David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle used this quote in today's column:
"Why have all other countries figured out a way to do this?" Grumbach asked. "Why are we the only ones that are so uncivilized?"
"Grumbach" is Dr. Kevin Grumbach, head of UCSF's Department of Family and Community Medicine; and he was discussing, as was Lazarus, the fact that the U.S. spends twice the amount on health care that other industrialized democracies spend (the ones which guarantee health care, like Canada and Britain), yet we don't live as long as their citizens, and more of our babies die. (That's English for "life expectancy in the United States was lower than in each of these other countries and infant mortality was higher.")
I'm afraid I know the answer to that question, and it isn't pretty; it reflects some of the nastier side of the American public. Why do we spend so much and get so little?
Well, for one thing, we're cheap bastards. We don't want to pay for the common good. We have one of the lowest tax burdens in the industrialized world, and we're terrified that we might have to pay more of "our" money to "the government" for a program that would provide benefits to someone else. This is the state of mind that objects to paying into Social Security because the objector could do better investing the money himself, and to supporting the public schools because the objector has no kids.
We seem to have forgotten that we are the government: of the people, by the people, for the people. Health care isn't the only example of this: the state of California hasn't spent a nickel more on infrastructure maintenance than it absolutely had to for 40 years, because it would have had to raise taxes. But health care is the one that's affecting the most people.
Numero Two-o (as dear Molly used to say): We blame the victim. If you don't have health care it's your own fault. Going way back to the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed that personal prosperity was a sign of God's grace, there's a sneaky feeling, not often voiced out loud, that if you aren't personally prosperous enough to afford health care, then God must be punishing you in some way; you must be less deserving than others, because if you were truly deserving, God would have given you health care (or whatever other benefit you need but don't have). This is another variant of the (also usually unstated) American belief that if you are poor, it's because you're lazy and shiftless. In fact, most of the poor in this country are working 2 and even 3 jobs just to pay the rent and (we hope) put food on the table.
Third, we were hypnotized years ago by the American Medical Association's shrieks about "socialized medicine," back when "socialist" was just a sidestep away from "Communist." Perish the thought that you shouldn't be able to pick your own doctor. The issue here isn't who picks your doctor; it's who pays your doctor, and how much, and for what. The stupidest thing we ever did was to allow health insurance companies, and health providers, to be for-profit; because when you get a bottom line in there, someone will make the unilateral decision that Treatment X is Too Expensive, and then someone else will die to increase the quarterly numbers.
Fourth, we don't believe the government could do it efficiently. This isn't a completely off-the-wall concern. MediCare is run by the government and provides health care to everyone over 65. MediCare isn't, God knows, perfect; consider the MediCare drug program, for government-run insanity squared. But if your alternative to government-paid-for health care was no health care at all, and for over 40 million Americans that's exactly the case, what would you choose??
The generally quoted administrative overhead number for Medicare is 3%; for private health insurance, 15% - plus or minus 10%. I'm not kidding. Google "medicare overhead" and you'll see a wide range of overhead numbers quoted both for MediCare (anywhere between 1% and 4%) and for private insurance: as low as 8%, as high as 30%. (And that's just in the blog titles!) I think the truth is, nobody really knows. This is a very murky and complex area.
OK, maybe I'm being a typical American and blaming the victim. We don't have universal health care because we're nasty people. It isn't that simple. But one thing is clear: what we have now isn't working, and we need to fix it, and we may need more than one try to get the solution right. Another thing that seems clear to me: the existing health insurance industry has a huge vested interest in keeping things as they are now, and is spending money like a drunken sailor, on advertising and government lobbying, to make sure they stay that way.
Can we please stop arguing about socialized medicine and do something useful? People are dying here.
I didn't do any driving in England; my husband and I agreed that it would be better if one of us did all the driving, so we'd only have one learning curve. Besides, he did it last time too. The two hardest things about driving on the left turn out to be lane position, and right turns. Right turns is a fairly obvious issue, since in the U.S. it's a no-brainer and the left turn is across traffic; fortunately he only turned right into the near lane once, and nobody was coming. Lane position was more subtle; if you aren't used to being in the left lane, you also aren't sure where in the left lane you should be; and you really aren't used to having traffic come at you on the right, so you edge left. We clipped a lot of left-hand curbs the first week or so. The other big issue is pedestrian: which way do you look for oncoming traffic when you cross the street?
Driving in England is complicated by the fact that most of the roads were there centuries before the cars were. They're narrow; they wind; and all too many of them are lined right up to the road verge by 6 foot stone walls, especially in rural areas. (Shoulder? What shoulder?) In some rural areas they're lined right up to the road verge by 6 foot hedgerows which are growing out of 6 foot stone walls; a quick glance to the side just shows leaves, but it's not the whole story. This combined with the American or Continental driver's tendency to hug the left curb makes riding in the (left side) passenger seat pretty nerve-wracking. He says I was very restrained. Of course, in other rural areas there are no walls at all; that's when you get sheep on the road. We saw a sign on Dartmoor warning, "Sheep lying on road," and it was quite right. The other side effect of the walls and hedgerows is that, unless you're driving through something like a national park, you get no view of the countryside from the road. All you see is hedgerow (or wall).
In towns, the streets are not really wide enough for two lanes of traffic plus two sets of parked cars; in fact, they're not really wide enough for two lanes of traffic plus one set of parked cars, and some of them just aren't wide enough, period. We live in a neighborhood somewhat like that, which has given rise to a maneuver we call the "Rockridge do-si-do", where oncoming traffic slows and moves aside into open curb spaces to allow each other to pass. They do this in England, too - but they don't slow. They do it at 35 miles an hour. It still amazes me that the only real accident we had happened at 2 miles per hour (trying to get out from a tight space behind a truck on one of those narrow streets, he misjudged the left distance and forcibly removed the passenger mirror.)
As far as I can tell, there is no custom in England that says you should park facing in the direction of the traffic on the side of the street you're on. People park any old way, sometimes on the sidewalk. If there is a sidewalk.
As cars have gotten wider, so have roads. In some rural areas you find yourself driving past a house (usually a stone house) less than a foot away, because the road has been widened right up to the wall; some of the houses had doors and windows filled in because you can't use them with A road traffic sailing by at 50 MPH, 6 inches away.
We rented a C-class Mercedes because it's a car he knows. In the U.S., this is a smallish sedan. In the U.K., it's one of the biggest cars on the road; but it gets 35 MPG or better. Which is good, because petrol cost 99p (about $2) per liter or about $8 per gallon. If you don't like our gas prices, try $90 a tankful; we have some of the cheapest gas in the world. And don't let Ford Motor Company con you that they can't make small, fuel efficient cars. The roads were crawling with little Fords, they're very popular in the U.K., and since the U.K. is part of the EU, they have to meet European mileage standards. Ford just wants to keep selling F-150s to dumb Americans.
Just so you know that my vacation isn't the only thing on my mind:
Did anyone else read or see the "Meet the Press" interview with Mike McConnell, the National Intelligence Director? (And there's an oxymoron for you.) Mr. McConnell wants to reassure the American public that the CIA doesn't torture people. Mind you, he won't tell anyone what the CIA actually does when it interrogates people; but it's not torture! Honest, it isn't. He even goes so far as to say that he "wouldn't want a U.S. citizen to go through the process." (We only do that sort of thing to them.) But "there would be no permanent damage to that citizen."
This is so bizarre, and so characteristic of this administration, that I hardly know where to start boggling. First of all, why should we believe the man? This administration has told so many lies about what it does and wants to do, that the only time you can believe what they say is when they say that they aren't accountable to the electorate. The attorney general is on record that torture is acceptable to him.
Second, if the process is unsuitable for U.S. citizens, doesn't that give them some pause that it might not be a good thing to do to others? This nation was founded on the principle that the laws apply in the same way to everyone; some people seem to be losing sight of that principle.
Our president makes a big deal about being a born-again Christian when he vetoes funding for stem cell research; but when it comes to torture, he seems to have forgotten that "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matthew 25:40)
We started our vacation with 3 nights in London, arriving on Saturday morning; the first day and night spent, of course, arriving, and then recovering from the jet lag and the fact that neither of us sleeps well on planes. By the time we got to bed I think we'd been more or less up for 27 hours. This is harder to do than it was 10 years ago.
We stayed in a hotel in Kensington, on Prince of Wales Terrace, a couple of blocks from Hyde Park; we walked over to the park the day we got in, to keep from collapsing and going to bed before it was even dark (which happens much later in London than in Oakland). I can't find Prince of Wales Terrace on Google maps but there are a lot of little streets that aren't labeled. It had rained but stopped; we took pictures of the swans on the Round Pond, and of Kensington Palace and its gardens. The hotel was small and the shower was even smaller, and gave us our first taste of a British paradox: in a country where it rains enough that it's green all summer, the showers generally have very low water pressure. We only found a couple of exceptions. Showers are also (probably because they've all been put in as an afterthought) microscopic; you barely have room to turn around. For that matter, we barely had room to turn around in the hotel room; luggage for a 3 week stay took up enough room that we had to jigsaw everything around to get at our clothes, which were in the suitcases; there was no chest of drawers and no hangers to speak of. And my colleague Penny was right: the English don't seem to use face cloths. With one exception, the only towels we got anywhere were bath and hand.
Kensington is a very urban neighborhood and reminded me again (this was our second trip) that in England, especially in English towns, there are no "front yards". Everything in London is built right out to the sidewalk line, and up at least 4-5 stories, and usually down to a basement too; if there are yards at all, they're in back. There were also (at least in this neighborhood) very few if any street trees. You want trees, go over to the park.
We didn't have a car in London (not being insane), so going anywhere meant walking around to the Kensington High Street station and taking the Tube, about half a mile each way. In fact, walking (and climbing stairs!) was the keynote of this vacation; I thought my feet were going to fall off! I will say that the Tube went everywhere we wanted to go and was reasonably easy to use. Britain in general is not "accessible"; I saw plenty of people in wheelchairs in gardens, but they generally had someone along to help horse the chair up the inevitable stairs.
Sunday was our first functional day, and we spent it touring museums: the Science Museum, and a quick look at the Victoria and Albert. The attraction in the Science Museum was the Babbage Difference Engine, the first attempt at a mechanical computer. The museum has several of Babbage's trial versions, but what they really have is the version they built themselves, from Babbage's design, to see whether it would work. (It does.) The full thing is huge, over twice the height of a man and broader than it is high. It's beautiful, done in machined brass (very Victorian). They also have a huge collection of various mechanical calculating aids, from abaci to a vacuum-tube computer the size of a room, to an old PDP-8 (I worked with people who programmed that thing), plus a large collection of mechanical adding machines. Absolutely fascinating. We also glanced at the section on time measurement, and had lunch in the cafeteria.
We had very little time at the V and A, because we had dinner reservations and theater tickets (more on that later); so we ducked in and I picked a section at random from the directory. Next to the "Medieval" section (always a favorite), they had something called the "Cast Courts", and I erroneously assumed this was some medieval related thing that I hadn't heard of. Was I ever wrong. The cast courts are a Victorian phenom, and they cracked me up: the "casts" are plaster cast reproductions of pretty much any monument, statue, bas-relief, fountain, or tomb that took someone's fancy, all painted to match the original stone or whatever. I mean anything: they had a plaster cast of Trajan's Column from Rome (in 2 parts, to fit it under the roof); an Italian shrine like a weird pagoda, taller than the Trajan pieces; the entire Porticó de Gloria from Santiago de Compostela in Spain (it took up the whole end of the hall; the doors in it, however, were plaster casts of doors from 2 other places). The hall is huge, at least 4 stories high, and it was full of these casts, in no special order, except that the end near the door had a collection of tombs of some medieval English kings and queens (Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard I and Berengaria, etc.), all together. They had the stone of Offa. They had everything, all jammed together in one room (actually there are two but the other one was closed) where you could come and presumably be edified by looking at all the great art. It was the most cluttered, confusing, hilarious thing you could imagine and so Victorian it practically had side whiskers.
Our evening tickets were a treat: opening night seats at Love's Labour's Lost, in the Globe Theatre in Southwark, with advance dinner reservations at the restaurant in the Globe - all very early (dinner at 5) because the play was not cut and ran 3 hours. The theater is modern but built to match extant drawings of the original: we had seats on the top gallery (Elizabethans must have had very short legs, there was no leg room), under the thatched roof. Fortunately for the players it didn't rain that night. I had a ball watching the play and just being there. The acoustics of the place are amazing, we really heard very well although some of the accents were difficult.
Our second day in London we spent taking a boat down the Thames to Greenwich, where we saw the old Royal Naval College buildings, the National Maritime Museum (very briefly), and the Royal Observatory. It rained on us going but cleared up in the afternoon, sunny and windy. Greenwich is a gorgeous town, elegant curving streets lined with Georgian buildings. We saw the Painted Hall (pure 17th century baroque imagery, plump nudes in classical draperies, winged allegorical figures, Gods and nymphs), and right next to it the Chapel (which looks like it was decorated by Josiah Wedgwood, all precise abstract patterns on pastel blue and green and pink backgrounds). Moving between the two is quite startling. The Painted Hall was originally meant to be the dining hall for the Naval College, but by the time it was done they decided it was too elegant to eat in and started using it as a tourist attraction. They have mirrored tables set around so you can see the ceiling without breaking your neck.
The Observatory stands on top of a steep little hill (thank you, Greenwich, for the motor trolley up the hill!) with a fabulous view of the Thames and Canary Wharf (and a somewhat regrettable view of the Millenium Dome; my, that thing is ugly). They have painted a Line on the ground (with an elegant silver sculpture) to mark the Prime Meridian - Latitude Zero - which is really the arbitrary line established by astronomer Flamsteed in the 17th century for taking star sightings. (The web site says it was established by George Airy in the 19th century, but I'm pretty sure I recall that Airy put his transit circle on Flamsteed's line.) The popular sport there is to have one's picture taken standing on the Prime Meridian; I settled for taking a picture of the sculpture.
The other thing the Observatory has is all four versions of the famous Harrison marine chronometer - you can see how the design evolved from H1 to the final H4 that effectively solved the "Longitude problem". For those interested in mechanical engineering, this is a must-see.
Greenwich was the end of our London stay; next, on to Kent.
British Airways has found all four suitcases! Yay! Of course, they haven't delivered them yet, but at least they know where they are...
This is the saga of our attempt to return from our summer vacation in England and Wales. I wouldn't normally start a vacation story with the end, but this is the worst airline mess I've ever personally suffered through; and it was complicated by the way the travel agent set up our lodgings.
Friday morning we started from York, in northern England, and hit the M1 for London. All was smooth until after we stopped for lunch in Leicester; it started to rain then, and rained continually for about 70 miles, until we reached Luton, just north of the M25 (London ring road). This was world-class rain, too - so bad the M1 traffic slowed under 30 MPH (think of I-80) because the windshield wipers couldn't keep up. The water couldn't drain off the roads fast enough. The only other place I've seen it rain that hard was in the Arizona desert. It had quit by the time we got to the M25, but that was no help: it took us an hour and a half to go about 25 miles to our exit. We now knew why our first London cabbie had called it "the biggest car park in the universe". We inched our way down to exit J13 for Staines, where we had a hotel reservation; this is 2 exits past the M4 junction, which is (among other things) how you get to Heathrow.
By the time we got off the motorway, checked into the hotel, luggage unloaded, it was 5 PM; and we still had to return the rental car to Heathrow. We now know that you can get to Heathrow from Staines without going on the motorway; but we didn't know that then, so back we went into the meat grinder. It took us another hour and a half to get to the car rental return (the directional signs at Heathrow conform to the general English road sign assumption that if you don't know how to get somewhere, you probably shouldn't be going there; but I assumed the car rental firm wanted their Mercedes back). By this time my husband had been driving in appalling traffic for something like 7 hours since lunch, and was fraying badly. It took us almost an hour to return the car, since we had managed to remove the passenger side mirror early in the trip and they had to do a detailed damage report (the extra insurance fees just paid for themselves). The car rental shuttle got us to the terminal around 7:30 PM, when we found that the line of people waiting for taxis was longer than the line of taxis.
We gave up and went into the terminal to eat dinner. If the taxi situation was still bad after dinner, at least we'd be fed and somewhat relaxed. After dinner the line was still long, but at least now there were taxis stacked up; at which point we discovered how badly our travel agent had placed us. Heathrow taxi service only does metered delivery into central London. Staines, where we were staying, is an outer suburb and there is no standard taxi service there from the airport (because they couldn't count on a return fare); it's a "fixed fee" of £55! (At the current Exchange rate of $2.05, that's almost $113 to go about 6 miles!) And in cash, which fortunately we had. We managed to negotiate it down to £50, including tip. We probably could have gotten a cab, or a shuttle, to one of the hotels in the airport, which was where we had wanted to stay; but the agent hadn't booked us into any of them.
During the cab ride, we learned from the cabbie that Heathrow had also had torrential rains the day before: the runways were flooded, multiple afternoon flights were cancelled, and in fact the single tunnel that allows ground transport access to the terminals was also flooded. (Can you spell crummy access engineering??) In addition to the Heathrow problems, the M4 itself was down to 1 westbound lane about 15 miles west of the airport, due to landslides from still more rain. All this may explain why the traffic at the M25-M4 junction was so ghastly around 4 PM, added to the fact that it was Friday at 4 PM. (Mem. to self: next time, fly on Wednesday.) We got back to the hotel around 9 PM, and spent the rest of the evening packing everything into 4 suitcases and 2 backpacks, since travelers leaving Heathrow can carry on one and only one bag (and this DOES include women's purses).
Next morning we had a 10:50 AM international flight, so we got to the airport at 7:30 AM (taxi fare in that direction? £16), to find a howling crowd on the access road in front of the terminal. A British Air person asked us for our flight and directed us to a queue that was about a block long; before it was over it was almost 3 times that. We stood in that queue, refused entrance to the terminal, for an hour and a half, while BritAir let in people with earlier flights (including, I think, everybody whose flight the day before was cancelled; other people who got into the airport without standing in this line included everyone who took the train, which goes directly into the terminal. Only people who came by road were blocked this way.). The howling crowd included abnormally large numbers of children and adolescents, accompanied and not, because 7/21 is the first day of the British school summer holidays. (Mem. to self: travel earlier or later next time...)
At 9:00 AM they finally allowed in the people on flights after 10:30 - they had a big flight out at 10:30 - so we went into the terminal and found another howling crowd, all trying to check in at once, in at least 14 languages. The self-service check-in kiosks hadn't worked for us the night before, and they still didn't work. The BA rep suggested we were late checking in for our flight and I snarled at her. We stood in line for another hour and a half (my husband had been freaking out spectacularly ever since we got in the terminal, but by this time even I was beginning to wonder if we were going to get on a plan that day at all), in front of a plaintive German woman, on her first solo flight, whose plane was leaving at 10:45. We finally (in the nick of time) discovered that they had an emergency check-in station for people whose flights were leaving Real Soon Now, so we first shoved the German woman to it, and then we used it.
It was now 10:35; our flight was scheduled for 10:50; we had boarding passes and had checked our bags, but we hadn't cleared security. We got through security in the fastest time I've ever seen by telling the few people in line that our plane was leaving in 10 minutes (they let us cut in; actually, due to the massive backups at check in, security had almost no line at all; I've never had a faster pat-down); then we ran for gate 52. It wasn't the farthest possible gate, but by God it wasn't much short of it. And as we panted up to the gate, desperately waving our passports and boarding passes, the attendant said, "Oh, you're fine; take a seat. I haven't called the flight yet."
After that, everything else was anticlimactic. We even sat together, and my husband had the window seat he likes. The plane actually boarded around 11:30, and lifted off at 11:50. British Air serves you the least amount of liquid they possibly can, as infrequently as they can; the air conditioning didn't work (my husband was carrying an altimeter that also shows temperature; it was 78 degrees Fahrenheit at our seats); you couldn't get a cup of water from the dispensers because the water pressure was so high it splashed out of the paper cups; and one of the lavatories smelled of stale piss and had a nameless liquid sloshing around the base of the unit. I was not impressed with the service; but nothing else actually went wrong until we landed at SFO and discovered - wait for it - that our luggage had not made it onto the plane. None of it.
We have a tracking number; British Airways insists they have our luggage; they just don't know exactly where it is. It might be still at Heathrow, waiting for a flight; it may be somewhere at SFO; the U.S. Customs may be going through it. I wish them joy of my dirty underwear; at the moment, those bags contain almost all the underwear I own. I've talked to BA twice, and it's clear that they are completely overwhelmed and may not get this sorted out until mid-week; and that even our bags do arrive today, it may still take hours for someone to get around to updating the file that tells BA knows where they are. But at least we're home.
Here we go again. Residents of South Lake Tahoe, the residents of the Oakland hills salute you. In 1991 we too watched helplessly as the wind lashed the flames toward our houses; some people died because they couldn't get out. At least no one has died at Lake Tahoe.
I live in the Oakland hills - in a normal urban neighborhood, not a forested glade. But every time something like this happens, I marvel again at humanity's desire to live in dangerous places, because they're pretty. Dry climate forests, where fire has been a part of the landscape for thousands of years, until we moved in and started suppressing it to protect our houses, because we like them to be nestled among the trees. Earthquake country. (Yeah, that's me - half a mile downhill from the Hayward Fault. But: our house is earthquake braced.) Flood plains. Hurricane tracks. Tornado Alley. We seem to think that because we live there it won't happen again; but it will. The only question is when.
And yet, think one more time: what constitutes a "safe" place to live?? For that matter, define "safe". We all have to live somewhere; offhand, everywhere I can think of in America has some disastrous phenom that happens at regular intervals (blizzards; droughts; heat waves). Maybe what we need is not to be safe, but to be aware that we aren't safe, and take the necessary precautions; and if the precautions aren't enough, maybe we should live somewhere else. Yes, I'm talking about you, the people who live in the Sacramento Valley subdivisions, below water level, behind 100 year old levees. What were you thinking of? The houses were affordable; but if those levees go, replacing everything you own won't be. The people who live around South Lake Tahoe are in the process of learning this right now.
Every time I look at the mess in Iraq, I want to scream, "I told you so." It would be so nice to have been wrong. I'd love to have been wrong. I just reread the posts I put up on this mess last October, and then again in January.
In October I said (along with a whole lot of other people) that this was a civil war, and anybody with half a working brain could see it was a civil war, and we didn't have a the chance of a plastic cat in Hell of stopping it.
In January I predicted (again, along with a lot of other people) that the surge was not going to work. Well, here we are, almost in July, and we have more soldiers in Iraq than we've had since 2005, and the carnage is increasing daily. It isn't just that we can't control it (although we can't); it's that the Iraqis can't control it, even if they wanted to. I see no evidence that they want to. Every faction is jockeying for personal power, and revenge on the other side (with the possible exception of the Kurds who are simply trying to hold their borders).
I wouldn't change a single word of either post if I wrote them again today; so I'll just suggest that you go read them again, and tell me if I wasn't right.
The worst thing about the situation is the comment I heard on NPR, from a senior U.S. military logistics officer, that if we started a pull-out today it'd take 12-15 months to get everybody out, because every single piece of equipment has to be taken apart and cleaned to get the sand and junk out, so it will pass inspection by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. That's right - every Hummer, every rifle, every walkie-talkie, has to be inspected for pests by the U.S.D.A. before we let them back into the country. I'm speechless. This is just insane. And they're going to clean the equipment while people are shooting shaped charges at them, and suicide bombers are blowing themselves up?? And how many U.S.D.A. inspectors will that take, and do we even have that many, given they way Dubya has been cutting funds for everything but the military??
Gen. Petraeus keeps saying the surge will take time to work. Gen. Petraeus knows, I'm quite sure, that the surge will never work. The purpose of the surge is to stabilize the situation so the Iraqis can negotiate an equitable government. The Iraqis don't want an equitable government; every single faction wants to be in control of the oil reserves, and is quite happy to kill everyone else to make that so. I read today that when the British pull out of Basra, they expect fighting to break out among 3 rival Shia groups; there aren't even any Sunnis in Basra, so the Shias fight each other.
We could be in Iraq until the children of today's soldiers are old enough to be inducted and shipped over to fight, and the surge still won't work. We have to get out of there.
Today is Der Tag - The Day! I turned in my BlackBerry/cell phone, my laptop, my corporate credit card, and my badge, and walked out of the office a free woman. I feel - light. I feel free. I'm not really sure how I feel, but I met with a friend this afternoon (also recently retired), and she said she'd never seen me look so relaxed. The garden is blooming, the weather is gorgeous, and we're going out to dinner tonight. Wheee!
Reading the news coverage of everyone's response to climate change, I've noticed that the hot new thing is carbon offsets. Everyone knows, of course, that we can't be expected to turn our busy, high-impact lives on a dime and suddenly stop emitting all those greenhouse gases - after all, we have to get to work, and public transit doesn't go anywhere near the office. (It does go by my office, actually, and I ride it; but I'm in the minority. In any case, I'm retiring in 5 days.) But - we have money! We can buy into other people's efforts to sequester carbon or reduce pollution or plant trees, and that will make it all better. Sort of. I was arranging a planned airplane trip on British Airways, and their online web site for managing your flight even includes a link labeled Buy carbon offsets.
This may not sound as familiar to you as it did to me, unless you are also a student of medieval history; but the human race has been here before. In the 15th and 16th centuries (that's the 1400s and 1500s), those of extreme sinfulness could get indulgences from the church, which would cleanse them of sin for specified periods of time. They had to do this so they could attend church and receive the Eucharist.
Indulgences occur when the Church, acting by virtue of its authority, applies existing merit from the Church’s treasury to an individual. The individual gains the indulgence by participating in certain activities, most often the recitation of prayers.
I'll confess to being charmed by the notion of an existing treasury of merit; especially considering the general moral condition of the Catholic Church in the period in question. The church said that no money could change hands in exchange for indulgences, of course; but, also of course, it did; and the scandals associated with the sale of indulgences were part of what brought on the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism. Martin Luther's 95 Theses were all about the sale of indulgences.
The difference is interesting here: the medieval indulgence buyers were trying to save their souls, or at least reduce their stay in Purgatory. The carbon offset buyers are trying to do - what? Save the world? I'm afraid all they're really trying to do is appear "greener than thou" to their neighbors. But we've changed the definition of "sin" rather substantially, haven't we?
I have only 9 working days left before I retire. This is an extremely strange space to be in, with frequent recurrences of the thought, "Why do I care about this?" A firmly rooted Protestant work ethic, however, keeps me focused on the last clean-up tasks.
The Oakland City Council can be pretty odd, and pretty annoying, but at least we haven't elected anyone equivalent to San Francisco Supervisor Ed Jew. The whole incident is giving me second thoughts about instant runoff elections, since it's pretty clear that he would never have been elected in a first-past-the-post contest.
As dangerous as XDR-TB is (that's extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, in case you were in a cave last week), I think we're over-reacting to it as a society. The case of Andrew Speaker disturbs me deeply, particularly since the head of the CDC is now saying that "we need to have confidence we can take action absent documentation of intent to cause harm" (quoted in the Detroit Free Press). Presumably she means forced quarantine, as they have now imposed on Speaker; or as in the case of Robert Daniels, who is being held in solitary confinement in Arizona because his XDR-TB (which is in the process of killing him, by the way) makes him "a public menace." He was ordered to wear a mask in public, because he is infectious; he didn't do so; and the court locked him up. He is in a medical isolation unit in a jail. He hasn't been outside in 10 months. He hasn't seen a human except his medical attendants. The windows on his solitary cell are frosted; the lights are always on. Interviewers have to talk to him through the door. His wife and son are in Moscow; he may never see them again.
Neither of these men has committed a crime. As far as I know, it's not criminal to go out in public without a surgical mask, even if you do have XDR-TB. It's not criminal to fail to follow your prescribed medical regimen. It's true that to fail to do so causes drug resistant diseases; but then you die of the disease, which could actually be considered enough punishment. The ACLU is suing on Mr. Daniels' behalf, and more power to their elbow; as this man goes, so could we all go.
I don't take tuberculosis lightly. In 1929 my Aunt Margery, whom I know only by repute, died of it; my Uncle John's entire life from the age of 3 was made miserable by it (he got it from his sister, in his hip joint); my mother grew up in a household with two incurable invalids, and she herself had it and recovered, but she always registered positive on the skin test. It is inhumane - it is inhuman - to lock people away like criminals merely because we can't cure their contagious disease. Nobody locked my Aunt Margery away, and her disease was contagious and incurable. Yes, people can die from XDR-TB that they might catch from these patients - but they are all going to die anyway. Can't we show these people some compassion, instead of allowing our fear of catching their disease to turn us all into Nurse Ratched? Whatever happened to, "There but for the grace of God go I"??
Our increasing tendency to criminalize anything we don't agree with or can't control is a very disturbing and dangerous trend; we must stop this.
Encouraged by the anonymous commenter to my May 18 post, I got tickets, and my husband and I went to see Josh Kornbluth last Sunday, which included a post-monologue discussion on democracy with two political science experts whose names I (regrettably) don't recall. But they were very interesting, and I have to concede that the commenter was right: there was no profanity, there was no put-down humor, and I do cherish the mental image of Josh Kornbluth, perched precariously on the top of the Structure in Ohlone Park, because it's best Verizon signal in his neighborhood and the only place he can get "four bars". As a Verizon customer, I can relate to that, and I don't have a Structure to climb. As I recall, though, he didn't use the phrase that so impressed me; but the discussion overall was very thought-provoking (and has been extended for 2 more weeks in case you're interested).
Having watched him for 2 hours, I have concluded: Josh Kornbluth is a Hobbit. Maybe a little tall.
And then there was the crab incident. We arrived at Fort Mason early, on a sunny, boisterous day, and walked out to the end of the nearest pier to look at the bay (and, hopefully, not get blown off the wharf). About halfway down the pier, I saw a dead crab, lying on its back on the walkway. I poked it with my foot, I don't know why, and it waved its little feet in the air - not dead after all. I flipped it over and it began to scuttle down the boardwalk. I didn't see how it could live long and prosper on a boardwalk, so I talked my husband into picking it up and heaving it off into the water; our karmic deed for the day.
I just hope it stayed there, because when we got to the end of the pier, there was a guy with a bucket and a net, crabbing - he had an identical critter in the bottom of his bucket. Oh, well.
OK, the Democratic leadership in Congress has handed the President what he wanted, a war funding bill with no deadlines for bringing the troops home. And everybody on both sides of the argument is lambasting them for wimping out.
First of all, give them credit for trying. They sent him a funding bill with withdrawal deadlines (the first one since this mess began) and he vetoed it. They tried for over a week to negotiate something better; our Fearless Leader laid his ears back, planted his front feet, and brayed at them. I agree with them that they couldn't allow combat troops to run out of money; and nobody knows better than Pelosi and Reid that they don't have the votes to override the president's veto unless they get a large number of Republican defectors. Right now, the Repubs are standing firm.
Second, the Democrats aren't done with this. Note that Pelosi did not vote for the final bill she took to the floor. Note also that this bill funds the war only through September; a mere 4 months. The issue will be back; and next time, there'll be 4 more months of disasters to make the Republicans nervous about continuing their support for this fiasco. The closer we get to the 2008 elections, the queasier the Republicans up for re-election will become. Some of them are already queasy. Get enough of them nervous enough and a veto override begins to look possible; I'm sure that's what Pelosi and Reid are aiming toward.
Frankly, if the troops in Iraq can bring this mess to a stable, successful conclusion by the end of September, Bush almost deserves to claim his "victory." But if they can, I'll pick out one of my hats and eat it.
After reading this AP article on some of the victims of the subprime loan industry's poor judgment, I've about concluded that, of all the different volunteer opportunities I'm considering doing in retirement, the single most socially useful thing I can do is teach basic financial literacy through Operation Hope. The people who were suckered into these loans did things I've known were stupid since I was about fourteen - like, signing blank loan applications and returning them to the mortgage broker. Some of the people interviewed for the article didn't see the applications again until after they had signed up for loans - at which time they discovered they were credited on the loan applications with income they didn't have, jobs they didn't have, and assets they didn't have. These people have now lost what little they did have, and ruined what credit they had, to boot.
[Ed. note:] Checking back on this post 10 years later, I find that the link to an AP article in the first paragraph is no longer valid. This 2007 article in the Washington Post covers the same incident: Neighborhood Swayed by 'Liar's Loans'
The other characteristic of the group covered in the article that left a very nasty taste in my mouth was the fact that the loan brokers who screwed over this particular group of people, mostly low-income women in Boston, operated out of the basement of the Victory Chapel Church. I don't recall the article noting that they made any particular point about being associated with the church; but I'm quite sure that the people in the neighborhood assumed that, if the church rented the basement to them, they must be OK.
Speaking of basic financial literacy, let me remind us all about the word "assume" - it's the word that "makes an ass out of u and me".
The Victory Chapel Church isn't the first religious institution that has been used as the operating base for a scam artist, by any means. In the early eighties, a firm called Lendvest operated out of Napa, California (my home town), and eventually became the center of a massive scandal surrounding bankruptcies and unsecured loans, as well as drug trafficking and at least one suspected murder. All this data is from a very brief Google search, I haven't researched it in detail, and I wasn't living in Napa at the time. However, some of the neighbors I grew up with in Napa lost a large portion of their life savings in the Lendvest mess, and my recollection is that they bought into it because their contact at Lendvest was a member of their church and a "good man." Of course, they also bought into it because it was promising ridiculously high rates of return.
Speaking of basic financial literacy again, they forgot the basic TANSTAAFL principle: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
To put it another way, the world is not full of people standing around waiting to give you money out of the goodness of their hearts. If it looks too good to be true, you have to assume it is too good to be true. The people pushing the loans discussed in the AP article were falsifying loan documents in order to make big transaction fees on high interest subprime mortgages; the fact that the borrowers were going to lose their shirts in about 18 months when the loan rates adjusted was irrelevant to them. Frankly, I hope they all go to jail.
I'm not sure I have much to add to the numerous comments on the life and contributions of the late Rev. Falwell. But it always bothered me that someone whose primary public comments always centered on hate, vengeance, and punishment, had the chutzpah to call himself a Christian. I no longer consider myself a Christian, for reasons I won't go into here; but I grew up in the faith, and I remember principles like, "Love your neighbor as yourself", "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you," "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" - I could go on, but you get the idea. Jerry Falwell seemed to me to belong to an entirely different religion. I certainly wouldn't bet money that he had ever read the New Testament.
If you look back over American history, though, you'll see that from time to time the country, or parts of it, goes through these fits of religious fervor. The first one, of course, was the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which the Puritan fathers ran as a theocracy, after leaving both England and the Netherlands because they were insufficiently moral and pure. I firmly believe that the memory of the Puritan rule in Massachusetts has a great deal to do with the separation of church and state in the Constitution.
These episodes weren't all bad: we owe the end of slavery to one of them. We also owe Prohibition to one of them, a very mixed blessing; and I'm convinced we also owe the current "War on Drugs" and "Right to Life" movements to the same turn of mind, which says, "you can't do that because we believe it's wrong, and because we believe it's wrong we're also going to make it illegal." Adherents of this position don't usually state the "we believe", either - they just say, "this is wrong."
The late Rev. Falwell fits right into this tradition. I wonder what he found when he finally go to the great Other Side. Speak no ill of the dead; which really means I have to stop right here.
I don't go in much for stand-up comedy. The likely incidence of profanity, vulgarity (I get so tired of the "F word"), and humor based on the humiliation of others, is too high for my taste. So I've never see a Josh Kornbluth show; and probably I never will. But Jon Carroll quoted him on Wednesday, from a new show called "Citizen Josh", and his comment on democracy is one of the best descriptions I've ever heard or read. Here it is:
"In a democracy, you have to be both the ruler and the ruled. You have to fight the man, and you have to be the man."
That is just about where it's at.
I just realized that I have an anniversary of sorts coming up. On Memorial Day weekend in 2000, I turned to walk across the room to the table for dinner, and something went "pop" in my left knee. That was the last day until sometime in 2006 that I could walk without any possibility of pain. We had planned a 3 week tour of New England in the fall of 2000, and I did it on crutches, with my left knee in a brace. A hideously uncomfortable brace, let me add; even custom leg braces do not fit well on fat thighs.
Three surgeries, two painful rehabs, and five years of weight training and water aerobics later, I have two working (artificial) knees, I can walk better than I have in years (even before the "pop", my knees were compromised - the first X-rays showed advanced osteoarthritis in both knee joints; the "pop", although painful, was actually incidental, a torn meniscus). And, by the way, I'm in better shape than I think I've ever been in my life.
Does this count as lemonade? I think it does. Strangely, the state of California still considers me permanently disabled; I got my 2007-2009 handicapped placard in the mail this week. I don't need it; I wouldn't dream of using it now; but there it is. I'll have to ask my doctor about it.
I think what I'm trying to say here is, we never know what's going to happen, or when; and all we can do is cope with it as best we can. Am I proud of how I've coped with this? You bet!
A well-known remark of Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Parliamentary New Model Army in England's 17th century Civil War, comes from a letter he wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650: I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken.
I remembered this as I read a recent article in the Economist about the current travails of Paul Wolfowitz. ("Wolfowitz agonistes," May 3, 2007 edition) I'm not linking it since the Economist, online or print, is a fairly expensive subscription, but it's worth looking for the copy in the library.
This article quotes Mr. Wolfowitz to the effect that he is the victim of a “smear campaign” designed “to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that I am an ineffective leader.”
He claims that he didn't want to be involved in the details of his girlfriend's compensation, but the directors made him do it; the charges against him are "unfair and untrue"; and on and on to the effect that he is right and everyone else is not only wrong but is wrongly conspiring against him.
I realized that Mr. Wolfowitz is a man who is cannot think it possible he may be mistaken. In fact, this is a characteristic of the entire neoconservative inner circle. Think about them: Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feith. The architects of the war in Iraq, believing their own convictions in the face of every fact, every implication to the contrary; manufacturing evidence to support their beliefs when the real evidence failed them. It never occurs to them that they may be wrong, and this is why they are dangerous.
I have deliberately left President Bush out of this list. I don't believe he is a member of the neoconservative inner circle; he is virtually the only member of his original administration who did not sign the Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century. Read the list of signers. His brother Jeb signed it; but he didn't. He holds his position because the neoconservatives judged, rightly, that he was malleable enough to take direction as long as he was allowed to appear to lead.
Most of us, who know we're capable of making mistakes, will stop to reconsider the situation occasionally and see if what we're doing still makes sense; not the man who knows he is never wrong. If you are never wrong, you can fall into the dangerous trap of assuming the the ends (because you are Right) justify the means: and so we come to Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib; warrantless wiretapping in America, and sectarian murder in the neighborhoods of Baghdad - because the neoconservatives are never wrong.
It's probably unreasonable to require that no one be elected to high office unless he has publicly admitted at least one major error of judgment; but it might be safer for the country. Harry Truman had gone through bankruptcy; and although he took a lot of flack while he was in office, in retrospect, his judgment looks pretty sound.
I seem to have developed a sleep disorder. To be exact, I've been tested for sleep apnea - for those of you who haven't met this personally, you quit breathing for various (brief) durations during sleep, and then start again with a gasp. You don't usually wake up, although you may wake your bedmate up, as this is often associated with snoring. It does interrupt your sleep; you don't always realize it.
The day-to-day effect of this is that you're tired, all the time; you never feel as though you've had enough sleep. A secondary side effect, for me, is that I get uncontrollable urges to fall asleep whenever I'm mildly (or more) bored. Falling asleep in meetings is merely embarrassing. Falling asleep at the wheel while commuting to work is potentially fatal. I spent several months literally fighting to stay awake at the wheel, fortunately never coming to grief. But it's a very unpleasant feeling.
Then I had to attend a meeting in San Francisco (driving was completely out of the question; do you know how much parking costs there??), and discovered by accident that my exercise program has brought me back to the point that I can walk to the BART station in under 20 minutes. (Not much under...) This is the breakeven point that says, hey, you can ride the train to work, and you get another 40 minutes a day to read the paper. Also, with the new in-ear earphones I got, I can listen to my iPod on BART. The downside is an extra half hour of commute every day (15 minutes at each end).
But I was still tired all the time, so I sent my doctor an email (thank you, Kaiser, for secure email) asking, why am I so tired all the time, when all the blood tests come back normal? And my doctor said, have you been having trouble sleeping? Has your partner noticed anything? So, I asked my husband, and he said, "Oh, yeah, you have sleep apnea; I've had to shake you a couple of times." (He claims he told me this, but if he did, I don't remember...)
I reported this to the doc, and the next thing I know I have an appointment to be tested. Being tested entails wearing a small computer unit on your arm all night (as the nurse said, we don't care if you sleep all night or not but we insist you wear the box for at least 8 hours), hooked up to an oximeter on one finger and a blood pressure cuff on another. This wasn't especially easy to get used to, and the day after I was even more tired, but I caught up the next night.
I haven't heard the test results; this isn't like blood tests where you get an email sometimes the same day. But depending on the results, I may have to learn to sleep with a mask on - attached to a CPAP machine. (Google it; there are lots of sites.) The best of these masks looks like a dust mask; the worst looks like a full-face gas mask; and it's attached by a hose to a machine on the night stand. And they're all kept on with a sort of harness of straps. They don't look at all comfortable to sleep in; but I'm told the result is worth it. I'm hoping this will all just go away.
Most of the country must know by now that we've had a - well, an incident - here in the S.F. Bay Area. Here's the short account (excerpted from today's www.sfgate.com):
At around 3:40 AM, a gasoline tanker truck, loaded with 8,600 gallons of unleaded gasoline, was passing through the MacArthur Maze, on its way from a refinery in Benicia to a gas station on Hegenberger Road in Oakland. The driver was a 51 year old man from Yolo County; the current police account is that he was going too fast in a 50 MPH zone and rolled his truck. He was also, I'll add, negotiating one of the worst-designed freeway interchanges in the country. It was never good; and when they rebuilt the interchange after the Loma Prieta earthquake, they made it much worse. It's so bad that I refuse to drive it: I get off the freeway and take other routes.
The overturned truck burst into flames, estimated 200 feet high; the temperature reached 2,000 degrees; the freeway supports melted; and something in excess of 250 yards of the freeway (I've seen it called 275) slumped down onto the freeway connector underneath. You can see photos and video at the linked site; it's really impressive to see a huge section of freeway, draped like a Dali watch.
There isn't much to do about this but boggle. The first boggle: nobody died. The only injury was the driver, currently hospitalized with second degree burns; but he got himself out of the truck on his own and took a taxi to the hospital on his own. They say he'll be out in a few more days. A cat that did this would have blown about 4 of his 9 lives.
The second boggle: oh, what this will do to the commute traffic. You can get to San Francisco just fine; but you can't get back if your destination is on highways 580 or 24. Well, you can, but you'll have to take the West Grand exit and travel for better than a mile on city streets. With stop lights. And you can't get directly from Berkeley to the Coliseum (and points south) any more. You have to loop through a series of freeway connectors; at least it's all freeway.
I can't draw any brilliant conclusions from this, except that all the world loves to gawk at a disaster, and this is an eminently gawkable disaster. Don't speed with a truck full of gasoline? Don't assume you can make that curve?
And thank God my personal commute doesn't go this way.
As of today, I have eight weeks left in my working life. My last day in the office is Friday June 22. (Yes, I know I said June 30; I'm burning some vacation.) I'm beginning to feel very weird; the words "lame duck" occur to me regularly. At least one of my colleagues has said to me, "I can't give you anything new to do."
I'm trying to clean up (or at least document, so someone else can clean up) all the weird little messes I know about, that I've never had time to take on. My team has decided that the guy who will "take over" most of my critical stuff is a newbie to the group, who lives on the other coast. I'm not arguing with their decision; in the long run, or even the medium term, it's not my problem. However, one of my problems with my current job is that I never get to do anything technical; and this same guy was complaining to me recently that he never gets to do anything technical; so my prognosis for the long term of this arrangement isn't good. I have a feeling that I'll transition everything to him, and then he'll bag the whole business for a job as a sysadmin somewhere.
My boss also wants me to "teach the engineers" how to do what I do as a technical consultant. This is a very odd request, which I don't think I can satisfy in a mere 8 weeks, since a good deal of what I do is a side effect of the fact that I'm (a) an English major, so that I enjoy writing and do it well, and (b) an outgoing people-oriented type, who likes to talk to people about what they are trying to do (and then turn it into technical specs). The engineers he wants me to train are nice guys, to a man; but every one of them is also a techie to the core, which means he doesn't like to write, doesn't write well, and doesn't know how to talk to people - or, more accurately, to listen to them and understand what they're saying. The other problem with this is that my preferred method of communicating is to write stuff down, in great detail; and all the engineers hate to read, and mostly don't read my doc because it's "too long."
But there's nothing I can do about all that. I think I'll just have to do the best I can, and then walk away from it. Someone asked me yesterday whether I care that there "won't be anybody" to clean up "all the little messes". Well, I do care; but I also understand that there will never be a time without a bunch of little messes to clean up. You have to put a stake in the ground; and I've done so.
But I still feel very strange.
No, this is not about ducks. In fact, in the interests of full disclosure I will tell you up front that if you are a devotee of homeopathic medicine, I am about to piss you off.
I am annoyed at my gym. In general it's pretty good; clean, well maintained, new equipment; so I'm giving them a pass by not including their name. In the interests of Earth Day they published their own version of (in this case) 40 "small things each of us can do" to help the earth. I was browsing through it to see if they included the one I've been doing for 35 years (cloth dinner napkins instead of paper - they missed it; they did get the cloth towels for spills), and when I got to #32 I'm afraid I blew my stack. Number 32 said, "Use homeopathic remedies rather than synthetic drugs - it's healthier for you and the planet."
Well, I can't deny that homeopathic remedies are healthier for the planet. Being composed entirely of water, you could pour them into storm drains with no visible impact on the environment. But - healthier for you?? I don't understand how an organization that regularly sends me emails about exercise, good nutrition, etc., can possibly suggest to me that I should stop taking the "synthetic drugs" which are currently managing my thyroiditis, my rheumatoid arthritis, and my osteoarthritis, and replace them with expensive homeopathic remedies compounded according to the "law of infinitesimals" (I am not making this up), which suggests that the less of something there is, the more powerful an effect it has.
Homeopathic medications are composed along the principles used by the man I once read about who liked his martinis extremely dry - he locked the gin in a closet at the back of the house, and walked past it once a month, carrying a bottle of vermouth. The dilutions commonly used in homeopathic remedies are so extreme that it is physically, chemically, impossible for any molecule of the advertised substance to be in the bottle they sell you. But because they shake it up really hard before diluting it again (and again, and again...), they argue that the vigorous shaking or pulverizing with each step of dilution leaves behind a "spirit-like" essence—"no longer perceptible to the senses"—which cures by reviving the body's "vital force." Modern proponents assert that even when the last molecule is gone, a "memory" of the substance is retained.
Sure it is. This is pure medievalism: as above, so below. I shudder to think of the effect should some innocent take this advice seriously and quit taking something they really need, like blood pressure meds, or nitro for heart trouble. Or prednisone for any of the really nasty conditions that appalling drug gets prescribed for. The idea that homeopathic remedies are "less harmful" comes from the fact that they were developed in the 19th and early 20th century and, because they have no effect at all, were less harmful than many of the 19th century's orthodox medical practices, thereby allowing patients to recover naturally, in some cases, from conditions where the medical doctor's standard treatment would have killed them.
You don't need to take my word for all this. I've found a wonderful site called Quackwatch, which I recommend in general; and in specific, I recommend their feature article on homeopathy. The author, Stephen Barrett, is a retired M.D., a man of impressive scientific credentials, and a fellow of CSICOP. All the details above (except the story about the martini drinker) are excerpted from Dr. Barrett's excellent feature article; please go and read all of it. And don't, if you ever did, pay the prices charged for what is effectively a small bottle of water.
Oh, and the "evidence of wonderful results"? Just remember, double blind studies have shown that the placebo effect, from a sugar pill, can produce a recovery rate in the 30-40% range. Homeopathic remedies are placebos, nothing more.
I have filed a (signed) comment card with my gym suggesting that it was irresponsible of them to include this suggestion in their list.
I saw something very odd, leaving work the other day; odd to me at least. The data center where I work has broad expanses of lawn, punctuated with willow trees (which I always thought were an unreasonable choice for a water-challenged climate); it also has little decorative fountains with ponds. The willows are always full of birds, including crows, which have become more common in the last few years; and we've recently had a pair of mallard ducks enjoying the lawns.
I saw a crow attacking a smaller bird; and not very efficiently, either. I was maybe 40 feet from all this and couldn't see details clearly; but the smaller bird seemed to be all white (unusual in a wild bird); it looked like a parakeet. It was about that size and had sort of a rounded silhouette; it was walking along the lip of the fountain pool, peeping. The crow was standing on the lawn, several feet away, and as I watched, it flew over, pounced on the small bird, and picked it up in its beak. The crow carried the small bird, peeping wildly, to the lawn, and dropped it. The small bird seemed to be trying to defend itself (I'm anthropomorphizing wildly here) - it waved its wings at the crow, peeped wildly, and tried to scuttle away. The crow watched for a bit and then struck again. It looked like nothing so much as a cat toying with a mouse.
This sequence repeated itself three or four times while I watched. By then I had decided that I wasn't enjoying this very much, and in any case I had a train to catch and was already late. So I went on and didn't see the end.
I asked my husband about the incident later; he's not a birder as such, but he hikes and backpacks, and has seen a lot in the back country. He's the source of the phrase, "crummy raptors"; crows, he says, will try to be raptors but they aren't very good at it. They certainly aren't; an owl or a hawk would have killed that bird with one strike. I refuse to anthropomorphize to the point of thinking the crow was playing with the bird for fun; I assume it was trying to kill it with inadequate equipment.
The other thing that puzzles me is where the little white bird came from. I've never seen a bird like it anywhere near the data center. It almost looked like a released domestic bird. It met an unhappy end, wherever it came from.
Anyone who has ever spent any time working in, or with, a nonprofit arts organization (a community chorus, a local theater group, etc.) knows that they are chronically short of funds. Their volunteer officers spend hours working on fundraising. I've been considering joining such a board, after I retire; and it's beginning to dawn on me what I may be letting myself in for.
My problem is, I hate fundraising. I hate asking people for money; it makes me actively uncomfortable. I dislike being asked for money; and when I don't like people to do something to me, I try to avoid doing it to them. This is called the Golden Rule. I even have trouble selling concert tickets, although I believe that our chorus is a talented performing group that produces excellent music; because I believe people have a right to decide what to do with their own Friday nights.
I wonder if I can persuade the group to let me do routine back office stuff, while somebody else goes out and hustles for funds. I'm happy to stuff envelopes. I'd enjoy working on the web site, or learning to use the sound equipment: anything but asking people to donate money.
I expressed my amazement in my last post, that Jon Corzine, the governor of New Jersey, should have been riding in a vehicle without a seat belt, which decision led to his current hospitalization. I find myself musing over this incident. We are told not to "blame the victim." In the case of a woman who has been raped, I fully agree. In Mr. Corzine's case, however, his current state of health is a direct result of a decision that he made, presumably, all by himself. I don't, he must have thought, need a seat belt for this short trip.
Jon Corzine is not a stupid man. He's been highly successful: a banker; an investment banker (believe me, not the same breed), the CEO of Goldman Sachs; a U.S. Senator. The only conclusion I can draw here is that he was convinced "it can't happen to me," even though he was riding in the front passenger seat, sometimes called "the death seat." The facts clearly indicate he was wrong.
Assigning blame is pointless; Mr. Corzine's present physical state is ample, possibly excessive, punishment for his lapse in judgment. I do wonder about the police driver of that vehicle, however. It's too bad he didn't have the cojones to make the simple statement, "I'm sorry, Governor, I can't start this car until everyone has buckled up." I regularly make that statement myself, when carrying passengers. Apparently he either didn't notice that his passenger wasn't secured, or didn't have the temerity to challenge him.
The latest ABC News article on the incident suggests that the vehicle's air bags may not have deployed. I'm not sure I believe that. This was Gov. Corzine's normal secure transport, chosen for protection. For all the jokes about New Jersey, one assumes the governor's security detail takes care of the car that protects his, and their, lives. But the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that the 2005 Suburban doesn't have side-impact air bags.
Whatever happened (and I'm sure we'll be reading follow-on articles for weeks yet), I've seldom seen such a clear case of cause and effect. It's not as though we haven't known for 50 years that seat belts protect passengers in a crash, even without air bags.
One of the reasons I haven't blogged this week is music: the Oakland Symphony Chorus is performing next Friday, and our director has scheduled extra rehearsals. Since I haven't retired yet, this brings the schedule down to eat, sleep, work, rehearse, and exercise if you can make time for it. Blogging does not make the cut.
The other reason I haven't blogged is the absolute overload of insanity in the news. I can not believe what's going on.
Don Imus calls a college women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." (At least he made no references to "jungle bunnies.") Mr. Imus has apologized, and has lost his job. Some people have observed that when African American gangsta rappers use the same words in their offensive productions, nobody says boo, and they are perfectly right. If it's wrong for Imus to say it, it's wrong for NWA to say it (or whoever is hot this week). Or are we simply assuming that black rappers are inferior beings who can't be held to a civilized standard, which is even worse?
The governor of New Jersey, riding in a police car to an interview between Imus and his targets, is seriously injured when the car swerves to avoid an out-of-control vehicle and crashes, because he isn't wearing a seat belt. There's a great public example for you. And in a police car; that's what floors me.
In other news, Paul Wolfowitz, of neoconservative fame, is about to be drummed out of his post at the World Bank because he arranged for his girlfriend to be posted to the State Department and given two outrageous raises. She now makes more money than the Secretary of State. It is doubtless unfair of me to feel that these are the homeliest two people I have ever seen pilloried for sex related peccadilloes. (I can't find a photo of both of them together to link, but just check the Google News files.) I don't think it's at all unfair of me to wonder why President Bush would appoint the man to head up an organization that "desperately needed shaking up", when even Wolfowitz' friends admit that "management was never his strong suit." (See David Sanger's article in the NY Times.)
And finally there is the astounding mess surrounding Karl Rove and the missing emails. Now, I support email for a living; and the amount of plain garbage flying around here is incredible. But the simple fact that the White House is trying to camouflage behind a barrage of possibly deleted emails, is that White House staff, including Rove, may have been using email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee for official government business. This violates the Presidential Records Act, which requires all official documents to be archived. I don't know if it violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government facilities for politicking; but it seems as if it should; the reverse behavior would. And the claim that Rove assumed that deleting email from his inbox did not delete it from the server is outrageous. I don't believe that Karl Rove gave one moment's thought to whether the server was archiving his deletes or not. I do believe he deleted emails he knew perfectly well should be archived.
Which brings me to a question I ask regularly. How many laws does this administration have to break before Congress realizes they are committing impeachable offenses?
At last, I can blog about this. I've decided to retire. My last day of work will be June 30.
I've been sitting on this like a hen on an egg since the beginning of the year, when I stomped into the office intending to tell my boss I wanted to retire, and couldn't find him. It took 3 weeks for our schedules to mesh to the point that we were both in the office at the same time; and I refused to do this by email, or phone, or (God forbid) instant message (which is how an awful lot of work gets done around our office). Trouble is, there are people at work who know about my blog; so I couldn't even hint at it here until I had made the official announcement to the boss. And then, he wouldn't tell anybody until I had formally called the retirement people and started the process, and then come back and asked him, when are we going to tell other people. I wonder if he thought I'd change my mind if he gave me time to think about it. However, the immediate team has known for about a month now, and the word is beginning to spread to the rest of the department; so I can post it here for the amusement of my 3 readers.
I've been working for a living since March 1969; that's 38 years. With a few interruptions, of course: 8 months or so after the divorce in 1976; a month off between jobs in 1988; two 3 month sessions in 2001 and 2005 while I replaced one and then the other knee. The rest of the time, on the job: seventeen years as a librarian; two years running a small mail-order surplus business; nineteen years as a systems programmer. In the office every day at 9 if I could manage it, 8 if I had to; I'm not really an early morning person, although I can do it. Home as early as I could manage, not always very early. Going to bed early so I could get enough sleep, which meant I never had any time to read books. I can nibble at magazines and stop when it gets late; but with books I want to follow the story all the way out, and the next thing I know it's 11:30, and my tomorrow is shot. I could argue that I'm retiring so I can catch up on my sleep, I never seem to get enough; I'm tired now, my eyes are scratchy.
Soon, now, I get to answer the Great Question: who am I when I'm not working? As Satchel Paige might have said, who would you be if you didn't know who you was? If you think about this even a little bit, you realize how much we define ourselves by what we do for a living. I read a book or article once, I forget where; but someone was comparing the English and the Americans, and they said that when an Englishman wants to know who you are, he asks what your family is, and when an American wants to know who you are, he asks what you do. I've been a technician, a good one if I say so myself, for a long time now; what do I do next? "Retired" is an acceptable description for "what do I do", but it's sort of like, "out of here" - it isn't a destination.
I began to come to terms with this when I realized that what I really do next, is to figure out what to do next. It's time to reinvent myself again. The majority of those 38 years have been spent "working for the man" - for companies with a bottom line, mainly in the financial industry. Yes, even the library work: Google "Special Libraries Association" to see what kind of library job I had. (And imagine telling your accountant boss, in 1976 or so, that you were attending an SLA meeting after work...) I still don't know what I want to do next, but I have a list of possibilities, and not one of them involves working for anybody who makes a profit. I don't hate people who try to make a profit; I just want to try something else.
We're having a Jules Verne fit here, after the article on the subterranean body of water (see my post, Jules Verne was right!). So we thought we'd rent 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from Netflix. Well, the search on Netflix turned up a treasure which I highly recommend. Did you know that in 1916, there was a blockbuster movie version of 20,000 Leagues, containing the first underwater photography sequences in movie history?? They're fabulous - it's too bad they aren't in color but you can't have everything, and they are clearly live underwater sequences of coral reefs.
The movie is a total hoot. Apparently Verne's plot wasn't enough for the filmmakers, so they incorporated another whole story, about an evil ship captain, a bereaved Indian prince (not Native American), a Child of Nature (female of course, and wearing a sort of leopardskin dress) living on a Mysterious Island, and four American Navy men in a balloon, also marooned on the Mysterious Island when the balloon blows off course. I spent about half the movie asking, "Who are these people??" They tie it all together in the last reel, sort of.
And the submarine! The submarine looks amazingly like a modern submarine. I guess form follows function, although Captain Nemo's cabin seems to have more wood paneling and hangings than the U.S. Navy would provide. They even have diving suits, and "self contained oxygen tanks" which allow them to stay under the sea "indefinitely" (they look about the size of a small propane tank). You scuba divers, quit giggling. This was 1916. There are a number of sequences of people in diving suits with lead shoes, walking around on the sea bottom, and one where a couple of guys suit up, climb down to the bottom, and walk ashore, and then help each other take the suits off. It's obviously quite real, this was much too early for trick photography, and I have no idea how they did this with a hand-cranked camera. They have wonderful footage of circling sharks and barracuda, shot from below.
The best of it is - you don't have to listen to Kirk Douglas singing "A Whale of a Tale."
I thought I'd written on this subject before, but as I look back, the last time I quoted George Santayana ("those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it") had to do with Prohibition and the war on drugs, not real estate. However, it's real estate - specifically the current melt-down in the so-called "sub-prime market" - that brings the quote to mind now. I guess when you're right, you're right all the time.
Everyone is now freaking big-time over the fact that the housing market has flattened out, and you can no longer buy a house for a mortgage you can't afford, wait 4 months, and sell it for enough to cover the outrageous amount of money you borrowed and put a little extra loot in the bank for yourself. Apparently everyone thought the housing market was going to continue heading skyward indefinitely. Let me repeat another old saying that's still true: what goes up must come down. Isaac Newton only dealt with physical objects; but this also applied to skyrocketing markets. In fact, to date in human history there has never been a skyrocketing market in anything in which the bubble hasn't eventually popped, causing a large number of investors to lose their shirts and everything else. But every time a new bubble comes around, everybody convinces himself that "it's different, this time." No, it isn't.
The infuriating thing about the looming massive defaults on sub-prime home loans, which have already taken down a number of
- Lenders who specialized in sub-prime loans because they're so profitable
- Investors who bought "securitized" sub-prime loans because the interest rates are so high
is that we have been here before. Recently. In fact, we were here in my adult lifetime, in the late 1980's, when that iteration of the housing bubble popped, doing exactly the sort of damage this one is doing, and incidentally bringing down the entire savings and loan industry in the U.S., which had to be bailed out at great expense to the taxpayer. That would be you, and me. I wonder who we'll be bailing out this time.
Yes, I remember all of this from the '80's: the negative amortization loans. The low-to-no down payment terms. The adjustable rate mortgages where nobody bothered to ask if they could afford the payment after the adjustment. The desperate scramble to buy a house on any terms, for any price, just to get "into the housing market." I even think I remember "no doc" loans, where the lender just asks how much you make and writes it down; I understand these are called "liar loans."
The real tragedy is that the loan companies, investors, possibly the U.S. economy itself if things get really bad, are all secondary victims. The primary victims are the people who took out these loans, which they couldn't possibly afford, which a rational lender would never have offered to make to them, in order to buy a house to live in, which they assumed would be an investment to protect them in retirement. These people will now lose the house, ruin their credit rating and their personal financial position, and probably never be able to retire in comfort at all. And all because of the bubble madness.
You can say, they should have read the fine print; and they should have. But if you aren't very well educated (and there's a whole generation or two of Americans who aren't), the fine print may or may not have made it clear to you that you were not going to be able to make the payments on this loan. The lender certainly did not. And the housing market is now going down and sideways, and you can't refinance, because you owe more than the house is now worth; and besides, interest rates have gone up, although not as much as your adjusted rate has. In short, you the borrower are screwed, and you're going into foreclosure Real Soon Now. And it's only poetic justice that the lender who loaned you more money than you could rationally expect to be able to repay is also screwed.
166 years ago, in 1841, Charles Mackay wrote a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It's still in print; it is regularly reissued with new material. The latest edition I see on Amazon was reissued sometime in the mid-90s. It should be mandatory reading in every school in America. Assuming American schools still teach students how to read; but that's another rant.
The synchronicity is delightful here. Just about the time I was drafting the last post, on the well-known evils of the passive voice, Kyrie O'Connor was on WWDTM discussing the "passive exonerative"!
I haven't heard it yet - I was at a rehearsal this morning during the broadcast, and my husband told me about it. I'll have to download today's podcast. But what a WONDERFUL term for it! I Googled the phrase and find it's used quite a lot and has turned up on DailyKos and in William Safire columns. The latest relevant use, actually about Awful Alberto, is a very similar post last Wednesday in Jeff Weintraub's blog, So It Goes. It's also called the "past exonerative" and "past passive exonerative."
The So It Goes post ends with a summary that is better than I could have written:
Politicians who use it think they're dousing a fire. They should all remember the teachings of their composition teachers. Because when the rest of us hear "mistakes were made," we know the fire has only begun to burn.
"Mistakes were made." That's what our Fearless Leader has to say about the U.S. attorney mess. Let's set aside the implications of the Attorney General of the United States firing U.S. attorneys because they were insufficiently politically pure and zealous. That's too obvious to bother with.
The point here is the appalling obfuscation caused by - the passive voice. Anyone who has stayed awake in English class knows the difference between the passive and the active voice, but for those of you who slept through it, here are examples:
Active: I hit the ball.
Passive: The ball was hit by me.
A little thought will tell you that you can't write a sentence in the active voice without making it crystal clear who is doing what to whom. I hit the ball.
When you write in the passive voice, though, you can obliterate responsibility entirely, merely by leaving off those last two words, "by me". The ball was hit. Who hit the ball? We don't know. A man was killed. Who killed him? We don't know, unlike when Bob Marley sings, "I shot the sherriff."
This is why politicians adore the passive voice. It's very rare that you'll find one speaking - and certainly not writing - in the active voice. You'll know when you do find one because ... they will be more interesting to listen to. Writing or speaking in the active voice, you tell a story. Writing in the passive voice, you produce a government report, or a political speech, in which no one is responsible for anything. This is why you'll never see Alberto Gonzalez stand up on his hind legs in front of cameras and say, "I blew it."
And of course, if you never have to admit responsibility, you also never have to repent for any errors that "may have been made". You never have to look inside your soul, or your karma, or whatever you have, and consider that you might possibly not have handled that last incident in the best possible way. Because you didn't make the errors: they "were made."
The other two groups who dote on the passive voice, and use it almost exclusively, are academics, and business management types. The business management types, of course, operate under the same imperatives as the politicians. No business executive ever wants to come out and admit that he screwed up, big time; "mistakes were made." Also, neither business executives nor politicians (two groups which interbreed regularly) ever ever want to report bad news up to the next level. The boss must only hear good news. The boss wants to know that the situation is completely under control; so that's what his juniors tell him. In the passive voice. Regardless of the actual facts on the ground.
It's that nearly universal business practice that makes me almost willing to believe that the board members at Hewlett-Packard genuinely did not know what their underlings had commissioned the private investigators to do. Nobody wanted to tell the boss anything but what s/he expected to hear. (Almost willing to believe...)
I haven't been around academics enough to know why they use the passive voice. Maybe they want to sound like people in power. But it seems very odd to me that the most powerful people in both business and politics, deliberately express themselves in a way that makes it impossible to tell what they actually do, or whether they ever do anything. Maybe they don't, and that's the whole point.
This is a selective phenomenon, by the way. Not all politicians do this. Read the Gettysburg Address. Or any of FDR's fireside chats. Or Winston Churchill's speeches.
I knew it! In Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne's characters go down through endless caves and finally come to a huge underground sea (which, remarkably, they can see to navigate around...). Well, in today's Yahoo News, we see an article entitled Huge 'ocean' discovered inside earth. There is apparently a huge body of water deep in the earth's mantle, under east Asia. In fact, it appears to be centered under Beijing.
They don't say anything about the giant whirlpool Verne described in the middle of his underground ocean.
It's funny, just today I was discussing the USGS Earthquake web site with a colleague at work. Then this evening (about 40 minutes ago), I was sitting peacefully reading the newspaper when the whole house started to rock and the windows rattled. This quake was located 16 KM deep and 2 KM NE of Lafayette, CA - which is about 10 miles from my house. Maybe 12. It was magnitude 4.2, which is a healthy shake, enough to make the house creak really well.
If you've never sat through an earthquake, they're very unsettling, because your house isn't supposed to shake under you like that. Also, they create a weird form of time dilation - the seismograph traces (available on the USGS site) show that the shaking lasted for 12-15 seconds, but it felt like about 5 years. And this was a relatively minor shake; I remember the Loma Prieta quake (6.9) which I would have sworn went on for 30 seconds or longer (but Wikipedia says it was 15 seconds; I'm still not sure I believe that). There's always a point in a quake where you ask, "Isn't it done yet??" and it's not.
With all that, it's over now, and nobody was hurt, and nothing even fell off the shelves (at least not here). At least we don't have tornadoes.
