School lunches

Maybe I was just lucky but I have pretty good memories of the school lunches back in Burrton, Kansas... my favorites included the pizza, bierocks, and cinammon rolls.

Sadly not much food gets cooked in schools anymore... hopefully that will change:

But little actual cooking goes on in the nation’s largest public school system, largely because little of it can. Barely half of New York’s 1,385 school kitchens have enough cooking and fire-suppression equipment so cooks can actually sauté, brown or boil over open flame.

Even in those that do, aging ovens sometimes don’t heat properly, equipment is hidden away in storage rooms or broken, and the staff isn’t trained to do much more than steam frozen vegetables, dig ravioli out of a six-pound can or heat frozen chicken patties in a convection oven.

New York is not that unusual. More than 80 percent of the nation’s districts cook fewer than half their entrees from scratch, according to a 2009 survey by the School Nutrition Association.

The slide didn’t happen overnight. As many American families stopped cooking and began to rely on prepared and packaged food, so did the schools. It became cheaper to cut skilled kitchen labor, eliminate raw ingredients and stop maintaining kitchens.
“In school food 30 or 40 years ago, they roasted turkeys and did all of these things,” said Eric Goldstein, the chief executive of the Office of School Support Services.

One New York school, however, is bucking the trend:

On a recent Monday afternoon in the back of a middle school kitchen in Queens, it sounded as if a deal was going down.

“You want garam? I can get you garam.”

Jorge Collazo, executive chef for New York City schools, was making an offer to Sharon Barlatier, the manager of one of the largest middle school cafeterias in New York, and, by extension, the country.

Her job is to entice nearly 2,000 students at the height of adolescent squirreliness to eat a good lunch. Because many of her students at Middle School 137 come from families with Indian roots, curry is one of her secret weapons. The spice mix garam masala might improve its firepower.

She has to make curry from a limited list of ingredients approved by the Department of Education: frozen pre-roasted commodity chicken parts, jarred chopped garlic and a generic curry powder.

Mood for the day

It's been a bleak day for me for a variety of personal reasons. And rather than seek out some sunshine to remind myself that life goes on, I've retreated to the comfort of food... my original comfort food, actually: macaroni & cheese, the first food I ever learned to cook.

And I read two columns today that gave me reason to frown for the country as a whole. David Brooks wrote yesterday about the risks we face because of the profligate path we've taken:

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

And Thomas Friedman cites the dangerous parallels between the atmosphere in Israel that led to Yitzhak Rabin's assassination and the current mood in America:

I remember the ugly mood in Israel then — a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

And in so doing they created a poisonous political environment that was interpreted by one right-wing Jewish settler as a license to kill Rabin — he must have heard, “God will be on your side” — and so he did....

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

I also read a new article in Nature that examines the key parameters that have made Earth so conducive to our species' expansion over the last 10,000 years. It warns that for three of those parameters--climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and species loss--we've already passed thresholds which endanger the balance that has allowed us to thrive.

BUT TO LEAVEN IT ALL, my cousin Kim reminded me of a quote from a woman that we both adored as children, Gilda Radner:

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.

There is no perfect ending. There's just tomorrow. And there's no way it's supposed to turn out. It's up to us to figure out if we can overcome the challenges we face. And if we fail that test, life will go on... somehow.

Flu shots: confusing coincidence and cause & effect

A good reminder:

As soon as swine flu vaccinations start next month, some people getting them will drop dead of heart attacks or strokes, some children will have seizures and some pregnant women will miscarry....

Every year, there are 1.1 million heart attacks in the United States, 795,000 strokes and 876,000 miscarriages, and 200,000 Americans have their first seizure. Inevitably, officials say, some of these will happen within hours or days of a flu shot.

The government “is right to expect coincident deaths, since people are dying every day, with or without flu shots,” said Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine and co-author of “The Epidemic That Never Was,” a history of the 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign.

Officials are particularly worried about spontaneous miscarriages, because they are urging pregnant women to be among the first to be vaccinated. Pregnant women are usually advised to get flu shots, because they and their fetuses are at high risk of flu complications, but this year the pressure is greater....

“There are about 2,400 miscarriages a day in the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay C. Butler, chief of the swine flu vaccine task force at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “You’ll see things that would have happened anyway. But the vaccine doesn’t cause miscarriages. It also doesn’t cause auto accidents, but they happen.”

Now...

Obama calls Iran on their sh*t. :-)

More on the absurdities of end-of-life care

A note from Portland, Oregon:

But for reasons both cynical and clinical, the American political debate on health care treats end-of-life care like a contagion — an unspeakable one at that.

Nobody was more frustrated than John Kitzhaber as the health care debate got hijacked over the summer by shouters and misinformation specialists. And no politician is more battle-scarred on this issue. He looks, at 62, still the Western man, with his jeans, his shag of gray hair, the face weathered by days spent trying to lure steelhead to the surface in the Rogue River. It has been his life work to see if at least one part of the country could join the family of nations that offers universal coverage.

With his mother’s death in 2005, Kitzhaber lived the absurdities of the present system. Medicare would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests but would not pay $18 an hour for a non-hospice care giver to come into Annabel’s home and help her through her final days.

“The fundamental problem is that one percent of the population accounts for 35 percent of health care spending,” he said. “So the big question is not how we pay for health care, but what are we buying.”

Coming out in junior high

It's a different world than when I was a kid... and it was a different world for me than for the generation before. Despite all the work still to be done, we shouldn't forget the huge progress over the last forty years that's allowed so many gay men and lesbians to simply be themselves.

Song of the day

Jason Mraz singing "I'm Yours"

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Driving up the cost of healthcare...

I just checked out the statement from my most recent visit to my doctor--a visit where all I wanted was to have a prescription refilled--and I'm amazed, sickened, and angered by the cost of the tests he ordered. Ridiculous! The last time I'll ever be in his office.

FLU SHOT INFORMATION

I got my regular seasonal flu shot today, and a friend asked me why I didn't wait to get the H1N1 shot. The reason is that they're two different shots, but this is something that I haven't really heard clarified in the news.

The regular seasonal flu shot is available now. It does not protect against pandemic H1N1 (the swine flu).

The pandemic H1N1 flu shot is not yet available, and when it is it won't protect against the regular seasonal varieties.

So for the most comprehensive flu protection you need both shots. Since the flu shot normally takes two weeks to provide immunity and lasts up to a year, there's no reason to wait to get your seasonal shot.

Opposition continues in Iran

Those opposed to the tainted re-election of President Ahmadinejad hijacked a state-sponsored pro-Palestinian rally to demonstrate that the opposition has not died in Iran.

When government men shouted “Death to Israel” through loudspeakers, protesters derisively chanted “Death to Russia” in response. Many opposition supporters are angry about Russia’s quick acceptance of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s electoral victory.

The three opposition leaders, Mir Hussein Moussavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohammad Khatami, joined the crowds in Tehran for the first time in months, drawing cheers.

Later, Basij militia members tried to attack Mr. Khatami and Mr. Karroubi, but defenders pushed them back, opposition Web sites reported.

Manure and other agricultural run-off in your drinking water

As industrial farms house increasingly larger herds, the contamination of wells, watersheds, and rivers and streams is becoming a more urgent problem. As noted in this New York Times article, a single cow produces as much waste as eighteen people.

Tests of [Wisconsin resident Lisa Barnard's] water showed it contained E. coli, coliform bacteria and other contaminants found in manure. Last year, her 5-year-old son developed ear infections that eventually required an operation. Her doctor told her they were most likely caused by bathing in polluted water, she said.

Yet runoff from all but the largest farms is essentially unregulated by many of the federal laws intended to prevent pollution and protect drinking water sources. The Clean Water Act of 1972 largely regulates only chemicals or contaminants that move through pipes or ditches, which means it does not typically apply to waste that is sprayed on a field and seeps into groundwater.

As a result, many of the agricultural pollutants that contaminate drinking water sources are often subject only to state or county regulations. And those laws have failed to protect some residents living nearby.

On Wall Street, milliseconds count...

And in this race, the big guys have a huge advantage over everyone else... giving them the ability to profit at our expense. Henry Blodget describes one aspect of the problem--the ability of computerized traders to detect and respond to market movements in milliseconds, so called "flash trading"--and this 2007 article explains the other--trading firms who are co-locating their computers in the same facilities where the exchanges' computers are placed, giving them a crucial millisecond advantage in placing trades.

The SEC announced plans today to tackle the flash trading problem.

Progress on the HIV vaccine front

Researchers have found a couple of antibodies that protect against a wide variety of HIV strains, raising the possibility that they could be used to design a vaccine that is broadly protective. A lot more work ahead, though, unfortunately.

RIP Henry Gibson

One of my favorite of Henry Gibson's skits, this one from The Kentucky Fried Movie.

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Daddy's home...

Great pics of President Obama being greeted by Sasha and Malia here. :-)

Eleven days in Portland

Pictures from my trip... click on the link below for a full screen slideshow.

(Slide show link - click here and then on the 'Slideshow' button in upper left)

RIP Mary Travers

Mary Travers of the Peter, Paul, & Mary has died at age 72.

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Ezra Klein weighs in on the Baucus bill

Ezra Klein knows more about healthcare policy than any other writer I know with the possible exception of Atul Gawande. Here's Klein's take on the Baucus healthcare reform proposal.

Tragedy and horror as a form of play

Yale professor Paul Bloom offers an interesting theory for why we humans are often fascinated by horror and abomination (think scary movies, circus freak shows, and feeding Christians to lions) and drawn to tragic figures or the odd beauty that sad stories can evoke:

A better idea, I think, is that these pleasures reflect a form of safe practice — or, to use a more common term, a form of play. Some play is physical: It is a useful skill to be able to attack and defend yourself skillfully, and you get better at it the more you practice, but real fights are risky and painful, and so certain animals, including us, are constituted to take pleasure in play fighting, going through the moves of combat with someone we like, holding back so that nobody is hurt.

Then there is imaginative play. We use our minds to explore alternative worlds, an indispensable skill when it comes to planning for the future. From this perspective, the appeal of horror and tragedy doesn’t lie in the specifics. It’s not that we have to prepare ourselves for the rise of the undead or our father being betrayed by the Queen. We are drawn to horror and tragedy because they are creative representations of worst-case scenarios, situations that we really need to worry about, such as being attacked by strangers, betrayed by friends, experiencing the death of those we love, and so on.

It’s a fascinating question to me how far this “safe practice” theory can be pushed, whether it can explain other masochistic behaviors, including social and sexual ones. But if it is right at all, it would show that being a hedonist is more complicated than it looks. Even seemingly perverse pleasures have meaning; they have been shaped by natural selection to solve problems that we might not be consciously aware of. Simple pleasures aren’t that simple after all.

Some details on the Baucus healthcare reform proposal

Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, released his long-awaited proposal for reforming the way we pay for healthcare but without any Republican support from the Gang of Six who were helping him to craft it.

Here are some details on some of the more controversial issues that are separating Democrats and the GOP.

And the New York Times had five healthcare analysts and economists grade Baucus' proposed legislation here.

Matthew Yglesias puts in his two cents here (which basically amounts to a statement that what came out of the Finance Committee simply doesn't provide enough money to help people who need it the most).

UPDATE: More from Ezra Klein on why the "free rider" provision in Baucus' proposal is such bad policy.

More on the election in Afghanistan

Monitors from Europe believe that up to one out of three votes for President Karzai may have been fraudulent:

Mr. Karzai, who is vying for a second five-year term, won 54.6 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff election, according to the tally released by the country’s independent election commission. His closest challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, won 27.8 percent.

But the election was tainted by blatant evidence ofballot-box-stuffing and other frauds, and the country’s United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission has ordered recounts and forensic examinations of ballot boxes in 10 percent of polling stations — involving at least 15 percent, and possibly a far higher proportion, of reported votes. The complaints commission, headed by a Canadian, is the ultimate arbiter of election results.

Some western officials say that if all fraudulent ballots were discarded, Mr. Karzai’s tally would drop below 50 percent, forcing him into a runoff against Mr. Abdullah. But it is unclear how many ballots might be ruled invalid in the recount, and even if Mr. Karzai were ultimately forced into a runoff, the harsh winter weather may prevent a second election from being held until April.

We're getting closer...

to finding another Earth-like world. Astronomers have discovered about 300 planets in other solar systems, but they've just found the first one that's confirmed to be a solid body like Earth. The others have all been gas giants or of undetermined status.

This first extrasolar rocky planet, however, is unlikely to harbor life since its surface temperature is around 3600 degrees (even hotter than Vegas).

More from NPR. Thanks to my Portland buddy Jake for the heads up.

Ice cream for heterosexuals

My friend Scott just posted this David Letterman video... love it! :-)

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Getting the best results from a colonoscopy

I posted recently about the growing evidence that aspirin may protect against colon cancer. Anyone about to get a colonoscopy should also take the time to read a couple of articles from the New York Times first:

• Easily Overlooked Lesions Tied to Colon Cancer
• Colonoscopies Miss Many Cancers, Study Finds

Stephen Colbert: Let Freedom Ka-Ching

Stephen Colbert weighs in on the role of corporations in financing election campaigns, as well as the whole notion that corporations are treated as persons under U.S. law and are currently entitled to First Amendment protections. (More on the pending case here.)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Let Freedom Ka-Ching
http://www.colbertnation.com/
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

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In my opinion, the treatment of corporations as persons is just about the stupidest legal precedent ever set in these United States...

President Carter: racism to blame for anti-Obama anger

President Carter today said that despite a lot of progress in the South and elsewhere, he believes that much of the backlash against President Obama's initiatives can be traced to racism.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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Maureen Dowd made the same point in a recent op-ed piece in which she specifically addressed Congressman Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

Gail Collins has also had a couple of good columns on the "You lie!" controversy here and here.

Picking it up again...

Three and a half years ago, I left Portland and returned to San Francisco with a vague notion that I wanted to do something new with my life. It goes without saying that I've long since recognized the value of having a plan over a notion.

I'd returned to Portland once in 2006 and then again in June before going back for these past eleven days. I'm moving back there now with a plan but also with more than a little good fortune to have quite a few threads from my prior life there that are available for me to weave back into my life as it is now. In many ways I can pick up where I left off, but not by going back in time. Instead, who and what surrounded me when I lived in Portland seem to have advanced in the same direction that I've advanced. We've walked somewhat parallel paths... re-connecting them is not so hard.

And, I suspect, it's not so coincidental that as I sit here on my flight back to Vegas from Portland, I've been able to open Love in the Time of Cholera to a page midway through the book and start reading it again, picking up where I left off but enjoying it far more than when I laid it down a year ago.

Life does go on... and as Gabriel García Márquez wrote in describing an uncle's willingness to offer a second chance, "He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."

Obama, the morning after

I think a lot of people, myself included, are feeling a renewed sense of why we worked so hard to get Obama elected. Here's Andrew Sullivan's post on that subject:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/taking-the-bait.html

Also, if you're a liberal or progressive who is disappointed with Obama, I suggest checking out Matthew Yglesias' post "The Truth Thing".

More on Obama's healthcare speech

I'm still in Portland and my laptop is misbehaving, so blogging isn't too easy right now. There are a number of articles and posts that I've read about Obama's speech tonight that I'd normally blog about, but for now you're going to have to settle for checking out the "What I'm reading" sidebar on the right at www.torqopia.com.

Obama's healthcare speech

Here's a good analysis of Obama's healthcare reform speech:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32769832/ns/politics-the_new_y

Sad, so sad

I just accidentally watched ten minutes of America's Next Top (Petite) Model. The reactions of the girls who were chosen--and those who weren't--were truly tragic. Get a grip!!!!

This isn't Parliament!

I know I'm not the only American who was appalled when Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled, "You lie!" at President Obama tonight during his address to Congress.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090910/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_health_care_heckling

Transcript of Obama's healthcare address

Here is the transcript of Obama's awesome speech to Congress in which he outlines his plan for reforming our nation's health insurance system. For anyone who had any doubts on Obama's ability to regain command of the debate, he delivered!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32765453/ns/politics-health_care_reform/

Highly recommended article on the health/healthcare/health insurance debate

I completely agree with David Brooks' op-ed on what's wrong with the current healthcare reform proposals getting most of the attention in Washington: they don't go far enough. Specifically, they don't address the underlying incentives in our healthcare system that drive the costs up.

Brooks' piece pointed me to "How American Health Care Killed My Father" in this month's The Atlantic. If you're following the healthcare debate, if you're interested in improving healthcare in America, if you're interested in improving the health of Americans... I highly recommend the article.

In the first half, David Goldhill--whose father died after contracting a hospital-acquired infection--deconstructs all of our assumptions about healthcare and health insurance and puts forward a credible explanation for why our current system is so dysfunctional.

I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.

Like every grieving family member, I looked for someone to blame for my father’s death. But my dad’s doctors weren’t incompetent—on the contrary, his hospital physicians were smart, thoughtful, and hard-working. Nor is he dead because of indifferent nursing—without exception, his nurses were dedicated and compassionate. Nor from financial limitations—he was a Medicare patient, and the issue of expense was never once raised. There were no greedy pharmaceutical companies, evil health insurers, or other popular villains in his particular tragedy.

Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

I found myself persuaded by just about every point he made. To summarize, here are a few of those main points:

• Healthcare isn't the same thing as health... a variety of factors (medical care, nutrition exercise, our environment, etc.) all impact our health. And health is one of multiple factors that determine our overall happiness and satisfaction with our lives.
• Health insurance isn't the same thing as healthcare. Goldhill emphasizes the fact that health insurance is different from every other kind of insurance: you don't expect to submit a claim for your gas expenditures on your auto insurance or your electric bill on your homeowner's insurance. Health insurance has somehow come to be the principal way we pay for all healthcare expenditures.
• The moral hazard of paying for so few of our medical costs directly leads to distortions in how medical care is priced and consumed.
• We live under the illusion that someone else is paying the bill for our medical care... but there isn't anyone else to pay it. Ultimately we are paying these huge costs ourselves.
• Even with its leverage in setting prices, government has done a poor job of controlling healthcare costs.
• There's little competition in the healthcare industry which results in high costs and high profits. And government regulation has tended to maintain the status quo even as technology and consumers' needs have changed.
• The fact that someone else--an insurance company or the government--is paying the bill results in a strange system where the person receiving medical care isn't the true customer.
• Because of all the structural oddities of our healthcare system, technological advances often increase costs rather than lower them as they do in other industries.

In the second half of the article, Goldhill proposes a plan for making fundamental changes in how we pay for healthcare in America. While I was less persuaded by his specific plan, I do agree that without dealing with these systemic issues, reform is unlikely to produce much in the way of significant savings or healthcare improvements.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN WASHINGTON... the Washington Post reports that Obama will be laying out more specifics next Wednesday and that some Republicans still see a chance for bipartisan reform (as long as the scope is much more limited than what Democrats have proposed).

David Brooks reminded me of why I walked neighborhoods for Obama: some problems are serious enough that only bold solutions will suffice. Healthcare is one such issue; a few Band-Aids aren't going to cure what ails us.

ARSON

I think arson--the kind that destroys people's homes and kills people--is near the top of my list of the worst crimes. The Station fire near Los Angeles now appears to be the result of arson.

Aspirin and colorectal disease

I thought I had posted something about this last month but apparently not. In addition to helping prevent cardiovasular disease, aspirin has also been found to protect against colorectal disease, including for those patients who've already had problems. From the New York Times:

It has long been known that people who took aspirin regularly were less likely to develop tumors of the colon, and now a study has found that even after a diagnosis of colorectal cancer, patients who took aspirin had a much better chance of surviving than non-users.

The improvements in outcomes were striking. Patients with colorectal cancer who regularly used aspirin before and after a diagnosis were almost one-third less likely to die of the disease than non-users. Patients who initiated aspirin use only after a diagnosis did even better and had half the risk of dying from the cancer, possibly because of differences in their tumors. The patients were all being treated for nonmetastatic, or localized, cancers, and were followed for almost 12 years on average.

As always, talk to your doctor about what's right for you. I've been taking an enteric-coated 81 mg daily aspirin for about ten years.

People people people!

I find it amusing that when I went to public school, we had to watch several hours of Focus on the Family videos (which clearly have a Christian conservative perspective), but parents are now upset that... gosh... horrors... the President of the United States wants to speak to their children by video.

Best of all: these people's worry is that this is all part of spreading his "socialist agenda." Sarah Palin's legacy, God bless her, sigh.

The Obama administration is responding to the concern by reiterating that a) school participation is completely voluntary and b) releasing the transcript of his planned speech 24 hours in advance.

Healthcare off the rails

Humor from Tom Toles:

Autotune the news... brilliant!

Just discovered this (they've been coming out since April)... and OMG hilarious. You can subscribe on YouTube here.

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Paul Krugman: how the economists got it wrong

Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times Magazine, gives a guided tour of the history of economic thought and his take on why economists failed to see our current mess coming. Not surprisingly, he also has some thoughts on where economics should go, summed up by a quote from H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.” In other words, economists need to incorporate into their theories the fact that humans are sometimes irrational and markets can behave unpredictably.

Here is "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"

The election in Afghanistan

In the wake of the problems with the Iranian election, we now have widespread reports of fraud and corruption in Afghanistan's election. This time, though, the U.S. finds itself in a more difficult position.

There is increasing uneasiness on the left in America with respect to continuing the war in Afghanistan. And while I've been generally supportive of Obama's plans so far, I would not be able to get behind continued U.S. support for a Karzai government if the allegations that he stole the election are substantiated (New York Times, 9/1/09):

Just a week before this country’s presidential election, the leaders of a southern Afghan tribe called Bariz gathered to make a bold decision: they would abandon the incumbent and local favorite, Hamid Karzai, and endorse his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.

Mr. Abdullah flew to the southern city of Kandahar to receive the tribe’s endorsement. The leaders of the tribe, who live in a district called Shorabak, prepared to deliver a local landslide.

But it never happened, the tribal leaders said.

Instead, aides to Mr. Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali — the leader of the Kandahar provincial council and the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan — detained the governor of Shorabak, Delaga Bariz, and shut down all of the district’s 45 polling sites on election day. The ballot boxes were taken to Shorabak’s district headquarters, where, Mr. Bariz and other tribal leaders said, local police officers stuffed them with thousands of ballots.

At the end of the day, 23,900 ballots were shipped to Kabul, Mr. Bariz said, with every one marked for President Karzai.

“Not a single person in Shorabak District cast a ballot — not a single person,” Mr. Bariz said in an interview here in the capital, where he and a group of tribal elders came to file a complaint. “Mr. Karzai’s people stuffed all the ballot boxes.”

The U.S. is a dominant force in Afghani politics right now. If Karzai stole the election, it's our responsibility to take action, even if that means leaving.

UPDATE

A more recent roundup of election news from Afghanistan here.

Passage for the day

From Joseph Conrad's A Personal Record:

The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view — and in this view alone — never for despair! Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair — the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind — that's our affair! And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth. A task in which fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the haunting terror, the infinite passion and the illimitable serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle.

Woodstock and the moon landing

Michael Ventura ruminates on the paradoxes of 1969: a desire to get "back to the Garden" while we celebrated standing on the moon.

We wanted liberty – and security. We wanted the war to end – but not the excitement of being against the war. We wanted the fall of capitalism – and all that capitalism could supply. We wanted innocence – but did all we could to experience its opposite. We wanted to "drop out" – so long as we might still order pizza, which meant that someone, somewhere, had to keep the mechanisms of society going. We wanted holiness – and publicity. We wanted the self-knowledge of meditation – and to be stoned. Yes, these are vast generalizations (I, for instance, didn't want to get high). But if we are to believe our own music (and there is no doubt of its sincerity), through the technology by which it was created and disseminated we wanted all this and more, not the least paradoxical of which was how we wanted somehow to transcend the technological world that supplied the means by which the music connected us all. And one more thing, one more beautifully impossible paradox: Like many before and after us, we wanted a freer sense of order.

One irony lost on most, as it was certainly lost on me, is that the summer we yearned to get back to the Garden was also the summer we celebrated humanity's presence on the moon.

Here's his July 31st "Letters at 3am" column.

Gail, Levi, and Sarah

Here's Gail Collins' take on the new Levi Johnston Vanity Fair tell-all about Sarah Palin and her family:

Given the fact that Johnston is a 19-year-old high school dropout whose mother was arrested last year on six felony drug counts, it is conceivable that he is not the perfect arbiter of normal families. But even if he were an Eagle Scout with a scholarship to Harvard, can you imagine anything worse than discovering your daughter’s teenage ex-boyfriend has been given a national platform to discuss his impressions of her mom’s parenting skills?

It’s hard to totally resist an article that has sentences that start with: “In early August, before I went hunting and Sarah was picked, Bristol and I were at a tattoo parlor in Wasilla. ...” Or information like the fact that baby Tripp’s middle name is Easton in honor of “my favorite hockey-equipment company.”

But somehow I have a feeling that even the most ardent Palin-haters are not going to be able to work up much sympathy for Levi’s complaint that Sarah made him cut off his mullet before his appearance at the Republican convention. Or that when she moved to Juneau after being elected governor, she tried to take Bristol with her in order to break them up.

In fact, trying to separate her daughter from Johnston could be filed away in the rather slim folder titled “Sarah Palin’s Good Ideas.”

Read Gail's column here.

An update on the bees...

The New York Times has an update on what we've learned about colony collapse disorder, the problem that's been affecting honey bees and the agricultural industry since 2006. Read it here.

"Coolest" NASA video: Tour of the Cryosphere

A new video from NASA uses images from multiple satellites to create composite images of the icy, snow-covered parts of the globe (e.g. the poles, mountaintops). The video shows the breakup of ice sheets and the impact of lower snowfall on vegetation in the subsequent summer.

CNN has a report here.

And you can watch the full video at NASA's website; look for "2009 Tour of the Cryosphere."

Thanks to my friend Cary for letting me know about this.

"Can I have Sinead's hand in marriage?"

Something to think about...

(Video link)

Bill Moyers on Obama, Afghanistan, America, and healthcare

Last Friday Bill Maher interviewed Bill Moyers whom he described as the "conscience of American journalism."

Here Moyers speaks about Afghanistan (and its parallels with Vietnam) as well as the straits in which America finds itself today: a great nation with the "rivets coming out."

(Video link)

And here he speaks on health insurance reform, the role of money in politics, and the fact that "profit" is not the right way to determine who gets care and who doesn't:

(Video link)

IF YOU'RE LOOKING for more information on how other countries manage healthcare, Frontline had a program a year ago on the topic. They looked at Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, and the UK. Check out "Sick Around the World." (You may just want to start on their "what can we learn from what they do?" page.)

As Bill Moyers said in the Maher interview, we have to remember that "we're all in this together."

Where the Wild Things Are

I can't believe I haven't seen the trailer yet, but I'm totally ready to see the movie, especially after reading about the difficulty Spike Jonze has had in keeping the film true to his vision.

Quotes for the day

"When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."

--Alan Watts

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

-- Henry Miller