Stupid Economic Theories

Yesterday, watching the evening news on PBS, I heard this really dim-witted fellow from some misleadingly named organization called something like "numbers-usa" debating the "immigration issue." He made the seemingly obvious claim that since we are short maybe 20 million jobs and that "illegals" now hold 7 million of the jobs that exist, we need to kick them out so that we citizens can reclaim those 7 million jobs. This guy clearly knows numbers only in the way that a flimflam artists does. It's a talent, but one we should watch out for.

Then my otherwise intelligent friend was marveling at the very evident fact that dual income families are now struggling to maintain the standard of living which used to be common when only the men were working. It feels as though there were some kind of conspiracy to dilute the wages of working people. Some kind of OK women, if you want to work, go for it. We'll adjust. Um, yeah, I thought this much was obvious. These two matters are not disconnected. Hello!

The idiocy of the anti-immigrant comment is that this economy is "designed" such that some percentage of the workforce is out of work. That doesn't mean that there is some designer, any more than do the results of natural evolution, no matter what the crazies say. It just means that there is no set number of jobs, such that kicking someone out of his might free it up for you. The issue is systemic. As with food and water and energy, it's usually not the quantity which causes shortages, it's the distribution. The appearance or especially the fear of shortage allows prices to spike. That serves somebody or some class of people that ain't you or me.

A pretty good clue for what's up with immigration is that when you dig, you are as likely to find that it was the right wing which wanted the cheap immigrant labor as it was the liberals who wanted to afford every soul a human chance. Pitting workers against desperate "illegals" does a pretty good job to push the price for labor down. Ditto women.

But these arguments play because we're angry and we seem to need some target for that anger. Someone who doesn't look too familiar in the mirror.

And so some grand artificial debate gets played out over our heads, without our ever having a chance to find where the game is fixed.

Like the healthcare debates; it helps the criminally kleptocratic insurance industry (executives, owners, not workers) when the left side calls for government to just take it over. That energizes the teapartiers, who - probably sensibly- recoil in horror at the notion of civil-service healthcare. So no one imagines what could be accomplished if we were to have some sensible regulation of insurance as we already know it.

Like what if there were severe penalties for not paying legitimate claims? What if there were a time limit to pay, and what if the price for uninsured were required to be identical to that charged the insurance companies? What if the providers were required to get pre-authorization for payment, the client were completely off that hook, and the subsequent negotiations and arguments were required to take place between and among the experts?  I think that's been tried around the world, and it works pretty well.

What if, furthermore, the patients weren't somehow taught that it is their right to feel entitled for treatment for whatever sort of "off" they feel. What if drugs were not deployed as a cure for the stresses of poverty or of warfare? What if we didn't all crave endless medical testing against terror at various what-ifs as encouraged by advertisements from the drug companies? What if those ads were made illegal again?

Well, apart form the absurdity of attempting to put the genie of information back into its bottle, there is reason to think that all the decisions shouldn't really be in the hands of the doctors. Sometimes they might be motivated to call for more tests than you yourself would if fully informed. They're fighting the insurance companies right now, and have to make up for their losses somehow. The system seems stacked against us even as the sides seem to be warring against each other. Coke and Pepsi. Microsoft and Google. Democrats and Republicans. They need each other. But even more, they need us to think they are opposed and in competition.

Drug companies seem to spend, naturally enough, the most money on issues which might require constant medical intervention. Viagra and Lipitor and things like Prozac are the perfect drugs, compared to useful things like antibiotics which might be used once in a while and that's it. Where overuse creates more problems than the drug can solve, but also where the excuse is somehow "out there" that it's we who use them too much. Forgetting that it might be our feedlot meat production system which creates many of the problems. That with bacteria, it should never be about eradication, but more about a kind of ecological balance among the organisms always present in our bodies and environments. By and large, "we" do what we're told within the limits of our education, intelligence and information. I know I'm not one to second guess my doctor, unless there's a really good reason to do so.

The distortions get created from and by the very same sort of motivated misinformation that the racist fellow used to cover his actual fear of difference. I'm sure he's even convinced himself that all he really wants are jobs for his fellow Americans. Drug companies don't want us to know everything about what they're selling - they speed up the voices magically when forced to fill us in. They refine and expand the unreadable print.

Government doesn't have to be populated by geniuses to provide the same sort of intervention to the public discourse - the balance to the body politic - that antibiotics might provide to the individual human body gone out of whack.

It serves someone's purpose to suppose that the problem is that the regulators now are not so clever as those they regulate. That the germs are smart; the terrorists are smart, that the bombs we need are smart bombs, that each of us only wants to get for ourselves what the least of us, the Bernie Madoffs, want to get for themselves. And morally, he is the least among us. Not a one of us would do what he did against his fellow Americans even if we had the chance.

I for one don't really imagine that the folks who work for the NSA are at the cutting edge of cybercriminal investigation (I have inside information). I doubt the government actually has the most computing power, and if it does, I doubt it's as cleverly deployed as the stuff arrayed in the private economy to measure my desire. I worry that dullards in government service will become overeager in their enforcement, just like the FBI did under J. Edgar, knowing which direction their promotion would come from.

So, too much power is no good answer. But there ought to be a way to release the creative energies of the private marketplace without allowing the predators, always, the upper hand. There ought to be a way to allow the financial markets to do their thing with the efficiency of money flows without always presenting those geniuses with that much temptation to dip into the flow for themselves. You don't have to be a genius yourself, you just have to get the sense that your work is valued, secure, amply rewarded against its difficulty and risks. Something we no longer really provide to our civil servants.

And another thing! Wouldn't you think the capitalist system would prefer a mobile work force? How about a nice regulation limiting the drag on mobility now guaranteed by regionally limited and company-connected health insurance. It's almost as though "they" want you to remain enchained. Or pitted against the great unwashed masses of "illegals." Vagrants. Homeless. Border crossers.

Come on, let's get a clue. This isn't as difficult as we're making it out to be.

New Digs

Well, I haven't moved yet, but since I was making a little bit of fun of the idea that peoples' ashes need to be respected, it seems appropriate that my bike ride today landed me in the cemetery. New digs indeed!

I wasn't sure that bikes were allowed, but that worry evaporated the first time someone whizzed by. Lots of folks were moving in today, and there were a lot of fresh openings. Some really beautiful mausoleums, lots with recognizable local names; a few like advertisements for the prominent businesses named after them. The coolest sculpture I saw was of leather-looking couches made of granite. They looked really comfortable, but I'll bet they give new meaning to the notion of chillin'.

I knew I would and eventually did find my grandparents' grave, and that of my uncle nearby. It had to be within sight of Red Jacket, where Granddaddy wanted to be buried. (I imagine he mentioned it once, and it somehow became his most ardent wish for death). All in all a nice wind-y ride.

Along the way, I toured the living mausoleums to days gone by. We have some really really fine mansions in this town, most still available for less than a small house elsewhere. One of the finest is occupied now by this alleged coke dealer and pimp who came here from Las Vegas. I used to have the blueprints for that one in my office, since it was supposed to house the school I once headed, but I think the founder pissed off the family and so it went to the preppy Proddy school, which sold it to, you know, the pornographer dude. There goes the neighborhood.

Of course, I couldn't resist going by the old school; gazing into what had been my office reverted back to a mansion now. Overall, the most powerful feeling I had was to hope that there wouldn't be some former students driving by to make me look as though I were part of the past too, patrolling the place like some kind of ghost. These students are remarkably attached to the place.

I guess I'm ready to check out, though. You know, I was really really angered by the governor of Arizona, giving her self-righteous spiel about how the Federal government hasn't done anything about the "illegals" living among them. As though this is the fault of the new administration she wants to tweak. As though there would be any way to establish "suspicion" of being illegal other than by profiling. Um, hello, that's what suspicion means. What the hell could seeming alien mean other from acting "different???"

But she gets up a head of righteous indignation and lots of folks will follow her, feeling invaded somehow, as if these border crossers weren't also leaving something behind. As if they really want to leave strong and deep connections with people, traditions, land, the burial grounds.

But when there's no economy, what are you going to do? I know Buffalo is holding out better than lots of places, but I'm not sure there's a whole lot of what gets called innovation here. We talk a good game, but mostly things are run by the folks who've always run them, and they're holding on tighter and tighter the less there is to go around. And, um, I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me anyhow. There's always some hidden codicil to the arrangement. A spot in some mausoleum. Spooky.

Hey, I went to the Sabres game last night. It was a pretty big deal, although I feel toward all the hype the way lots of people must feel about ghosts. I mean, I'm into it and everything, and I did the screaming jumping out of my seat high five thing. But I felt askance, as though way too much was being made of what is really just a game. I especially felt this when the crowd roared for the shaking booty up on the big screen when the booty was right down in front of me and wouldn't have been shaking but for the screen.

Here, check it out:

Can't you just see where the megatron in the middle will someday soon become a hologram, with 3-D seeming figures. Maybe you'll be able to watch from inside the action, with all the music and cheering seeming just for you. Don't get me wrong, it was fun. Just not all that fun compared to other possibilities I can imagine. Especially considering the cost these days. And they screen you on the way in as though it could be as dangerous inside as, say, riding a bike on the streets is. Just a little creepy for the scale of the simulated mayhem.

Then there was this big glove throwing fight at the very end, tweaking the rules requiring that its instigator be suspended when the fight is in the last seconds. But it gave the crowd it's punctuation thrill. We went screaming into the streets, "Let's go Buffalo!!!" against a rhythm played on hundreds of car horns.

I'm not saying all these hyper-innovations are bad. I try to implicate myself with everything I say. I do have elaborate ways to say goodbye though, and that's for sure.

Well, moving on then. The car heat's back, the boat is gone, the belongings winnowed way down. Spring has sprung. You know the drill. Don't cry for me, I'm still on this side of all those ashes.

The thought I had was that the arena where the hockey playoff game was played was itself in fact a hologram, or microcosm if you will. The feedback loops for hormonal interactions were compressed, pretty much in the way that the radioactive materials are brought into proximity so that they can "go critical" and create heat or a bomb in a nuclear reaction.

I think that's what the marvels of information technologies is doing for the planet, really. It would be nice if we could cheer together without having to mark someone as the enemy. It would be nice if there didn't seem always to be the requirement for someone to hate, someone to be angry with, someone to act as scapegoat for what frustrates us.

It would be nice if we weren't holding on quite so tightly so something which indeed was once really really nice, but now it's time to move on. Move on in the direction of humanity, decency, bigger hearts and minds. Move beyond endless graveyards and meaningless ritual toward something more alive. Where people who once were loved live on in fact, through words or even pictures or videos that they participated in. These are the only meanings which really cross the boundaries of space and time. Eternity is meaning meant not symbols preserved. Well, if you were to ask me, which I know you're not, but that's what I'd say if you were to.

Framed!

Back when I was working on my boat a lot, I would sometimes find myself in a mess of more than I could handle. A handy way to picture this situation might be to imagine me with toxic epoxy up to my elbows, a head full of the understanding that I would have to use toxic acetone (nail polish remover) to get it off, and panic about various boat parts in various stages of hardening into the wrong position.

Of course, none of these problems could or would occur had I been less concerned to make permanent repairs or modifications. In the "old days" before the advent of such conveniences as epoxy, it was understood that timbers would rot, that they would need periodic replacement and that the entire labor was an ongoing and therefore never-ending process. Things were even built with an eye toward the possibility to repair them.

We have such enduring and durable methods now, and hardly anyone really bothers with wooden boats. Still, the plastic ones don't, in fact, last forever, and they can be pretty hard to dispose of. And somehow the cost in real dollars to own one keeps shooting up to the point where you almost might as well just build more disposable ones. Except that the cost for a wooden boat goes up even faster.

It is very hard to find peace and calm up against the rush of daily life as we live it.

These days, politically, we seem to be engaged in a new version of trench warfare; that ancient WWI disastrous technique which led to the advent of chemical agents and other monstrous techniques to smoke soldiers out of their trenches.

The longer term solution, on top of fairly lame new laws of warfare, seems to have been bigger and more powerful machines of war, combined with a sort of tactical guerrilla deployment of lightweight units.

In the political arena, we have opposing camps of certainty, which keep looking for ever more powerful tactics or techniques to outsmart foes which are certainly more stupid than your camp. Deserving to die outright. Sometimes the camps even try to sharpen up their arguments, but it seems difficult to downright impossible to entice anyone out of the other team's trenches even to pay attention.

Certainty is certainly not a function of being right. We know, historically, that each time we have thought ourselves certain, that certainty, over time, looks silly. Think about bloodletting, or early treatments for mental illness, or certain medical techniques and chauvenisms. The only embarrassing thing, looking back, is that we were once so certain of something which now looks silly.

Look back on your childhood, for instance. There's nothing that terribly embarrassing about being a child, or being wrong. Just about being certain when it turns out you are in no position to be so.

Certainty is a function of meshing your own position to a larger frame whose stability feels like the very definition of sanity. These frames may be religious, or scientific, and sometimes, especially in the case of science, fairly propositional. You aren't sure what the "right" answer will be, but you're pretty confident of the procedures which will find it.

So, the frame, in the case of science, becomes the Grand Narrative of progress. And still, if you are a medical doctor, called upon to diagnose individuals' dire and distressing complaints, you have to operate within some kind of ad-hoc certainty to be able to function at all. You operate within the frame of what is state of the art today.

And still you might have a hard time listening to those who understand at least the broad outlines of what you're saying, but from the inside, as it were, can't quite go along with the diagnosis. They have contrary evidence, but maybe not the words.

In the case of warfare, nuclear explosive devices have arguably kept conflict down to what classroom teachers like to call a dull roar. World War and the epic-level casualties from the two Great Wars have been kept pretty well in check.

Meanwhile, even though the age of Einstein also marked the age of Thomas Kuhn's skepticism about the certainties of "progress," as well as the overall Post Modern critique of any kind of certainty, we do and must await some sort of new approach to resolving entrenched differences before we can put away the bomb.

Here's a thought:

Yesterday, yet again, I landed in the ER. It felt like the same thing which happened Christmas Eve when I was found to have suffered multiple pulmonary emboli. The diagnosis yesterday was dehydration, likely related to having had a few too many drinks the night before.

The only trouble with that diagnosis for me is that I've had a few too many a few too many times for this brand new set of symptoms to make sense to me. Plus, I'd felt fine in the morning, no headache, no hangover, and had headed out for a walk, in the middle of which I felt the same kind of sudden and total loss of power that I'd felt on Christmas Eve. So, I kept walking, with whatever energy I had left, to the hospital which was no further than to turn around and go back home. Made sense to me.

Lots of tests later, the good news is that there is nothing apparently wrong with me. The clots are known to still be there, and the treatment protocol is ongoing. I guess I'm looking for some trigger this time which made my dehydration do something different than it had ever done before. I'm looking for some connection between this event, the event on Christmas Eve which also came on while walking in the cold, and an earlier event which bizarrely enough felt about the same from the inside, but which was diagnosed to be more of a manic episode with psychotic symptoms.

I know that in the earlier case my mind really did go off the rails. The narrative that I was inhabiting was fully detached from reality. There are reachy links among these events, relating to potassium levels, perhaps, but there have also been very definite and distinct diagnostic protocols which have been able to pin specific issues. And thankfully, some medicines to treat them.

Extraneous to all of these diagnoses is the fact that I have been making an awful lot of changes in pretty short order. I left my job, on the basis - I have to guess - that the cognitive dissonance between what I was doing and both expected of myself and was expected by those who paid me to be doing; and what I felt to be central to my being.

Then I moved premises, sold my house, re-established some important relationships, and established some important new ones. And without really thinking terribly hard about it, I find myself eating the kind of anti-cholesterol healthy diet which I never could get myself to do back when the doctors told me to.  Not to mention distressing events in the Big Picture, like the catastrophic anti-government, anti-regulatory, anti-common sense regime of GWB and his team of hucksters. Global warming, peak oil, teapartyism, Fox TV, and all sorts of things to make a thinking man feel as if the whole world is going off the rails.

So, there have been a lot of changes to my life, and it makes perfect sense to me that there might be a slew of symptoms as I seek, however inchoately, to re-establish some sort of homeostasis.

I by no means wish to be my own doctor, nor to second guess the treatments that I've been receiving, many of which may well have saved my life. I do, rather, wish to second guess the certainties in which these treatments are embedded. Because the one and only thing which ties the different things which have happened together is me. Not me as in the master of psychosomatic symptomatologies, but me as in the guy who has made all the decisions as a result of dissonances which I didn't really do a whole lot to cause.

Sure, I had choices about what job to take, but like all of us, not as many as you might think. I could have deployed strategies to stay where I was, but I saw an opportunity, like a speed skater at the Olympics, and bolted through the gap.  I could have tried more medicines, but, at least inwardly, my difference from the norm was worth taking into account, and none of the diagnoses fit well enough for me to inhabit them fully. Provisionally, for sure, but never quite fully. There has simply been too much changing at the same time, and it hardly surprises me that there might be physical or emotional manifestations.

It always surprises the medical establishment that I'm not on any meds. What's wrong with this picture?

What the doctors can offer me is a much more finely tuned sense than I could ever have of liklihood. They know how to weigh things in some context, where I might be latching onto potassium deficiencies, because among its list of symptoms are all the things which I have experienced. Where an experienced practitioner can put these into some sort of perspective, based on lots of obervations and research.

On my own, at best, I would make a kind of teaparty random mess of my desperate flailing after some explanation. And in the case of health issues, the explanation is precisely what you don't want because that would be a diagnosis, which would mean that there really is something basically wrong with you. So, I'd say ambiguity can be a good thing. Sometimes.

Well, unless a diagnosis is missed and then you end up dying when you needn't have. Which is pretty much why you keep your head down in the trenches too. It's scary to consider what might and can and sometimes likely will go wrong, and if smart people are warning you to look out for what might happen, it's pretty hard not to. Even though, sometimes, the aggregate net effect of looking too hard is pretty hard to distinguish from lots of people getting sick all at the same time, maybe mainly because they've stopped looking after themselves.


Which goes right back to that godawful mess you can get into working on an old fashioned wooden boat in the face of more modern technologies. Sometimes when you add up all the treatment regimens for any one human being, especially after they start interacting and even conflicting with one another, you do end up with a treatment looking a whole lot worse than whatever the disease was that started the whole thing way back in the first place. How many tales have you heard, especially from the elderly, about having to strip away the meds one by one to get back to some baseline from which some sense can start to be made.

The mess is the simple and perfectly predictable result of working within little subsets of certainty without, ever, being able to step back and consider the whole. Imagine if we let the Palin Republicans handle the economy, while the Obama Democrats handled health care. Is there anyone in the world who would consider that a very good idea?? But does anybody consider the compromises we end up with a very good idea? Really?

We will have to find a way to crawl up out of our trenches. We will have to accept that some of us may die of missed diagnoses, reticence, stupidity. It may well be fewer than die now from mistakes in the hospital, which is far more than die from mistakes on the highways.

In my life, retrospectively, there was no need for the big guns deployed against various possibilities which never did materialize. I think I would have died of an appendectomy if there had not been surgeons, but I don't really think that was a terribly complicated surgery. And who knows, I may not have needed to drink so much, which might have been what brought it on, if things hadn't become so crazy in the world by then. If I hadn't been in the middle of not just cognitive dissonance, but crazy amounts of stress trying to keep a school open to which all sorts of lovely people had somehow attached their identities.

The trouble is that you can't really know in advance which are the ones who really do need the intervention of the big guns. Which are the ones who will need the anti-psychotic meds for life. Whose hearts are ticking time bombs. Who is prone to clotting, who will die of cholesteremia. Which cancer must be cut out and how drastically?

But who wants to live life afraid of his own body? On the screen, we all love to watch and cheer and cry about those who live a life as though in contempt of death. These are our heros, athletic, firefighting, fishers in the north seas. And we are afraid, sometimes, even to step outdoors because the neighbors might be toting guns.

The fact of the matter, if you were to do the math, is that the only reason health insurance is affordable to any of us is that most of us don't really care for or need the drastic interventions. God help us if we all become thoroughly modern, and consider it our right to rule out each and every illness which might explain our current symptoms.

There is no wooden boat which lasts forever. There is no body either. It is no longer clear that the way medicine works is in the direction of progress overall. That's not because there aren't wonderful new techniques to help the truly ill. But likely too many folks are dragged into the system hoping for something that just cannot be forthcoming.

We look to the medical system, or at least I do, for simple statements such as "this is what we are willing to do" without the question back "are you willing to pay for it, then?" Instead we get the absurd statement "this is what could be done if you can get someone to pay for it." And no-one is in any position ahead of time to tell you it will be paid for. This creates a state of perpetual panic, pretty much like living on a fault line. Imagine if the police asked you each time they intervened for your safety.

We have displaced our grief in the same way that we have displaced our heros. When it comes home, it is almost always unbearable because we had thought that there could be none so close to home. We had fallen into the lulled sleep of those whose life is too smooth. Until the very earth starts quaking.

Let's dial it back, how about? Stop the advertising which makes us all feel unwell *unless.* Taking trains most of the time will hardly affect our lifestyles. Electric cars for the local trips, rented hopefully, should be sufficient. Walking out of doors makes a huge difference to your healthcare profile. And how about shaking hands across the divides of race and class and education. That would do a lot to calm our fears.

There is so much that is wonderful about life as we have discovered it in these United States. Let's not blow it because a tiny class of hucksters in our midst would have us believe that we must take snake oil to feel whole. I don't think that there's a single person, embedded in whatever trench of certainty, who wants the hucksters to prevail.

And surely no-one believes in a centrally controlled economy anymore. So, what's the fuss? We're only talking about the boundaries. Should healthcare be on the side of police and fire, or the side of coke and pepsi? It's not about goverment making decisions. It's about you and me making decisions, taking responsibility, and calling in the trained experts when that becomes necessary.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for spring when I can figure out if that old wooden sailboat is still salvageable. For maybe the fifth time in its life. About the same number of times that I've failed to die myself. Let's see, there was the scarlet fever, the drowning, the near-miss on a motorcycle, the appendicitis, the embolism, not to mention the food poisoning, the storm at sea. Oh, I guess it's a lot more times than for the old sailboat. Bottom line, I feel pretty lucky to be alive. Which has not quite but almost nothing to do with elaborate interventions on my behalf.

I sometimes don't think it's my narrative which has gone off the rails. Sometimes I think it's the frame itself which isn't tethered any longer to reality.

Loser!

My sweet daughter used to make an L on her forehead at me a lot. Powerful expressions always originate with the very young, and of course it took me a while to "get" what this expression meant.

It has taken me my entire life until, perhaps, about now to decide that no matter how often I earned the nickname HardLuck, I am precisely not a Loser.

Lately, I whine about what the Health Insurance Industry does to me - they have systematically rejected every single claim, except for the incidentals, for my recent hospitalization. The total bill is enough to wreck me, and having paid my premiums doesn't begin to cover my obligations up against the set of rules they have for me to break unwittingly.

But the good news is that they are showing their hand. Demographically, they should consider me on their side in the Big Fight. They should bend over backwards to convince me that we really do have a fair and honest and worth-preserving system of health care. I'm one of the lucky ones who's recently enough unemployed actually to have health insurance, and still luckier to continue to be able to pay their premiums.

But just like Dick Cheney, they can't help themselves. By their actions they seem to believe somehow that I will be grateful each time they make an exception to their arcane rules that somehow I haven't precisely followed. Most of the time, I'm not the one failing to follow the rules anyhow; it might be the doctor using the "wrong" code, or the hospital passing the deadline for pre-certification, or me getting sick while crossing insurance boundaries. But I'm the one at the end of the line. I'm the one with the fewest resources to fight.

So, the power remains entirely with them to make exceptions, and I should be grateful? Actually, I think I've been granted a glimpse into the hellish orgy which is behind the way profits get made around these parts.

Back in highschool, everyone was shown highway atrocities, enough to make you quite actually sick, for the purpose of discouraging drunk driving. And we continue to be told of what a large percentage of highway accidents are caused by alcohol. For that matter, we continue to be terrorized by stories about drunken airline pilots.

But the message is never conveyed that if you put that many autonomous death machines on high-speed roadways, a certain amount of mayhem is simply inevitable. And it will look just as gruesome.

I prefer to focus on how few fatalities there are, given the nutso system that we have to multiply the consequences of any one of us going off, or making the wrong deer in headlights move, or just being despondent because of some sort of extreme cognitive dissonance.

Leaping ahead here; the terrorists are not the problem. The problem is that we live in a world where we grant the nutjob or the drunk so much power. Every time we think it must have been some Islamic radical, it turns out to have been some neighbor (in the case of Buffalo and Tim McVeigh) or some local nutjob flying his private plane into a building (in the case of Austin) in imitation of the big guys.

And when it really is some Islamic radical, we come up with bizarre conspiracy theories about how it must have been the Big Guy. Which just diverts attention from the fact that the Big Guy was always ready to take full advantage of whatever happened whenever it happened. They tell us all the time that some sort of terrorist incident is inevitable. Is that so that we can prepare for it (how would you prepare???) or so that "they" can?

We are being prepared by a slow but steady erosion of our civil liberties and degrees of freedom, but not the ones that count, like being able to drive cars or fly planes. It's the ones we shrug about which are being whittled away. The ones which, each by themselves, don't mean much, but will add up, down the road, to something which looks very much like Too Big to Change.

Google's gmail wasn't really working very well yesterday. I don't know if this will be documented, or allowed to languish as something that lots of people might have noticed but assumed was something "on my end." We're all vaguely aware of how vulnerable our information systems are. Cybersecurity is generally recognized to be as critical as infrastructure security of any sort. Google gets attacked by overzealous Chinese patriotic students, but that might be a difference without a distinction from being attacked outright by the forces of the Chinese government.

Just as it really doesn't matter who is the pilot of a mobile bomb and what deranged him. The system is simply set such that this stuff has become an inevitability. We like to assign blame, but maybe it's the system that has gone rotten.

Or maybe "the system" is working really really well, but there are some terribly minority winners for whom what they've already won is never enough. Maybe our fear is fully functional for them. If we think the system is busted, wrecked, headed for disaster, then we will remain fully powerless to do anything about it, and the ones who have the power can just keep getting more.

I do think it's about that simple.

The good news is that we will learn to get along because we must. The bad news hardly needs reciting, it's on the news every day, whether it's a Harvard genius toting a gun, or the figment of someone's imagination toting a gun in the UB Library. We're really scared of one another.

But no-one seems to notice how well we do, in fact, get along.

I'm a weirdo on my street, just because, I guess, I'm the only renter. Plus, I'm shy by disposition and don't really know the rules for interaction in the local soap opera. I guess I'm part of it - I wonder what role they have scripted out for me? I could make up some fascinating tales, based on the part that makes it out in public. They'd be at least as believable as the truth, whatever that is. I have no idea what my role is or should be. Honest.

I did not get that job, by the way, where I would be taking on a very public role helping to diffuse the tectonic forces now at the intersection of China and the U.S. This was not a mistake on the part of the search committee, nor does it make me a loser. I was well qualified for the position, and made it to the podium for sure, in a very crowded field. But there was only one position on offer, and I didn't get it.

In a minor sense, I am a known quantity in Buffalo. I am not one of the players. More of a bit part at the fringes who somehow has been in prominent positions at certain moments, but never in a real spotlight. That has been fine for me, but I have also allowed myself to consider myself a loser, even though each time that I have 'failed to succeed' the entire arrangement was a kind of setup. I was a patsy for someone else's failure to set a winnable context.

I guess that makes me some kind of fool, stepping in where more sensible people always have something better to do, or know how to say no. (there's absolutely no way I would have been able to say "no" if I were offered this job. I'm just as scared as you are about being out of work)

Whether heading a school for gifted kids during a stagflationary recession in a shrinking city at a time when "gifted" was a widely derided claim. Whether guiding a high level commission to China without the proper high level alignment back at the home school. Whether struggling to keep up with expectations in a field where those in power all, to a person, announce their utter incompetency (that's what IT work means in case you didn't know what you were doing to those guys who fix your machines).

But it doesn't make me a loser. The losers are the ones who are not allowed to live on my street, and who are therefore concentrated in places I would consider it a risk to my life to live. I wonder how the people who do live there consider it. Isn't it a risk to their lives as well?

Very smart and very well-grounded (sic) people trade advice back and forth, at a very high level - like 30,000 feet in the air high - about what should be done to "rightsize" Buffalo's infrastructure. Which parts should be let go, which bulldozed, which mothballed, since it seems perfectly obvious that there simply isn't enough population of sufficient income to preserve it all.

I don't think I want to live at those 30,000 foot heights. There's no air to breath up there. Well grounded in some esoteric field of experts is not the same as having feet actually on the ground.

I'm guessing that there are lots and lots of people in Sprawlsville who would love to live closer to the action if they weren't so encouraged to fall prey to the notion that everyone in the city is bound and determined get you and yours.

There's a big shopping mall just outside the outer ring of Buffalo called the Galleria. When it was built, it was one of the larger such places in the nation, built to take advantage of the cross-border shopping trends from Canada (depending on the ascendancy of Canadian or American hockey, say).

It's been in the news nationally for not allowing buses from the city to terminate there, leading to the loss of one poor woman's life crossing the quite literally impossible-to-cross highway to get to her low-level job inside the mall.

The first thing you see when you enter the mall are signs announcing that "children" under 18 are not allowed unaccompanied. The assumption is that this too is because of the unruly kids from the city (as if they could get there in the first place).

I happen to know first hand, because I was there, that this rule is because of a very exclusive and expensive private boarding school for dyslexic boys where I used to work. This mall was their Friday night release. During the week, the prescription to empower these boys, who were demonstrably smart (and necessarily rich, which is  neither here nor there) but who had trouble reading; the prescription was to provide order to their lives. And constant phonic drilling.

This was not exactly a military school, but it did set out to internalize order that the students were lacking, in a way often reminiscent of military schools. For the right sort of student, it really really worked. It was liberating.

But if you set these kids loose in the mall on a Friday, with teachers who have been on duty (you had to live on campus to teach there) virtually 24/7, you do have a bit of a problem waiting to happen.

It was these kids who were the reason for the rule at the mall.

As FDR once convinced us, it truly is fear and fear alone which is our adversary.

And if I, a winner in every sense of the game *except* perhaps my own internal impressions, cannot overcome fear, who can?

So, I'll continue to work on it. I'll keep you posted. I still think that the tectonic tensions between China and the US are critically important for us all to worry about, collectively. But of course, they are worries at the level of asteroids possibly coming in from the far reaches of the cosmos if you're on the ground dealing with health and safety emergencies.

The way to bring those issues down to earth, I am fully convinced, is to make it clear on a local level what it might mean to throw out the search for scientific stratosphere-level certainties (religious, technological, blueprinted - it hardly matters, because they're all the very same thing) in favor of a kind of contextualized flowing usage trued against centuries of drilling and practice and recitation. We could use the balance.

The funny thing is that in the so called ghettos, they're already way way ahead of us in the Eastern martial arts training. There may actually be less ground to travel there toward making sense of China, than there ever could be at the University which still only affords a tiny handful of professors and courses.

Well, it's a thought. My strength in my professional life has always and only been my patience. I seem to lend a bit of calm in the face of dire circumstances. It's why I like to sail in the wild weather. It's the kind of fool that I am. It defines my success in the field of IT, overpopulated by over-reacts who love the adrenalin pumping emergencies. I will remain calm, ever looking for ways on the ground to connect with the 30,000 foot perpetual emergency that the smart people in power pay attention to, exhorting us to do the right thing.

Swindled!

Last night, arguing with a very talented lawyer friend of mine (we like to posture adversarially, although it's not a fair match, since he does this professionally) I heard a sad and funny story.

We were arguing about Tiger Woods and Bill Clinton, and the Starr commission and framing and responsibility. For the sake of argument, let's say I was taking Clinton's side, excoriating (a word lawyers would never use in a courtroom) Starr for dispensing with procedural justice in his rabid pursuit of some truth with a capital T. It seemed to me that Clinton was simply maneuvered into a position where his answer was guaranteed, and that it would necessarily be at odds with the goods being held in reserve against him.

The other side of the argument in this case being that he was *out* maneuvered, and that Clnton was the one with the brains, the staff, the power to avoid precisely this predicament, and in the end he still lied to the American public, in whose service he had pledged to labor.

Clinton lied, perhaps, because it was a small matter. He lied, perhaps, because the consequences of telling the truth would cause greater harm to the public than the harm of keeping it from them. He'd been cornered, and perhaps he'd proved his mettle?

I don't much care about the proper answer. It makes interesting dinner conversation.

So, there was this judge, having an affair with a university professor. One night, they are caught on tape having "not-sex" (if you speak like Clinton) in the parking lot of a restaurant. There was a small accident - a fender bender in the process of backing out - which entailed a quick "no problem, officer" check written on the spot (not to the officer, to the victim, sorry!). There was a tale of drunken weaving on the skyway bridge, and an arrest for DWI.

You pretty much know which side you should be on, until you hear that the judge's wife was having him tailed, and that the DWI was a setup. A tipoff. The pictures were not captured accidentally. Who knows about the bumper bumping?

Apart from your envy that these participants in an illicit affair could keep it that hot after two years, it's not all that easy to tell where the justice is or should be. At least not for me.

The part that's hard to get beyond though, is that you do know that the scorned wife was the reason that the affair stayed hot. She was being used that way. You also know that these players probably knew that about themselves, and wanted to keep things that way for as long as they could. Well, you don't really know, but you can reasonably surmise.

I don't really know the end of the story, although I have to assume that a few lives were wrecked. Once public, these things make a hard time stuffing them back into the can. It's hard not to see the wife both vindicated and justified. But you don't really know the backstory. You don't really know anything about their homelife, what led up to things. Do you need to? So what if she was just a controlling bitch. Isn't that just a cliche to put down those who outmaneuver you?

I spent part of yesterday in the VW shop. My brakes were always on (take that Toyota!), and it was costing me lots of gas mileage. They'd just completed a total redecoration of their shop, which made the entire customer service experience much more lavish than it used to be. I hardly need to tell you that it made me nervous.

Now, I'm pretty loaded down with technology, and I tend to know how to use it. This was the first time that I remember their quote for the part being so far out of line with the "standard" price on the Internet. They'd suggested I should have the brakes replaced at the same time but I held off, on the reasonable argument that I'm still not working. I made some lame jokes about how they'd better not start serving Cappuccino or I'd start thinking I was among the wrong class of customer anymore. They assured me I'd have to bring my own. (the coffee was pretty good, oh, and I just rechecked and it must have been a fluke, like looking up prices on Travelocity before you move to commit. It no longer looks like they overcharged me.)

Of course it did turn out that there was more wear left "than we'd thought". I couldn't tell if that was said sheepishly. It wouldn't have mattered to me. I've driven this car nearly 300,000 miles, and all the service has been done at this shop, and I'm not about to stop loving them just because they made their showroom and customer waiting area look more like that rip-off place which serves Cappuccino, and which I, of course, eschew.

But there's more to the story, of course. Recently, in Toronto, on a Sunday, picking up my girls from the airport, one of my coils went out. (yeah, I thought there was only one too) The car made it home at potentially great expense to the car, and later on I found that the 'net is full of VW haters and flamers who post about this issue, and how VW sux. But when I'd taken my car in for the brake diagnosis, they just replaced all these coils, no charge to me, fixed the rattle with some duct tape arrangement, and told me how I could get reimbursed for the coil I'd bought myself, on the road, on a guess.

The coil I bought was too cheap to bother searching for its receipt (that plus the time to manage the paperwork). And I know the VW shop was eager to do this for me because the newly official recall would mean that they would be paid for charging me nothing. I'm not stupid. But it felt like I was being respected, treated well, favored. Any damage done to the car was by now ancient history. I mean that rather literally.

But now I have no way to tell which was the bigger factor in my lost gas mileage, and where the permanent injury is. An ambiguity I'll just have to live with.  I think the difference from Toyota is that there was never any danger to life and limb here. Just pocketbook risk. But they didn't exactly come clean about it ahead of time, and who knows if maybe the flamers on the 'net had something to do with forcing their hand.

Trust is rough. The temptations are all over the place - I'm sure the VW shop is hurting as much as anyone else for business.

***

Sorry, had to take a break. You know how it is when you stay out late, have a few drinks (I walked home!). You're ravenous the next morning.

I made myself an omelette. It was incredible. I don't know if you'd like it, or if it was just incredible to me. It was a garbage omelette, full of too much unmatched stuff that I had by the dregs. Beans. Chorizo. Olives. Broccoli. Brie. Salza. Little bits of stuff. I have no way to know if I liked it because I'm an easy sell, or because I was happy to find use for those dregs. Oh, I forgot to tell you about the potatoes fried in olive oil.

The one thing I do know for certain is that you would never be able to eat such a thing in any restaurant. That I know for certain. What I don't know is whether that is because there can't possibly be that much love in a plate for hire, or if no self-respecting chef would even think of that combination, or simply because there would be some guarantee of returns to the kitchen. All I know for certain is that you'd never get that in a restaurant.

I also know for certain that I'd never have satisfied my particular craving in a restaurant.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, OK, sure, you're thinking this is pretty clever, right, trying to make it seem as though these things just happen and I don't orchestrate them, and that they will somehow magically fit right into the story?

I'm not that disingenuous. Please! I make shit up as much as the next guy. I edit. I revise. (the omelette story is true though, and even I know I'll have a hard time selling the notion that I revise. I'm not stupid)

I was going to speak, rather, about how, magically, on the news, as if I were the one to cause it, there are these seemingly coincident happenings. Well, their happening is not coincident, it's plain fact that they coincided. But the randomness of their apparent alignment, that's the seeming part.

First, there's Dick Cheney outing himself as a "big fan of torture." Then there's this guy over in England who pretty much confesses to murder right on TV; how he suffocated his "partner" suffering from terminal AIDS and lots of pain. How he thereby relieved the doctors and his lover all, of what he knew they could never do. And how he was interrogated for 30 hours against the likelihood that he was, in fact, guilty of murder.

Here's the shocker. I want to give them both a pass, both Cheney and the lover. Both of them had the decency to speak their "truths" out loud and in public. Now, you might say that they have little enough to lose. They're old, both of  them, on death's door for various reasons. But there's little enough of that truth telling out there. (there are few enough cars that even get that far!) I'd really like for Cheney to be interrogated, on the power of risking his life, but I'm tipping my hat that he at least says out loud what he's doing in private. When it affects us, I mean. I don't really give a damn what he does in his closet.

How are the rest of us supposed to make good decisions, when everyone's making up stories? How, when everyone's got an angle on everyone else's story?

That's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Really the omelette was incredible. I'm not about to open a restaurant, but still . . . .

From not moving to barely moving from the move

I'm certain you neither want nor need to hear about this, gentle reader. But there really ought to be a statute of limitations on bodily exertions and requirements to move premises without the funds to do so. I should really have simply executed a sit-down strike, which is all I've got since I'm not a violent person no matter how outraged I become.

But it's easy enough to score some Vicodin (r) from among the oversupplied. (I'd thrown mine out years ago, after taking one course so that I could work through some broken leg pain) It's easy enough to rally. And I'm not dead yet, although I wasn't sure there for a while, with endless shelves of books remaining in the U-Haul (r) and zippo (r) energy remaining in my sore and beaten body.

So, now begins the endless process of unpacking and more winnowings. Meantime, I discover that a few words of mine have stirred up a hornets nest among the right wing of the family. Remaining silent and being thought a fool is ever the better part of valor, but I'm the genuine article - a fool - and couldn't keep my yap shut. Good thing I was absent to defend myself this time, since I'd a stuck it in deeper.

But really, I don't think the right wingers should be both fanning the flames of fear of "death panels" at the same time that they are preaching personal responsibility. It's not rationing we need. Just simple rationality, which, like the smart grid, would allow good decisions to be made on the basis of good information devolving to the point of decision. The doctor and the patient. Who should not be adversaries in this match, the way that I am with U-Haul, say, or the drug companies, or the purveyors of death however striped.

You know at U-Haul they warn you that it's easy to reverse the F and E on the fuel gauge, so that you don't get dinged for thinking you've sent it back 3/4 full when you really sent it back 3/4 empty. And then they give you the contract saying it's 3/4 full and you believe them, until you discover they've made the mistake they warned you about. And you feel like you've just been flim-flammed.

Shouldn't they really send the truck out with a full tank so you don't have to be gamed on the return anyhow? Where they reserve the right to ding you if it's under, such that you have no choice but to overfill as some kind of insurance against what they could do to you? Not to mention the insurance they sell you in some very vague distinction from the kinds of protection rackets which have been illegal for quite a while now. The implication being that you might just be bankrupted without it, so you pay the carefully calibrated fee. They've got you over the barrel.

I remember loving my windproof Zippo back when I was young and immortal and thought that smoking was a nice way to spite the world. I don't remember any drugs working for me though, except the kind that are really cheap and therefore must be controlled. Once when my appendix burst on its way out. Everybody I know wants to push drugs on me though. And they get angry when I suggest that they might be subject to the advertisers' placebo effect of oversupply. Well, I'd get angry too, but I still demand my liberty to just say no.

And I'm too tired now to think. Too tired to write, but I have this obligation going. Today I received maybe five gentle emails about how after much careful consideration, no, in the end, they won't be able to take the old sailboat I'd offered up for free. Still, I feel mildly abused, to be the object of dreaming battled out with sensible spouses back at home across some dining room table.

My friends offer now to subsidize the boat's move, since they have fond memories too, but I think that what's on offer is a kind of shared ownership, which - as in the case of love too come to think of it - can never work with an old wooden sailboat. The awareness while under way requires an intimacy, a familarity with each of the particulars, which is at the very least unlikely when the work is delegated.

You can't sail a wooden boat the way that most people drive now; almost as if the airbags were part of the calculations, in just the way that legal transgressions are part of the calculations of most successful businesses. It's the profit margin for insurance companies, and credit card companies, not to mention the porn which provides the profit margins for online dealings. Right wingers should get a clue about such things. They make their money denying claims they're obligated to pay, just because they get away with it from a significant number of us. They make their money on late fees. They're gaming us. I'm tired.

Lots of people make scant consideration for bounding deer when they crowd you on country roads; for saturated traffic, and things which weren't repaired right. But here I am repeating myself - I'm pretty certain I've made that identical observation before, now buried beneath my energy to search for it.

And I cannot even cook my dinner until I unearth the things still buried in boxes around the small apartment. So, I've gotta go, but I'll be back. Well, unless the bald tires don't make it to the credit-card shop, since we've had our first real snow this morning. Let's see, together with my still unpaid dental crown which comes due tomorrow or they won't clean my teeth, that makes a dollar three eigthty left after the house closes at the end of the week, plus there's the cost to move the boat . . . well the happiness I feel. As they say on that credit card ad, Priceless!

How Drug-Industry Lobbyists Won on Health-Care

How Drug-Industry Lobbyists Won on Health-Care

I just had a dumpster delivered to my house. I've found a buyer, and I feel blessed. Around here seemingly every second house is for sale. The buyer is a young fellow; a hunter who's already set up a deer stand high in a tree on what will soon be his land.

He'd worked over in Iraq as a contractor to earn his down payment, alongside devoted patriots. Though I have never hunted, we can agree that there is something wrong with the disparity in pay over there. We like each other pretty well, though we come from different backgrounds. Both of us would prefer our patriotic soldiers to be paid more, and for better jobs to be available here at home.

I'm happy that he could afford his nugget of cash to get past the borrowing hurdles which were never there for me. I bought this house for no cash down, way back when they were giving money away. Now, even with lots of money down, the bankers still want to be sure your house is worth at least half its asking price.

Around here in Western New York we never did experience any great bubble in real estate value, and so no real wealth evaporated when that bubble popped. I mean the wealth never was real, but the leveraged purchasing surely was, and we never experienced that either.

I think, but have not done the research to be certain, that there is less unemployment around here now also. Well, it's been so many decades of hemorrhaging jobs by the tens of thousands form Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, never mind the old manufacturing industries like steel and automotive.

Housing prices aren't really down, but the number of qualified buyers surely is, which has approximately the same effect. Stimulus cash doesn't matter if you don't have the down payment nest egg. If you want to be the one to sell, you have to give the buyer his price. We are pricing now well below the replacement cost for similar housing. While there was no bubble, there was a drastic oversupply of sprawl-placed cardboard housing.


Now I face my impossible quarterly bill for health insurance, and life insurance, and disability insurance - shortly to be disburdened of the homeowners which has always been, strangely, the least expensive of the bunch.

There are lots of burned out houses around here, and you can only speculate as to the origins of those fires. Rebuilding a destroyed house would bizarrely leave the insured with a covered expense that much higher than the new house's market value.

I wonder what the insurance companies actually do? Do they pay you just to move?

So, according to the Time Magazine article quoted above, there are that many more drug industry lobbiests than members of Congress - 2.3 for every 1 - and one must assume that each of them is paid more highly than we pay our representatives, or at least that a large number of them are at $180K apiece from my back of the envelope calculations, as compared to $165K for our more patriotic, yeah, servants.

Or, who knows? Maybe these guys also work for peanuts and the bulk of the money goes to perks and parties and campaign or memorial contributions for their favored elected officials. People will do almost anything for money these days.

I've been a kind of Rip VanWinkle for some time now, living way out in the boonies, catching the news as catch can when I return after dark from my ever widening tech support rounds. I had no real clear idea that genetic engineering had already begun reaping multi-billion dollar rewards from actual medical products. I'd been waiting for announcements of gene therapy and brave new disease-free human forms.

And I had absolutely no idea that the cost to use these "biologic" drugs, "derived" from living matter, could exceed in one year the cost of an actual house around these parts. Surely they have perfected now a kind of perfect torture for those afflicted with whatever their drugs can cure.

If you are known to have the disease - let's say rheumatoid arthritis - then you won't be able to get new insurance and so you couldn't possibly afford the $50,000 annually which relief might cost. What then would you do. And which side are the genetic engineers on? Shouldn't they really want publicly funded health insurance. What else aren't we being told? Shouldn't they be arguing for no exclusions for pre-existing conditions? Wait . . . .!

They argue, and apparently win, to extend the period of their patent protection well beyond the 5 years which is customary for other drugs. Their outlays are so huge. And apparently these full outlays must get factored in to however the price gets set to alleviate the suffering for those afflicted.

It's supposed to be a real price, but how does it get measured then, against the massive profits. What is their calculus for returns from the government granted patent monopoly extended out now to perhaps 12 full years? They must know precisely how many of us have which diseases. They must understand the interval of pain against believability. They must have programs to suppress inconvenient truths about alternative methods. They must have budgets to fund the touting of the preferred routes toward solution.

Where does the drive to innovate then come from if the holding pattern to keep the old, and to water-drop-tortuously stage the rollout of the new, can be so unimaginably lucrative?

This is really no different from the torture apologies deployed over in Iraq. What limits can there be when lives are at stake?

I guess there's word that big pharma Rummie might be behind the scares for H1N1 vaccine production, because there is so much money in that too. He chairs big pharmas boards. Cheney won't shut up about why he'd had to torture. And Congress now makes little compromises to get the vote of those others on the take who want re-election that badly. What's matters a few years' patent protection among friends?

I think it might be critically important to whittle away around the edges of our assumptions. There are arguments that all cancer treatment, say, is motivated. That costly to life and wealth amputations and radiations and chemo-therapies are not so drastically better than strict dietary and lifestyle changes would be if they were tried. Certainly from the prevention side, there is much to be said in favor of not holding out medical remedies as a kind of nostrum to allow us to keep living as we have been.

But even from the side of treatment, there is much new to be said about less drastic interventions. That too early treatment might make that mountain of what could have been a disappearing mole-hill.

Science could be brought to bear on differing interpretations, but there would be that much less money in them for sure. And to the desperately afflicted, any margin of better must be priceless. Any statistical assurance of right direction.

But I do think that the margin of pain reflected by the price for relief is an almost perfect measure of the greed which must be deployed to find our cures. Isn't that what price means? These are our fundamentalist foundational Democratic Capitalist assumptions.

Surely, it is impossible to imagine that these cures could be found by the power of a kind of love, as they were so recently by Jonas Salk with his polio vaccine. Surely University researchers, tenured and motivated only by a search for truth, could never develop the wonder drugs so magically revealed by billions in venture capital deployed by motivated researchers?!

Masters of outsourcing are always mesmerized by a kind of perfected efficiency, as though this will magically release the human potential now locked away behind plodding work by ordinary people. Plausible deniability is an outsourced set of instructions to those who understand how to read the secret codes of implication.  Extraordinary rendition is an outsourced set of dirty deeds, no different in essence from the export of toxic wastes that we have accomplished now so perfectly in our tango with China.

The masters of these processes must be that drunk on their powers. There must be something intoxicating to be at that pinnacle of wealth and power and influence. Something nearly equal to the promise of eternal life their championed Jesus grants by proxy to such evidence of grace here on earth.

And what would it be worth to you, to alleviate the chronic pain of your afflictions? I sit now in the ever so mild pain an aging body feels after raking leaves by hand. I still perversely refuse the bottled analgesics, and don't have them available if I'd wanted them: a family member recently and so helpfully tossed the huge bottle of aspirin I've nursed for as old as my adult children now are. It had long expired.

So, I may be that willing to ignore life's small indignities. I still find hand tools near enough as quick, and far more satisfying than the powered variety. My mind is quiet enough to endure the repetitions. My body allows for pain.

But if I were in acute and chronic pain, there might be no limit to what I would pay or do to alleviate it. I think that must be what those people around here start from when they do crystal meth.

I find it unspeakably cruel that we would levy such a fee. No matter the costs, I think these should be born by the same agency which sends our rockets into space. I think our wars should be fought by patriots or not at all. And I think both Rumsfeld and Cheney belong in jail with their compatriot Bernie Madoff.

But that's just me. I'm about to dispose of my spent dreams in a very conveniently deposited dumpster. I'll pay my insurance premiums, up against the pain I would save those who love me. My life, my health, my abilty to continue to rake leaves measured with excruciating precision against my willingness to pay that price.

My true foundational and fundamentalist belief is that ordinary people liberated from the bonds that corporate and financial giants would precisely engineer for them would accomplish that much more and faster than can any of these out-sized quasi humans motivated only, apparently, by greed.