Hunger Pangs

The Free Market Healthcare-Rationing Basketball Tournament!

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:21:01 GMT

I'm hearing economic conservatives talk about "rationing" healthcare, saying that healthcare is a scarce resource, and the best, most equitable way supply it is based on a person's ability to pay. That system may not be perfect, they'll argue, but they think it's still pretty awesome. Any other form of rationing using the influence of government is worse, because government is clumsy, ineffecient, and caught up in liberal interests like "equality."

I already have them beat: how about rationing medical based on who is going to die if they don't get treatment.

(Economic conservatives hate this idea because it is exactly the same as saying "as according to need," which is something Karl Marx said, therefore evil. I hope Marx didn't like basketball!!)

Anyway.

You can tell I am a bit of a contrarian when I mingle in economically conservative circles. I happen to be of the beleif that, on the slim chance that there is such a limited supply of healthcare that paying more people to become doctors would never work, it just doesn't make sense to have one person on a plan that gives him six referrals a month for acupuncture and a chiropractor because of his achy back, when the next person, who can't afford that plan, has leukemia that she will ultimately die of because of her medical circumstsances. Lets say she does have insurance, but her plan is only useful for catastrophic emergencies because of a hugely unaffordable annual deductable, so she, being a good budget-conscious person, doesn't get checkups, and didn't go to the doctor until she was showing bad symptoms. It turned out to be late in the course of the disease there's a 75% chance that she will die now even with expensive treatment.

I think a lot of people are in denial that this kind of thing even happens, and secondarily they'll argue that if it does it's impossible to change things for the better. First they're not paying attention, and second they're being painfully uncreative. But that's because their position doesn't really come from observations or pragmatism, it comes from a certain ideological perspective on how everything in society ought to be run.

That is: economic conservatives are very attached to the idea of free market capitalism. But in a culture inundated with capitalism's messags it is easy to lose perspective on what the free market actually is and what it isn't. We live in a post-industrial society, and the market isn't based on "labor" and "capital" in the old-fashioned sense; most of our stuff is made in Asia or Latin America, and our economy is based on services, a more abstract category of goods (like intellectual property) and on investing. Investing is key because it requires surplus income and good luck, and virtually everyone needs to do it to retire.

Many will have you think the way the economy works is to give the most money to those most willing to work hard. Now I won't argue that hard work is a valuable thing to be doing. Unfortunately, we happen to live in a world where people go to college and get a degree so that they'll have to work less hard in their lives (I sure as hell hoped for that when I went to school), and as much as we want to beleive that only the most deserving people make it, that's not how things shake out.

People don't put moral character and determination on their resume. You can write it in, but what employers want to know is what you've done and where you've been. A little fib here and there, though unscrupulous, turns out to be helpful, though not as helpful as knowing someone in high places - something that depends a lot on the community you were born into. In America, income is not based on work. The people you see at bus stops at 4 in the morning to clean the hotel beds or sweeping our streets - the most uncomfortable and inconvenient jobs - are poor, not rich. I bet the vast majority of people in this country making between $30,000 and $50,000 a year would love to accept a 60-hour workweek for a few years if they were guaranteed a six-figure income, if only they could land that job or its training. I bet the vast majority of people in this country would love to be an invester or be offered a million dollars by inheritance even if they weren't allowed to spend a penny of that - not even a penny - but simply they invested it, doubled their money in 25 years, and then had to pay the original million dollars back.

Unfortunately our world doesn't work that way. More often than not the people who make the most money had something other than willingness to work going for them: they had elusive skills beyond their ardent toil and suffering. They were savvy. Innately confident. They had a high IQ. They were able-bodied. They had an expensive education - starting in private elementary schools. They had private tutors. They knew the language of power and business. They got positive feedback to keep them going. They were "cool." They had friends or family members who knew people. They had a reputable family name. An the end, while few rich people have all those qualities, the mixture of those qualities they had paid off for them. They started out lucky and got lucky breaks.

Capitalism is, in the end, a game. It is your ability to play the game correctly, along with your natural-born talent, that gets you ahead.

Now I am willing to concede that capitalism is all we have to progress in the free world. Communism doesn't work, and people are ultimately happier and more secure if they have their own private property with the autonomy to do what they want with it. They want the control to determine their immediate surroundings, to choose their job, and if they believe the government or the community mismanages its resources, they are entitled to their own separate savings account or sphere of wealth and to do what they want with most of what they earn. I concede that capitalism is necessary, and even good.

But it's still a game, that requires natural-born talent, an able body and mind, and a few luky rolls of the dice. Some things are okay to ration as according to that game; the size of the house you live in, the fanciness of your car, the tennis court, the swimming pool, the number of rooms in it can all be rationed that way, I suppose because there's not much of a better way to do it.

But not life or death. Life or death should not be dolled out so tenuously. So in its place I propose a fairer game, the Free-Market Medical-Treatment Basketball Tournament for Economic Liberty, Market-Based Distribution and Freedom!!!.

Everybody can don their fancy basketball shorts and a tank-top, and it's onto the court to play!

First thing we do is put everyone in the country onto teams of 6 (five players one alternate) with people who have their same ability level, which will be judged in the pregame period. You get a couple (free!!!) training sessions - you can choose whether or not you go - then other players vote on how good they think you are, and choose what team to put you on. If you drop the ball a few times it might not be good for your placement.

This game is played like every other basketball tournament, and through the tournament's play, all teams will be ranked against the other teams. They will be ranked from the best players, to the worst. All people regardless of age, weight and physical disability must play. If you're in a wheelchair - gonna be tough for you buddy! - but this is no less fair than how we ration resources or jobs in the real world. For example if you were born with Down's Syndrome and your IQ is 60 you're going to get a banking job, so you just have to try to cut it as well as you can. If you have poor motor skills, also too bad. Those with poor social skills don't get a handicap at work; they have to find a lower-paying job that suits them. Those with no training in basketball are, similarly, shit outta luck. That was your choice to not get trained there, buddy! Either that or you weren't good enough to make it to advanced classes. Those without college degrees don't get a pay bonus to compensate for their lack of knowledge!

But hey - you may say - really old people are at a total natural disadvantage over young people! They were once young, too, one could argue, but even so, you argue; this basketball tournament is a one time deal, and it's not their fault for the year they were born!

Tsk tsk sir. It's not a person's fault for the income level/community he/she was born into either. Some old people might be in good enough shape to hold their own - just as lots of poor people hold their own and get ahead. But we don't give you automatic pay raises or promotions because of where you were born.

Okay okay, fine, we can throw in a “minority scholarship” for middle-aged folks. They get a few free classes to get them up to speed, and we'll try to place the ones who give the most effort on teams with younger players who are a little better than they are, so that they are pushed a little harder to get in shape. (The younger players will howl and whine about the "unfairness" of it till our ears bleed. You know, that's affirmative action, which is racist. So we won’t do it often; just on a few select occasions.)

You say men have an advantage over women? Ah, you already know how we're likely to handle that.

After the first round of games, we do some 1-on-1 games to see if there are a few individual shooting stars out there who were weighed down by their team, for some additional shakeup.

Okay everybody! Lets play some basketball!

The people who score in the highest 30% of the tournament are our winners. Clearly the most deserving and determined people in our competition - Unlimited healthcare! They get their life-threatening conditions treated, obviously, and if they get tendonitis or shin splints well let them see some physical therapists to work on that, too. They get to see a psychiatrist or psychologist if they need one, and get whatever medication they want. Need an acupuncturist? Go for it! Need some massage work done? We'll provide that too. Hey -- YOU EARNED IT!!!

The people in the middle 40% can get whatever's left. We'll try to give them care for the most serious conditions, but if somebody in the top category is having his slipped disc looked at, you aren't exactly our top priority for that swollen ankle. Sure it looks bad but it's not gonna kill you, is it? Unless it's broken, you're gonna have to wait in line.

Those in the bottom 30% get nothing. Unless it's, you know, life threatening, like you're bleeding to death, then you can go to a hospital; but you have to prove it to us. You don't get regular physicals or screenings.

Sound fair?
Confident you'd do well in the competition?
It's at least as fair as things are with a totally market-based approach to healthcare. See in our society, we think the best players in the game of life have the liberty to do what they want with their success.

Fair enough for most things, maybe - BUT NOT FOR HEALTHCARE. Call your local representative and ask them to support a Public Health Insurance Option if you want something better for America.

Making Kombucha

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:42:07 GMT

I've been brewing my own Kombucha Tea lately so I made a video on how you do that:

A Shot in the Dark

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:54:07 GMT

Prediction: the reason that Sarah Palin is resigning from the governorship from Alaska is that something from her emails (which are part of the public record) as the governor of Alaska would incriminate her in a scandal, as she is fighting against their release. She's either hoping that in resigning and retiring from the spotlight she can avoid having their release by escaping public pressure to open them, or is hoping that she will be far enough from the spotlight that the turmoil after their release will not be as intense so she will have the chance of running for office again.

The higher you go in public office, the more you must clean up your act because you'll come under greater scrutiny. Politicians tend to rise slowly and therefore can "grow up" over time (think of George W. Bush's 1976 DUI arrest, 24 years before he became president when he was 30), but Palin was thrust into the spotlight so quickly and unexpectedly that she didn't have the chance to prepare, or at least didn't have the chance to let her past activities become old news the way most politicians college days, bad habits, DUIs and personal issues fade from importance.

**Update July 5, 2:00pm MT**

Sarah Palin's attorney released a statement threatening to sue for defamation any publications that allege Sarah Palin could have been involved in unsavory activities leading up to her resignation.

For her attorney to do so would be laughable, because Sarah Palin is a public figure and office holder, making her fair game for almost any kind of coverage or commentary by the First Amendment's guarantee to freedom of political speech. For any politician to win a lawsuit against the press for defamation would be almost impossible, and would certainly be an unprecedented decision that would change the way we cover politics in this country.

Aside from that, it really ruins Sarah Palin's image as a fighter as a tough-as-nails maverick governor who swims upstream. Sarah Palin has fronted an onslaught of allegations over her political career - ranging from the solidly plausible to left-field baseless criticism. She and those in her camp have complained repeatedly about attacks on her personal spending habits, her daughter's pregnancy, her intelligence and her competence and allegations of ties to Right-wing fringe or separatist groups. But this is something that all politicians deal with when they are widely known, and those on the far-right and far-left (Sarah Palin represents one of those camps) are most at fault. Barack Obama has faced repeated allegations that he isn't really a U.S. citizen or that he is a Muslim in league with terrorists, President Clinton faced rape and murder allegations while in office by the very same political camp that Sarah Palin is most popular in, and George W. Bush was accused of Plotting September 11, which probably takes the cake for how theoretically "damaging" a false allegation (if everyone believed it) would be.

Of course the media is going to speculate on Palin's resignation, because no politician in any prominent office in recent history has resigned without having faced a scandal or at least a serious personal issue equivalent to a cancer diagnosis. And Palin's utter lack of explanation (she said she didn't want to become a "lame duck" after informing everyone won't run for office again - something that could have been avoided simply by waiting longer to announce she wasn't running) for her move, coupled with her already divisive and controversial public image, make it one of the strangest political curiosities in recent history.

The threat from Palin is absurd, and is likely to spark another round of more intense speculation from the press rather than intimidate anyone into backing off. One thing her camp has continuously failed to do since she first emerged in prominence last year is to have any clue about what those outside the far-Right are thinking or doing. Most of the moves by her and the McCain campaign to seem bold or independent have come across as desperate or nonsensical to the American public. Her resigning from the governor's office may have been the the most bizarre yet - and a lawsuit against any media organization for defamation would really take the cake.

Compromising with the Uncompromising

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:48:51 GMT

From DailyKos: If the Republicans' idea of compromise [on healthcare] is 'drop[ping] their opposition to universal coverage' why can't our idea of compromise be 'dropping our determination to give a free Pony to every child on his fourth year checkup?' We'll meet in the middle at a single payer system. How 'bout that?"

Max Baucus at (202) 224-2651

Olympia Snowe at (202) 224-5344

Charles Schumer at 202-224-6542

Senator Edward Kennedy at (202) 224-4543

Senator John Rockefeller at (202) 224-6472

Senator Ron Wyden at (202) 224-5244

Senator Kent Conrad at (202) 224-2043

Senator Jeff Bingaman at (202) 224-5521

Senator John Kerry at (202) 224-2742

Senator Blanche Lincoln at 202-224-4843

Senator Debbie Stabenow at (202) 224-4822

Senator Maria Cantwell at 202-224-3441

Senator Bill Nelson at 202-224-5274

Senator Robert Menendez at 202-224-4744

Senator Thomas Carper at (202) 224-2441

Senator Kay Hagan (202) 224-3121

Welcome to the Senate, Al Franken!

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:25:54 GMT

A reminder of why the ideological Right was so virulently opposed to Al Franken as senator from Minnesota:

Most politicians intentionally avoid such spats as head-on debates with fringe figures like Ann Coulter; they don't win many friends beyond those who were already on your side, but they do win enemies. Meanwhile, it was Franken who wrote a book titled Lies, and the Lying Liars who Tell Them, about Fox News and political commentators from the right, including Ann Coulter. Franken did his homework and was very well-sourced and careful to avoid making points that are disingenuous or easy to refute, something that another icon of the Left, Michael Moore, often failed to do. But Al Franken wasn't likely to pry away any followers of the ideological Right for his work, and the very title of his book indicated he wasn't interested in making friends across the aisle.

On the other hand, Al Franken's is a demonstration of how much the Democratic brand was outperforming the Republican brand in 2008; try imagining Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity unseating an incumbent Democrat from any state.

Why I don't believe in Hell

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:21:56 GMT

To most people the philosophy of Hell is a non-issue. If you are agnostic or atheist or from a religion that doesn't believe in Hell, you think, why should one believe in some mythical place invented by some other group of people, with no evidenciary basis, and a lot of reasoning based on premises that can't be proved? If you are a believer you say of course there is a Hell, but I'm in the right church and I'm not going, so what do I care?

But if you grew up Roman Catholic, like I did, hell, taught as a physical place, is a founding part of your religion, and something you learn to fear. Whether you are Catholic or Protestant, Christian doctrine teaches that all people are sinners, and having even the slightest, tiniest unforgiven sin on your record means you are damned for eternity. Jesus is the atonement for your sin; accept Jesus as your Lord (meaning accept him as God), and because Jesus died on the cross, your record is wiped clean! He was punished in your place! By his love and mercy you are free!

The fate of your non-Christian family or friends notwithstanding, there are some hardships to accepting this with glee. Catholic doctrine teaches that most people lapse into "mortal sin" from time to time, so you must repent and go to confession to re-gain grace. Mortal sins are seen as a rejection of God so they aren't automatically forgiven like other kinds. If you die "in sin" before you get to confession, you go to hell. Mortal sins include big, obvious things like rape, murder, genocide, torture, adultery and intentionally offending God.

They also include everything sexual you can think of, even if it doesn't seem that harmful; in Catholicism, ALL sexual activity outside marriage (even if there is no penetration), masturbation, or even "deep kissing" (according to my church's youth group leader), are mortal sins. Even entertaining sexual fantasies can be a mortal sin. Acting on any sexual impulse the Church doesn't like is damnable, so if you are one of those rare individuals attracted only to the same sex, you are taught that you will either die a virgin, or find yourself, at many points in your life, in mortal sin you must repent.

Nowadays they don't teach the littlest kids about Hell. You grow up vaguely aware of the fact that the world's worst people go there, but it doesn't affect you or anybody you know. I remember telling my parents I thought the Book of Revelations was hooey because there's no way God would be so cruel. At Catechism they only talk about heaven until you're 13 or 14 years old - they don't want to piss off your parents by scaring you - and then they spring it on you when you're a hormoned teenager and you really want to do the things you'll be condemned for. That's when you learn that not only is there a real Lake of Fire somewhere in the universe for bad people like Hitler and Timothy McVeigh, but MOST people, far more than half, end up there: society is full of hellbound miscreants who are the either wrong on religion, don't believe in God at all, reject God at the end out of bitterness, stop going to church out of laziness or apathy, or most commonly, die in sin. (Like they have sex with their teenaged girlfriend before marriage, you'll be informed.) But you are one of the lucky few, your church instructors explain: you are Catholic, so don't have anything to worry about, just so long as you don't have the wrong kind of sex or have sex too early.

Well, not exactly. I knew I didn't have any choice but to have "the wrong kind" of sex, since I was attracted to men, and was reasonably terrified of facing either a loveless life or hellfire. I started to avoid hot things like campfires and ovens because they made me think of Hell. I remember resolving, at one point in my adolescence, that I would avoid sex forever, become a priest, or at least be some kind of a hermit, only rejoining society for Mass on Sundays. That hardly seemed like something God wanted for me - they always taught us that you feel God's plan for you deep in your heart, and my heart was not telling me that locking myself up to avoid temptation was it - but I figured God would at least understand why I had to do that. The urge to find love and a family, and yes, to have sex too, was gripping.

Then one day I happened across a book on Islam in my high school library. I was sixteen years old. It was called The Life of Muhammad, and must have been written by someone prejudiced in favor of Islam because I distinctly remember finding the random line: "Muhammad didn't believe sexuality was sinful, like the Christians did. He taught that it was a gift from God to enjoy."

Hallelujah! That was my answer! I was elated. Maybe I was wrong about Catholicism all along - purritannical old Catholocism - maybe Islam was the way to go! I had always had a hard time understanding doctrines like the Trinity or saints, and now here was this progressive, joyful, affirming faith, that probably didn't - I hoped - probably didn't have any problem with gay sex as long as you did it in a committed loving relationship akin to marriage.

Well, again, not exactly. And by that I mean that when I opened up the Qur'an there were far more vivid depictions of Hell than I could ever imagine, along with explicit condemnation of fornicators, idolaters and adulterers, and there were some pretty negative statements about homosexuality from every apologetic resource on Islam I could find Online.

By making myself aware of the existence of another faith, I was opening Pandora’s Box. Because with it, a famous line of thought called Pascal's Wager was blown to smithereens:

Pascal's Wager states that it is better to believe than to disbelieve. You can never "know" for sure if God is real, but belief is ultimately safer if you're wrong. If you choose to believe in God and He does not exist, you may have sacrificed a few worldly pleasures you'd rather have had but for the most part it's no loss. If you choose not to believe in God and he does exist, you face eternal punishment, which is infinitely bad. Any rational person would choose to believe.

Had I not considered other faiths I'd find Pascal's Wager compelling. There may not be a Fire and Brimstone God - most of the things I experience or observe lead me to believe that dogmatic, traditional Christianity is false - but with so much to lose, why not just go with it and save myself from the nasty consequences? There is the strict and forbearing God verses the all-loving God to consider, so I'll just live by the strict God's rules to be safe.

But now we put Islam, and its own strict God, into the mix. Fundamentalist Muslims believe that a person who worships Jesus Christ as God is worshipping a false God since Jesus was only a human prophet. Worship of something false is considered the ultimate, gravest sin in Islam, and anyone who does it goes to Hell. Pascal’s wager would insist you be Muslim to be safe.

But then Christians tell you Muslims are going to hell, because they deny Christ - all those who deny Jesus Christ burn forever in the Lake of Fire.

It gets worse, as I soon discovered. Protestants believe that Roman Catholics are hellbound for believing in the saints. Roman Catholics believe that Protestants (or at least Catholic apostates who become Protestant) are hellbound for forsaking the sacraments. Jehovah's Witness believe that anyone who isn't a Jehovah’s Witness is going to hell. Muslims think all the other groups are going to hell. All those groups think Muslims are going to hell.

I was paralyzed from believing anything anymore. I was terrified to pray to God, because I feared that I was more likely than not praying to the wrong god and committing an atrocious sin. I remember riding in a car with my mother once, staring at her face, and thinking God, whichever religion you come from, would you please just, at least, save HER?

The God I prayed to was a God I feared and hated - I realized that the Christian depiction of the damned as bitter and spiteful towards God, rather than just ignorant to him, could be right. I never asked to exist in the first place, and now I was entwined in this horrible trap in which nothing I could ever do would guarantee my safety from the most horribly unimaginable fate, a fate far worse than never having never existed in the first place. The "God Loves Everyone" theme I've heard all my life was no longer a guarantee - what if he doesn't love everyone? That seemed more likely than not. Many religions teach that God loves some and hates others. Could he just create a being for the sole purpose of tormenting it in fire forever? Would that be immoral, or is everything God does automatically moral just because he's God?

I had to figure out which church was most likely right, but they all seemed to have equal merit in the reasoning behind them; go to a Islamic website and you find all these reasonable, rational-seeming steps to explain why God having a son is just ridiculous, God dying on the cross is just ridiculous, and it's perfectly logically reasonable for someone to go to Hell for disrespecting the infinite being who created you by denying its existence or worshipping something else. Similarly, I would go to a Christian website, which would have lots of scriptural quotes explaining why there must be some awesome sacrifice - that of Jesus on the Cross - to redeem humanity, and that God doesn't want you to go to Hell, but simply has no choice if you reject him by rejecting Jesus. There was absolutely no way to know who was right and who was wrong. The only thing that was clear was that God made the stakes very high without endowing the universe with clear guidelines.

God, for me, was like the Jigsaw character who set up the traps in the Saw movies. You must figure out which box to get in, amidst incredible stakes, or face an awful doom when the timer on your life runs out, a trap door opens in the floor and anyone who wasn't standing in the "right" spot or on an acceptable range of spots will plunge into lava. Find the right religion or burn for eternity. As in the Saw films, the tape recorder gives you some convoluted argument about how really you got yourself here through your own deeds, that there is some moral lesson in this, that the being who put you here is actually benevolent. But really you are forced to play a game while different sources are providing completely different sets of rules, they all say they have the "official" rules but you have no way of knowing who is right, you are aware that the vast majority of people fail, your intellectual ability to uncover the secret or discern truth correctly is said to be determinet of your worthiness and you are informed that you will actually deserve whatever ultimately happens to you.

And the more of this confusing bullshit you expose yourself to hoping it will give you some answer, the more you realize that the possibility of pleading ignorance is gone, because you have had the unique opportunity to "know and reject" every single faith or version of God that is out there. Though you have to reject them all but one. You wish you had been born mindless, and that kind of perspective on the nature of the universe makes you bitter.

I grew up a devoutly religious person - far more spiritually-minded than my parents taught me to be. I looked for answers and questioned my thinking where most people would simply accept that what they mused or were born into was capital-T TRUTH. Ordinary people make up religious ideas for themselves all the time, and live them as if they were on authority. They think everything they believe came to them through their own church, but they innocently pick up bits from other religions here and there. They aren't aware of the contradictions entailed therin. Or when their preacher offers something that gives them comfort, they take it. For most people, faith and religion are processes of finding comfort and security. But my ability to do that was utterly gutted from me by this turmoil. I don't know if the God I prayed to when I was eight or nine years old was imaginary or not, but I have never gotten back the comfort and acceptance I once felt when I was young and prayed to that being.

I found a lot of comfort in Hinduism or Buddhism which, though are not without their punities, teach that everything is temporary. An atrocious, obvious sin in Buddhism sends you to a Buddhist hell for a long time, but when you paid your dues you get out. Lesser sins have lesser consequences. So maybe there's a chance that something somebody is taught in his own faith is imperative (like sacrificing a goat to God) is actually a horrible sin (most Hindus and Buddhists think killing animals is wrong) and you are punished for it thorough bad Karma. At least, then, that Karma is limited; a billion years from now, you aren't going to be facing the same agonizing punishment you faced 900 million years earlier all for innocently slaying that goat. As an effect of your deeds you may feel the pain the goat felt, to whatever extent your level of consciousness compares to the goat's consciousness - which could be awful, while it's going on - perhaps you cut yourself pretty badly - but you ultimately overcome it. The stakes are much lower, and it's much easier to believe that God or the gods or the Ultimate Spirit wants as many people as possible to do well.

Other parts of my mind will tell me that it was never a worry to begin with. These are the rational reasons religions believe in Hell the way they do: not because it's true, but to survive. Early Christians were eager to convert the Jews - we know through sound historical records how bitter, even hateful, Christians were toward those who didn't convert - who didn't accept Christ's divinity and refused to join their Christian movement. How do you confront the Jews? Voila - tell them that anyone fails to accept Christ, even if he or she believes in God, will burn. It's directed right towards Jewish people.

Similarly, when Islam was founded 600 years later, the new faith was being laid down on a cultural crossroads of Christians, Jews and idol-worshipping polytheists. How do you confront them? Tell them that the trinity is false, their idols are false, there is only one God, and if they fail to join your movement by hanging on to those beliefs, they will burn, because their own beleifs happen to be the single most offensive concept to God, more offensive than any grotesque deed or sin.

I could also point out how beleifs in Hell are based largely on scripture, and scripture accumulated over long periods of time through ambiguous circumstances. The people who wrote the Bible 30-70 years after Jesus died had never even met him. The Qur'an was committed to memory for a generation before it was scrawled onto tree bark and finally on paper. How could either religion trace a definite, infallible link to God? And we know the Christian Gospels become more critical of the Jews in order that they were written - Mark is very friendly to Judaism; John, written decades later, says that only those who accept Christ will be saved. So religions must drift towards being more punitive than their founders intended them to be.

Still, there is always a what if to plague me. I don't believe in anything now; I am formally agnostic - I hope that there is some kind of continuation of life after death and I think it's possible but I can't put money on that. But the neural pathways that were formed during my teenage years of terror are still there. You could say I have a religious kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome, more commonly known as "Catholic Guilt" that many ex-Catholics never manage to overcome, because sometimes certain images or ideas set me off and I can't get them out of my head for days or weeks.

But my ultimate understanding of the issue is, if there is a God, for that God to send nonbelievers to Hell would be immoral. And if God, though infinite, is immoral, it would be immoral to worship him, though the smart thing to do and the thing for anyone to do would be to capitulate because the stakes are so high. It's a moral conundrum of the most profound kind, and impossible for me to accept except out of sheer terror. When I am feeling calm and rational, it's easy to step out of it.

No "beleif" is total; every person sort of beleives in the supernatural and sort of doesn't. That's an idea I'll get into more fully another time, but I think that even the most ardent athiest has a grain of faith from time to time, and the most ardent beleiver has doubts. We evolved to beleive in God and its impossible to excize that part of our brains, even if it isn't based on fact. But we are also rooted in the material world, even if we think our souls are something else.

So I am agnostic, and I tend to leave unknown things to the unknown, rather be disingenuous by professing beleif. But the part of me that does beleive is certain, in spite of some reservation, that there could not possibly be a hell.

To me, the worst part of the doctrine is not how ardently people believe in it - I can understand why people become fixated on something that is obviously so terrible, and if you think it's real, then extremely important that you know so to avoid it. No, it's how lightly they take it, or to be more specific, how gleefully they discuss bad people going there or how convinced they are that, if its real, it's a good thing. Or that people who go to hell "deserve" it; that it isn't some cruel aspect of the universe that we must avoid, but is rather an outlet for justice for even petty things. I hear people talk about murderers or thieves going to hell, or wishing it for political enemies. Wishing damnation upon another human being is far worse than wishing them death - its certainly the worst thing a person could ever will. I understand why "God damn" was once the gravest cuss word that a person could utter.

Headlines from 4:30pm Thursday, June 25

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:35:37 GMT

Drag me to Hell is amusing but troublesome

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:49:23 GMT

From a film-critical standpoint, Drag me to Hell is entertaining. It achieves what it sets out to achieve - to be a shocking, fun, jumpy and self-satirical film. It requires a hefty dose of suspension-of-disbelief, but remains within its boundaries. Every bit of information offered early on is important later, and a rich and funny scene with the protagonist and her soon-to-be in-laws ads a familiar element to an otherwise horror film. Some parts of Drag me to Hell are so gross or playful that they'd be jarring in a serious film, but this movie is delightful for those who like gratuitous terror, green vomit and slimy mucus pouring from rotting corpses. You get the sense that the director is poking fun of other horror flicks with the utter cheesiness of some of the dialog.

The film has little literary or social value; to take anything in it seriously would mean admitting that many of the ethnic portrayals in the film are so hyperbolized in their stereotyping that it becomes problematic. Get ready for the familiar trope of wise brown-skinned people representing the mystic or supernatural, because there is a lot of it here. (See Michael Clarke Duncan as the feeble-minded yet holy giant Black prisoner in The Green Mile, Brandon Walters as the earthy, Aborigines boy in Australia or Tourism Australia's commercial, or Gloria Foster as the all-knowing Black oracle in The Matrix trilogy to see more of what I'm talking about.) This film has an East Indian psychic as its main spiritual guide, and an even more powerful Latina psychic medium who does a dramatic spiritual battle with the antagonist demon. Meanwhile, we cannot leave out the utterly cliché curse from an old Gypsy witch with one eye, which sets the film's plot in motion. One scene where the protagonist visits the Gypsy home is painfully stereotypical; everything you ever associated with Gypsies: a candle-lit room, boisterous laughter, copious amount of food and reveling, walls utterly covered in adornments, Eastern European iconography, framed pictures of deceased relatives set on empty table places, and huge numbers of people packed in a small space are randomly present inside the otherwise-inconspicuous home. There is even someone playing a fucking Gypsy Violin in there while they eat dinner, for chrissakes.

Every character seems to be enveloped in a cliché social archetype; the young university professor boyfriend who is a rationalist and initially dismissive of his girlfriend's interest in the supernatural, the grotesquely-wealthy, self-absorbed and restrained parents who live in an immaculate home and want their son to marry into high society, the boss figure, played by a Jewish actor, who is fixated on nothing but the bottom line, the career-hungry but groveling Asian who will do anything for a promotion is the protagonists main competitor at work, and the once-chubby former farm girl who wants nothing but to prove herself. And lets not forget our two main psychics, who are familiar with this kind of gypsy curse, and turn to esoteric books to inform us everything we need to know about every kind of supernatural being or phenomenon.

The film is fun if you're willing to laugh at it, with spine-tingling demon scenes and lots of startles. But I'm not a film critic - I wouldn't post an entry here to discuss a film from the standpoint of is it entertaining or not.

What moved me in Drag me to Hell is the depraved immorality of the universe itself. The ultimate premise of the film is grotesque: it accepts a Christian-Islamic version of an eternal hell of flames and lava, but hell is not where a person goes because of evil deeds or even lack of faith; in this film, you go to hell because you are the owner of a cursed object you don't even know is cursed, and three days after obtaining said object you are pulled down alive into the fire. What bothers me most is how lightly the idea of going to hell is taken in a film that is ultimately meant to be amusing and funny.

That's why Drag me to Hell is so troublesome, whether you see that troublesomeness as a good thing or a bad thing. I can tell you without spoiling the plot that at least one innocent person does get "dragged to hell" in this film, in the very beginning - a young Mexican boy, not even ten years old, who, too young to even comprehend what he was doing, "stole" a necklace from some Gypsies and was not allowed to give it back. It is 30 years before the rest of the film's plot takes place, and introduces the psychic Shaun San Dena, who calls after the demon that they will meet again after it successfully claims the terrified young boy.

This film is like a cross between a traditional horror films and films that portray epic spiritual battles between heaven and hell, like The Prophesy and Constantine - each with its own theological universe - except that Drag me to Hell battles the forces of hell with no theological universe beyond a viewer's speculation and no explanation of good. Throughout the film there is no mention of whether or not God exists, or why there is no good force that can overpower this particular demon. There is no mention of why the lamia (the evil demon that fetches the miserable souls) is allowed to travel to and from hell but the human inhabitants are stuck there for eternity. There is no explanation as to why demons, who are themselves revealed to be somewhat mortal, lack infinite power but hell itself contains infinite power to trap forever the people the demons catch. There is no explanation as to how it is different being pulled there alive through a portal in the ground than to go there after death as consistent with traditional theology.

I'm rather shocked that the film got away with being rated PG-13. If full-frontal-nudity or bloody violence is considered too traumatizing for young children to handle, then surely the thought of someone their age being sucked down to burn for eternity is more likely to give them nightmares. The most disturbing movie clip of my entire childhood was the Hell scene from All Dogs Go to Heaven and this one was far, far worse.

There are a few ironies in the plot that the writers simply overlooked. It is strange that a woman who grew up on a farm raising pigs would later identify as a PETA-friendly vegetarian who is shocked by the idea of slaughtering animals, as the film later explicitly states. It's also strange that the Gypsy woman, who was presumably an ordinary human, becomes more or less a disembodied stand-in for the powerful demon at different points of the film - or why she is so adamant during a time later in the film (I will try not to give too much away) to prevent the protagonist from putting a meaningless coin on a tombstone.

They are really excessive on the sound effects in some places; the dog growling sound while the old woman tries to bite the protagonist just puts it over the top.

There is no explanation as to why the protagonist didn't tell her boyfriend more of what was going on - there is first an easy enough assumption that she kept it secret because he wouldn't understand, but when he later reveals that she did tell him part of the story off-camera, and he seems to beleive her, it leaves a question on how some of the tragic events of the film could have been avoided had he known more.

If you watch the trailer carefully you could probably use it to guess how the movie ends.

72% of Americans Support a Public Option - Conservative pundit George Will admits it would cut costs

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:06:15 GMT

If the public were to directly vote on a government-run option for health insurance, the initiative would win in a landslide, according to a recent New York Times poll that only reaffirmed what we already knew from other polls about public support for this plan. Not only does the public option have a mandate among the general populace, but even fifty percent of Republicans support it.

Yet it still may not pass. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com explains:

The bottom line is that the health care debate is not really being played out in the court of public opinion. If it were, Congress would pass a robust plan with a public option that was funded by raising taxes on cigarettes, booze, and people making over $250,000, and we'd live happily ever after (or not). Rather, this is a behind-the-scenes fight at the committee level, where certain senators who have ample financial incentives to please the insurance industry have a disproportionate amount of control over the process.

I'm generally not one to carp about special interest money -- seeing politics through that lens is often an overly reductive formulation that serves as a catch-all excuse any time Congress does something you don't like. But on something like the public option, which has broad public support and which would probably reduce -- not increase -- the long-run bill to the taxpayers, it is just about the only way to explain what's going on in Washington.

How shameful would it be for this plan to fail?

Here's another entry from fivethirtyeight where Nate Silver says essentially what I said in my last post about healthcare:

George Will Admits Public Option will Cut Costs.

Nate explains that George Will's argument is essentially that: of course government would do better than private insurance companies, because they have no need to make a profit, and that's unfair competition.

Which essentially means, we are ideologically opposed, even though your camp is technically more right on the facts. And what I'm saying is, ideological opposition is ideological opposition, so why turn around and use false factual arguments to back that up?

It doesn't follow!

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:35:14 GMT

I'm running into a common breakdown when discussing healthcare policy with economic conservatives. They are people who believe that taxation to pay for government programs is unfair or immoral, and because of that belief, argue that any form of government-provided healthcare is bound to fail and dig up a bunch of statistical or factual points about why they think it would. Or to be more accurate, they think adjusting our already-public/private system by creating a government-sponsored public healthcare option is a "step in the wrong direction" and therefore bring up points about why they think it would waste money and lead to worsening health conditions. There are rapid shifts from moral to factual arguments.

This is akin to discussing theology based on someone's personal interests:

Person A: I know there is a god.
Person B: How do you know?
Person A: Because there should be something to right the wrongs in the world.

There may be a god, or there may not - I'm not trying to get in to that argument - but the above argument is a non-sequiter. Just because you want something to be so doesn't mean it is.

Similarly, just because you think that taxing income to provide healthcare for low-income people represents what you call an immoral redistribution of wealth - a power that the government has no legitimate claim to - doesn't mean that using a government program to provide better healthcare to our 50 million uninsured people could only do so by worsening healthcare for everyone else.

I doubt that many economic conservatives are even fully aware that their passionate opposition to a government health insurance provider - that they still oppose to even if it were, for the sake of conversation, completely self-supporting and not require tax dollars - is based on their desire to see society structured in a certain way but not actual facts or interests. But it would be hard to argue that the uninsured's interest in getting access to better healthcare outweighs a private insurance company's interest in their profits, or their own asthetic preference for private over public entities - and that their passion in opposing it is really proportional to how destructive they honestly think it would be.

To be fair, there are people on the other side of the aisle who make similar leaps. Some want a public option because they would rather buy in to that option and have their money go into a common public plan than a private entity, which they consider immoral. Others dislike the private sector in general, or just want to stick it to those mean rich guys. But I consider this more of a European-style leftist attitude than one of American liberalism, which, excepting a few hardliners, is open to the market if that's the best way to solve the issue we want solved.

Also to be fair, I am sure there are some opponents of government-subsidized healthcare who reached that conclusion out of reasoned analysis rather than a need to fit their observations into a predetermined ideology, and there are also liberals who support government healthcare for ideological reasons - one of the main reasons why I and most other liberals want to increase access to healthcare is that we consider 50 million uninsured Americans to be morally unacceptable. So it is a moral argument. But we have sought out, and would consider, any number of a wide variety of plausible solutions to expanding access. Single-payer would be the preferable option for many liberals, but we'd be willing to compromise for a public option in a private market if it were more feasible or more likely to make it through the political process. We'd be willing to consider a variety of options if it could be argued better than how it is working now. I think you could argue that we are operating under a pragmatic concern rather than a moral one - we'd be up for anything if you can convince us that it makes healthcare better for everyone and expands the number of people who have access to it.

The scarcity argument does not work for me - healthcare is a service, and is therefore as scarce as monetary resources spent on healthcare put in the right places. The scarcity argument would only in economies that have no expendable income or economies that aren't wasting the vast majority of dollars already spend on healthcare - maybe Africa or Southeast Asia, where people have a hard enough time paying for food. We do not need to "ration" healthcare - a buzzword of the Right - when we live in an extremely wealthy society that has as many resources for healthcare as we provide. Putting money into healthcare on behalf of those who currently do not have access could certainly lead to an increase in the number of doctor's offices, doctors and nurses and other medical staff, medical research and resources. Scarcity is only limited by the number of people employed in the profession and the efficiency with which we use those resources. Furthermore, giving low-income people access to preventative care would reduce the need for delayed care which is more expensive and uses more resources - which is the single most important issue I and most liberal advocates of healthcare reform will talk about. It is perfectly reasonable to believe that shifting the system around and encouraging people to see a doctor sooner would ultimately reduce the scarcity of healthcare in America - and it's what most economists and experts say anyway.

I've heard the scarcity argument from six or seven people now, who insisted that any government intervention in healthcare would mean it is being "rationed," and it seems to be more of something fed by university economics departments than a real-world analysis, or in some cases even a scare tactic. They have the need to fit the same basic principles to everything because doing so tends to put factual arguments in a framework of their moral philosophy. I didn't graduate with a degree in economics so I can't name any philosophy that argues that in some cases, in an industry that is a service rather than a good, scarcity is limited by how much much energy we choose to spend and not a physical property, but if I did know, I'd name that.

Tell your legislators to support a public option!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:26:31 GMT

I'm sure that few of you are unaware of the healthcare crisis facing the United States; American healthcare is more expensive than healthcare in any other nation on Earth, yet we provide coverage to fewer people than any other developed country. We also have shorter lifespans and poorer health due to incomplete coverage than most other developed nations.

One of the focal points of Barack Obama's presidential campaign was a public option for health insurance.

What's a public option? A Public Option creates a publicly-owned health insurance provider. It gives individuals the choice to buy health insurance from the federal government if private companies refuse to insure them or do not charge reasonable rates. It would not be free, but would more than likely cost less than private insurance for the same product. There would be no "pre-existing condition" clause and you would not have to "qualify" for this insurance. Meanwhile, a public, not-for-profit system would have less incentive to find excuses from paying for parts or all of an individual's medical care. It could be scaled so that low-income people pay a reduced rate.

Expanding affordable health insurance coverage lowers healthcare costs for everyone. Expanded coverage means hospitals are not forced to foot the bill when uninsured people allow themselves to get sicker and sicker until they are hospitalized, but cannot afford to pay the hospital for treatment. The hospital must raise treatment costs for everyone to avoid debt. Treatment would be cheaper if the same people had insurance coverage and got early treatment which costs much less.

Perhaps most importantly, a public option would add competition to the healthcare system. If the government could come out with a better product at lower cost, people would flood into that system and pressure private companies to come up with better deals or find ways to cut costs. But if the government option was failing, or if individuals didn't want to choose the public option, the private markets would still be there. It allows the public and private center to provide checks and balances on each others' runaway costs.

The public option is a great compromise between a nationalized, single-payer system used in Europe and most developed countries, and private insurance that is currently failing in the United States. It doesn't abolish the existing market, and incorporates free-market principles of competition, so escapes the heavy political opposition that "socialized" single-payer healthcare has.

But moderate Democrats in "purple" states are now capitulating to Republicans and insurance companies who oppose any form of public option - so while 75% of Americans support an extensive reform of the healthcare system so that everyone can be covered (scroll down after link for healthcare section), our elected leaders are compromising to a system that would attempt to limit the cost of health insurance but couldn't possibly cover everyone and would make it easier for health insurance companies to find loopholes in new regulation. The political pressure is too strong for the government to avoid passing reform legislation, but they may ultimately do so in a way that siphons off that public will without leading to real change.

President Obama still supports a public option, but the American Medical Association, the largest lobbying group for doctors, and the health insurance industry have come out in opposition, and are joined by an increasing number of elected officials including Democratic senators. Even Tom Dashle, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader, is saying that though he thinks a public option is vital, Democrats may have to compromise by scrapping it.

This is going to come down to who can howl louder. Can you?

Dear Senator Bennet:

I am deeply troubled to hear that many Democrats are abandoning President Obama's call for a public option for health insurance. Adding a public option is the minimum acceptable amount of reform to expand access to healthcare.

Healthcare is the greatest challenge that our nation faces from one decade to the next. I vote in the primaries as well as in general elections, and always support candidates who beleive in that the choice to have health insurance should be universal.

A public option is, in itself, a compromise with free-market advocates who oppose single-payer healthcare. It leaves private insurance plans in place and gives each American person or family a choice. What could be a better way to synthesize all interests than to leave both public and private options on the table?

MOST Americans support expanding choice in health care. We do not need to further a compromise with conservatives by gutting healthcare reform of its intent to create a systemic change. According to all the rececnt polling, numbers on the order of three quarters of Americans are on board with a drastic overhall of the healthcare system in order to make universal coverage possible. We need a public option to put pressure on private providers to lower their costs and improve the product!

I speak to my family and friends on this issue, and even individuals far more conservative than I am are in support of a public option.

How tragic would it be if our elected officials were so gutless as to let the majority interest fail for the interests of a few very rich and powerful institutions.

I hope I can count on your support for a public option, and that you will give the president your support and encourage your colleagues in the Senate to do so as well.

Sincerely,
Matthew Pizzuti
Boulder, Colorado

Colorado Senators:

Mark Emery Udall
Mark Udall for Colorado
P.O. Box 40158
Denver , CO , 80204 United States
Colorado Democratic Senator
email

Michael Bennet
2300 15th St., Suite 450
Denver, Colorado 80202
Phone: (303) 455-7600
Toll Free: (866) 455-9866
Fax: (303) 455-8851
Colorado Democratic Senator
email

Moderate Democratic and Republican senators on the fence:

Claire McCaskill
DC Address: The Honorable Claire McCaskill
United States Senate
717 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-2504
DC Phone: 202-224-6154
DC Fax: 202-228-6326
Missouri Democratic Senator
email

John Tester
Helena
Capital One Center
208 N Montana Avenue, Suite 202
Helena, MT 59601
Phone: (406) 449-5401
Fax: (406) 449-5462
Montana Democratic Senator
email

Arlen Specter
Philadelphia
600 Arch Street
Suite 9400
Philadelphia , PA 19106
Main: 215-597-7200
Fax: 215-597-0406
Pennsylvania Democratic Senator
email

Olympia Snowe
U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe
Maine Republican Senator
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202) 224-5344
Toll Free in Maine: (800) 432-1599
Fax: (202) 224-1946
email

Mary Landreiu
Hale Boggs Federal Building
500 Poydras Street
Room 1005
New Orleans, LA 70130
Voice: (504) 589-2427
Fax:(504) 589-4023
Louisiana Democratic Senator
email

Susan Collins
Augusta State Office:
68 Sewall Street, Room 507
Augusta, ME 04330
Main: (207) 622-8414
Maine Republican Senator
email

Kay Hagan
310 New Bern Avenue
Raleigh, NC 27601
Phone: 919-856-4630
Fax: 919-856-4053
North Carolina Democratic Senator
email

Blanche Lincoln
912 West Fourth Street
Little Rock, AR 72201
(501) 375-2993
Fax (501) 375-7064
Toll Free 1-800-352-9364
Arkansas Democratic Senator
email

Tom Carper
300 South New Street
2215 Federal Building
Dover, DE 19904
Phone: (302) 674-3308
Fax: (302) 674-5464
Delaware Democratic Senator
email

Mark Warner
5309 Commonwealth Centre Parkway
Suite 401
Midlothian, VA 23112
Phone: 804-739-0247
Fax: 804-739-3478
Virginia Democratic Senator
email

Other Heavy-Hitters

Harry Reid
Las Vegas
Lloyd D. George Building
333 Las Vegas Boulevard
South, Suite 8016
Las Vegas, NV 89101
Phone: 702-388-5020
Fax: 702-388-5030
Nevada Senator, Senate Majority Leader (Democratic)
email

Nancy Pelosi
Office of the Speaker
H-232, US Capitol
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-0100
San Francisco Congresswoman, Speaker of the House (Democratic)
email

Cable Network Website Screenshot Comparison

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:18:32 GMT

It is near noon on Monday, June 15, 2009. President Obama has just finished addressing the American Medical Association calling for healthcare reform. Iran is boiling over as reformists spill onto the streets protesting suspicious election results giving incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the vote. Early word indicates that some protesters have been killed by police.

Here's how the networks have the news of the day:

Populism + Racism + Nationalism; is Geert Wilders the Next Hitler?

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:09:11 GMT

In 1933, Adolph Hitler rose to power in Germany by popular vote.

Hitler was more than a Right-Wing ideologue. At his core he was a populist, lining up with German workers and arguing that the banking class was getting rich on the backs of the poor during the worldwide Great Depression. He was fiercely defensive of those he beleived were his people, and ideologically communitarian in supplanting individualism with his sense of "common good."

Hitler's fatal flaw - the one that elevated him from nationalistic socialist despot to being reviled as the most barbaric murderer in human history - was that the people he grouped as worthy of the "common good" didn't include everyone. Not everyone qualified to benefit from Nazi social programs, and not all German residents even qualified as citizens in Hitler's Germany. Membership in Hitler's ideal society was based on genetic and ideological criteria; one had to be white, healthy, heterosexual, German-born, non-handicapped and well-assimilated into German culture. Hitler hunted down communists and socialists, and bore a special hatred for Jews, who, under the guise of the war, he exterminated in unprecedented numbers along with other "undesirables."

Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, is someone to watch. His ideology - similar to Adolph Hitler's in being, at its core, common enough to win votes among ordinary blue-collar social conservatives, but appearing in an extremist far-Right manifestation - can be characterized as economically libertarian, but with a strict anti-immigration bent. His special enemies are Muslims. He is an athiest but supports changing Article 1 of the Dutch Constitution replacing equality under the law to cultural dominance of Christian, Jewish and Humanist values. New mosques and Islamic schools would be banned under Wilders' agenda, and Turkey would be prevented from joining the European Union for its Muslim population. He claims that he would tolerate moderate Muslims in theory, but denies that moderate Muslims can exist because he beleives the Qur'an's scripture does not support tolerance. Wilders claims that moderate or liberal Muslims do not follow the Qur'an by letter and should be forced to publicly admit they are not actually Muslims to be counted as legitimate Dutch citizens.

Wilders is a controversial figure and has been banned from entering the United Kingdom because of his anti-Muslim views (Britian routinely bans foreign public figures it considers extremely racist, homophobic or hateful from entering the country). But on June 7 this year, Wilders' Party for Freedom won 750,000 votes, or 17 percent of the electorate, translating to 4 seats of Netherlands' 25 in its constituency to the European Parliment in a wave of Right-Wing victories across Europe. His nationalistic movement has real power in an otherwise tolerant and liberal country. His party currently holds 9 seats in the 150-seat Dutch legislature from 2006. Then it earned 5 percent of the popular vote - which means it has shown real growth in the last two years.

Wilders' views have made him a natural target for Muslim extremists, which has given him ammunition in his political claims that Muslims are intolerant and ill-fitting in Dutch society. It's hard to say how far he would actually go if he were given power; comparing him to Adoph Hitler exactly would be an exaggeration, as it seems unlikely that he would go farther than revoking the citizenship and deporting those on his cultural enemies list. Still, doing so would be seen worldwise as a gross and atrocious human rights violation. And he's riding in among a series of conservative and ultra-right-wing victories across Europe this June amidst an economic downturn.

Cancer is contagious -- wha!?

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:29:45 GMT

The first time any of us witnessed a cancer patient - a bald-headed peer in our elementary school, an aunt or grandmother with an appointment for a mastectomy, or a grandpa who got a dark, funny-looking mole removed - a reassuring adult explained that cancer isn't contagious. Cancer is our body's own growth turned against us, sparked by a precise series of genetic mutations that debilitate a cell's self-regulation but fail to kill it. It escapes immune detection because it is our body's own cell; a cancer cell transfered to a new body would be recognized as foreign and pulverized by vigilant white blood cells.

Ther's also the problem of getting an intact cancer cell into another person's healthy tissue in the first place. Viruses spread because they are are extremely small packages of genetic material that can float through the air or wait on dry surfaces, hardy because they were never really "living" from the start. Bacteria are contagious because they can grow outside the body, can wait on skin, thrive in saliva or feces, and can often survive drying and re hydration by turning themselves into hardy spores. But a cancer cell is, first and foremost, a dependent tissue cell from a multicellular organism, which needs to be inside an organism to survive. It would have to be carefully detached alive, kept moist and immediately implanted directly into the deep tissue of another organism to recover and begin growing. When cancer spreads through a single person's body in a malignancy, it does so by traveling through her or his own nourishing blood or lymphatic channels, never emerging outsisde the body.

There are a few kinds of cancers caused by a virus, including cervical cancers, genital cancers (usually caused by the Human papillomavirus) and Kaposi's Sarcoma, found in people with advanced HIV infections and the elderly. Clusters of cancer cases have sprung up in rare anomalies where a virus is thought to have been the cause. Many common viruses lead to increased cancer risks - for example mononucleosis, caused by the Epstein-Barr virus which virtually everyone gets, is linked to an increased risk of developing leukemia. But in all these cases it is the virus that is contagious, not the cancer itself.

But there are two kinds of cancer that are actually contagious in and of themselves, spreading as living cancer cells from one organism to another. One is responsible for landing the Tasmanian devil on the endangered species list and threatens to wipe out that species.

Tasmanian facial tumor disease, image from the Public Library of Science

Tasmanian devils have the unfortunate habit of biting each other on the face while feeding and mating, often drawing blood. That allows living cancer cells of devil facial tumor disease to be implanted directly into the facial tissue of another Tasmanian devil. The tumors are fast-growing and kill the animal by overwhelming its face and preventing it from eating, leading to starvation. The disease has already affected between 20 and 50 percent of the Tasmanian devil population and has mutated into several different strains. But upon a genetic analysis of one of those tumor cells, you would find neither a fungus nor bacteria, but rapidly-growing Tasmanian devil cells from another individual.

The other kind of contagious cancer is the Canine transmissible venereal tumor, affecting dogs, foxes and coyotes. It spreads by sexual intercourse and affects the genitals and occasionally the face. It is estimated to have originated from a couple hundred to a couple thousand years ago, meaning that the original host's own cells long outlived it; its cells continue to survive, as a pathogen, in other canines to this day.

Transmissible cancers break the rules of cancer by spreading from individual to individual, but are also unique among contagious diseases because they originate in an animal among its own cells. It would be as if a bump on your skin, part of your body, grew into a disease that started planting itself in other people and killing them. Anyone who got infected with your cancer would contain all of your your mutated DNA in their tumors - they'd essentially be dying of you, as a parasitic disease.

Our Treatment of the NY World Trade Center Site is Weird

Sat, 23 May 2009 02:00:16 GMT

I'm somewhat of an urban planning and architecture junkie, always talking about what should be built on a given site downtown, always cheering increased density or critiquing whether a new building is good or bad. I'd say it's my second interest besides politics (or maybe third behind politics and plants).

But there are a few places in the world where politics and urban planning intersect, and foremost is the redeveloped Word Trade Center site in New York City.

I think the U.S. set itself up for failure when it made re-building the World Trade Center a matter of national pride in the face of 9/11. Of course I was there cheering it along at the time, but if we'd had the foresight we would have known that the issue was too political for anything to get done quickly, especially when the speed of redevelopment, too, became part of the politics. The U.S. government had no control over what was under the local jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the Port Authority was not a good mediator of nationwide politics. Now we know that on the 10-year anniversary of the 2001 attacks, the spot will remain a construction zone.

In late 2001, mythologizing 9/11 seemed the right thing to do. Anything suggested in its name was rammed through without debate; the government outright gave $7 billion to victims' families (1.8 million per person), then Iraq War rolled forward in spite of a total lack of supporting evidence, a wave of Republican election victories swept the nation even when Democrats were agreeing with them on foreign policy, and the federal government clamped down on civil liberties without a political backlash.

Meanwhile, we would have been better had we not concluded that the exact spot of the destroyed twin towers was the best place for the memorial.

People often sanctify the exact location of large-scale disasters; the city of Hiroshima, Japan built a "peace park" at the epicenter of the 1945 bombing, and the U.S. put a memorial in the center of Pearl Harbor, leaving the sunken USS Arizona in the ocean. If a disaster happens in a rural area - or is so widespread that an entire portion of a city is relocated - I think that's fitting to memorialize it on-site; take, for instance, Auschwitz. But we didn't put a memorial in the exact spot where John F. Kennedy was shot or where buildings were shaken to the ground in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake - it's not practical in a big-city setting. Nor do we bury people where they die; otherwise interstate highways and hospitals would be littered with tombs. It's sometimes better to relocate to a place of peace and quiet - like a nearby park - than to deal with the complicated process of memorializing deceased people in the middle of a busy thoroughfare or the economic center of the free world.

So somebody said the WTC footprints should be turned into its memorial, and everyone was forced to either agree or offend the multitudes of people who were emotionally caught up in the issue. I think the breakdown of real contemplation ultimately dehumanized the WTC victims, who were defined, politically, not by their lives but by the way and location where they died.

I don't think many people are emotionally connected to the office building where they work. Nor do they wish to be remembered by the fact that they died in a shooting or of cancer or of kidney disease or a car accident. Think about everything that is meaningful in your life today: your family, your home, your friends, your town of origin - if you were to be killed tomorrow, in, say, a violent robbery in a shopping mall across town from where you live, would that mall suddenly represent your life? Would you want your tombstone to be located in that exact Sacks Fifth Avenue, converted into an outdoor courtyard surrounded by remaining stores, busy streets and parking lots? Would you want your life to me memorialized as "Ohio's battle against cash robberies," something you had no relationship with before you were shot in a Toledo clothing store?

To me it seems weird to require a memorial at the site. And now we're dealing with a crisis: ten years have passed and nothing of significance has been built on the site, partially because of the lengthy cleanup, and partially because it's been so hard to work out the politics. They're building something that was first called Freedom Tower, 1,776 feet tall to memorialize the year of America's founding, and given a name that could have emerged straight from the Bush Administration's argument that 9/11 was not a tragic historic event launched by misguided extremists, but instead about free America verses all the evil un-free forces of the world. And due to the global financial collapse - coincidentally, itself centered in Lower Manhattan - the Port Authority cannot secure financing to start reconstruction of secondary towers. The Port Authority wants to build the tower bases first and fill them with retail - an urban planner's dream for maximizing the use of any high-profile urban space beneath a building - but is facing cries that it's wrong to locate retail so close to a memorial. It's "too commercialized," critics say.

Is a retail center any less commercialized than the current plan, for corporate office towers housing the offices of Wall Street companies?

This all would have been avoided by simply not locating the memorial on site. A place of reflection could have been in Central Park or even Battery Park, just a few blocks away and on the edge of the water - a beautiful site, every bit as high in profile as the trade center but more fittingly quiet.

Then, the Trade Center site could have been rebuilt with restored buildings that matched the impact of the originals. New York could get its iconic Twin Towers back. I personally would have updated the architecture and exposed more glass, and used something other than square shapes and flat roofs, but replicated the basic structure of the Twin Towers making use of the foundations already drilled into Manhattan bedrock. The plaza should have been filled with trees - and perhaps a fountain or pool or a plaque commemorating the site - put at the gateway of an elaborate transit center, embracing and living in the city rather than isolating itself. Lower Manhattan was, and still is, very much an epicenter of economic activity in the world. It should continue thus, making use of the extreme density and centralized location to build something as high-profile as it is busy.

The current plans I've seen for the restored Trade Center site clash with the planned memorial, which calls for reflection pools in the footprints of World Trade Center buildings 1 and 2 surrounded by supertall office towers. They're trying to build this peaceful, quiet, naturesque area in what is literally the most opposite location on Earth.

A number of weird fixations have happened since the 9/11 attacks. The hijackers who flew the planes died alongside their victims - and their bodies ended up among the rubble with the others. The excavation crews had been identifying remains through DNA testing to give remains back to the families - in tiny fragments, the size of a fingernail shaving or tooth. But remains that couldn't be identified as a victim were given a second barrage of tests, just to make sure they weren't from one of the hijackers. The need to punish the unpunishable (unpunishable because they are dead) is so intense that millions will be spent testing remains so someone can stomp on them or burn them or do some disrespectful thing to insult the murderers' memory. There is no popular religion, nor is there any philosophy held by nonreligious people, suggesting that what happens to a body after death has any bearing on the soul - in fact most religions teach the opposite. Yet real money is being spent to make sure Muhammad Atta's canine tooth is punished for his crimes.

Meanwhile, remember Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11 when the flight's passengers fought to regain control of the flight. The first plan for a memorial, called "crescent of embrace," was modified when critics said it was an insult to allude to a symbol in Islam in the memorial. Instead they will turn the crescent into a circle they are calling a "bowl", with a line to indicate the direction the plane crashed from. To me that seems an even weirder fetishization of the circumstances of 9/11 - you wouldn't immortalize the path of a car in a fatal accident or diagram bullet paths on a person's tombstone - but even that arrangement may go, since some have pointed out that the line points roughly towards Mecca.

If there wasn't going to be a 10-year delay before anything gets substantially off the ground, I wouldn't have criticized the decision to build the World Trade Center site the way it is being built. If preserving the footprints of towers 1 and 2 in the memorial is that worth it to somebody, let him have that - unless it means the deaths of nearly 3,000 people would be needlessly politicized and the memorial delayed. Now the more complicated scenario has happened. And now the twin towers, which once were the icons of New York City, will not exist.

I'm sure what eventually goes up will work, and be modern, and last a long time. They're pouring millions upon millions of dollars in resources into this development and we should hope that the people of New York get what they paid for just as they did the first time the World Trade Center was built. But one of the obstacles to plow through is there because of of a possibility that the Port Authority was unwilling to accept - of moving the memorial somewhere else, not using the exact footprints of the towers as reflecting pools.

Uh... that was predictable.

Thu, 21 May 2009 07:04:39 GMT

I just watched American Idol for the first time since I was in high school. It was the season finale of the program, and the first time an openly gay person has been in the top two so I figured an interesting social moment to watch.

The competition was between two very nice guys, both surely better-than-average when it comes to talent. They seem to have forged a real friendship and are very gracious, and for the first time I'm looking at pop culture without my usual tinge of bitterness that morality has so little bearing on who makes it and who doesn't.

But this is an analisys of who won and why. And what we had was, essentially, a popular preppy kid beating out the jaded, effeminate alternative kid who hangs out in the smoker's pit.

Consider it a microcosm of high school America, considering who would win prom king at your school:

One character is Kris, the gut-wrenchingly cute, popular, clean-cut preppy boy who gets straight A's. He's humble and friendly and the kind of guy the teachers just love.

Then we have Adam, who is gay and forward, a bit gaunt, sings "change is gonna come" and Queen, hangs out at the smoker's pit, wears eye makeup and dresses in black.

Remember that American Idol is a major area of interest for kids in high school, especially the kids of kids who get caught up in mainstream pop culture. Who do you really think is gonna win?

Before I saw this episode I rolled my eyes at the suggestion that Adam Lambert was something special; I'd seen him in photos. Is the emo gay guy who wears eye makeup and snaps really original? Compare him to the folksy, earthy guy who actually plays guitar and piano.

I thought the emo hair flip was cliche, and the eye makeup and gawdy clothing are narcisistic and over-the-top. Judging by image alone, Lambert is a supersized-version of every died-hair cigarette-smoking gay kid I'd ever seen with aspirations of being a pop star. I kind of rolled my eyes at people who were excited about him. I'd take the guitar player in plaid over the guy with eye liner any day.

But after watching the final episode, my impression was that Adam Lambert was head-and-shoulders more talented than Kris Allen. You'd hear a clip from Allen's performances and think he's not bad, then hear Lambert and think wow. He has a great stage presence and a rockstar quality that no amount of boy-band cuteness can overcome, even if Idol's viewing audience falls for the boy-band.

Lambert's superior talent is what made this notable. If Allen was better than Lambert, his victory would not only have been predictable, but unremarkable as well. But we had a mediocre performer beating a superior performer and nobody being too shocked.

Music is usually about being edgy and breaking the rules, not about being neat and perfect. I am sure the program's producers would have rather gone with Lambert, though I also suspect that he will be glad to be free of them.

TwitLog, 4Twits

Mon, 18 May 2009 02:04:29 GMT

I'm going to start a Twitter-style Video Blog.

It will be called, Twit-log. Twitlog on YouTube.

Now I'm blogging about my new blog on my other blog. How 21st Century!

The Coolest Political Web Graphic Ever

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:14:49 GMT

The coolest political web graphic ever comes from my favorite Online news magazine, Slate.com.

The graphic, here, represents Democratic and Republican senators as a bunch of blue or red dots, and, like a Facebook friendship network, draws lines between them if they are connected. The criteria is this: two senators are connected if they voted together at least 65 percent of the time in 2009.

The computer initially randomizes the dots but gradually moves them into a more "balanced" physical map - it pulls together those who are connected by a line, and pushes apart those who are not connected. Democrats and Republicans almost immediatly separate into two distinct camps. Some breakoffs appear: the two moderate Republican senators from Maine, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, isolate themselves between the parties. In some scenarios they even start in the Democratic cluster and graduately migrate outward to a position in the middle.

You can mouse over unlabeled dots to see which senator they represent, and the program will also highlight all other senators with direct links.

After a while, moderate Democrat Ben Nelson pops out of the Democratic pack, and Republican senator George Voinovich graduately migrates to the Democratic side of the Republican mass. Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter, the purple dot, is still more conservative than some Republicans but distinguishes himself from the pack as having few allies in either party - only 14 Republicans and one Democrat.

The scenario does not have any initial tendency to place the party extremists at any location in the map; the diehard liberals do not gravitate toward either the center or the far edge of their party's node, as might be intuitive. That's because almost all senators in either party are already connected to nearly everyone else in their own party, be they liberals, conservatives or moderates. But it's interesting to see who the real "mavericks" are, and there are only five. Hint: John McCain isn't one of them.

I left the window open for a solid half hour and the Democratic side was still bumping and nudging around a little bit to find a better equilibrium, though the Republican side was completely satisfied.

The Death Spiral of the Republican Party

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:32:06 GMT

I never thought I'd see the day when the Republican party came to be completely marginalized. Yet today as moderate Republican Arlen Specter leaves the party after it threatened to run an ultra-conservative against him in a primary, members of the party are collectively shouting "good riddiance." They don't need weak-willed moderates among their ranks! Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and John McCain can go too!

It's hard to figure out exactly what the Republican party considers "acceptable" given that a president who lays out what are essentially Ronald Reagan's tax policies is labeled SOCIALIST. The range of views they'll approve of are exceedingly narrow, and simultanneously vague. Activists have contradictory libertarian and authoritarian currents; what they call the decay of our morals is simultanneous with the installation of a fascist state.

Liberal Democrats are currently in love with a surprisingly incrementalist and balance-minded leader in Barack Obama, who manages to win their approval even with fairly pro-market and pro-business policies. He doesn't want to remake the market, he simply wants to patch it up, which is all the American left ever wanted. It's fair to say he has had his ideological counterparts on the Center Right, including John McCain himself, a group which constitutes the perhaps one third of the country that stands to the left of the 20% that still indentify as Republican. That group is exceedingly abandoning the Republican party, or are forced out.

It's hard to imagine what kind of candidate Conservative Republicans want to see elected. Sarah Palin frightened America with her lack of intellectualism and base rhetoric but the Right loved her. Yet her left-wing counterpart, probably somebody like Ralph Nader, wins no friends among Democrats.

I think this is the moment when the American Right finally realizes, once and for all, that what they always thought of as the destiny of America is an illusion; that we will continue to lose our identity as a white, Christian nation, and that the days of the Wild West and segregated South are over. The flat tax will likely never happen. We will never declare a formal allegiance to Christ or install the Ten Commandments plaques in all state capitol buildings. Meanwhile my generation has always perceived a steady march towards a progressive and tolerant society, towards increased secularism and diversity alike, and see that as inevitable now. America's future indeed looks more like modern Western Europe than the individualist's utopia they've always beleived in.

What will emerge in the place of the Republican party? It would be interesting to see the Libertarian party become elavated in status but the reality is the American electorate is just as opposed to ideological economic conservatism as it is to ideological social conservatism. That's especially true as Americans generally don't think taxes on the wealthy are too high, and like the programs those taxes pay for. I see the nationwide ceiling of a pure libertarian movement (without social conservatism) being twelve or fifteen percent of the electorate. Meanwhile something has to appeal to the social conservatism of the Evangelical movement - and a socially conservative party that is open to social welfare - essentially a Southern Christian populism - probably wins more support, by numbers, than a purely libertarian movement.

The biggest problem that any new party would face - including a new, re-made Republican party - is that it is easier for Democrats to take a step to the center and become the moderate party than it is for Republicans to do the same. That is increasingly true as the nation itself takes a step to the left, and as moderate Republicans defect and become moderate Democrats. If moderates in the Republican party leave, Conservative Republicans are left to select increasingly unapalatable far-Right candidates in their primaries.

It's ironic to hear the radical Right comparing Obama to a Nazi or a fascist (they use those terms interchangeably). The things that made the Nazi party dangerous were extreme racism, rabid nationalism that excluded many residents of the country from the national identity, the willingness to use violence or physical coersion as a political tool, and ambitious militarism. None of those things are remotely characteristic of Barack Obama's policies - indeed they are policies and sentiments that Barack Obama specifically and unambiguously opposes.

Can Good Urban Planning Reduce Racism?

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:19:27 GMT

Can good urban planning reduce racism? It's a pretty audacious point, but Nate Silver, numbers wizzard at fivethirtyeight.com who predicted the 2008 Presidential Election outcome to within fractions of a point, says so.

His argument is, essentially, that people living among those of other races and cultures have been shown, through fairly well-grounded scientific analyses, come out more tolerant. The first two thirds of Silver's presentation go over the scientific examination of where more people with self-identified negative attitudes towards people of another race (focusing on African Amerians) live. In this case, rural uneduated states that are traditionally associated with social conservatism had the most people citing race as their reason for voting against Barack Obama in 2008, and there Obama did the worst compared with Bill Clinton in 1996. (The states include Arkansas, Tennesee, West Virginia, Kentucky.)

The second part of the argument is that people in cities have more interaction with people of other races or cultures. That is obviously true because more diverse people happen to live there, but Silver also argues that a way the city is laid out can play a role in how often people walk around and meet their neighbors.

One possible counter-argument Nate Silver failed to address is the causality problem, or the chicken-or-the-egg argument. Do people living in rural areas naturally become more racist, or is it, rather, that racists choose to move to rural areas? Do people in a winding, suburban-style subdivision evolve to have more racially problematic attitudes over time or are those neighborhoods just a magnet for people who didn't want to live among blacks in an inner city? One could easily argue that "White Flight" to the suburbs in the 1960s left the tolerant white populations in the city while those seeking to escape the influx of non-white newcomers were less tolerant to begin with.

Still, it's fairly easy to see how growing up among people of other races and occasionally identifying them as part of your peer group would prevent stereotyping and vilification of those groups.

And to counter cries of "rampant black racism against whites" rural or socially Conservative circles launch at American black communities, this information indicates that white populations would have more negative attitudes towards people in another racial group than blacks or latinos would have towards whites, since it is easy to be white and never interact with a black person but relatively difficult to be a person of color and never interact with a white person in the United States.

Transportation Freedom Day

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:44:38 GMT

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articl...eedom0330.html

The Arizona Republic reports that the average American spends at least 3 months pay on transportation.

Libertarian organizations push Tax Freedom Day, which they say is the day that Americans have worked to pay off their tax burden. Now consider transportation freedom day - the day that you've earned enough to pay off the cost of getting to work. That includes buying cars, paying for car insurance, paying for gasoline and dropping extra dollars here and there for repairs. In most cases the two days are very close together - the tax burden costs around four and a half months of income while transportation costs are three and a half months on average.

The article says that sprawled cities or residents of suburbs spend far more on transportation than people in urban areas with subways or light rail. In Phoenix the day fell on March 23 but in San Francisco it was March 1. Houston paid until March 25 and Stockton, California paid until April 3.

This is part of why I argue that public transportation is a social justice issue. Owning a car is all but necessary to living and being employed in most cities, and carries with it a huge financial burden that raises the cost of living to, in many cases, higher than the wage-earner can afford in the first place. A low-income person obviously pays a far greater percentage of her or his income on gasoline than a high-income person, unless that person forgoes having a car and uses public transit when its available.

It's also a clear demonstration of why a progressive tax system is necessary and a "flat tax" would be intolerably immoral. If a poor person spends three months wages paying for gas, he or she should not be taxed the same rate as a rich person who only needed to spend one month's salary on that gas, and choose to spend the other two months' on a fancier car plus a few airplane tickets for vacation.

All these "freedom days" represent money spent on some necessity that goes entirely somewhere else. If you were to calculate "housing freedom day" for people paying rent (not mortgages) and add it to tax freedom day and transportation freedom day, you'd find that low-income people pay till a date later in the year than rich people do.

So when tax dollars are used to make transportation cheaper or faster, is that a positive or a negative? It might push your "tax freedom day" back by one day, but brings your transportation freedom day forward by two - in other words, leaving you with more cash in your pocket. But we spend billions of government dollars per year on roads and highways anyway, which means that including the most affordable forms of transit - trains and busses - so that as many people as possible can be able to use it, is a bare minimum when it comes to fairness.

See the full list of "transportation freedom days" by city here: http://www.uspirg.org/uploads/mE/PH/mEPHVUKABlbc94ShtPZrvQ/TFD-Metros.pdf

Anti-Tax Tea Parties in Perspective

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:33:47 GMT

This year on Tax Day, hundreds of thousands of people from across the country gathered at state capitol buildings, city halls, busy street corners and parking lots to protest government and Barack Obama's policies.

The "Tea Party Movement" draws inspiration from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American protesters dumped boxes of tea off a trade ship to protest British taxes on American goods, levied without American representation and without American benefit. The Boston Tea Party is known as a major political incident leading up to the American Revloution.

The modern tea party movement also draws inspiration from Conservative pundits and the Fox News Channel, who pose the vaguely directed protests as powerful movement sweeping the nation, attracting young and old.

The Denver Post published an estimate of 5,000 people gathered at the Colorado State Capitol building on April 15, drawing from the entire Denver Metro Area and representing one of the largest groups in the United States. Fivethirtyeight.com estimated that 300,000+ people attended Tea Parties across the United States on April 15.

Any movement that inspires nationwide protests has far more supporters than are present during protests, as one could easily argue that far more than 300,000 Americans oppose taxes, Barack Obama or corporate bailouts.

But I still say that the numbers are hardly significant, in light of another kind of gathering that occured just 5 days later on April 20.

Remember that the Denver Metro Area drew just 5,000 protesters on April 15. Then on April 20, over 10,000 people gathered on the University of Colorado campus to smoke pot publicly at 4:20 pm. I love big gatherings of people so I had to be there, and captured these photos (click to enlarge):

Looking East:

Looking West:

At 4:21PM:

This is a crowd drawn to a movement as obscure as marijuana usage, just as vague and undirected as the tea party protests. One could argue that it is more geared toward the legalization of cannabis, and could also argue that it's just a party. But in any case, this is the kind of spontanneous energy that is available drawing from a single community. My guess is that the campus police are also intentionally understating the size of the crowd, since they judged last year's to be 10,000 people and this one was noticeably bigger.

As a more direct contrast to tea parties, on November 04, 2008, I watched about two thousand people spontanneously erupt with joy and pour onto the 16th Street Mall in Denver when CNN announced Barack Obama had won the election. There were other crowds in other parts of Denver, because it was unplanned and people just ran out into the street wherever they happened to be at that moment. My roommate who was at home in Boulder told me about an even bigger mob that erupted there, and pointed me to videos on youtube.

My generation is the Obama generation, and as they mature and vote in increasing numbers - bringing along people who are now too young to vote - they support liberal policies in huge numbers. It's not just social conservatism that turns young people off to the Republican party, it's their seeming insistance on choosing, again and again, ideology over pragmatism.

There are surely a lot of young urban hipsters who hate the idea of "big government" and would love to let the big banks fail. They'll complain that a 35% tax rate is awfully high even if it's just the richest bracket. But if you get into the details and ask exactly WHICH programs they want to get rid of, they don't know. They like trains. They like public schools and universities. They think universal healthcare is a moral responsibility. They want the federal government to expand national parks.

All these things requre taxes to take place, and despite vocal protestations, the "don't tax me" crowd is at a long-time low in energy level.

This also tells us a little bit about how news coverage works, since the tea party protests were all over and 4:20 - despite its huge gatherings - are still esoteric to college students. Maybe the news organizations are compassonate to the stoners and don't want to incite public outrage and mass-arrests - knowing what kind of habits Journalism majors have makes me beleive this is possible - but in any case, it means that 4:20 drew twice as many people as the tea parties even as its basically a secret.

What's Wrong with Zoos

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:36:07 GMT

I've slowly come to the realization that I don't think zoos are ethical. We treat the process of trapping and caging large animals like some progressive fountain of civic utility and ecological awareness - but instead zoos are weirdly voyersistic housings, where animals are kept in an artificial vegetative state by small enclosures and unnatural settings.

If a tiger is used to a range of over 25,000 acres, putting him in a pen the size of a living room seems downright barbaric. It would be like keeping a human being inside a bathtub forever. Would anyone expect an animal to behave "naturally" under those circumstances? It should be no wonder that zoo animals tend to appear antsy, lethargic or neruotic as they pace back and forth in the enclosed area. If a psychiatrist peered into that animal's psyche, he would probably find anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behaviors and clinical depression.

I'm not saying "down with zoos," I'm saying zoos need to change. I'm for drastically reorganizing the physical layout of zoos in an intelligent way to maximize the benefit to the animals and also, hopefully, enhance the educational experience.

Every zoo of sufficient size could be ancored by ONE habitat for megafauna based on a single natural ecosystem, which would take up at least half of the total area in the zoo. By "megafauna" I mean any animal larger than a dog. Zoos should network with other zoos to choose who gets which exhibit and trade animals to fit the pieces together. One can use half of its property to construct a large Savannah habitat for zebras, warthogs and hippos. The organization will give its camels to another zoo that can construct a large Desert habitat for camels and goats and desert foxes. The habitat doesn't have to be perfectly round or square shaped - it should wind and weave and be stretched out so that most of it is near the viewing area - but the animals' living area should be at least one and a half square miles in size, which is about half the size of a large zoo and means there won't be more than one exhibit in an urban zoo.

By trading animals, Association of Zoos and Aquariums can hang on to all its animals it keeps for "conservation" purposes, but give them a life that is of some semblance to what they get in the wild. The visitor's experience with the zoo is not as broad, but instead goes in-depth into the particular ecosystem it focuses on most. Then tourists have an incentive to visit the other zoos when they vacation in other cities, and the entire association can benefit.

Living areas of a square mile or more would be an improvement for any large animal, but still aren't big enough for every kind of animal. Zoos bill thesmeslves as scientific places so I think it's appropriate for science to play a role in what stays and what goes - ecologists can determine if an animal's natural range is comparable to 1.5 square miles. An elephant's range is hundreds of square miles, so it's clear that 1.5 isn't big enough and they wouldn't be kept in any standard zoo.

If the zoo's space is not conducive to the needs of the animal, the animal shouldn't be kept there. Sadly, that means that many animals we typically associate with zoos will have vto go: elephants, tigers, wolves and others - especially most predators - can't be kept in urban zoos anymore.

But perhaps a hippopotamus and an ostrich could be comfortable in a space of under 2 square miles, and zookeepers can determine which species get along with each other well enough to go into the exhibit. They don't necessarily have to be from exactly the same geographical region, as long as zookeepers can be sure they won't attack each other.

Meanwhile, zoos can have other exhibits outside their main anchor exhibit. Smaller habitats can house snakes, lizards, turtles and rodents that don't need a large range. Even some monkeys could live in a smaller caged space granted there is plenty of intellectual and environmental stimulation there, as well as natural light.

I forsee futuristic zoos where the animals roam free in their habitat and the humans are in the small spaces. A pathway, completely enclosed in glass, could snake through a large network of greenhouses - housing a manmade rainforest - where New World monkeys and parakeets and taipirs mingle together. Insect populations living there give the animals natural feeding habbits, and also add to the fauna for viewers to appreciate. The monkeys have plenty of full-grown trees to play around on giving them a multi-dementional and naturalistic home. The key is for the animals to share a large space rather than being separated, so that they have more mobility and can interact with a wide variety of peers and plants.

That way people pass through the confined tube and the animals get some freedom. In some cases the pathway doesn't even have to be in glass - if the animals are small, shy or tame enough, and you can be certain people will behave and stay on the trail, a fence is sufficient barrier.

I like how the Denver Zoo lets peacocks wander free in public areas, which means they have a relatively boundless range. Wild geese land and raise young in the park and eventually lose their fear of humans. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see happening in zoos more often, where animals are interacting with human beings but still have roaming freedom. Animal rights activists might complain this human-animal mixing is still "unnatural" but I think it represents a fair balance that focuses on the animal's interest. I'm not a nature-supremacist who thinks any human alteration of the wilderness is bad, but I'm concerned with the interests of the animal as well as the scientific accuracy of how they are presented.

So the zoo of the future I am envisioning looks like this:

The visitor enters the zoo and in one direction is an enormous "ecosystem" where animals selected for co-habitability will mix and mingle. Trails that people can walk on will surround the ecosystem and bridge over it, allowing visitors to walk into the heart of it and look down from a safe distance. Part of the housing area - where animals can get shelter when the weather is bad - will be accessible from the path as well.

In the other direction will be 2-3 smaller "ecosystems" for small animals, similar to the large one but without megafauna. Most zoos already have these, but they often keep large animals in them when those animals need more space.

Beyond that will be single-species habitats for small animals that don't need large spaces; insects, snakes, turtles and fish can fit in there. There will be no birds in small habitats since birds should have room to fly long distances.

Near the entrance area will be an educational center - something most zoos already have - with a theatre with videos of animals that don't fit in the zoo, so the visitor can learn about elephants and cheetahs and jaguars and everything that was lost. If I were the designer I'd also have an exhibit explaining old inhumane zoos where animals were kept in cells behind bars, and the exhibit would explain how the new scenario is better.

Some zoos are already trying to achieve what I am saying, and I'm fairly confident that 50 years from now this is how they will all work. The only thing I am suggesting beyond where most zoos are now is that they have one large ecosystem for medium-sized animals and that they get rid of most large animals altogether.

Turks Love Obama

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:00:13 GMT

...apparently even more than Americans do.

He's pretty much president of the world right now.

What ADHD is and what it isn't

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:40:04 GMT

Well I had another bit of humiliation this week - I went to the pharmacy to get my perscription for Ritalin filled and they refused. Five minutes after I handed the paper to the woman in the window, she returned and told me that they actually don't carry Ritalin, which I am certain is a lie. I called the doctor who perscribed Ritalin to ask for help but he didn't return my call. I don't know what to do.

I need to get treated, I'm wasting years of my life!

I keep getting these "you don't have ADHD, you're so smart" comments from people, which is flattering but also frustrating given the fact that I am struggling so much to do something useful and nobody beleives I really have a problem.

I am going to try to explain this now, because it's a little different for me than it is for the majority of people with ADHD.

To clear things up, ADHD is not the inability to focus, it's the inabilty to choose what you focus on. Rather than "Attention Deficit Disorder," it would be more aptly named "Misdirected Attention Disorder."

Watch a little kid with ADHD play video games and he will be so lazer-beam fixated on the screen that you'll say there's no way in hell he has ADD. You'll be shouting his name and he won't even hear you, and he will stay up till the early morning trying to beat the game. That fixation is part of what ADHD is.

I never got in to video games, but one of my fixations is reading compulsively; if you send me into a college library to find a book about the French Revolution, I'll end up going through the aisles reading about String Theory or Hinduism or nuclear explosions or rare diseases. I won't ever read a whole book - just the chapter titles or a little text here and there - then on to a new book. After 6 or 8 hours I suddenly realize I haven't even opened up the book I was sent there to get, and will start freaking out.

Sometimes the panic of the iminent deadline helps me to finally focus, but that's a stressfull way to live, and I'll end up half-assing the project at the last minute and get a B- on it when I could have easily gotten an A had I managed my time like a normal person does.

During my undergraduate years I probably spent 100 hours a semester getting distracted in the library, which pales in comparison to the time I spent getting distracted on the Internet.

That's why I end up knowing a little bit about EVERYTHING, but didn't have as good of grades as my peers. Most of my friends at my intellectual level were getting 3.8 or 3.9 grade point averages in college, while I got a 3.2, which isn't bad but it's not enough to get in to the grad schools I wanted. And easy jobs like working at a sandwich shop are nearly impossible because I'm always picking up newspapers rather than doing my job.

the Internet makes my life even harder; I spend like 2 hours a day on Wikipedia. I'll be trying to write an article for a freelance job I do, then suddenly think I WONDER WHAT THE LARGEST VOLCANIC ERUPTION IN THE EARTH'S HISTORY WAS? I'll google it and then spend 2 hours reading about volcanoes, and a link there will lead me to volcanoes on Jupiter's moons, and I'll end up reading about Jupiter's moons.

Since my problems are technically "behavioral," people treat me as though they are a choice. People ask "why can't you just stop doing that?" and I can't really explain, my self-distractions are an automatic thing for me and it makes perfect sense at the time that I do it. While I'm reading about volcanoes I'll think, maybe someday this will information will come up and I'll be glad I know it. It's only when I look back on it that I realize I just wasted huge portions of my life and am letting my responsibilities fall through.

There is a lot of overlap between ADHD and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I think this situation makes that clear.

ADD is a little different for everyone - I don't think compulsive reading is very common - and when I was a kid I did really well in elementary school because teachers allowed me to go off-topic and write about whatever my curiosity led to. If they said "write an essay about Washington State," I could tap into my fixation on Mt St. Hellens, which is in that state, and I'd get an A on the project. Teachers always patted me on the back for showing a genuine interest in something and thought I was a great learner.

But the older I got, the more people expected me to complete a narrowly-tailored assignment as requested, which I have a really hard time doing. In my Literature and Death class, for example, I was supposed to write about Heidegger's perspective on death - which was impossible for me to read through - so I wrote about how literature is a way of dealing with anxiety about being mortal. When I got my feedback at the end of the semester, the teacher wrote, scathingly, that I hadn't picked up a single thing from the class and gave me a C.

When I feel like I'm failing, or that my professors are on to the fact that I haven't been doing the readings, the symptoms only get worse.

Another symptom of ADHD is a dificulty concealing or rationalizing emotions. When I was a kid I cried several times a day. I can't bury anything and people can recognize if I'm upset the moment they look at me. When I feel intimidated or judged, I feel extremely intimidated and can't think or speak clearly. Rather than prove myself - which I can only do when I'm on stimulants - I get avoidant. That made me easy to pick on in school - I appeared weak and submissive so was a target of bullies - and now it means I have a hard time fixing professional relationships when they hit a snag. If I think a professor or boss dislikes me, I don't even want to think about or look at work I have to do there. ADHD kids with aggressive tendencies can't hide their aggression. I never had aggressive tendencies to manage, so was lucky for that, and teachers tended to like me so I had an easier time working with them.

But it did mean that Journalism, the profession I chose for myself and dreamed of doing, turned out to be impossible because it is too individualistic, competitive and adversarial. There is no way I could ever function in an adversarial relationsihp with either an interview subject or a peer. Ironically, having ADD made me love journalism because it allows me to information-seek and know "a little bit of everything," but made it impossible for me to pursue because I could not handle the criticism and negativity of other journalism students.

I don't know what it is, but something about stimulants like Adderall or even caffeine and cigarettes help me do what I'm supposed to do. I don't feel all that much different when I'm on them - and when they do make me feel something it's tweaked-out, dehydrated and jittery - but it just so happens that the place my mind "wanders to" is exactly where my assignment is. I hate taking them but they immediately fix nearly every personality problem I have.

I sometimes wax and wane about my confidence in the ADHD diagnosis. When I'm getting treated I feel like everything is going fine so I might not have ADHD after all, and sometimes stop taking the pills because I would rather not be taking them if I don't have to. I think about the symptoms I DON'T have - like drug addictions or compulsive risk-taking - and wonder if the diagnosis was false. And if I start thriving in what I do, the feeling that I'm doing well helps me focus and carries me on for a couple months after I stop taking the pills. But after a while the problems return.

Even when I'm taking Adderall I still sometimes do the wandering fact-gathering I am prone to, but am much more efficient when I finally do focus, and I don't feel anxious and desparate about my chances of success.

But now that I don't have health insurance and I can't convince any professionals that I actually have ADHD - they don't ask about my symptoms, they just weigh in on my credibility, which makes me too nervous to even think or respond clearly - I really wish I hadn't allowed the treatment to lapse.