes, Prime Minister noted, a politician's funeral is an ideal opportunity for politicians from many countries to get together without press scrutiny and thrash out all their outstanding issues without the usual press scrutiny.

Hillary Clinton must have been rubbing her hands with glee watching President Obama screw up like this. She has her flaws, no doubt, but has taken many lessons from her husband's political successes - lessons that Obama doesn't seem to think apply to him.

Wild speculation about the Boston Marathon bombings

What we know from the TV footage: the first bomb that triggered went off just over 4 hours after the marathon started (the clock shows 4:09:53 a few seconds after the explosion in this video footage near the finishing line) at 2:57pm local time. The second bomb went off approximately 12-13 seconds later as you can see in this second video which covers the relevant timespan. You can also see that very few windows near the first bomb are broken, which indicates that the blast either wasn't that powerful, or was focused away from the buildings. Those are the facts.

The next level of information are the reports, and let's remember that first reports are always wrong but we're later i the news cycle so these reports should be reasonably solid. Two other devices are reported as having been recovered. There have been 3 deaths so far, about 130 injured, many limb injuries and amputations. This implies that the devices were not that big. In terms of explosive power they were probably a bit smaller than the 7/7 London bombings where the devices were in backpacks and killed an average of 13 people each - the 7/7 bombs all detonated in confined spaces, which amplified their effects. The Boston bombs detonated in relatively open areas, with the ground reflecting some of the blast up and away from people. They may have been hidden in garbage cans, causing increased shrapnel (and hence limb shredding) but restricting the blast effects which hit the respiratory system and heart, causing fatalities. One of the Boston fatalities was reportedly an 8 year old child - their bodies are more vulnerable to trauma, so the 3 fatalities is more like 2 in comparison to the 7/7 average.

The casualty count was also likely lowered by the presence of many medics near the scene, allowing them to intervene in the seconds and minutes after the explosion, stop potentially fatal bleeding and clear obstructed airways. They would have had emergency kits targeting heart attacks, asthma and similar afflictions of exertions, but the airway management apparatus and plentiful oxygen would have been key in fighting off shock (under-oxygenation of the body) which is a classic killer in trauma.

I saw one particularly messy photo at The Atlantic (you can find it if you search for it, no doubt) of a gentleman with his lower leg gone - flesh and muscle stripped off the bone halfway down the shin, and foot missing entirely. That's going to hurt, no doubt, but it's not going to kill you - the guy looked reasonably alert as he was wheeled away. His lot is much better now than ten years ago. We've had ten years of the Sunni militia, Taliban and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards proxying through Shia militia with IEDs; immediate management of explosive trauma, long-term rehabilitation and the sophistication of prosthetic limbs has made great strides in that time.

If there were four bombs, and hence two duds, it's going to be interesting to see how they were triggered and detonated. Were the duds due to trigger failure or to bad detonators? I find it interesting that the two bombs which detonated were 12 seconds apart - were they on timers, or was there a cellphone trigger for each? Was the intent to scare the crowd away from bomb #1 and have them gather near bomb #2? If so, the timing was off - the 12 seconds was barely enough for people to collect their wits and start to move, let alone travel 100-200 yards. It's also interesting to speculate why the bomb wasn't timed for just after the first runners were crossing the finish, when the crowd and media interest would be at the peak. Where were the other two bombs, and when might they have been intended to explode?

For a more informed take on the composition of the explosives, though, I'm waiting for the expertise of The Register's Lewis Page who will no doubt weigh in on the matter with the benefit of his background in bomb disposal.

You'll notice I have not speculated on the identity of the perpetrators of this outrage. I doubt we'll really know anything for at least a few days.

Cognitive dissonance on late-term abortion

One of the more distasteful stories of this year in the USA: the murder prosecution of Pittsburgh doctor Kermit Gosnell for the death of a 41 year old woman during an illegal late-term abortion. By itself the story seems tragic yet not massively newsworthy. There arose two problems from this, however. The smaller problem is that it seems that late-term abortions were quite the feature of Dr. Gosnell's clinic, there were fridges full of parts of aborted babies, babies born alive had their cervical spines snipped with scissors to ensure they didn't survive, and non-white women got a far lower standard of care than white women:

"Like if a girl – the black population was – African population was big here. So he didn't mind you [the non-qualified assistants] medicating your African American girls, your Indian girl, but if you had a white girl from the suburbs, oh, you better not medicate her. You better wait until he go in and talk to her first. And one day I said something to him and he was like, that's the way of the world."

The prosecution has been demanding the death penalty in this case, though I suspect their chances are rather slim.

The greater problem was that the US (and UK) news media showed very little interest in covering what should have been a sensational trial:

Thurs. April 11: empty media seats in courtroom 304 for the Gosnell trial in Philadelphia.#Gosnell #LifeSiteNews twitter.com/jdmullane/stat…

— jdmullane (@jdmullane) April 12, 2013

There has been a concerted social media campaign in the last week to persuade the mainstream media (with the notable exception of Fox News, bloggers and friends) to do their job and actually start reporting on the trial. But why the reluctance to report in the first place? Blogger Trevin Wax proposed eight reasons:

6. The Gosnell case involves the regulation of abortion clinics.
Whenever we see news stories about abortion, the clinic must be portrayed as under siege from anti-abortion extremists. But it is impossible to spin this story in a way that will keep people from pushing for policy change and further regulation of Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics.
7. The Gosnell case exposes the disproportionate number of abortion clinics in inner cities and the disproportionate number of abortions among minority groups.
Whenever we see news stories about abortion, the discussion must be framed in terms of providing “access” for low-income, minority women. But it is impossible to spin this story in a way that keeps people from wondering if perhaps some abortion providers are "targeting" low-income, minority women.

It's possible to support a woman's right to have an abortion up to the legal limit, and yet feel very, very concerned about what Dr. Gosnell was doing. Point 6 hits the nail on the head. The last thing that strong proponents of abortion want is any increase in scrutiny and regulation of abortion clinics. It's one of those societal aspects that most welcome being "out of sight, out of mind." If people are forced to confront what actually goes on in at least some of those clinics, it may just cause some problems in the current general support for abortion in the USA.