Plum Duff...not your ordinary gruel!

Catching up

2011-05-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

It's been over a year since I have blogged, and that is hard to believe. That year included a fairy tale trip to Gallicia in Spain in May along with my sister Mary, hosted by my daughter-in-law's wonderful, remarkable parents, Rafael and Pilar. I wrote about that to family and friends...actually writing only through half of the trip, which also extended on to a week's stay in London with my daughter-in-law Cristina and son Dale William.

But I missed the family reunion at Spofford Lake in New Hampshire in August; my cancer was acting up. But I was in high hopes of having a stem cell transplant at Stanford University in the fall (Mary is a donor). However, it turned out I had too many cancer cells in my body to go ahead with the transplant. Instead, I was put into a research program, taking an experimental pill to shrink the lymph nodes in my body (I have both Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and non-Hodgkins lymphoma) along with chemotherapy to tackle the leukemia.

The routine was biweekly trips to Palo Alto, with the chemo taken only once a month. I needed a number of platelet and red blood transfusions, but all seemed to be going well; the lymph nodes certainly had shrunk back, until Jan. 4 of this year, when I had to go to Reno's Renown Hospital's emergency room with horrendous stomach pains. This began a 2 1/2 month stay in the hospital, with short breaks of a day or two.

My first visit was for an obstructed colon. Surgery was out of the question because of my platelet counts; the surgeon was not optimistic that I would survive. It was a trying time. Mary flew from Virginia to be on hand for over a week; my sister and brother-in-law, already traveling to visit, stayed a few days, and Cris and Dale, who had just returned to London, turned around and came back for about nine days. I was the center of a lot of attention, but I was also so miserable and often groggy from morphine that I could hardly appreciate it. I did know how tough it was on Dale and that broke my heart.

Less apparent to me were the number of people who were praying for me. My sisters put me on a number of prayer chains, as did members of our church, small as it is. I am absolutely convinced that the prayers of these people, most of whom didn't know me, but prayed because they love Jesus Christ, saved my life. I pray today for God's grace and peace for them.

Still, when I went home at the end of the month, I found myself back in the emergency room three days later and back in the hospital with a high fever and double pneumonia. There went another month. I was virtually chained to my bed with an alarm system so I wouldn't get up on my own. During this time I lost over 20 pounds...and they were muscle, not fat pounds. I could no longer walk unassisted. So at the end of the month I was released to a rehabilitation hospital where I spent nine days. All was not over: Less than a week later I was back in the hospital for an additional nine days because of more problems with the colon. All the while I had to take tremendous amounts of antibiotics and have several transfusions; I thought they were trying to make me chemically perfect, which I believe is an impossibility.

When I came home on March 19, finally, I was pretty much a basket case. Dale became my long-suffering nurse. He still is, although I am walking much better now. I think the muscle tone in my legs and most of my balance is back, but I tire easily, and sometimes I just hurt. This week I went back to Stanford to see if I can get back into the research study, or at least be able to take the experimental pill again, but I have no definite answer on that as yet. In the meantime, I feel a shadow of my former self. Gone is most of my energy. I haven't been able to babysit, and I miss that intimacy with my grandchildren. When Ione sees me, she hugs me and tells me she loves me. I tell her I miss her. Maddox, almost 6 now, is less demonstrative, but blessedly impish.

I do a lot of reading, too much really; it gives me a backache after a while. I have cooked a little, and I think I need to force myself to do more. I go to physical therapy, and I enjoy that; I do well. Several of my sisters call me almost every day, though we are widely separated geographically, and I've come to know my big brother better through his phone calls. The kids call too; I know they are worried, and I wish they didn't need to be.

I have a lot of trouble sleeping at night. I try to ration the pain pills, which do bring on sleep. The nights seem so long; I wake up and sometimes get up several times. I want to be very strong and brave about what is happening to me, but inwardly I am not. I have faith in Jesus Christ, but sometimes I don't. Last night I cried because I thought I really have no faith; I don't trust. I know this is all in God's hands. But I know I want to see my grand kids grow; I want to see the grandson Cris is expecting in October. I don't want Dale to be left alone and bereft. I feel so bad thinking of leaving him.

If I were a better Christian, I should have more faith. I have had a good life, a wonderful life, and I praise God and love Him for the many blessings he has bestowed on me. But I don't want to take the cup, although of course, like everyone, I will. I hope it will be later rather than sooner. I hope my kids will remember that I want them to hold a big Irish wake to remember me. I want them to stick together and look out for their father. I hope I'm not being a great big baby.

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." Hebrews 11:1

Cheers for the outdoors!

2010-04-09T08:10:00.000-07:00

At last, grandma and the kids can play outside!

On this spot, the Donner party camped before their ill-fated ascent of the Sierra Nevadas. Maddox makes it a living monument. And Ione tries to escape the camera with her usual blur of movement.

Foiled this time!

No longer my passive photo model, Maddox mugs for the camera, while Ione imitates a shizu.

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

and be a child again!

When the sun shines...

2010-04-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

...it's easy to praise God as we should every day.

Psalm 100

Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.

Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.

Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that have made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations.

Psalm 148

Praise ye the LORD. Praise ye the LORD from the heavens: praise him in the heights.

Praise ye him, all his angels; praise ye him, all his hosts.

Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light.

Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens.

Let them praise the name of the LORD: for he commanded, and they were created.

He hath also stablished them for ever and ever: he hath made a decree which shall not pass.

Praise the LORD from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps:

Fire, and hail; snow, and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling his word:

Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars:

Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl:

Kings of the earth, and all people; princes, and all judges of the earth:

Both young men, and maidens; old men, and children:

Let them praise the name of the LORD: for his name alone is excellent; his glory is above the earth and heaven.

He also exalteth the horn of his people, the praise of all his saints; even of the children of Is-ra-el, a people near unto him. Praise ye the LORD.

The picture is of Pyramid Lake near Reno, Nevada, and the beautiful language is from the King James Version of the Bible.

Enjoy this and every day that God has made!

Egads! Where went March?

2010-03-30T17:44:00.000-07:00

Is it really over a month since I blogged. Oi! But March has been busy. First and best was the visit of my son and daughter-in-law from London. What a treat! And of course Cris came supplied with European chocolates and fine (but fiercely hot) ginger/ chili cookies. These were definitely not on Dale's to eat list, especially since he has been suffering a bout of GERD (acid reflux disease).

Our son brought his cigars and some rather good scotch, as always, and we all sampled the American microbrews he can't find in London. London, it turns out, is not really a beer and ale town, or at least not an adventurous one. My personal favorite is India Pale Ale, perhaps because my father drank it when I was little, and we kids always drained the bottles to the last drop before depositing them in the return case in the cellar (or at least I did). Over the winter, Dale and I have just stored beer in the garage, where it has been plenty cold, but as the weather has warmed we've gotten in the habit of leaving it there and drinking a cool bottle or even one at room temperature. I think that better brings out the flavor. I guess it's something I have in common with the Brits.

While he was here, Dale William got a tattoo...a free one because he bumped into his tattoo artist at an old hangout. Although I wasn't an original fan of multiple tattoos, I've come to accept my son's appreciation of this "body art," and this time I went with him and Cris not only to the tattoo convention that happened to be in town, but also to watch Dale get the freebie hour glass etched on his leg. I'll admit it was fascinating. Tattoos aren't for everyone, for sure, but they are for my son. He loves them, and others do as well because they love him. One possible exception may be Cris' grandmother in Madrid (who does like Dale) but not the tattoos at all. Fortunately, his can be covered by long sleeves, and he works in advertising where eccentricities are accepted.

The best thing about family visits is how distance and time away evaporates as soon as everyone is together again. Our daughter Lisa hosted Dale and Cris at her house, but we all got together for a couple of family dinners (a belated Christmas turkey, apparently not easily available in London, and an early St. Patrick's Day Irish stew). Because daughter Hilary and son-in-law Dustin are next door, Dale William and Cris had a good bit of time to spend with their nephew and niece. Maddox went bowling with the grown ups and was upset when one of his balls knocked down only nine pins. "He's a competitor," said his uncle. And Maddox is; he was happy to whip around on his Christmas BMX bike and show off his increasing skills on a skateboard.

Ione overcame a very short initial shyness and then reveled in the attention only a little girl with a sweet (and sometimes mischievous) smile can evoke...especially from grandpa!

However, all good things must come to an end, and unfortunately Dale and Cris' visit ended before our Reno weather turned from late winter to sunny spring. But hey, what are they used to in London!

But I am doubly blessed because in six short weeks, I'll see them again in London with one of my sisters and then travel on to Spain to tour Galicia with Cris' parents. I've been to Spain once before, and the country is beautiful; the people are welcoming, and life is lived wholeheartedly. I can hardly wait!
I do worry that my Spanish skills (I've been teaching myself all year) will leave a lot to be desired, but I think Cris' Mom and I will be able to communicate. I know we will be able to enjoy.

...so that was the beginning of March and on March 19th, I began a new journey that may occupy me for the next year and which I'll write about tomorrow (I hope, or perhaps the next day).

Holy Moses!!!

2010-02-21T14:49:00.000-08:00

"Holy Moses" were the exact words out of my mouth as I walked out of the bedroom this morning and looked out the office window: snow and lots of it! But this has just given me an extra opportunity to try out my new camera, a point and shoot Sony Cybershot DSC H20.

I chose a point and shoot because I've become quite the klutz with my DSLR, missing most of the good low-light shots I really wanted to capture (and I hate flash, with which I've always been unsuccessful). I've had the new camera for three days now, and I am very pleased. It is almost klutz-proof (the exceptions being when my granddaughter Ione chooses to move too abruptly). With a memory stick PRO-HG Duo, the pictures load zippily into iPhoto, and that certainly is a change from the past.

Here are some of my shots from Friday:

Maddox in his "Mohawk"..."The kids (at pre-school) laughed and laughed." And it was a good day..."no time outs," he reported on his arrival home. Hurrah! He gets to watch "Toy Story."

Meanwhile, Ione and I hung out together: and she took some advantage of her brother's absence to test out his clothes and the toys he's outgrown, but not entirely, not completely enough to really want to share with a little sister.

And Saturday, Grandma stayed home and baked tomato soup muffins for church on Sunday, which (due to the Sunday morning scene outside) never made it to our church that is 40 miles away.

So the kids came out to play:

...and to snitch graham crackers...

and to tell Dad all about it.

Do You Want to Clone a Caveman?

2010-02-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

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Most of us chuckled at GEICO's caveman ads ("so simple even a caveman can do it!") that placed a couple of Neanderthal-appearing guys in a contemporary setting where they are regularly offended by Neanderthal-acting humans. But some day in the not distant future, the joke may be on us as scientists clone Neanderthals in the lab and create, perhaps, a modern day Neanderthal community, with which we humans will need to deal ethically and legally.

BioEdge, an on-line review of issues in bioethics, quotes John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin paleoanthropologist, who says "In the end, we are going to have a cloned Neanderthal." Hawks is opposed, but others interviewed by Archeology magazine, from which BioEdge draws its review, favored cloning. George Church, genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, even believes it may be unethical not to clone: "Just saying 'no' is not necessarily the safest or most moral path. It is a very risky decision to do nothing."

According to Archeology, Neanderthals and humans co-existed for 6,000 to 7,000 years before the more adaptable humans pushed Neanderthals into extinction some 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthal, who Archeology notes, broke away from the lineage of modern humans 450,000 years ago, was physically different from the human: shorter with a protruding brow, stronger upper torso and a larger brain cavity. He lived in communities, buried his dead, made and improved on tools, and likely communicated in a language. Archeology quotes Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany: "they [had] a different way to give birth to babies, differences in life history, shape of the inner ear, genetics, the speed of development of individuals, weaning, age of puberty." But others believe Neanderthals were not different enough to be considered a separate species.

Bits of Neanderthal DNA have been found in a cave in northern Spain where 11 Neanderthals were murdered about 49,000 years ago and then cannibalized. Geneticists like Professor Church believe it may be possible to create a Neanderthal person by implanting a stem cell with Neanderthal DNA into a human blastocyst and then keeping all the non-Neanderthal cells from developing. Of course, just as does embryonic stem cell research, this requires eliminating human life and is opposed by many, like myself, for this reason.

But there are other reasons to balk at cloning a Neanderthal. Church, himself, acknowledges that anyone cloned would lack the social and environment factors that shaped the original: "They would be something new," he says, "neo-Neanderthals." "This is a species-altering event. It changes the way we are creating a new generation," says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Archeology notes that "legal precedent in the united States seems to be on the side of Neanderthal human rights"...one of which would certainly be the right not to be experimented on. This might make moot Professor Church's desire to use a cloned Neanderthal to further medical research.

Archeology quotes Bernard Rollin, a bioethicist and professor of philosophy at Colorado State University who believes "the problem lies in how that individual would be treated by others." Rollin says, "I don't believe it is fair to put people...into a circumstance where they are going to be mocked and possibly feared, and this is equally important: it's not going to have a peer group. Given that humans are at some level social beings, it would be grossly unfair."

In the end, Archeology poses the question: "The ultimate goal of studying human evolution is to better understand the human race. The opportunity to meet a Neanderthal and see firsthand our common but separate humanity seems, on the surface, too good to pass up. But what if the thing we learned from cloning a Neanderthal is that our curiosity is greater than our compassion (remember, as Archeology states, the number of sick and dead individuals produced by nuclear transfer cloning is the reason nearly all scientists are opposed to human reproductive cloning") ?"

More likely what's learned (or relearned) would be that our technological know how is greater that our wisdom.

Count Me In!

2010-02-18T19:09:00.000-08:00

This is the Mt. Vernon statement, signed by a group of conservatives today at Mt. Vernon:

A Constitutional conservatism unites all conservatives through the natural fusion provided by American principles. It reminds economic conservatives that morality is essential to limited government, social conservatives that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government, and national security conservatives that energetic but responsible government is the key to America’s safety and leadership role in the world.
A Constitutional conservatism based on first principles provides the framework for a consistent and meaningful policy agenda.

It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.
It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life.
It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.
It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.
It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.

Does this match your beliefs?

Sadly a Portrait in Group Think

2010-02-17T08:56:00.001-08:00

At U.C. Irvine, Islamic students disrupt and attempt to shut down a speech by the Israeli Ambassador. To the University's credit, the disrupters are escorted out and if students, will face disciplinary action.

However, the whole scene is a sorry spectacle of closed ears and closed minds. This is an un-American spectacle...though at least one and probably many in the group are American citizens. As such, they certainly are bereft of American values. We can not let our culture of free speech be destroyed by those who so totally disrespect it.

These people need to be strongly condemned and prosecuted. I would same the same if it were Israeli or Jewish students acting in the same manner...but Israeli and Jewish students don't act like this.

This video is raw footage and a little lengthy, but please watch and note that politeness in the face of fanaticism effects nothing. I apologize for not being able to embed it here, but click on this youtube address, and you will be able to see the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w96UR79TBw

After watching, think about whether tolerance for such actions is un-American as I believe it is...as strong as that word is. Dissent that shuts down the constitutional rights of others is a threat to the foundation of our system, and perpetrators need to be prosecuted. Free speech requires constant vigilant protection, and it is cowardly to tolerate its affront.

From Little Rhody: A Rare Portrait in Courage

2010-02-16T09:05:00.000-08:00

I'm a product of Rhode Island public schools: a good elementary (then Broad Street School in Providence), a bad junior high (Roger Williams, but only for 7th and 8th grades), and an excellent college prep high school (Classical). But that was in "the day," I guess. With five of my siblings, I went on to college and also earned an advanced degree, and I do credit much of that success rate to our high school education that sent more than 90% of graduates on to college or nursing school (and, of course, also credit much encouragement from home).

Today, I am passionate about the need for better public schools, and I believe that means charter schools where parents lead and participate and/or school vouchers where parents choose public or private education for their children. This will only be accomplished, you can bet, over the cold dead bodies of teachers' unions. So cheers to School Superintendent Frances Gallo who will fire all the union teachers at Central Falls High School, which has a graduation rate of less than 50%, because they refused to work an additional 25 minutes each day or to help tutor failing students. Guess where teacher unions' priorities are!

Got Ya (Cel Phone) Number! Friday's Quote

2010-02-12T08:14:00.000-08:00

"… Where liberals once screamed foul that George Bush ordered the monitoring of phone calls going in to and going out of the US from, or to, known or suspected terrorists and phone companies who participated in that measure should be tarred and feathered… [to] when Obama says Americans should have 'no reasonable expectation of privacy' and it is decided their 'Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when a phone company reveals to the government its own records' ... is fine and dandy and is met with silence…

"My, what a difference a “historic” and “unprecidented” presidency makes." Erick Erickson

Patience, thy name is Stubborn!

2010-02-08T20:39:00.000-08:00

"There's no use being Irish if you can't be thick," my Dad told me with a chuckle on a number of occasions, not all of them appreciated. Stubborn I am; patient I am not. And I've long realized my lack of this virtue. It's golden, my mother frequently reminded me. And I won't quote some of what Dale has said as I have fidgeted, muttered, and banged my way through frustration.

In truth, I have even prayed over my failure, and God has left me impatiently awaiting a fix: until now, until my ever-patient younger sister Madeline reintroduced me to knitting during a visit last month. Years ago when my two oldest children were young, Madeline guided me through the making of two afghans before I set my needles down. Last month she guided me through the making of a scarf, and it occurred to me that I should become more ambitious and make a gift, a shawl for a dear lady I will be visiting in May.

Luckily it's still February. As I curse the delay of sunshiny days, the absence of even buds on the trees, the soggy ground, the filthy car that would be senseless to wash, the dour expression on the face in my mirror, the darkness even until past seven in the morning, the chill, the flat grey sky, the dog tracks on my living room floor, the power bill, and the grumblings of discontent that fill my mind, I begin my project and find I am grateful that I have three months to succeed in it.

For knitting is an in and out proposition...not so much the movement of the needles, I mean more the knit five rows in, tear six rows out. Indeed, I have been driven nearly to distraction. I have spent periods of three and four hours bumblingly testing my sanity. And it's been a very near thing. Ask Dale.

But gradually I am making some progress. I'm learning to be smarter about tearing out and catching the added stitch that necessitates pulling out nine rows. I'm taking some of this with a grain of salt; it really doesn't require I tear my hair out as well even as it makes me feel like doing just that.

There's even some humor in the situation. For instance, Dale finds it hysterical that I am becoming the caricature of a grandmother. I have the white hair, the spectacles, and now, Lord help me, the knitting needles. But he restrains himself also because knitting needles have other uses, which is why, I suppose, the TSA in its high flying wisdom forbids taking them on board an airplane.

There's really no joy in tearing out. In some ways, it's rather masochistic. It really would be a whole lot easier to simply dump the whole mess and begin shopping for a gift. But I'm from New England (originally), and it's hard to take all of that out of a girl even in riotous Reno town. Remember, I am stubborn. So I stand over the trash can, and retract the hand that is about to dump in the yarn. I pull out the needles. I grit my teeth, and I begin again. Some might call this patience...but as you can see they would be wrong.

Quote of the Day

2010-02-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

"You [President Obama] say you want innovation. You say you want competition. And you say you want America to lead, not follow. You brought down the house during your State of the Union address by saying so. But education innovation, competition and leadership depends upon giving parents, teachers and schools the freedom to do their jobs, not forcing them to abide 20th century labor laws that [protect] adults and not kids, and allowing children to attend schools based on their best interests, not on their ZIP code.
Good domestic policy isn’t just about making tough decisions on biofuel, energy or health care. Good domestic policy means making tough decisions about who educates our kids and who does not, and puts parents, not bureaucrats in charge." Jeanne Allen

By Invitation Only

2010-01-31T18:09:00.000-08:00

This morning after church I was handed a copy of Bender’s Immigration Bulletin of January 1, 2010, which purports to analyze "What the Bible Really Says about Immigration Policy…(http://tinyurl.com/ygeqdlm)" by Bruce and Judy Hake, who associate themselves with the advocacy of “merciful” immigration laws—and asked to comment on what they have to say.

The Hake's are contrasting the pro-open immigration policy supported in a book by Donald Kerwin and Jill Marie Gerschutz (You Welcomed Me: Immigration and Catholic Social Teaching) and an article for the Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder: A Biblical Perspective on Immigration Policy by James R. Edwards Jr., Ph.D., that is opposed. The Hake's also refer to an article they wrote in 1998 that supports open immigration.

Obviously, I haven't read the Kerwin book, which is available on Amazon. com and has a single five star review (and no others). I wouldn't recommend it on the strength of the Hake's discussion.

Both the Hake's and Dr. Edwards look to the Bible for guidance on the issue of illegal immigration into the United States (I know I will be chastised by open immigration advocates for using the term "illegal," but it seems straight forward and factual to me). Edwards' discussion allows some hedging: "On some matters of public policy, the Bible speaks clearly," he points out, "On other issues, there is less clarity and more room for prudential judgment. The rub comes where there is a lack of scriptural clarity on a particular issue."

Lack of clarity may very well be the case here, although the Hake's appear not to believe so. The strength of their argument is "many passages from the Old and New Testaments regarding the imperative of generosity to foreigners." They also speak of "a mainstream Catholic social justice view" and cite catechism. The extent of their conviction (or might I say prejudice) is the statement that "[o]ur own instinct is to regard the CIS article as discredited before even reading it."

Their argument is further spoiled on a number of occasions by attempts to slur Edwards and those who disagree with themselves as "nativists," perhaps even "racists" (note the quote from the Southern Poverty Law Center on the third page). The Center for Immigration Studies is an "anti-foreigner propaganda outlet," while, oddly, a site associated with the American Immigration Lawyers Association is recommended as "genuinely neutral." In fairness to the Hake's they do footnote Mark Krikorian, executive director of the CIS, writing that "Free Speech is Great, But...The open-borders lobby's attempt to silence its critics."

But what about the arguments? To be generous to strangers or foreigners? Clearly this admonition appears throughout the Bible, beginning, the Hakes suggest, in Genesis when God says to Abraham: "And to you and to your descendants after you, I shall give the country where you are now immigrants, the entire land of Canaan, to own in perpetuity." But I wonder, "to own"? Does not ownership imply control over?

The Hake's also cite Matthew 25:

"The the King will say to those on his right hand, 'Come, you whom my Father has blessed, take as your heritage the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world. /For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me."

But skeptic that I am, I think that the kingdom prepared for believers is in Heaven, not on Earth. And food, drink, clothing, care...compassion? Yes, I'd say--but residency, citizenship?? This is not at all clear, the Hake's further recitation of the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Golden rule notwithstanding.

Edwards provides, to my mind, a useful distinction: government is required to exercise justice, and occasionally to act with mercy. The two are "complementary," but not synonymous.

Writes Edwards: "Government's exercise of mercy is more challenging that its role in ensuring justice. Examples of mercy in public policy exist; for instance, granting a criminal a pardon or parole before he serves out his prison sentence, having proportionality for punishment of a crime (e.g., an eye for an eye, rather than a life for an eye). But most such policies aim in a rifle-shot fashion at individual cases, and often they involve some level of merit."

He adds: "When considering mercy as public policy, however, an important distinction must be drawn. Nor every moral or ethical teaching in the Bible fits cleanly or applies equally to both individuals and societies...Legislating mercy requires prudence, restraint, and good judgment...[because] the practical consequences of civil government's 'mercy' are actually borne by the citizenry."

The consequences here could and honestly have included lawlessness (gangs, drugs), a drain on the public treasury (education, medical care), and the taking of jobs from citizens (especially the least educated). There has also been the tendency (in opposition to Biblical passages Edwards' cites on immigration into the Biblical Jewish state) of recent illegal immigrants to resist assimilation into the host culture. Of course there is also the history of immigration enriching our nation over the course of centuries, but there remains the difference, the need for assimilation that is lost in the chorus for multi-culturalism today. The Hake's assert in their own article that "there is no evidence that the American melting pot has stopped working." It's an assertion that is coming under increasing negative scrutiny in this country today.

Personally, like most Americans, I am conflicted on the immigration issue. I recognize that I am the granddaughter and great-grandaughter of immigrants (albeit legal entrants). As a Christian I do want to alleviate suffering in the world, but as a practical (former) New Englander, I don't believe open immigration does much of anything permanent for the rest of the world (for example, Mexico) as the U.S. tries to absorb its brightest or its most discontent. Better (more practical), I think, is putting pressure on the Mexican government to improve; better is pushing for a decent government in Haiti or ending the genocide in Sudan than attempting to receive all the world's hurting.

The Hake's do admit in their own position paper from 1998 that "The United States has been far and away the most generous nation in world history in its treatment of foreigners"and "Compared to other countries, current U.S. policy is angelic." At the same time, it's true, I think, that current U.S. policy is ineffective: protecting neither American citizens from potential security breaches nor improving the lot of foreign populations. We should do better.

Last night Dale and I watched a National Geographic documentary (God Grew Tired of Us) that tells the story of three "lost boys" of Sudan, raised in a refugee camp in Kenya, who are brought to the U.S. to begin new lives. Of these three, one receives his bachelor degree in economics from the University of Pittsburgh, marries a childhood sweetheart, finds his brother, and plans to return to Africa to start a school. A second, brings his mother and sister to this country and supports them, sends money to other family members in Africa and to the refugee camp of lost boys, forms an NGO to build a medical clinic in Africa and along with holding three jobs, goes to the University of Syracuse to earn a bachelor's degree. The third is unable to locate family members and remains working gainfully in this country.

This is the kind of seed immigration we need to support. This is the kind of immigration that spreads benefits here and abroad. The Hake's cite "the enlightened perspective" of The Wall Street Journal in favor of an open immigration policy because the modern, globally interconnected world requires free movement of goods, capital, information...and thus labor. But this perfect balance has certainly not arrived, and some of the policies (free movement of goods, for one) are stridently opposed by the same people who are pushing an open immigration policy. Rather than an open policy, we need a common sense policy that promotes continued U.S. strength: economic, cultural, constitutional. And, believe it or not, that's best for the poor nations of the world as well: that we should be strong enough to offer effective aid to their peoples.

A Teaparty Opportunity Missed?

2010-01-26T11:10:00.000-08:00

Life certainly interrupts good intentions. I intended to blog on Sunday and decided to put it off until Monday, but then spent Monday morning from 1:45 a.m. to 6:45 a.m. with Dale in the emergency room. He had puzzling chest pains and had to remain in the hospital himself until 8:45 p.m. Monday night with many blood draws and tests, little sleep, and nothing to eat until dinner time. And the result was inconclusive, but of course that's good news: not a second heart attack (his first "baby" attack was in 2002).

I did get to go home and keep my scheduled appointment with the oncologist at 9 and after that flailed around for the rest of the day on the strength of a one hour nap.

But I had pursued my better intentions on Saturday and gone to the Washoe County (NV) Republican Precinct meetings, all held in a beautiful new high school on the current fringes of the city. I needed to look up directions to get there, and apparently many others didn't do that because the caucuses were sparsely attended. I looked in vain for all the teabaggers that I'd heard had been urged to attend local precinct meetings, but I saw no wild-eyed revolutionaries in evidence (myself excluded, I guess). I was the first of two in my precinct (out of 2 or 3 hundred registered GOP voters) to show up. Thus, I became precinct captain. Dale says that makes me officially a politician, but I think one has to run successfully for office to achieve that distinction.

So I will be attending the county convention on March 13, and I've even expressed an interest in the state convention in April. But I'm nevertheless uncertain about all this, as was my companion attendee. I want the Nevada Republican Party to stand for something. Eight or so years ago, I abandoned participation in the Lyon County Central Committee because I didn't believe it did (anymore, of course, than the state Democrat Party of the time). Has anything changed? I think the Democrat Party has become even more Las Vegas centric and even more at the beck and call of the Service Workers Union. So why didn't more teabaggers show up for the nitty gritty work of moving the Republican Party toward their goals? Please don't tell me that's not possible because I think that sentiment is a cop out.

I attended two teaparties in Reno and Fallon last summer and fall. It was great fun...especially the sunny and hot Reno outing (it was freezing in Fallon). It was terrific to join with people who noisily (but orderly) shared my opinions on the issues of the day (healthcare, national security etc.). I missed them on Saturday, but it is possible some were present in the rather humdrum process of party organizing. This wasn't a time when party platform or even candidates (beyond a straw poll for governor and U.S. senator) were discussed, but it was the stepping stone to the county and state conventions where these will be on the agenda. It seems a little odd to me that on the same weekend as the Washoe County meeting, sixty national teaparty leaders were meeting in D.C. with Dick Armey's FreedomWorks group and specifically targeting Harry Reid in the Nevada senatorial race as a must defeat while Washoe County Republicans stayed home or enjoyed Saturday's beautiful sunshiny break from the gloomy, wintry grey we've been suffering through of late.

However, there will be a competitive group of Republicans running in the June 8 primary for the party endorsement in this race...despite the fact that the national media seem to mention only Sue Lowden. Teabaggers and everyone else should be following these candidates and becoming involved in the campaigns now and should plan to register and vote in the Republican primary to choose the best candidate. I hope there is no intention to raise up a third party contender. Harry Reid, as unpopular as he is in state, has a huge campaign chest...and probably a lot of political favors to call in. It's not a given that Reid will be defeated, and teabaggers need to work with conservative Republicans to choose a candidate that will embody their principles and a candidate who can win.

On principles, most important, in my mind, is solid fiscal conservatism. This is the keystone issue both for teabaggers and independents, and the latter are essential to ending Harry Reid's dynasty. Social conservatism, of course, is not unimportant. Respect for our constitution, knowledge of our history, and embrace of the traditional virtues of truthfulness, honor, self reliance and self respect really are essential to a strong free-market economy. And participation in the political process is essential to educating and shaping public opinion and successfully electing principled candidates.

God Forgive Us For We Have Sinned

2010-01-22T07:26:00.000-08:00

But when Jesus saw it, he...said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Mark 10:14

Today marks the 37^th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade and below is telling commentary from today’s edition of Erick Erickson’s Redstate morning briefing:

Almost four decades later, somewhere around 50 million unborn children have been victimized by the breathtaking arrogance of the Court. They committed no crimes, were afforded no due process or trials at all, and every appeal made on their behalf has fallen on deaf ears. They have been killed in the most brutal ways imaginable, unceremoniously sucked from their mother’s wombs, and carelessly discarded without even the dignity of an unmarked grave. Every reasonable effort to curb the abuses of the system that has produced these gruesome results has been summarily rejected by society’s robed masters. And so the carnage marches on.

The truth that these children are biologically human and biologically distinct from their mothers is beyond question to anyone who believes in the most basic tenets of science. Why, then, are they declared so totally bereft of rights in our society? The fact that a woman can, with the protection of the law, kill her child on the day of its planned full-term delivery, indicates clearly that the only answer to this question is “physical location within their mother’s womb.” If a child is in this place, it may be killed with impunity; if it is in another, to kill it is murder. Even the more generous (but less accurate) characterization of the Court’s jurisprudence as respecting “stages of development” rather than physical location provides us no more satisfactory answer. If a child can be kllled with impunity because it has not reached 24 weeks’ gestational age, why may it not be killed because it hasn’t reached its first birthday? Or puberty? Logic and reason provide no defensible answer to these questions, because in the legalized abortion regime, logic and reason - like science and law - have been sacrificed on the altar of self-aggrandizement and convenience at any cost.

The evil Roe v. Wade has wrought has cheapened and weakened our society. It has decimated minority population growth, especially among African-Americans. It has caused us to devalue the handicapped and less fortunate, as mothers who carry these precious children to full term are now somehow thought to be less responsible for the decision. The damage to the fabric of the family itself - the most basic building block of our society - has been incalculable.

The good news, I suppose, is that more and more women, particularly young women are turning from the evil of abortion and having their babies. They deserve our praise and support. But for redemption as a society, a nation, we need to condemn and end the legal killing of God's most innocent beings, and we need, practically, to provide loving homes with a father and a mother so much as possible for all our children.

Although the ideal two parent family is not universally obtainable, we need to affirm it as our goal at the same time as we reach out with compassion to help single mothers and fathers and children who are orphaned or not able, for one reason or another, to live in their parents' home. Christians are called to be child centric, and good people of any belief need to recognize and support the vulnerable child's need to be loved and secure in a stable home.

...Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Matthew 10:4

God Bless America!

2010-01-20T08:09:00.000-08:00

Here's a great way to start a day. Listen to Denyce Graves singing at the National Service of Prayer and Remembrance following Sept. 11. May our nation continue to be united as we were that day.

Poise!

2010-01-19T15:39:00.000-08:00

Here's my first "oil painting" (click for a close up) using Corel Painter Essentials 4...which I can't take a great deal of credit for since it was done from one of my photos entirely on the auto setting.

The subject is my granddaughter on the occasion of having just finished a piece of her first birthday cake. She is entirely without chagrin over wearing some of the frosting on the end of her nose: what aplomb!

Toddlers have such a wonderful capacity for sang-froid. A few days ago we walked down the block, and Ione stopped dead in her tracks (clutching my finger as usual) in front of a group of four older teenagers who were bouncing around in the somewhat chilly air, giggling and smoking cigarettes. Of course they said "Hi" to Ione and "Isn't he so sweet," but Ione responded with not a word to them (although "hi" is definitely in her vocabulary)...and not, I think, because they'd mistaken her gender. She simply stared and stared and stared some more, recording many new tidbits of information through her mental synapses, before responding to gentle tugs from grandma to return up the street.

I really hope she carries her self-possession along with her through life, and especially through that dire challenge to sanity, the teenage years. But already with my gentle tugs, I am teaching her that staring is unsociable. She'll learn other marks of unsociability as she grows and will refrain from making fun of people (at 4 1/2, her brother knows that is wrong), and hitting, of course, and pouting and a whole hosts of other infractions. All this is necessary, but at the same time, I hope she will retain the confidence to be herself, to be original and creative, to stand up for her beliefs, to go her way and not the crowd's way, to be a good, generous and giving person. Knowing her Mom and Dad, I think she will.

I'MMMMMMMM BACK!

2010-01-19T07:57:00.000-08:00

I stopped blogging last September, discouraged, I guess because no one seemed to be out there reading my blog (oh, vanity). I thought I needed to find a new direction. And that turn in the path eluded me.

There were, also, a few other obstacles. My leukemia/lymphoma reasserted itself and worsening blood counts left me with less of my normal energy, plus a great deal of time was spent at the doctor’s office in the infusion room receiving therapy. Therapy will continue again next week as I become one of the first people to receive the recently approved Arzerra (ofatumumab…what a name!) treatment.

Then, yesterday, I was surprised to find an email in my inbox inquiring about my absence from blogging…about my health or other reasons for being a laggard (my phrase). It was from Lisa Rosewell, who blogs at http://ifyoucouldreadmymind.wordpress.com/ Over the past year, Lisa’s blog has grown slowly to express the variety and depth of her many interests. One of those, membership in a very small (in my case very, very small) traditional Anglican congregation, we share: hers in Texas and mine in Nevada. Lisa’s site also reflects beautifully her interest in music and participating in people’s politics, i.e. the 9/12 freedom march in Washington D.C., and her blog expresses her faith in God’s grace.

Lisa’s email has re-energized me to begin blogging again. I’ve thought I had no more to say and have been instead forwarding what others say, about politics mainly, to a list of friends, whom I hope I am not burdening with so much insightful commentary.

But I do really have some things I want to say. For example, right now I am looking at the sky as the sun rises over Reno. It’s red, purple, and pale blue, etched against the rugged outline of the nearby, snow frosted hills…even though I can see only a swatch through the office window. Of course, red-in-the-morning means sailors-take-warning. It will be a stormy day, grey again later, and we will have wet in some form because, as my daughter told me so many years ago when she was three: “The trees are shaking.”

And there are tales of my wonderful grandkids. Maddox is now 4 ½, still jumping through life, so full of energy; he will be a rock star (as he believes he is already) or a skateboarding/BMX daredevil if he continues on his present path…or maybe, Spiderman.

Ione is almost 17 months now, with a smile and charm that can erase any trace of grumpiness in her world, which, however, doesn’t preclude an occasional, comical and short lived display of temper when regal charm meets the word “no.” She clasps my finger (and her granddad’s) and leads us around. On walks now, we stop and investigate melting piles of old, dirty snow and rocks and whatever other small treasures appear along the sidewalk. She still doesn’t have a lot to say in English, but she chatters emotively in her own tongue.

And then there are those who pray for me because of my health. I find it a little disconcerting to be prayed for, which is not to say that I am not very very grateful for the prayers, which come from family and friends and people I don’t even know. But it’s been a little bit like accepting a gift I believe I haven’t merited.

I remember my mother telling me and my brother and sisters frequently, “T’is better to give than to receive,” but also telling me at a later date that it’s important to be able to receive a gift graciously. She didn’t put that in a religious context, but it is the essence of Christian faith, really, to receive the gift of God’s grace that not one of us can ever “deserve.”

And it’s like that with prayers. So I thank all those who pray for me, and I try imperfectly to pray for others. I am not systematic about this as I feel I should be, so if someone forgets to pray for me, I can certainly understand, and honestly, sometimes I hope that they do forget as I do, so I shall feel less guilty for my neglect. I haven’t yet been able to hang on to living as a faithful Christian throughout an entire day…or perhaps even an entire hour, so I know how needy I am of God’s all-inclusive love.

Practice Makes Perfect!

2009-09-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

....to say nothing about American dental care.

Barack Obama's amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Beware the Pig in the Poke

2009-09-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Baucus health care bill (will this this become the president's ???) is looking more and more like a pig in a poke. When the senator introduced the bill on the Senate floor this morning, he reportedly acknowledged its chief criterion was to be acceptable to any 60 senators who are needed for passage (short of the nuclear option).

Republican Senator Olympia Snowe (ME) announced her own criterion: no money added to the deficit. And there are some 584 amendments already proposed to the legislation.

All this makes me wonder...what happened to "reforming" health care? Why aren't senators concerned with ensuring the quality of our present system while expanding it to include those who are left out for reasons of income or pre-existing condition? Shouldn't the issue be resolving current problems in the most practical way possible rather than creating a grossly patchworked pig?

And to make matters worse, this morning Humana, the insurance company that provides Medicare Advantage plans that increase coverage for elderly purchasers, was told (on penalty of lawsuit) to stop sending letters to its customers informing them of the effect cutting Medicare funding will have on their premiums.

Say what? Is the pig also gobbling free speech rights? No wonder seniors are angry, and anyone with a knowledge of and appreciation for our Constitution should be also. This administration bumbles along with a heavy foot, whether through ignorance or intent.

The New English

2009-09-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

It's hard to tell which came first, the chicken or the egg, but Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D. Montana) certainly tried to decipher the president's health care reform criteria: Not a dime added to the deficit....unless "spending cuts" are made if "savings" don't materialize. Of course Baucus could find "savings" only or almost exclusively in added costs and fees for consumers and providers of health care. The result is those with insurance will pay more for less to cover those without. That will save the government money. Meanwhile, those presently without health insurance will be forced to pony up some of their cash (and some of the taxpayers') to receive services many of them would not voluntarily have deemed worth their penny.

And all of us are left wondering what this has to do with health care "reform," although it certainly falls into the definition of "change" for one-fifth of our national economy.

Two areas of traditional savings have been identified by the administration: 1. electronic record keeping and 2. a $500 billion cut in Medicare (at the expense of seniors' popular Medicare Advantage supplement insurance programs). Writing in The American Thinker (http://tinyurl.com/lcb2wh), Dr. Gerald T. Reiss, a neurologist, finds the savings from eliminating paperwork will be negligible, but says electronic health records will save money "by using computer algorithms to override the medical decisions of doctors in favor of less expensive alternatives." And does that also mean "less effective" alternatives? The government will decide. As to Medicare Advantage, sorry, old folks.

Writing in Real Clear Markets (http://tinyurl.com/kkamxn), Diana Furchgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute said the increase in health insurance premiums under the Baucus plan will be "a major cost...to the American public," and along the way wondered if this is "a major violation of President Obama's promise not to raise taxes on those making under $250,000 annually." Well, hey, is a government mandated "increased cost" synonymous with a tax raise? The administration will decide.

But there are a few pluses: The Baucus plan will cover most of those who don't already have coverage even if it's by threatening to impose fines of from $750 to $3,800 on those who don't comply...and by charging businesses a $400 fee per employee for not providing coverage. The Baucus plan will subsidize, on a sliding scale, insurance for those with incomes up to 300% of the federal poverty level by placing a 35% tax on high end plans (guaranteeing that they will become either more costly or less generous) and charge burdensome additional fees on both insurance providers and providers of medical devices (and that's not just scooter chairs, but knee and hip replacements and stents). Isn't it a bitch, being sick and getting old?

Doctors have been promised more reasonable Medicare reimbursement, but this is not included in the Baucus plan and would, naturally, add to its cost...possibly bumping it over "the not one dime added to the deficit" rule and thus requiring additional cost to consumers or a much to be regretted "sorry, Charley" notice to physicians.

One group that won't be affected by traumatic changes in health care provision are trial lawyers. Oh sure, the president made a curtsey to the concept of "tort reform" in his speech before the joint session of Congress. He'll look into a couple of isolated pilot projects to be conducted under the auspices of Health and Welfare Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, eight years head of the Kansas State Trial Lawyers Association... although The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel claims the dollar "savings" with tort reform are estimated at from $65 to $200 billion dollars annually (http://tinyurl.com/lhnj7w). Do you wonder how politicians missed that saving? Well, Strassel points as one example to Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who rhapsodized about the virtues of the tort bar without mentioning the "nearly $900,000" it contributed to his reelection campaigns. But let's not be cynics.

Did we really expect a free lunch? And won't we feel the warm fuzzies of caring for our less fortunate citizens? ...well, perhaps citizens, perhaps residents. We'll see how that shakes out five or six or eight years down the road. We'll be able to decide then when it's change we can hardly believe happened.

More Conversation With a Liberal

2009-08-24T20:39:00.001-07:00

(...a conversation begun earlier today and recorded below)

It should be noted that Hussein gassed thousands of his own people with gas that we (America) sold him and with our tacit approval. Secondly, it is against international law to attack a sovereign nation without provocation. Iraq was in no way involved in 911. Most of the terrorists on those flights were Saudis. Why didn’t we attack Saudi Arabia?

You are the umpteenth conservative that has said there are better ways to solve the health care crisis but none have forwarded a proposal that does so.

I am one of the millions of people that is essentially without health care and I am anything but indigent. I am self employed and in an industry that has been hammered by the economic mess created by the conservatives. I can’t afford health insurance for my family with a deductable of anything less than $10,000. So, the hernia surgery and the skin cancer surgery that I had in the last three years came out of my pocket. The health care system is designed to do one thing well, make money for insurance companies. I have had better health care in Mexico, New Zealand and Chile while on assignments for National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. I, a tourist, was covered by their national system. I couldn’t have paid if I wanted to, I was seen, the problem taken care of quickly and efficiently and I went on my way. America is the only non-third world country without a universal health care system. The scare tactics used by the insurance companies and their friends in congress are lies. Yes certain coverage is denied some people in some cases in those systems but I have news for you: ALL coverage is DENIED to MILLIONS of Americans due to lack of or insufficient health insurance because the costs have gotten out of hand.

Mark Gamba

www.markgamba.com

Well, Mark, can you please document that Saddam Hussein had "the tacit approval" of the US in gassing thousands of his citizens? Or do you mean, we did nothing to prevent or punish it, which, I'm afraid, fits your definition of deferring to a sovereign state.

As to reforming health care insurance...many sensible proposals to do so have been widely circulated on the internet, even popping into the main stream press occasionally. Here's a few:

1. Allow individuals to receive the same tax credit for the cost of individually purchased health care as businesses receive for employer provided care, thus severing health care insurance from employment and solving the "portability" problem.

2. Allow individuals to purchase the policy they want across state lines (at present individuals are limited to purchasing plans that may be inefficient or not what the individual wants because he must purchase health care in state).

3. Expand the number of plans available so that individuals are not required to purchase services that they do not want (perhaps, for example, IVF treatments or breast implants).

4. Work on the problem of "pre-existing conditions" so that an uninsured individual has options for covering a sudden diagnosis of, say, cancer. I'm not sure if this should be accomplished by requiring everyone to carry at least some health insurance (thus lowering the risk factor for insurance companies) or by creating state pools for such individuals.

5. Provide vouchers to the genuinely indigent to purchase insurance.

6. Initiate tort reform to limit rewards to actual damage in order to reduce the practice of "defensive medicine" and the cost of malpractice insurance that has become prohibitive for many doctors.

Now, I don't know the particulars of your situation, although you do not sound indigent. However, there are many millions of Americans who choose not to purchase health insurance because they are young and healthy; they take their chances. Others, I'm sure, face a definite budget strain when confronting the cost of health care, but their decision nevertheless involves choice. Personally, my husband and I spend almost 10 percent of our income on the cost of our share of the health insurance we carry.

I have no personal experience with health care in other countries. However, my son, who lives in London, has been shocked by brief contacts with the NHS there. His wait time for an antibiotic prescription was 6 weeks. His wife, who is Spanish, purchases private insurance from her employer. Nevertheless, when admitted for day surgery for a cyst, she was sent to a recovery room in which there were at least 40 others lying, separated by curtains. She has also lived in Denmark, where, she reports, satisfaction with public care is higher (but Denmark is a very small country).

I have a brother-in-law who has lived in China on a number of occasions, during one of which he had surgery (I believe for a hernia). He was delighted to be charged only the equivalent of some 90 dollars. However, at the time, 90 dollars was about three months' salary for the average Chinese.

I might point out also that emergency room treatment in the US is available to everyone; I imagine many problems are taken care of there "quickly and efficiently." Overall, satisfaction with the quality of care received in this country is very high. It's that quality which conservatives want to protect, and we believe this is possible while extending private coverage to the most needy.

Terri

Here is my issue with all of this, both your suggestions and the current plans wending their way through congress: Why not create a system by which we all pay one entity (the government for example) exactly what we pay for our health insurance (in your case 10% of your income) and that entity provides health care for everyone - period. No enormous profits for soulless corporations (insurance companies, hospitals etc). The profits made off of health care in this country are massive. That money could easily cover (the now reduced) costs of providing health care to all Americans. Simple, logical and workable.

I can answer that question easily: Because some very rich people want to continue getting richer.

Mark

Hi Mark,

I'm not sure how your system would work. Honestly, were my income to increase, would I want to continue to spend 10% on health care? If I were indigent and receiving care, would I want to contribute anything at all should I acquire assets? I think the fact is that most everyone is interested in becoming richer. We're not frozen in our circumstances.

And then, about that one entity... imagine its power. I realize you believe government is benign, but that's hard to support given any historical knowledge. You, yourself, obviously have greatly mistrusted the administration of George Bush. It's not inappropriate here to recall the words of Lord Acton: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This is a lesson played out again and again throughout history.

The advantage of power in the hands of corporations, soulless or not, is their plurality and consequently the competition between them. I've read that health insurance companies reap an average profit of 3 percent. This hardly seems outrageous even though, considering the sums involved, that must be a very large absolute figure. Were there only one health insurer, I suspect profit would be a great deal higher. And there would be little incentive to improve service beyond the goodness of the corporation's soulless heart. (Please note here that a non-profit is equally soulless except its excess is paid out more exclusively in executive salaries rather than stockholder dividends.)

I don't think there is an easy answer to solving problems in health care, and this is all the more reason to proceed cautiously and responsively (i.e. with fiscal restraint) rather than rush in pell mell with good intentions lacking sound judgment and ladened with hubris. Health care is after all a life and death proposition.

Terri

Profits are easy to disguise, anyone who has ever done their own taxes will attest to that, the facts on the ground are this: the current US Insurance industry estimates that 18% of every dollar paid by the insured is used towards “administration”, In France the health care system there spends about 6%, Germany – even less. So there is another 12% (at least) of the money available towards actual care of our health. 10% does seem high when you say it that way, but I spend more than that for insurance and don’t really get anything for it. At least if I was part of a system where all my health care was covered I would be getting something.

I do not believe that governments are benign but I also believe that most of the evil they do is at the bequest of corporations. Had not the tobacco industry spent millions and millions through their lobbyists for the reelection of certain congressmen I doubt the government would choose to subsidize the tobacco industry.

I know that you conservatives hate and fear Michael Moore and he is (like all good showmen) over the top, but he is none the less relatively accurate and his portrayal of the health care system in foreign countries is very similar to my own experiences. I would suggest that you have a glass of wine and sit down and try to watch Sicko even with a grain of salt, he makes it very clear that we do not have a health care system befitting the status of our country. Indeed most people from even decently developed countries enjoy better health care than most Americans do.

It’s a very broken system now and the rest of the world is aware of that. China is watching how and whether we deal with it and whether they continue to loan us money or call in their loans may well depend on our decision.

Best,

Mark

Hi Mark,

Let's take a look at this piece by piece:

1. "Profits are easy to disguise." I'll agree with you here with the caveat that it may not be all that easy for corporations that face much closer regulatory scrutiny than, say, the average small business. However, what this exposes, I think, is the total chaos, or if you prefer, corruption of our tax system that allows Congress to provide sticks and carrots according to the pleasure and often self-interest of particular members of Congress, their constituents, or whichever lobbyists grab their ears. This is certainly an argument for the reform of the IRS tax code, which the Obama administration has not made. In fact, we have a secretary of the treasury who successfully avoided paying his own tax bill until discovered to have done so in the confirmation process.

2. I'll accept the figure of 18% of health insurance benefits going toward administration. I'd even up your figure and say I suspect that a doctor might say that more than 18% of his staff time goes to complying with various insurance regulations (including federal or state Medicare and Medicaid regulations). I don't find the 18% figure totally outrageous. For example, have you ever investigated a charity to which you consider contributing? There's ratings for these. One group that rates is the American Institute of Philanthropy, and here's what it says on its website about its criteria: the "percent spent on charitable purpose" is "the portion of total expenses that is spent on charitable programs. In AIP's view, 60 % or greater is reasonable for most charities. The remaining percentage is spent on fundraising and general administration. Note: A 60% program percentage typically indicates a 'satisfactory' or 'C range' rating. Most highly efficient charities are able to spend 75% or more on programs."

Now, honestly, I'd rather not contribute to a charity that spends more than 15% on administration, but that's my choice.

As far as the lower administration expenses of government medical service in France and Germany, I think it is worth considering that funding is fungible and health services may benefit from sharing administrative costs with other government agencies... say accounting services. The charge has been made that in this country Medicare benefits in this way to achieve a supposed superior administrative efficiency over private health insurance.

3. I agree: a pox on government subsidy for tobacco, corn, ethanol, organic agriculture, etc.

4. This conservative neither hates nor fears Michael Moore; I look at him as a buffoon. However, I have not watched Sicko, but I am willing to submit myself to this agony... fortified perhaps not by a glass of wine, but a good shot of single malt scotch.

5. As to health care in "decently developed" countries, this concept is hard to categorize. I imagine many countries have adequate health care for the reasonably healthy. The U.S. has far superior healthcare for those who are seriously ill. We have five times the survival rate for cancer, for example, than does the U.K., which is a great deal more than "decently developed." On the other hand, the growing phenomenon of "medical tourism" indicates that very good health care is available more inexpensively than in the U.S. in some surprising places. I'm guessing that many of the techniques used were developed here. And this is a factor to consider when judging our health system: its innovation in creating new treatments... which, of course, is a costly proposition. Factoring it out is not quite cricket.

6. Finally, you betcha China is watching, but China is watching our fiscal integrity which is plummeting. It's no wonder China doesn't want to loan us any more money when we are heading to a 9 trillion dollar deficit (without adding a costly remake of health care). We are hell bent on pairing our first world health care with third world financing.

Best,

Terri

Parsing the NY Times on Health Care

2009-08-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

One of my sisters graciously forwarded two articles from Sunday's NY Times, and here's my take on these:

The article entitled "A Basis is Seen for Some Health Plan Fears Among the Elderly" (http://tiny.cc/MlOig) certainly illustrates that fears among the elderly are a great deal more than "not entirely irrational" as the author puts it. Let's begin with "Bills now in Congress would squeeze savings out of Medicare, a lifeline for the elderly, on the assumption that doctors and hospitals can be more efficient"....right on, but begging the question, by the way, of any thought that the government can be more efficient than either.

The article says that "the House version of the legislation [and doesn't having different versions cause questions about trial balloons and the lack of seriousness in drawing up the legislation?] would help older Americans with their drug costs." Now wasn't this done under the Bush administration....to general satisfaction????

One, apparently pro- Obama plan individual is quoted saying the elderly are responding to "fear of the unknown." Of course, such fear on questions of their health care would not seem unfounded, but the article goes on to diss the elderly, "62 percent [of those over 45] said they were confused by the debate in Washington, compared with 43 percent of those under 65." I'd suggest that the 57% of those under 65, or most of them, have not followed the debate and know nothing beyond platitudes of the discussion, in other words they know not enough to be confused.

Finally, what do doctors think: "In effect Mr. Obama says he can cut bloated Medicare payments to inefficient health care providers without adversely affecting any beneficiaries. Many doctors are dubious." And..."Cardiologists will be especially hard hit...'Cuts of this magnitude could cripple cardiology practices and threaten access to services for millions of patients,' said Dr. John C. Lewin, chief executive of the American College of Cardiology."

Please bear in mind that the people who are proposing this massive change in an existing system with which most people are happy (note polls) have never run anything in their lives. How can they, honestly, make the claims they do to produce a successful, if volcanic, change in something as vital as American's health care?

The second article on the San Francisco public health plan ("A Public Option that Works" http://tinyurl.com/nuqvy4) is interesting, and I am not opposed to differing plans being tried locally or within states. However, this article leaves many questions unanswered and fails to mention that the San Francisco plan is being challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court (The court will decide on Oct. 5 whether or not to review the case)...but the suit, which is supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, gives an indication that the response of the business world is not as approving as the opinion piece indicates. According to the San Francisco Chronicle (http://tinyurl.com/njo9v9 July 20), "More than 80 percent of the $200 million annual cost will come from state and local taxes and payment from patients, based on their incomes. The restaurant association's lawsuit challenges the city's authority to require large and midsize companies [over 19 employees] to pay the rest of the bill."

The Times' authors offer a 4 percent surcharge instituted at 25 percent of restaurants as a mitigating factor... acknowledging also that costs are passed on to employees in the form of lower or delayed pay raises. This does seem regressive to me, as would the restaurant association's desire to pay for the plan through a quarter percent increase in the sales tax.

Under the San Francisco plan, employers with between 19 and 100 employees must add $1.85 per hour cost per employee for "pay or play" ($1.23 for those with over 100 employees). This is a substantial employment cost, and despite the assurances of the authors (offered without statistical backup) that employment in San Francisco has not suffered, it is a cost that would make most small business owners shudder.

There's nothing in this article that informs on satisfaction with the plan among users. It has the advantage that a national plan would not have of not affecting the health care of those satisfied with their current coverage (about 87% of Americans, I believe). The article mentions that Massachusetts has a public health plan without offering any details, and this is as well since the Massachusetts plan is rapidly heading for insolvency.

A Conversation With a Liberal

2009-08-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting exchange of emails with a liberal this morning:

I'm fascinated that a person who loves the english language would prefer Bush to Obama or has my quick read of your site misrepresented you? I was looking for a description of plum duff on a whim and found you. I think that the current administration is at least in touch with reality whereas the previous one was not even on speaking terms. Not to mention the fact that Obama is a damn decent orator in this day and age and bush could barely string a coherent sentence together. And all this is mere superficiality. Bush got us into two wars neither of which was well reasoned and he put the final nail in the coffin of our economy. He also ignored all of science during a critical juncture in history. How can any thinking person still hold their head up and say "I'm a conservative"? The last eight years has caused conservativisim to equal having your head in the sand or worse.

best,

Mark Gamba

www.markgamba.com

Hi Mark,

I'm glad you stumbled upon my site and were fascinated. I must say that having just visited your site, I am astounded by the excitement and beauty of your photography.

However, I must confess to being conservative; therefore, although I am impressed by Obama's rhetorical skills in delivering a speech, I must judge him by his policies with which I largely disagree. Also, when he is speaking without a teleprompter, I find the president's rhetoric merely mediocre. He doesn't measure up at all to JFK or for that matter Ronald Reagan in his performance at press conferences, and he employs the most tone-deaf press secretary that we've seen in ages.

Of course how something is said is important, but nevertheless not the message. And in addition, should you read much of the political commentary of the day, I think you may find that conservative writers have better skills and employ logical thinking much more so than liberal commentators (even allowing for a wide range of exception in both categories).

So we must agree to disagree on politics, but I thank you for responding and giving me an opportunity to enjoy your work.

Terri Choate

Conservative writers may be better writers because spin is their biggest ally. The liberals count on truth and reality, both of those are given short shrift these days. Reagan spoke well, indeed. I would not agree that he speaks any better than Obama. I would also point out that Reagan was often lying or mistaken in order in ramp up his hyperbole. Again, the truth is never as glamourous as fiction.

Mark Gamba

Hi Mark,

I can agree that the truth is never as glamourous as fiction...but here's the rub: how can you assume that the Obama administration is speaking the "Truth"? For example, how can this administration claim it can reduce the cost of a Medicare program that already faces insolvency while adding millions of additional recipients and not reducing services? The president has no practical experience in administration (along with most politicians) and cannot honestly make this claim. I also question your faith that liberals, as opposed to conservatives, count on truth and reality. This is an enormous oversimplification.

I respect your concern about truth but believe you need to investigate further...and rely on individual instances.
Best,
Terri

Weapons of mass destruction for example? If Obama gets us out of Iraq, the money not spent there will easily cover the deficit in health care spending.

Mark Gamba

Hi Mark,

Well, weapons of mass destruction are rather old stuff. Like George Bush, and many others, I did believe Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction: He certainly gassed thousands of his own population. I also believe that Hussein's repressive administration equaled genocide, reason enough to remove the bastard. I realize, however, this is a slippery slope and can appreciate that you consider internal abuses less than grounds for war (would you feel the same way about fighting Hitler in WWII?). I must admit I am dismayed that liberals show such little regard for human rights in oppressive Muslim countries...while they push for extreme niceties in Western nations.

And I dispute that ending US spending in Iraq (which is happening) will fund public health care for many months...to say nothing of the question of Afghanistan, where at least for the moment, Obama supports a war. I do agree he should; I suspect you do not.

I cover health care quite a bit on my blog. I believe there are many better solutions to health insurance reform than a monumental, necessarily exploding public option. As far as I am concerned it would be easier, more practical, and more affordable to issue vouchers to the truly indigent to buy health insurance without interfering with the coverage of everyone else.

Terri

Democrats Stoop To Censorship

2009-07-26T14:55:00.000-07:00

From Saturday's Washington Post:

GOP: Democrats Censoring Mail on Health Care

House Republicans have been prohibited from mailing out this diagram of Democrats' health-care reform plan.

By Ben Pershing
The partisan debate over health-care reform has trickled down into one of the more arcane corners of the House -- the committee on free mail, otherwise known as the Franking Commission.

One of the perks of being a member of Congress is that each lawmaker is allowed to send "franked" -- or free -- mail, as long as it is related to official business. Members use that ability to send newsletters and legislative updates to their constituents. To ensure that privilege is not used inappropriately, a majority of the bipartisan six-member Franking Commission must approve each piece to ensure it meets some basic guidelines. Mail is blocked only on rare occasions.

But now the commission has gotten involved in the health-care fight, prohibiting several Republican lawmakers from mailing out reproductions of a colorful, labyrinthine chart that purports to diagram Democrats' reform plan. The controversy was first reported by Roll Call.

The chart was produced by the Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee and has become a popular visual aide on the minority side of the aisle, as the GOP attempts to convince the public that the majority's plan will be a confusing disaster. But Democrats have argued that the chart is an inaccurate representation of their health-care efforts, and for that reason, the three Democrats on the Franking Commission say the GOP can't use it in official mail. House guidelinessay that in franked mail, "Comments critical of policy or legislation should not be partisan, politicized or personalized." But what about information that's inaccurate, or -- arguably -- just misleading?

"We have never before censored anybody's presentation of facts this way," Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) complained in an interview Friday.

Lungren, the top Republican on both the Franking Commission and the House Administration Committee, said the commission has never traditionally played a fact-checking role. He pointed out that Democrats this year have sent out numerous pieces of franked mail touting the number of jobs created by the economic stimulus package, and while Republicans might disagree with those numbers, they've never moved to block the mail from being sent out.

"We let those things go by, even though we don't think it's true," Lungren said, adding that he knows of at least 15 Republicans who have asked to mail out copies of the health-care chart in question. (For some context, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) explains the chart's purpose here. Ezra Klein mocked the chart here, and includes a chart of Republicans' own health-care "plan." )

The controversy extends beyond the colorful chart. Salley Collins, a spokeswoman for House Administration panel Republicans, said GOP members were also being told by the Franking Commission that they could not refer to "government-run health care" in their mailings, and had to dub it "the public option" instead.

Democrats, led by Franking Commission Chairwoman Susan Davis(Calif.), say they are trying in good faith to negotiate a compromise with Republicans on this subject. If the impasse isn't resolved, watch for the GOP to turn up the volume on the controversy next week.

Health Care for the Generic Person

2009-07-16T09:50:00.000-07:00

Peter Singer, who's famous-or infamous-for most candidly promoting the thought that a rat and a boy and a dog are equals (although the precise quote "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy" was made by Ingrid Newkirk, a co-founder of PETA), has an essay in today's New York Times explaining "Why We Must Ration Health Care": http://tinyurl.com/nuvjr7.

Well, first let's look at the "we." It's not you nor I with our choices to purchase, or not, health insurance, nor our doctors with their advice on the efficacy of treatments who must ration health care, but rather bureaucrats in a governmental agency such as Britain's NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) who will do the rationing. Singer notes, with jaundice, these are the bureaucrats conservatives label "soulless," but in his exposition they come across merely as bloodless... straightforward actuaries.

Singer, himself, is a straightforward utilitarian philosopher, who is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and also laureate professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He was the subject of a fairly sympathetic review by Mark Oppenheimer in the Christian Century (July 2002) that you can read here: http://tinyurl.com/d87hd8.

As a utilitarian, Oppenheimer says, Singer sees "the moral task is to create utility--to increase the amount of happiness in the world, or at least decrease the amount of pain." Of course, these are excellent goals shared by religious people, but one that runs contrary to "monotheistic traditions" that hold "suffering can be redemptive; that people can be called to unexpected and unusual tasks, that a lone human life can have inviolable worth; and that there is something greater than humankind that deserves to be worshipped"...and perhaps honored by the building of cathedrals, by scriptual study, and by contemplation, items Oppenheimer categorizes as "a part of godliness," a trait Singer denies.

Indeed, Singer is well beyond the religious..and not so religious... mainstream because along with promoting respect and good treatment for animals and generosity in charitable giving, he also believes "it's OK to kill babies," and he does mean babies not fetuses. It's OK because, Oppenheimer points out, Singer is a "preference utilitarian" who believes in "allowing people to satisfy as many of their preferences as possible." Babies are incapable of having preferences beyond basic instincts to feed, sleep, and extricate (one might say to live) and so they are subordinate to their parents' preference to live without them...a condition that may continue up to three years of age: "a grey area," Singer told Oppenheimer.

This is the shocking aspect of Singer's world view. However, Oppenheimer also points out that many of Singer's views are accepted generally: for example, killing one of a set of Siamese twins to insure life for the second. And many would accept keeping brain-damaged infants alive only long enough to harvest their organs to save other lives.

Fewer agree with Singer that an animal may have a greater claim to life than a person..."that an intelligent adult ape has more conscious interests than a newborn" and should, perhaps be rescued from a fire before the infant, especially if the infant is retarded. The existence of preferences is the grounds for not taking a life and does not apply to infants and perhaps not to the severely retarded. The fetus's and infant's dearth of preferences is easily outweighed in Singer's philosophy, Oppenheimer points out, by preferences of the parents to kill. Apparently, the ingrained capacity of the infant to develop preferences in the future is of no account.

Oppenheimer points out that Singer might also argue that parents who thus deny themselves a child could later produce another and that parents who do not want the burden of raising a brain-damaged child might then be able to contribute thousands of dollars to UNICEF to save other children.

So this is the Singer who writes in the Times that "we must ration health care." Singer's tone in the Times' essay denies his more radical views. He sounds less like a college professor and philosopher than a business manager. He can think of no other way to apportion health care except by government rationing or by price as we (mostly) do now--although one might suggest charity, prudence (purchasing insurance), or reforming the insurance marketplace to allow individuals to buy the insurance...and only the insurance...that they need (i.e. eliminating requirements to include procedures such as stomach stapling, breast implantation, and sex changes that most people do not want and that drive up costs unreasonably).

With his proposals Singer attempts to set a price on human life--or to outline how to do so. It's important to realize he's speaking of generic people. In these terms, "the death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old. He asks rhetorically, "What if the teenager is a violent criminal and the 85-year-0ld is still working productively?" Well, no dice, seniors: "Decisions about the allocation of healthcare resources should be kept separate from judgements about the moral character or social value of individuals."

Singer also disses those with disabilities. He hypothesizes that a life as a quadriplegic is half as good as a non-disabled life, so it might be more beneficial to save the lives of two non-disabled than to restore the life of a single quadriplegic. If you don't think so, if you think the life of the quadriplegic is equal to that of the able-bodied, Singer asks why bother treating the quadriplegic at all? It's all in the numbers.

Now, Singer does, at the end of his 10 (printed) pages, qualify his support for government care: either people or physicians should be able to get out of Medicare for All should they choose not to participate. Unfortunately, Democrats in the House disagree with him here. Singer also believes people should be able to buy supplemental care to have an option for unrationed care (one I suspect he would use for his family). Does Obama government care allow this? Perhaps for the moment.

And I can't help but remember (because he frequently reminds us) that Obama is also infamous for regretting that the grandmother who raised him worried about the cost of her healthcare deductibles as she lay dying, despite her well-positioned and well off grandson (which opens up the moral, if not ethical, question of family support and care).

And also, I think, utilitarians may find it easy to be fickle. Singer has admitted to believing one might "need to lie for a good outcome." Utilitarians profess to seek lives that are free and valuable, but they value statistical averages and government edict rather than real people and free choices. And they are single minded in the way that I find many libertarians single minded, allowing them to sound logical when in reality they ignore the greater picture. For example, Singer ignores the destruction of incentive to produce new treatments and new pharmaceuticals that destroying profit from them will cause. He ignores a physician's inherent desire to practice his profession to the best of his (or her) own ability freed from bureaucratic restraint. And he ignores grown ups' desire to be free of government interference in personal life choices. And by ignoring "godliness" and human uniqueness, he removes most of the reasons we would choose to have a long life after all.

Obamacare Flow Chart

2009-07-15T06:44:00.000-07:00

Do you really want to navigate this maze???

Let's Ban Smoking in the Military?

2009-07-13T13:45:00.001-07:00

Yeah, sure... What's OK for the commander-in-chief (choice) is too good for the grunts who bear the burden of the battle.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

2009-07-04T14:25:00.000-07:00

Today was my best fourth of July ever for three reasons.

1. I took part in the 2,ooo strong tea party (that's Taxed Enough Already) in Reno. I waved a sign for two hours in the pretty hot sunshine, and I'm sure I made Sam Adams and company proud.

And here's some pictures:

These signs were not passed out
by big business...or the GOP,
but handmade, often on site...
and this young patriot's was
among the best:
A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything you have.

2. I contributed to the wounded warriors project, a project that assists today's severely wounded and disabled veterans as they return home. And you can do this also by going to https://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/content/view/446/1076/ and clicking on the Donate button on the upper right.

3. I'm baking Dale an apple pie...what could be more American!

ENJOY YOUR FOURTH AND THE FREEDOM OUR CONSTITUTION, NOT CONGRESS NOR THE PRESIDENT, GIVES US. WE MUST PRESERVE THIS GIFT FOR THOSE WHO FOLLOW US!

GOD BLESS THE USA!

Obama Gyrates!

2009-06-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

WHOOPEE!

This bobble man is a must for every dash. I received mine last week, and he's been a shimmying and shaking and entertaining me on every drive since.

(You can get yours at Glenn Beck's website: http://tinyurl.com/24dz8s.)

Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most... Erma Brombeck

Our Dad

2009-06-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

Our dad died in 2003 at age 96, and at that time, I was resigned to let him go: I thought "God must need him more than we do." Honestly, old as I was, that's a judgment I wouldn't have been able to make much earlier...because we always needed Dad, at least I know I did, but I also knew that since my mother's death five years earlier, my dad wanted most of all to rejoin her.

Dad regularly put other's needs and happiness before his own. Selfishly, I wanted to hang onto him forever even as I saw the fatigue in his eyes and his occasional stumbling step. To the end, he was always the helper, the fixer, the calm voice of wisdom and love. I may have seen my dad angry twice in my life; that fact made my own temper hard to understand, for Dad was always in command, all-knowing, sweet tempered, and calm. I asked him about this once. He told me that his two older brothers (he was third of nine children) fought constantly. It was mostly the fault of the second oldest, Dad said, who was hot-tempered. Dad decided not to follow that example.

And I think in any case, anger wasn't in his make up. Dad was interested in what makes things work, and he followed that inclination by commuting by rail to MIT from Fall River, Mass, to earn a degree in engineering in 1930. It wasn't an auspicious time to graduate. His own father had wanted Dad to follow in his monument (gravestone) business, but that wasn't Dad's intent. He left for St. Louis, MO, with my mother to take a job offered by a friend's father. By the time he arrived, the job had disappeared. Times were tough then. Dad worked for a while in an auto parts store, and he told me of waking up one morning with 5 cents and a loaf of bread in the house. If it were not for the generosity of neighbors, particularly one in the military who shared his paycheck, going hungry was a definite option.

After my brother was born in St. Louis, my Dad took my mother and their baby to Maine where he had been offered a job working on a farm for food. It was a long, cold winter trip in an unheated car, and on arrival, farming in Maine proved hard scrabble, and the food was limited to basics for survival. (In fact, the hardships there cemented my mother's later distaste for country living.) Eventually, though, times improved. By the time I was born (4th of six, five of us girls), my Dad was working in Columbia, PA. He'd moved into quality control engineering. When the war broke out, he was exempted from military service, and he moved from the manufacture of Cook washing machines to the manufacture of military aircraft.

One of my earliest realizations about my Dad was the respect with which others treated him. It was respect well deserved. Dad was the problem solver. Dad was the one everyone turned to for help. Around my Dad, I felt completely secure and really very special to be Bill Lord's daughter.

I don't remember my Dad playing games with us. I do remember him taking us swimming on hot summer nights...after he'd worked all day. I remember him showing us how to use tools and allowing us to mess around his basement work bench. I remember him fixing our car...in fact I remember impatiently calling him out from under the car on many occasions because it was time to take the family somewhere or time for dinner. And I remember my Dad tutoring me and my sisters patiently in algebra many many nights throughout high school. I owed my A's in math to him. Realizing this, I took symbolic logic in my freshman year of college to avoid math, and I found myself floundering. After weeks of panic, I decided I needed to follow Dad's example and work my way through problems step-by-step: I earned a B.

But my best memories of my Dad are being around him while he worked. Dad always sang. He didn't have a great singing voice, but that didn't matter because he was making up his songs as he went along. The songs were about whatever he was doing and also running commentary about the kid with him. They were funny, filled with Dad's quirky, good natured humor. They were the one thing that could force me to smile when I was in a perfectly awful pout and determined to stay there. Pouting was impossible around Dad.

I don't remember receiving a great deal of advice from Dad. We all just knew how we should act by watching him. He was the original, "do as I do." He did recommend once that I not drink gin. This is advice I've taken over the years...except once when I had the opportunity to try out some authentic moonshine from West Virginia. It reminded me of a time I asked my Dad if he'd gone to a speakeasy during prohibition. He told me no, but he had gone to the beach at night to meet the rum runners to buy whiskey for his Dad. My grandfather, as a result of his stonecutter's trade, suffered painfully from dust in his lungs, and he drank to kill the pain.

But if Dad missed out on speakeasies, he didn't miss out on fun. After my mother's death, he reminisced about the times they went to Horseneck Beach on Cape Cod to fry eggs and heat beans by fireside as the sun set. His and my mother's happiness was low key. They deeply loved each other and were happy with simple, inexpensive pleasures. My mother said she never wanted to live without my dad, and I can understand why. Dad survived Mom by five years, and he spoke to her every day of those years. Dad loved his kids; we all knew that, but his love for my mom was the deep passion of his life. Still, no one knew my Dad who didn't feel lifted up by his acquaintance. Dad was a common man and an uncommonly wonderful guy. I'll miss him this Father's Day.

Trickle Down Learning

2009-06-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

How much does your public school district spend per pupil on education? According to a recent position paper from the Nevada Public Policy Institute (NPRI), it’s most likely more than you think, indeed more than you have been told.

In “Funding Fantasies” (download here: http://www.npri.org/publications/funding-fantasies), the Institute’s education policy analyst Patrick Gibbons finds that “[t]he true cost of educating students is regularly misrepresented behind claims that certain expenditures, such as capital outlays and debt service, should not be counted, because those expenditures are not directly related to student learning. But such thinking merely seeks to illegitimately exploit the arcane distinctions of accountancy. If the expenditure does not contribute to student learning, why is it being made?”

Well, good question.

In Clark County (Las Vegas area), the school district reported per pupil spending for the recent school year would be $7,175, but dividing budgeted spending for the school year by the number of students, actual spending per student is $13,387. In Washoe County (Reno area), actual spending per pupil by weighted enrollment was $11,395. But the basic support claimed by the district is $5,323. Not included there is “additional revenue from...federal funds, local funds, capital project funds, food service funds, special service funds and debt service.”

This problem is not singular to the State of Nevada. Gibbons writes “[u]nderreporting of per-pupil spending is a nationwide practice. In the District of Columbia, Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute found that D.C. schools spent more than $24,600 per student—despite officially claimed expenditures around $13,500 per student. Meanwhile the average tuition at a D.C. private school that accepted vouchers from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program was just $6,620.”

Well, one way of reading this is to confirm suspicions: a huge portion of the money spent on public schools never makes its way into the classroom. It is in the interest of administrators and educators to cry “not enough money” when the truth is closer to “not enough money well spent.”

Gibbons finds that of the $13,387 to be spent per pupil in Clark County in 2008-2009, only $4,514 (33.7%) was to be spent on “instruction related expenses.” Average salaries within the district range from $55,651 for workers in facilities to $113,189 to those in curriculum and professional development. He asks, “Can CCSD's academic results justify these generous average salaries?”…and notes “[t]he district employs 32,202.39 full time equivalent staff (FTE) on its payroll. That’s roughly one employee per 10 students, and an average salary-and-benefits package of $69,871.”

WestEd, a non-profit research institution based in San Francisco, looked at student graduation and achievement rates in Nevada in 2005. The institute concluded in the executive summary to its report (done in collaboration with the Center for Education Policy Studies, CEPS, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas):

Our review of the state’s student achievement and graduation rate data leads to several findings:

On achievement. Despite some recent gains among the state’s high school students, achievement remains low, ranking Nevada near the bottom among U.S. states. Moreover, as in other states, a significant racial/ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gap persists.

On the graduation rate. Although wide variations exist across districts, Nevada’s overall graduation rate is one of the nation’s lowest. Here, too, the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gap is evident.

Well, there are gaps and gaps.

NPRI found a gap in school districts’ knowledge: “whether [districts'] spending patterns have any link at all to the policy priorities they publicly profess”…or is spending “an accidental system in which spending decisions, regulations and other restrictions are made piecemeal and with conflicting intent”...noting that “[s]chool board contracts with teacher unions currently determine how nearly half of all funds available to public education are used.”

Of course, teacher unions have a purpose…to increase teacher pay and benefits, but is that synonymous with increasing student achievement? Looking at results, the answer is “not necessarily.”

Accounting, also, has a purpose, but is it to clarify where the money goes or to obfuscate? In Nevada and in the nation, school districts hide the significant expenditures that create a top-heavy school bureaucracy and then claim to the public that they haven't enough money to educate students to even mediocre standards. Perhaps pundits should pan it as trickle down (maybe) learning.

Here's to Holes in Water

2009-06-11T08:58:00.000-07:00

George Will turns to our 29th president to offer our 43rd some perspective:

"Noting that people "criticize me for harping on the obvious," Calvin Coolidge justified that practice by saying, "If all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves." Consider what individual Americans know they ought to do, and what their government should know not to do.

"The nation could subtract from its health care bill a significant portion of the costs caused by violence, vehicular accidents, AIDS, coronary artery disease, lung cancer and Type II diabetes resulting from obesity. All six problems are significantly related to known risky behavior, which can change….."

Will notes the "new sobriety" of Americans ("more saving, less spending") encourages economic recovery, but wonders if it will survive. He sees the administration's huge stimulus spending as a "defibrillator" that quickens the economy's pulse, but reminds "a patient cannot become healthy attached to a defibrillator," and he sees the country being lead toward "[t]rillions of dollars of capital...being allocated sub-optimally, by politically tainted government calculations..."

Continues Will, "The president's astonishing risk-taking satisfies the yearning of a presidency-fixated nation for a great man to solve its problems. But as Coolidge said, "It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man." What the country needs today in order to shrink its problems is not presidential greatness. Rather, it needs individuals to do what they know they ought to do, and government to stop doing what it should know causes or prolongs problems.

(You can read the sad litany of "astonishing risk-taking" in the complete article here: http://tinyurl.com/lvlt3p.)

For the sake of our institutions, we can only wish that Obama's hubris will play out as American psychologist Og Mandino suggested: “The next time you are tempted to boast, just place your fist in a full pail of water, and when you remove it, the hole remaining will give you a correct measure of your importance.”

Times are shaky when we hope for a legacy of holes in water!

TOTUS Guides POTUS Through Press Questions

2009-06-09T10:57:00.000-07:00

On Amerian Thinker Cliff Thier speculates on the rescue of the president from his "uh"..."uh"..."uhs": http://tinyurl.com/n4puuz.

And you might want to read more on TOTUS' own blog: http://baracksteleprompter.blogspot.com/.

Go Tell it on the Mountain!

2009-06-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

We were six adults, three sisters, a brother-in-law and two nephews, and four kids, three sons (grandnephews) and a daughter (grandniece) whose homes spanned the continent, which meant we didn’t know each other all that well. But the bond of family was taken for granted; we climbed together, intermixing easily.

It was an August day in New Hampshire, and at the base of Mt. Monadnock, the heat, humidity and mosquitoes were discouraging even as we entered the shady forest path. The youngest demanded a ride on his father’s shoulders; I didn’t think he would reach the mountain top.

But before long, he was set down, and all four kids scampered ahead, vying to be first, vying to find the best native blueberry bush to gorge on its fruit. The adults proceeded at different paces, taking pictures, noting the vegetation, conversing. Periodically there were stops as the forest gave way to steeper, rocky terrain for a drink of water and snacks and admonishments to be careful.

Mt. Monadnock is not a difficult climb for kids and able bodied adults (although descending with bad knees is a challenge). The rocks are giant stepping stones, but not hard to maneuver over or around. No special equipment is necessary, and as we ascended, earlier climbers, teenagers, ran and lept down the pathway: oh, to be young again!

The reward of the climb is the mountain top. It’s a relatively flat, ½ acre or so of rock surface with peaks to stand upon to soak in the vista of the green, green lowlands below, the ponds, the stretch to the horizon, which can include a faint glimpse of Boston on a clear day. And there are small planes flying below, white against the landscape.

The summit is windy and chill after the climb, but there are rocks again to shelter beside and eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we’d brought for sustenance. And there’s a bronze plaque that notes the elevation: 3,165 feet. I was thinking about this number as I gazed, feeling very much on top of the world, out into the far distance. I live now in Reno, NV, which has an elevation of 4,505 feet. I was, in reality, some 1,400 feet lower than when in my backyard.

Perhaps this is a lesson in perspective, perhaps in irony. But what I was actually experiencing was the joy of the climb, the camaraderie of joint effort and success, the deliciousness of the moment (and the sandwich). These are the tangible understanding I brought back down the mountain.

And I think that is what is to be learned from a mountain top: how to live when we return. When Moses went, he returned with 10 commandments from God to live our lives. My grandnephews and grandniece that day, returned, I think, with awe at the height they’d achieved and confidence to strive and endure to success. Others may have found a peace that eludes them in the flatland, but a peace to bring home.

My granddaughter is now nine months old. She’s accomplished crawling, and now she has taken to looking up. No longer do the scattering of toys on the floor interest her; she looks up to pull things down (including a chair on her head) and she tries to pull herself up, succeeding, on her knees, in reaching into her brother’s toy bin to rattle the contents and pinching her hand as she descents down. There’s a momentary cry of distress, and then she’s off to other mischief.

When her brother was 18 months old, I watched with curiosity as he climbed a vertical stack of wooden flooring some four feet high, successfully. I probably should have stopped him, but we both wanted to see if he could do it, and he could.

Perhaps that’s another lesson: never be satisfied with the status quo, accept the challenge, strive. Why do we climb mountains? We do because they are there, and we do because they are much more enlarging than molehills. Looking up is our nature and destiny.

This posting is an entry into Robert Hruzek' s "What I learned from a mountaintop..." group writing contest a middlezonemusings.com (http://middlezonemusings.com/wilf-mountaintop-experience/). You have until Sunday, June 7, at midnight to enter, and I encourage you to return to Robert's site to read the many fine entries on Tuesday, June 9.

We're Not Your Friends No More!

2009-06-05T08:12:00.000-07:00

Here's the reaction from Israel to Obama's speech to the Arab world. Caroline Glick, an editor of The Jerusalem Post, writes:

US President Barack Obama claims to be a big fan of telling the truth. In media interviews ahead of his trip to Saudi Arabia and Egypt and during his big speech in Cairo on Thursday, he claimed that the centerpiece of his Middle East policy is his willingness to tell people hard truths. Indeed, Obama made three references to the need to tell the truth in his so-called address to the Muslim world.

Unfortunately, for a speech billed as an exercise in truth telling, Obama's address fell short. Far from reflecting hard truths, Obama's speech reflected political convenience....

And Glick concludes: By his words as well as by his deeds, not only has Obama shown that he is not a friend of Israel. He has shown that there is nothing that Israel can do to make him change his mind.

Read the full indictment here: http://tinyurl.com/oy5yq3. Charles Krauthammer has a similar take here: http://tinyurl.com/odfnuj.

Uncommon, Common Sense

2009-05-21T15:50:00.000-07:00

If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field. And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for - our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking today at the American Enterprise Institute

To Mom, With Love

2009-05-08T22:18:00.000-07:00

My mother died in May 1997, at the age of 92, with my Dad and four of her six children at her bedside. A memorial service was held for her in August, the month of my Dad’s birthday when we all gather for a reunion in New Hampshire. Many people were at her service, and I remember thinking how surprised Mom would have been to see them all there because she was so genuinely humble.

She was born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the daughter of German immigrants, one of six children. She remembered hardships: walking along the railroad tracks to collect pieces of coal in the wintertime, delivering the laundry her mother did for others, and being compelled to leave school at 14, right after her 8th grade graduation, to work at Beacon Mill. She called it her Alma Mater.

Mom met my Dad on a blind date when he was a student at M.I.T. The next time he saw her, he asked her out for an afternoon walk…and did they walk! By the time they returned, close to dinner time, he was exhausted and late for a date with a girl in his own hometown of Fall River (about 20 miles away) with whom he was unofficially engaged.

Dad never regretted choosing my mother instead. He called her “my girl” until the day she died and for the five years that he lived on without her.

My parents had six children also: five girls and one boy, fortunately for him, the oldest. They saw each of us through college, with two receiving advanced degrees. This was extremely important to my Mom. With only an 8th grade education, she considered herself poorly educated and not as smart as other people. She was wrong of course, but it fed her determination to have her kids go to college. And she went back to work in a jewelry factory to help make that happen.

I remember at my college graduation, my mother borrowed my mortarboard and posed for a picture of triumph, sitting on a brick wall with her legs crossed saucily, a rare moment of silliness for her.

My everyday mom cared for us quietly and conscientiously and unselfishly. She asked little for herself. One thing she did like was potato chips…and another was chocolates, but these were rare luxuries. I remember one year wanting to buy Mom a big box of potato chips for her birthday, but I didn’t have any money, or not enough. I got out our old blue wagon and pulled my two younger sisters around the neighborhood to collect bottles that we could redeem for 2 to 5 cents at the drug store.

We did get enough bottles to buy the potato chips that cost 69 cents, but Mom had seen us soliciting, and she was embarrassed. She told me she didn’t want me to do that again, but she accepted the potato chips, and I think she liked them, which was all we cared about.

I can’t give my mother potato chips or chocolates any longer, but love for her is writ deeply in my heart.

Happy Mother’s day, Mom!

Wanted: Bureaucrats?

2009-05-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

Here I go again linking: http://tinyurl.com/dmv3z8. This piece from Investor's Business Daily exposes the inherent structural deficiencies of Medicare, the presumed model for the president's proposed (but undisclosed) "public plan" for national health care.

When it comes to health care, maybe it really does take a brain surgeon and not a bureaucrat.

Avoid the Nocebo Cha Cha Cha!

2009-05-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, from the time I learned to read up to about age 13, I was a hopeless hypochondriac. I developed symptoms for every disease I read about, and I was particularly concerned about appendicitis. After taking me and my complaints to the family doctor several times (needlessly), my parents brought me to see their chiropractor...and there I was cured.

Like the physician, the chiropractor found nothing the matter with me, but he helpfully suggested my folks buy me a parakeet to get my mind off myself. I was aghast, insulted...and made well. My stomach pains disappeared, and my appendix remained intact for 54 more years.

This experience taught me early in life not to aspire to any employment in the medical profession, and that's just as well since, apparently, many medical students suffer disease-less symptoms just as I did. Nevertheless, today, because I am interested in health care, I do visit a few medical blogs. One I like particularly is Junkfood Science at http://www.junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/

This blog belongs to Sandy Szwarc, BSN, RN, CCP. She offers "critical examination" (read common sense evaluation) of healthcare news. Today's posting at http://tinyurl.com /cah62w
draws on an article by Stuart Blackman in, oddly enough, Financial Times, concerning the nocebo effect. Had I read it before my visit to the chiropractor, I should have been saved a bit of angst.

What I've Learned About Communities

2009-05-04T20:40:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday night my almost-four grandson stood on the stage of the Celebrity Ballroom in John Ascuaga’s Nugget casino with 100 of his peers and stared in bafflement at whatever a little boy could see of the darkened house beyond the bright stage lights. Then he proceeded to join the performance, singularly out of step in every particular. He was alternately funny, bad, and emotive, but never in group-sync, and to a degree, these nonconformities have been the story of his pre-school experience thus far.

Fitting in is not always easy. It takes a tremendous toll on teens in particular. However, three and four year olds are not much concerned about social status and very much concerned about their own needs and desires. They are the center of their universe, and they act accordingly and arbitrarily, sometimes cooperative, sometimes disruptive as mood and circumstance dictate. Everything is on the surface, though; there’s no concealment or artifice. So I wonder, can there be a community of pre-schoolers? I think not.

A true community is a voluntary association of like minded individuals. They may be drawn together by neighborhood (physical or virtual), and for the most part they share values, beliefs, and interests. I pulled out my 10-pound Random House Unabridged Dictionary for a weighty check of this definition and found Random House stressed also a “common governance”…and being old, the 1993 edition, mentioned virtual not at all.

Communities overlap, and we all belong to several. Envisioning them is like picturing rain drops falling on a pond and creating rings of ripples that expand, meet, and dissolve into the watery whole. Some communities are stable over long periods of time; others are as temporary as most of the alliances struck up in high school or among a travel group. Some associations are rock solid, like 20 years residence in the same neighborhood, and others are names and pictures and words on a dot matrix screen or people with no acquaintance at all, who are affiliated merely because they accept the same beliefs and attitudes.

For the most part, communities are considered good things. They can accomplish tasks that elude the individual. They offer trust and a sense of belonging, give meaning, motivate, and provide security. On the other hand, a certain amount of conformity is necessarily a part of any community. The very commonality that defines community excludes as well as includes.

I’ve been on a list of people taking The Polling Point poll frequently. I’m always asked for my political affiliation, gender, age, and household income even though these are things that don’t change every week. Then I’m asked to rate various companies in various ways. Lately, I am always asked whether I consider myself primarily a member of my local community, my country, or the world. I answer my country. I am attached to Reno, NV, because I have lived in this area for the past 13 years, and I love it...plus two of my kids and my grandchildren are here. Nevertheless, it does not claim my primary allegiance. Perhaps this is because I’ve lived in a number of different communities in different states and liked them as well. The world, on the other hand, is too large to claim my allegiance and also in many places alien, even hostile.

The sense of belonging to the American community is important to me, and I hope for all Americans. To me this sense of belonging comes from sharing the values and history of our country and believing that America is exceptional and should remain so, remain strong, remain a world leader. I believe the American community is and should continue to be stronger than its parts: the millions of individuals and the myriads of smaller communities that make up the nation.

This belief sets me apart from many people…including most everyone I was recently associated with in the academic community…who believe in multi-culturism and diversity. For the most part, for most people the difference here is only one of emphasis: the primacy of our national identification verses competing identifications with race, country of origin, linguistic group, religion, even gender and sexual orientation. However, for an activist few, multi-culturalism and its offshoot “diversity” are the whole potato, and they claim special privileges for groups deemed "minority." The latter practice undermines the organizing principle of our republic, which is equality before the law for all, not special treatment for some, and ultimately destroys the trust within the larger community.

It also goes against all we know about human nature. Despite all the communities we participate in, we are individual members of the human race, driven to make our own way in life with (or without) the support of friendly associations. Community is essential to human development, but individuals making free choices are essential to true community. As soon as narrowly defined affiliations call for privileges others do not enjoy, competition and conflict are inevitable. What is needed is allegiance to the overarching umbrella community that is inclusive.

My grandson (he's the blur in the picture above) hasn’t really developed a sense of community yet; he’s struggling with it while still developing the closer tie of family. He’ll have to give up some of his individuality as he becomes more acceptable within a group, but I hope not too much... because what I’ve learned about communities is that they need good, strong, principled individuals to check needless and imposed conformity, to lead and guide and work within them, and to check the privileging of some communities over others by dictate or decree.

Note that this posting is in response Robert Hruzek's group writing project at http://middlezonemusings.com/wilf-community/ that continues through May 10.

Ice Runneth in His Veins

2009-05-01T12:29:00.000-07:00

Nurse, mom and "member of the human race," Carol Peracchio analyzes the president's "Cold, Cold Health Care" on American Thinker: http://tinyurl.com/d22uox, illustrating how it's cool to be heartless.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn on Universal Health Care

2009-04-29T16:44:00.000-07:00

There's a revealing excerpt from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's The Cancer Ward (based on Solzhenitsyn's personal experience) on today's posting at the Assistant Village Idiot blog: http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/.

Check this one out!

Common Sense on the Environment!

2009-04-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

I'm spending this afternoon reading people I respect on the internet. Here's Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Denmark, writing in today's The New York Times and advising us: "Don't Waste Time on Cutting Emissions." Check him out at http://tinyurl.com/c7k6dy .

And check out my earlier posts on the environment: http://tinyurl.com/cfwkrh, http://tinyurl.com/d2zljz.

Torture, Too, is in the Eye of the Beholder

2009-04-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

How do you define "torture"? Neomie Emery takes up the topic of torture in the latest Weekly Standard and welcomes congressional hearings: http://tinyurl.com/cpy588 .

Ration Health Care? You bet!

2009-04-28T13:10:00.001-07:00

Larry Summers lets the cat out of the bag (doctors will get marching orders from bureaucrats): http://tinyurl.com/cjbsbq .

You can read my earlier posts on health care rationing here http://tinyurl.com/cb8vef and here http://tinyurl.com/d8tost, http://tinyurl.com/dhdqrr, http://tinyurl.com/cxfsr9.

And here's a good health care blog to check daily: http://www.healthcarebs.com/

And here's more from the inestimable Charles Krauthammer:http://tinyurl.com/cp2oj9 .

Wish You the Joy of the Day!

2009-04-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

Come on in or sit outside and watch the parade!

A million dollar smile!

Poetry in motion!

Mystique!

One cool babe!

All together now!

Help Celebrate National People Watching Days!

The Livin' Is Easy on the Truckee River

2009-04-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

Springtime in the "Biggest Little City in the World"!

Enjoy the sunshine, water sports and malt, vino, veritas, and pretty young girls!

Reno is much more than neon lights!

Disclaimer: This is not a paid advertisement....drat!

The Bitter Pill A-coming!

2009-04-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer exposes the road to health care rationing:

"Why do you think the stimulus package pours $1.1 billion into medical "comparative effectiveness research"? It is the perfect setup for rationing. Once you establish what is "best practice" for expensive operations, medical tests and aggressive therapies, you've laid the premise for funding some and denying others.

"It is estimated that a third to a half of one's lifetime health costs are consumed in the last six months of life. Accordingly, Britain's National Health Service can deny treatments it deems not cost-effective -- and if you're old and infirm, the cost-effectiveness of treating you plummets. In Canada, they ration by queuing. You can wait forever for so-called elective procedures like hip replacements (http://tinyurl.com/dcej9g) ."

Krauthammer is, as always, right on the mark...but I wish he'd chosen brussel sprouts instead of spinach for his metaphor!

One Giant Aspirin Won't Solve the Problem

2009-04-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

I have a vested interest in the health care debate which is heating up to the point of action--the wrong action--in Washington. This is because after a lifetime of good health and despite diagnoses of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) in 1994 and non-Hodgkins lymphoma (NHL) in 1995, I've been able to lead an active life, even completing the Seattle Marathon for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's fund-raising Team-in-Training program in 2002 (at age 62) in just under six hours.

But now I am more ill. I was released last week from my second hospital visit within one month for pnemonia, and truth is I've suffered one infection after another since last August. Despite good medical care, this is, I guess, the nature of the beast.

Making me well again and keeping me well will be expensive. I'll need perhaps two more infusions of immunoglobins (I had one in the hospital last week), catscans and when my blood is stronger, more chemotherapy. And this comes at tremendous cost, so much so that I feel guilty over it. I am fortunate because I have good insurance to pay for the excellent health care I receive, but I wonder how long that will last: 1. only so long as I remain covered by my husband's secondary insurance and 2. only so long as a health care provider decides that the care needed to prolong my life makes economic as well as medical sense.

Condition #1 will be determined by my husband's lifespan. Condition #2 will be determined by politics.

Already, my physician needs to decide if his office can give me the infusions I need. The problem is that reimbursement to the doctor is less than cost...although perhaps not for me since at the moment I have good secondary coverage to Medicare. Possibly, I can receieve the infusions at the hospital (which charges five times as much as the physician's office but is reimbursed more). Reimbursement is determined by Medicare. My private supplementary insurance also pays according to Medicare's rule book; that is, it cannot exceed the price fixed by Medicare.

The Obama administration is concerned that not all Americans enjoy the coverage I do, and that concern does weigh on me also. However, the president's answer is to turn writing a revolutionary health care plan over to Democrats in Congress...that's the Nancy Pelosi/Harry Reid bunch that send shudders through even the healthy. The plan of attack will be to sell the idea that universal health care will reduce the cost of medical service and make health care available to all. This is an economic policy, not a medical care policy (see Thomas Sowell http://tinyurl.com/dfar8k), and it's bad economics.

Universal coverage will increase the cost of providing healthcare: afterall, more people must be served. The cost savings promised through computerized record keeping will not make up the difference. The only way costs will go down when more people are placed in the system is to reduce the cost of the care given either by shoddy reimbursement leading to curtailing services (defacto rationing of care) or by overtly reducing the services offered (i.e. rationing care). Another intermediate and likely outcome is to delay services, which, perversely, will increase the time people are ill and incompacitated and increase the cost to the overall economy of sick leave and other social services intervention.

Maybe this is necessary in the interest of fairness. That is certainly the argument of advocates who claim large numbers of Americans are uninsured and many face bankruptcy trying to keep up with health care bills.

However, research shows much of this claim is not true. Economist John Goodman of the National Center of Policy Anaylsis refutes assertions that other countries with universal health care have better health care results than the U.S. His extensively documented article is available in PDF format at http://tinyurl.com/d8cfb8. Goodman posits that "all developed countries face...rising costs, inadequate quality, and incomplete access to care." He points out that the acknowledged superior American medical care "uses fewer physicians, nurses, hospital beds, physician visits, and hospital days" than the typical European universal care system.

Goodman continues: "a comparison of the British National Health Service (NHS) and California's Kaiser Permanente found that Kaiser provided more comprehevsive and convenient primary care and more rapid access to specialists for roughly the same cost."

Some medida commentators (Froma Harrop, for one, see http://tinyurl.com/de3ym8) claim worse medical results from American healthcare. That simply is not true. For one example, Goodman points out that after five years, the survival rate for all cancers for men and women is considerably higher in the U.S. than in all of Europe.

Still, what about the uninsured in America? Goodman claims that of 46 million uninsured, 12 million are eligible for Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Of the remainder, 17 million live in households making more than $50,000 annually (one-half of these in households making over $75,000). Many of these uninsured are young and healthy and decide to forego insurance for other priorities. Their lack of insurance does not lead to early death. Even when these suffer a debilitating illness, Goodman points to a Rand study that "suggests...insurance status has little effect on receipt of recommended care" once they see a physician.

As to saving money because of more efficient government accounting practices (which sounds like an oxymoron on the face of it), Goodman found that when "the hidden costs shifted to [private] providers of care and the social costs of collecting taxes to fund Medicare are included...Medicare and Medicaid spend two-thirds more on administration than private insurance...."

In addressing whether the private market can work in health care, Goodman looks at the costs of cosmetic surgery, corrective vision surgery, and walk-in health clinics. These are not dependent on insurance reimbursement, yet they are not only successful, increasing in numbers performed, but have also enjoyed price cuts of up to 30% in the past 15 years.

Health care is an issue that will grow in importance, particularly as the population (read baby boomers) age and there are fewer workers to support the twin entitlements of social security and Medicare. Writing separately in the March 2009 issue of Imprimus from Hillsdale College, Goodman points out that Medicare will eat up one of every 10 federal discretionary dollars in three years. By 2030, the progam will take one of every two tax dollars. This is a dismal prospect for the economy, and for the quality of care people will receive in the not distant future. A strong private market solution, or more likely solutions, to inadequate health care provision is needed quickly...especially before advocates of universal government care can take the country down a road that will insure higher costs and lesser results for all. It's important that Americans wake up to this challenge and think through innovative private insurance plans that will preserve the high quality of our medical care. If not, we will all be in the same boat, but it will be a leaky boat of poor medical results with more suffering and more deaths.

Keggers Next Time?

2009-04-16T19:53:00.000-07:00

The ever clueless Nancy Pelosi has labeled 800 or so "tea parties" across the country on tax day, April 15, as an "astro turf" rather than grassroots movement. She claims thousands of people turned out in often miserable weather because they were funded by "the high end"..."some of the wealthiest people in America" (rather than by the federal government itself as in ACORN).

In fact, the tea parties were expressive of a genuine and growing angst over the role of the federal government in people's pocket books and lives.

However, the wide-eyed Speaker of the House is right that most members of the "great middle class" haven't reached the limit of their tolerance for government intrusion, ooops investment, in their lives. Could that change?

State legislators are desperately trying to take up any tax slack Congress has left them, and they are sighting in on beer drinkers, most of whom, more or less, Mrs. Pelosi, fall into the category of "the great middle class."

Beer, of course, has a noble history. It is mankind's first fermented beverage, having been brewed perhaps as early as 10,000 BC. It's featured as follows in the Gilgamesh Epic from the third millenium BC, describing man's rise to culture:

"Enkidu, a shaggy, unkempt, almost bestial primitive man, who ate grass and could milk wild animals, wanted to test his strength against Gilgamesh, the demigod-like sovereign. Taking no chances, Gilgamesh sent a whore to Enkidu to learn of his strengths and weaknesses. Enkidu enjoyed a week with her, during which she taught him of civilization. Enkidu knew not what bread was nor how one ate it. He had also not learned to drink beer. The whore opened her mouth and spoke to Enkidu: 'Eat the bread now, O Enkidu, as it belongs to life. Drink also beer, as it is the custom of the land.' Enkidu drank seven cups of beer and his heart soared. In this condition he washed himself and became a human being."

Beer is, accordingly, almost sacred. This passage should give warning to legislators in Oregon, Maryland, Idaho, Arizona, Michigan, and California: Don't mess with the brew.

Will they listen? The Wall Street Journal reports politicians in Oregon want to raise the state tax on beer by 1,900%...from $2.60 to $52.21 per barrel. This reflects their altruistic concern to fund drug addiction, of course, and to reduce a $3 billion budget deficit to allow them to spend again. Ignored are 96 Oregon breweries that "contribute 5,000 jobs and $2.25 billion to the state GDP."

And tourism money as well. Just yesterday the Taiwan News touted Portland, saying the city "is in love with hefty brews with spine and character. The Oregonian has a beer columnist. At least one restaurant has a beer steward. It has been written that you can get into a fist fight here over who makes the best India Pale Ale. Yet Portlanders aren't all beer snobs. The city is a prime Pabst Blue Ribbon market."

Well scratch the latter from the good taste category, but you can see beer is integral to offsetting Portland's otherwise settled reputation as granola crunching land.

And one wonders why lawmakers would even consider raising the cost of a pint of brew by $1.25 to $1.50 during an economic recession? Why offend further "the great middle class"? Why, but for greed for power, take on Joe Six-pack, college frat boys, and football fans? This is an issue crying for an astro turf movement.

In Oregon, Maryland, Idaho, Arizona, Michigan and California, and even across the sea in the United Kingdom where another scandalous tax increase on brew is imminent, legislators need to heed the wisdom of Jake Handy:

"Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed - Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, 'It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.'"

'Tis better to lift a beer than to tax it, to toast the great middle class than to tax it, to quaff culture rather than to tax it, to party with friends than to tax them, to offer to pay for a round all around than to tax all around: Cheers indeed!

List Me Not

2009-04-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

Honestly, I don’t like lists. And now it’s day 2 of Darren Rowse’s "31 Days to a Better Blog Challenge" and the challenge is to write a list post. I don’t hate lists. I use them for shopping, for keeping track of what I really should be doing, and to keep track of points I want to make or others do make, so I acknowledge that lists are useful.

But they are also boring…and usually ill written. Items in a list should be parallel grammatically, but so many times they are not. In years of teaching composition I read so many lists that pinged around the mine field of grammatical booby traps, hitting each one, that my patience still explodes at the sight of lists.

I’ve come across only one list I like: “A List of Nothing in Particular…” by William Least Heat-Moon (You can read it here: http://tinyurl.com/cl8ctr). Least Heat-Moon’s list is grammatical (each entry begins with a noun), but it is also whimsical and keen and true, and these are the reasons I like it.

If I were to write a list about today, the best things in no particular order would be these:

1. home after four days in the hospital
2. Dale
3. sunshine
4. pink blooms
5. smiles from grandkids with runny noses, not off put by my blue mask
6. a telephone call from a very sweet friend
7. strawberry short cake
8. my cluttered desk
9. an email and pictures of Spain from Cris
10. Spanish verbs clarified (a little)
11. love (felt)

These are not nothings; like bread they are the staff of life. I’ll add that to my list: this wonderful topsy turvy puzzling enticing embracing life.

Up the Down Elevator

2009-04-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

Beware. This is an elevator pitch for this blog. It's a part of Darren Rouse's 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge (31DBBBC), and it's intended to suck you in and even more to bring you back again and again:

Plum Duff...not your ordinary gruel...but not champagne and caviar either, just well written observations, comments, and opinions on politics, our culture (or lack of same), faith, everyday life and grandkids, of course, plus anything else that strikes my (or your) fancy. I admit up front that I do aim to redirect the world by applying common sense to common and uncommon events, but it's a task too large to succeed without your help. Agree or disagree with me; I'll respond with serious courtesy. And we can digress also along the sidepaths good discussions open. Bienvenidos!

Agressive Action?

2009-04-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

I've just been listening to Fox News, and I heard the president is meeting with advisers to take "aggressive action"...but not against the pirates holding an American sea captain hostage on a life raft in close proximity to a U.S. Navy destroyer. This "aggressive action" will be on the economy...or, as the trend seems lately, against the capitalist base of the economy while our once proud Navy writhes in frustration over imposed inaction. To my knowledge, President Obama has made no comment on this humiliation. He apologizes only to foreign critics. Hopefully, I'm wrong and plans are being made to rescue Captain Richard Phillips and destroy the seat of 21st century piracy. Of course, it could go the other way. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, Barack Obama may decide that paying ransom is less expensive than funding a strong Navy.

Shaped by Adversity?

2009-04-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

Some people face mountains in their lives and climb them, but that hasn’t been me. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I was born into a loving family, and I’ve known love all my life. My trials have been small and mostly self-inflicted, so what I’ve learned from adversity is largely second hand: to be grateful for all I have and also grateful for all I’ve been spared. It could so easily have been otherwise.

We see adversity strike from the blue: anyone--the strong, the weak, the innocent, the guilty can suffer. Some are ground down, but others are also raised up, learning courage and perseverance, hardiness, helpfulness, charity and love. Of course, these latter results show adversity’s happy face; the darker side is degradation and despair.

Lately, I’ve been reading In the Shadow of Progress by Eric Cohen (New Atlantis Books, 2008) in which Cohen discusses the intersection of biological science and ethics. One point made is that our ultimate human adversity is death. None of us will escape death. But that in itself may be a good thing. Cohen cites Hans Jonas, a German-born philosopher who taught at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1955-1976: “Jonas quotes the Psalmist asking God: ‘So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom.’”

Wisdom knows what is worthwhile in life, what is essential to our dignity, what lifts us up. This is what adversity can teach by necessity because it jolts us from our daily apathy; we must confront our frailty and ignorance. We must see what to value in our transient, mortal selves. We must learn how to live.

Adversity is a fit topic for the Christian Holy Week. Jesus’ pain and suffering on the cross is a cup none of us would willingly sip. Yet Christians believe Christ’s death brings us redemption and eternal life. In my church on Psalm Sunday, we sang, “Ride on! ride on in majesty!/ In lowly pomp ride on to die;/ Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,/ Then take, O God, thy power, and reign.” Thus is the ultimate adversity conquered.

But “science” disagrees and seeks eternal life medically, at least as a backup. Wisdom is needed to guide us to embrace the search for knowledge while carefully evaluating its claims against the truth of human exceptionalism. Cohen’s book takes up the questions that medical technology presents for our human future: wonderful advances against disease and moral questions over means. The book is more exposition than answers, but Cohen does have a conclusion, and it’s worth the effort of reading through his very good discussion to reach.

The above is a submission for Robert Hruzek's "What I learned from adversity" group writing project at http://middlezonemusings.com/. Be sure to take a visit there and read all the entries and make a submission yourself!

Grand Old Lady of Politics!

2009-04-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

You have got to love her!

On Throwing Money at the Problem

2009-03-28T14:02:00.000-07:00

"To give away money is an easy matter ... and in any man's power. But to decide to whom to give it, and how large and when, for what purpose and how, is neither in every man's power nor an easy matter. Hence it is that such excellence is rare, praiseworthy and noble."
- Aristotle

Was Aristotle ever wrong?

In 1993 Walter H. Annenberg made a $500 million gift to public school education in the U.S. At the time, a 30-year veteran of the Detroit school district said the money would make no difference. He was right. Here’s the word from a year 2000 analysis listed by ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center): “…these grants did not accomplish more…because the idea on which they were based, that public schools lack expertise and that talented and motivated outsiders working with the system can provide it, is wrong.”

And alas, equally wrong is to expect school systems themselves to change (quod erat demonstrandum, I believe, in the video “Stupid in America.” For more on that, see my March 24 post, "Dumb as Dirt," below).

Barack Obama came to the presidency promising education reform, and he continues to promise it. Yet “reform” is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholders President Obama seeks to please or appease are the leadership of the National Education Association and education school gurus. Take a minute here to read the response of Kevin Ryan, professor emeritus at Boston University, to the president’s plan on Mercatornet, an ezine that you would do well to bookmark: http://tinyurl.com/b7njuo. And indulge me and read also my comment to Ryan’s piece.

Now when that wise Detroit teacher predicted Walter Annenberg’s philanthropy would be wasted, he said further that, from his experience, three things are necessary for learning: a [good] teacher, a blackboard, and willing students. The easiest of these to provide is the blackboard.

A 2007-2008 survey of new school costs in Virginia (http://tinyurl.com/cljpxy ) pegged these as averaging $20,554 per pupil in elementary school; $36,701 per middle school pupil, and $26,776 per high school student. And of course there is a costly yearly maintenance budget for facilities.

Contrast these expenditures with the cost of charter school facilities, often housed in rented store fronts or closed public schools. In Oakland, CA, Ben Chavis took over a Native American charter middle school, housed in an old church, and doubled student achievement (listen to an NPR report, http://tinyurl.com/cveq4n). While stressing academics, Chavis required students to work. He didn’t hire maintenance staff; he had his kids clean up hallways and set up tables for lunch etc. Lacking a gymnasium, his students took timed jogs around the block.

There really is not a direct relationship between the cost of an education, the money spent per pupil, and the quality of learning. Last April, Andrew J. Coulson of the Cato Institute pointed out that the annual per pupil cost in the abysmal District of Columbia public school district (about $24,600 per pupil) exceeds the average tuition cost of private schools in the area by about $10,000. Go to http://tinyurl.com/coo25l to check this out.

And then there is Kansas City, and the saga of how not to spend money. The following comes from a Cato Institute policy analysis, http://tinyurl.com/d2nka:

“In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. In an effort to bring the district into compliance with his liberal interpretation of federal law, the judge ordered the state and district to spend nearly $2 billion over the next 12 years to build new schools, integrate classrooms, and bring student test scores up to national norms.

“It didn't work. When the judge, in March 1997, finally agreed to let the state stop making desegregation payments to the district after 1999, there was little to show for all the money spent. Although the students enjoyed perhaps the best school facilities in the country, the percentage of black students in the largely black district had continued to increase, black students' achievement hadn't improved at all, and the black-white achievement gap was unchanged.”

And doubtless the Kansas City School Board was amazed to realize amenities such as an Olympic size swimming pool do not increase learning. Spending money foolishly on new and “up-to-date” school facilities is, to paraphrase Aristotle, as easy as passing a school bond issue (even it if takes a few election rounds to get approval), but it doesn’t guarantee money well spent. Most American public schools have more than adequate physical facilities, but most do a poor to mediocre job of fostering learning. The old one room school house with a blackboard and a minimal play yard did as well or better. One reason may well have been dedicated teachers, which will be the subject of a later post.

Please Don't Offend Me

2009-03-27T08:33:00.000-07:00

On puncturing the diversity balloon, Caroline Glick writes from Jerusalem: http://tinyurl.com/cpcufg. This is a warning to Western "tolerance": communities need shared values.

Words of Wisdom, Excellently Spoken!

2009-03-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

Here Daniel Hannan, MEP, addresses UK prime minister Gordon Brown at a session of the European parliament. Do you, like me, long for such eloquent plain talk in D.C.?

Sing a Song of Hubris

2009-03-25T07:44:00.000-07:00

This is a little outdated, perhaps, but just too good not to post:http://tinyurl.com/b9d7ll.

Dumber than Dirt

2009-03-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

In January 2006, ABC news editor and 20/20 co-anchor John Stossel produced "Stupid in America," which could easily be retitled "Dumber than Dirt." Well, if not dirt, certainly American school kids appear dumber than those in Belgium (and in truth a whole host of other countries) in this video.

Still, the problem isn't, largely, with the kids, and it's not caused by a shortage of money and--note to the Federal Reserve-- won't be cured by printing more do-re-mi. The problem is American public schools themselves. Stossel finds many that stink. Most others smell but a little less noxiously.

I know, I know...your kids' schools are pretty good. Most Americans believe this. But your kids' schools are with rare exception at best mediocre, and some are truly horrible. If you don't believe this, your assignment is to watch the 20/20 video: http://tinyurl.com/cu7oyc . This will take you approximately 41 minutes during which time your mouth will fly open in horror.

Do this so we can have a discussion of public school K-12 education in America. Do this because you really owe it to your kids and grandkids and all American kids to rescue their education from the ed school hacks, the status quo, the ineptitude that pervades school districts today.

And when you are done, watch this one minute video,"Grandmas [bless them] for Charter Schools": (http://tinyurl.com/dmcxta).

Now take a look at some examples of KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter schools: "Making Schools Work" Part 1 (http://tinyurl.com/djtlbp) and Part 2 (http://tinyurl.com/cjsodm) , both 7 minutes, and "KIPP Bay Area Schools" (http://tinyurl.com/cfdp9c), 5 minutes.

Now you are ready to begin a discussion of K-12 education in America...more later.

Don't Say "WOT" You Mean

2009-03-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

John Ray, blogging at Tongue Tied 3 ( http://snorphty.blogspot.com/), points out the Obama administration's continuing efforts to disassociate itself from its Bush predecessors--linguistically. The expression "Enemy combatants" has been disposed of or at least changed; these are now, according to Andy Worthington of the liberal AlterNet (http://tinyurl.com/cfbufj), "Nobodies formerly known as 'Enemy Combatants' in the 'Current, Novel Type of Armed Conflict.'"

So much clearer, you will agree.

Now it's the "War on Terror" (WOT) itself that has to go. Writes Ray: "What's being sought is a more precise phrase that can recast the U.S. government's counterterrorism fight in ideological as well as military terms." He continues, "Obama publicly signaled the new approach this week. When asked about the "war on terror" phrase by CNN's Anderson Cooper, Obama said, 'Well you know [ouch!], I think it is very important for us to recognize that we have a battle or a war against some terrorist organizations. Words matter in this situation because one of the ways we're going to win this struggle is through the battle of hearts and minds.'" Yup.

And another way might be through superior military might and will.

Brilliant Sheep!

2009-03-20T19:13:00.000-07:00

This comes from the great blogger, El Yanqui, who is now on sabbatical or a hiatus...so I guess he won't mind if I present it to you here.

Tales from Higher Education

2009-03-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a content description of a course at Temple University in Philadelphia, entitled "Urban Society: 'Race,' Class, and Gender in the City" from Front Page ezine:

"Take Professor Melissa Gilbert, an Associate Professor of Geography at Temple University, whose course “Urban Society: ‘Race,’ Class, and Gender in the City” teaches students that gender and race are “social constructions” designed to oppress nonwhites and women; that American society is structurally “racist;” and that all whites are racist, sometimes unconsciously so (which is itself a racist claim). How this can be justified as an academic course, and how it relates to the professor’s professional credential, which is “geography,” remains shrouded in mystery – unless of course one accepts the perversion of academic studies as ideological propaganda."

You really should read the entire article at http://tinyurl.com/c8bwjo especially if you are paying a student's tuition at Temple (about $21,500 a year). And if you are not paying this, maybe you should mull federal subsidies for higher education.

More Play Days!

2009-03-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was another wonderful play day with Ione and Maddox: Ione her sweet, collected self, and Maddox the bundle of exuberance, softened by an hour of play outside riding his bike and scooter in wild circles around the patio and climbing an overhanging tree, followed by a walk with Grandpa and the unruly Cleo...leading to the sleep of the angels.

That's Akenna with Maddox, his incredibly tattoed accomplice in adventure.

And here's a must-see, time lapse video of another young guy, 9 months, at play. Who can keep up?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vNxjwt2AqY

This Didn't Happen According to the News

2009-03-10T15:45:00.001-07:00

An important conference the mainstream media has never heard of ends today in New York. A featured speaker at the global warming skeptics conference, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, was straight talking Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and current president of the European Union.

Reason magazine reported the irrepressible "Klaus confessed that he was puzzled by the environmentalist ideologues' approach to technological progress. They oppose the technological progress that free unregulated markets make possible....environmentalists want to mandate what they call clean technologies. 'They want to operate technologies that have only one defect; they have not been invented.'

"Klaus added, 'There is no known and economically feasible a way for an economy to survive on expensive unreliable clean green energy.'"

And do economies need to? Reason reported keynote speaker Richard Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicates the answer is no: "Lindzen cited some of his own research that shows that heat radiating into space from the atmosphere is much greater than the [global warming] computer climate models were predicting.

"The idea behind greenhouse warming is that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels tend to trap heat from the sun. As the atmosphere warms up it holds more water vapor and produces more high thin clouds which in turn inhibit the emission of heat radiation increasing the temperature even more. It is this positive feedback loop that produces ever higher global temperatures in the computer climate models.

"[However,] Lindzen said that satellite data show that increases in temperature lead to increased emissions of heat radiation out of the top of the atmosphere. If confirmed, this would mean that the earth's climate is 'dominated by stabilizing negative feedbacks rather than destabilizing positive feedbacks.'"

Still, shouldn't we act "just in case"? Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, and Roy Innis, CEO of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), don't believe so.

Onenewsnow.com quotes Dr. Beisner: "When the apostle Paul wrote [in] his epistle to the Galatians about his first meeting with the other apostles early in his ministry, he said 'They only asked us [Paul and his companions] to remember the poor, the very thing I also was eager to do.'" Beisner identifies his own concern with Paul's and says "Because much environmental policy has the consequence--whether it is intended or not; and sometimes I think it is intended--of raising the cost of living, it tends to have a serious negative impact on the world's poor."

Roy Innis, says onenewsnow, labeled "the fight against global warming and carbon cap-and-trade legislation the 'new civil rights movement.'" He said of President Obama's proposed energy policies, "you wonder how a guy could run for the presidency of the United States on a platform that is supposed to be rescuing the poor, doing all these things for the poor--and one of the most important jobs that the poor needs done for them is to make energy, the most basic of commodities, more available, dependable, [and] predictable in price for them."

Now if you are not a skeptic, here's some information from the American Energy Alliance on how the president's budget will increase energy prices for all, rich and poor: http://tinyurl.com/blzhgv.

And here's a composite debate between Al Gore (who avoids in person debate) in An Inconvenient Truth and various scientists in The Great Global Warming Swindle (GGWS): http://tinyurl.com/yt8qto. If you get a chance to see the entire GGWS, and you'll probably have to purchase the DVD to do so now, there's is a stunning expose of the damage the response to the alarmist global warming scenario imposes on third world countries.

Weekend Shutterbug

2009-03-08T14:24:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to relearn, actually learn, my camera, an Olympus Evolt 500, so this weekend I determined to take it along with me, first on a bike ride Saturday, and then to church on Sunday...and my son sent me an apt cartoon from his New Yorker desk calendar, which also became a subject for a photo, and here's the results:

Well, I really don't use mixes, except for birthday cakes, which I do because 1. a fact: most kids prefer the frosting (also pre-mixed) to the cake and 2. laziness: my oldest daughter took over the cake-baking activity for me at about age 12, thanks to mixes.

Saturday was a bright, sunny and fairly mild day in Reno, so I pulled out my Montague paratrooper bike (of which I am wham-o proud and which for many reasons has been little used lately) and went for a sedate ride with my camera. Here's some pictures of March sunshine, wildlife, and flora in Northern Nevada.

Can you beat this sky?

And here's my favorites: hills, hills, rolling hills....hills like white elephants even.

...and pathways.

And the wildlife...well, semi-wild. Reno is sunbird territory for Canadian geese (pretty, but messy).

On Sunday came time to return to our little church in the desert, St. Columba's Traditional Anglican Congregation in Fernley, NV.

We're a tiny family really, and here's a few of us:

Father Ray and Father Bill

David D. and Betty H....

Sam H. and Father Bill & Amy

Most High, glorious God: enlighten the darkness of my heart and give me true faith, certain hope and perfect charity, sense and knowledge, Lord--that I may carry out Your holy and true command.

St. Francis d'Assisi

Let us all be joyful in the Lord!

Don't Break Your Mother's Back

2009-03-05T07:41:00.001-08:00

"Step on a crack and break your mother's back" was the refrain years ago when kids actually walked, ran and skipped to school (through wind, snow, rain, sleet, and sunshine of course). We stepped lightly along the sidewalk because we really didn't want to break our mothers' backs.

But breaking backs, at least appropriate backs, is now in vogue...and it's all for the sake of the kids.

Little commented upon at the end of January when Congress passed a major expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was a 61 cent per pack increase in the tax on cigarettes (to $1.066 per pack) and a 52.75% increase in the tax on each large cigar (capped at 40.26 cents each).

Now, no matter what you think of SCHIP (which I'm sure has many positives...although a big negative is its extension of coverage to middle class children already covered by private insurance, many of whose parents have, historically, immediately dropped private coverage), the tax on tobacco hits hardest the poorer, younger segment of the population.

In a web memo from July 2007 when MOCs (members of Congress) first proposed the tax increase, the Heritage Foundation documents this and points out that "Funding the expansion of a government health program through a tax on a toxic product with a declining revenue stream is not only paradoxical but also fiscally irresponsible (http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/wm1548.cfm)."

In fact, to sustain this tax revenue, Heritage declares 22 million new smokers are needed. Logically, socially responsible citizens should all light up, and certainly those anti-smoking ads that pop up regularly on TV should be banned for subverting SCHIP.

Lessons from the Top of the Stairs

2009-03-02T16:45:00.000-08:00

I’m sitting not on a sidewalk, but at the top of the stairs at my daughter’s house, looking into my grandkids’ room. It’s mostly, yet, my grandson’s room because he has been in possession of it for 42 months and baby sister Ione is a recent interloper. Her crib faces his bed, and she is trying to tune into his very loud rendition of Virginia Lee Burton’s wonderful The Little House (sadly surrounded by encroaching city and then happily rescued) while fighting sleep.

I am in my stair-top role as “guardian angel.” What that means is I’m here to keep Maddox in bed (today) or on a pile of comforters on his floor (most days) until he calms down and falls asleep for a nap. He doesn’t really buy the guardian angel bit; he’s guessed my real purpose and so sometimes throws horrendous three-year-old faces in my direction, but this afternoon it’s silliness and gab coming my way, which means sleep is even further afield.

Maddox’s room is, he acknowledges, a mess—“and that makes Mommy sad.” There are red plastic storage tubs in and out of boxes along the wall to hold the toys that are now spread across the floor so that it’s tiptoeing through the pieces to move anywhere. (One of his favorite games is “garbage man”: pouring all the little cars and pieces noisily from one tub to another. Another game is to mount the boxes that hold the tubs to build a castle for his sister and more importantly for Princess Fiona, who, I gather, is an amalgam of all the pretty women he sees in his world.)

But this afternoon Maddox has been Mr. Finder, searching for the Lost Boys and Wendy and Michael and John. He has along his Bob the Builder battery-operated power saw in case he runs into Captain Hook, in which case (please don’t listen, Mom), he will take Hook out.

When Maddox was born, his mom was careful not to force a gender role on him, and he’s still not allowed toy guns or superhero toys, but nature pushes nurture, and he makes do. It is 6-month-old Ione, aka Sweet Pea, who observes calmly and stoically with just a tad quizzical and disapproving little girl intensity.

She’s asleep now. Maddox isn’t, but he is reading a little more quietly. Their Dad’s IPOD is playing selections that range from hip hop and reggae to my preferred blues, folk and country. A wooden pirate ship is sailing across the floor. It will have to navigate around a stuffed dog, nose down; a tipped-over fire house; several blankets including the indispensable Mr. Stripey; two pillows; three medium size trucks; a play camera; a racing helmet; blocks, socks, mittens, small parts, and books, a rubber tiger, a soccer ball, my jacket (how did that get there??), and much, much, more. On the walls are Maddox’s art framed in blue paper borders and an overhead light that is waiting for darkness to shine planets and stars across the universe of ceiling and walls.

Any reasonable person would find this room a disaster, but kids, bless them, are not reasonable people, and disasters are to a degree largely in the eyes of the beholders. Lessons learned may be the same. Maddox’s room may teach that it takes patience to raise children…but I think it also illustrates the wonderful ability of a three-year-old to make order from whatever chaos surrounds him.

PS This post is in response to the "What I learned from..." contest at Middle Zone Musings.com that runs through March 8.

Wisdom from the East

2009-03-02T06:50:00.000-08:00

I'm back from a brief hiatus (a chemo-therapy week) and ready to put itching fingers to keyboard. I sure missed much to comment on last week!

This morning's New York Times (of all places) has a fascinating op-ed ("Japan's Crisis of the Mind" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/opinion/02tamamoto.html) by Masaru Tamamoto, a senior fellow at The World Policy Institute ( "a non-partisan source of progressive policy analysis and thought leadership for more than four decades"). Tamamoto's analysis is fascinating because he decries what American progressives, and by extension The New York Times, seek: "equality and sameness."

Tamamoto writes: "Throughout most of its history, Japan has had social stratification and great inequality of wealth and privilege. The 'egalitarian' Japan was a creature of the 1970s, with its progressive taxation, redistribution of wealth, subsidies and the dampening of competition through regulation. This all seemed to work just fine until our asset-price bubble popped in the 1990s. Today, the hemmed-in Japanese seem satisfied with the knowledge that everyone around them is equally unhappy."

Now, I wonder, considering President Obama's incredibly spendthrift budget request--laden with government solutions to our economic and social woes--on top of the budget-blasting stiumulus, is this a "back to the future" insight for the U.S?

Tamamoto continues: "...What we had was a concept of order and placement, which is essentially stasis. In the West, on the other hand, the idea of progress rests on establishing individual autonomy and liberty. In Japan, bureaucratic rule offered security and predictability--in exchange for personal freedom. The problem is that our current political leaders can't keep their side of the bargain. Employment security can no longer be guaranteed. The national pension and health plans seem to be insolvent in the long run. People feel both insecure and unfree. So despair is everywhere. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates among rich countries." He concludes: "Japan desperately needs change, and this will require risk....risk aversion translates into protectionism and insularity" [and I think "free trade aversion, Nancy Pelosi ???"].

For Tanamoto the course for Japan is "embracing an idea of progress that is based on innovation, ambition and dynamism." And I think the course for the U.S. is also not to toss out these oh-so-American capitalist values because we are in an undeniably bumpy and painful patch in the road.

Little Miss Muffet Updated

2009-02-20T09:11:00.000-08:00

It's fun to spend a day with a five month old! And who's to say that spider isn't preferable to "curds and whey"? My wonderful granddaughter is now trying her darndest to crawl and taking in all the wonders of the world, including that funny black thing grandma sticks in her face. She opens her mouth wide and says "Hi" even though it comes out more like "Haaaaa," perhaps a throwback to her mother's Texas birth. She's more laid back than her 3 1/2-year-old brother, but she watches with interest as he leaps around and returns to give her a squishy hug. Soon she'll be scooting around and creating her own uproar, knowing her charm will carry a long way.

Straight Talk

2009-02-20T07:56:00.000-08:00

Attorney General Eric Holder has proclaimed that we are "cowards" for not discussing race more often. I think he is right, and Heather MacDonald gives many of the reasons why in "Nation of Cowards?" (City Journal, http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon0219hm.html).

Political correctness does not allow us to say that more blacks are in prison because more blacks commit crimes (83% of gun assailants in NYC, according to MacDonald, compared to their 24% of the population) and among other things, blacks do more poorly in school (close to a 50% high school drop out rate), score lower on even the new revised SAT tests, and, most tellingly, lead the nation in single mother births. As MacDonald suggests, conversation would be easier if honesty were permitted.

And beyond that, it is true that most middle class whites have little contact with blacks. This is not choice; it's demographics...where we work and, more importantly, where we live. And again, this is not necessarily today's choice, but the result of historical conditions, including bigotry. However, I don't think, if blacks are 20% of the population, it would be particularly wise to decree they occupy every fifth home on a street.

I had an older black man in composition class last year. He had been in prison and been a truck driver for many years and wanted to advance into a position in the computer area. He was a big, jovial man, who called me "Teach." But he made it clear that he didn't want to be the token black in the class and respond to readings with the black race's viewpoint. He wanted to be himself: loud, sometimes angry, mostly funny. He had no desire to be a black foil to white misconceptions, nor to affirm white guilt.

Race relations and conversation in this country will be improved when it's possible to say to any candidate, "You didn't get the job because you weren't qualified" or "You didn't get into Harvard because your academic record didn't justify admission." Along with that honesty, we need to change our schools (I believe we need affirmative action for poorly performing schools) so that all students, especially minorities, are encouraged and pushed to excel. Obviously, a lot of that push must come from the student's home, and having a father in the home is one of the most important factors to ensuring success in life.

Ducks and Roses!

2009-02-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

I took a walk with my sweetheart (fortified with a great big chocolate bar) by the Truckee River on Valentine Day, and in response to the writing prompt on Middle Zone Musings (http://middlezonemusings.com/), this is what I noticed: two men feeding Canadian geese, which are a lot like pigeons except bigger, feistier, and messier; several older couples walking; one younger couple necking under a bridge; four possibly homeless guys smoking and talking (not panhandling), a mother and small daughter, and best of all a bunch of red roses, caught in a cross current that sent them swirling in a circular pattern around a duck couple, which noticed them not. Ahhh, romance.

Please Don't Eat the Books

2009-02-14T08:39:00.000-08:00

Sitting on my desk right now to be repaired (the front cover and next page have been ripped off) is a copy of Robert McCloskey’s wonderful Blueberries For Sal. I bought the book in a used book store years ago for my kids, and I saved it for years before giving it to my grandson (3 ½) a few months ago. This book is an all time treasure. I loved it as a child; my kids loved it. And Maddox will love it also as he begins to move beyond being careless with fragile books to appreciating the story and illustrations.

However, this book, and the remaining seven boxes (file drawer size) of my kids’ children’s books that our well-over-60 moving crew lugged to our new home last month, is now illegal. At least it is illegal of me to give one to a child or read one to a child because of the possibility or even likelihood that the inks with which it was printed contained lead. This is despite the fact that no one can point to any child who has ever been injured by lead paint in ink used in children’s books (Walter Olson, “The New Book Burning, City Journal,http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon0212wo.html.

This abominaton is the result of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act passed by Congress last summer in hasty response to panic over lead paint contained in toys from China. It shares this panic feature with the recent stimulus package, but it is demonstrably pernicious from the start. Walter Oleson may not be literally correct about “book burning,” but he quotes a commentator on the “handicraft and vintage goods-site Etsy,” http://www.etsy.com/:

"I just came back from my local thrift store with tears in my eyes! I watched as boxes and boxes of children’s books were thrown into the garbage!...Every book they had on the shelves prior to 1985 was destroyed! I managed to grab a 1967 edition of The Outsiders from the top of the box, but so many!"

Besides generations of children, this congressional edict will hurt second-hand bookstores, thrift shops…and those wanting to make a few books selling their old children’s books at a yard sale. Although it may be that the long arm of the law won’t extend that far, it could also be that a neighborhood nanny will snitch, and booksellers have reason to fear that the new administration, delighting in regulation, will not be lax in enforcement. Oleson points to an unknown consequence: the cost of replacing, if possible, the number of children’s books published before 1985 that reside in public libraries. It will be astronomical and, therefore, beyond the reach of many.

Just for a guess, I looked up Blueberries for Sal on Amazon. There are a few used copes available (still listed anyway) beginning at $25. I suspect I paid 25 cents for the copy on my desk (copyright 1948, The Viking Press). I will repair it for my gandson and talk with him about how important it is to treasure old books.

Half a Glass or Half Empty?

2009-02-10T09:33:00.000-08:00

After President Obama's prime-time-televised press conference last night, I'm wondering how many more he will want to subject us to. Frankly, I agree with Bill O'Reilly. It was boring. And I thought he sounded a lot like an Economics 101 or 102 student making a class room presentation.

But I may be wrong. Most of the conservative talking heads disagreed with Bill and thought Obama had stayed on message and made his point well: We are in "dire" straits," the worst straits since the Great Depression, so we have to do something as quickly as possible. How do you rate the logic of such an assertion?

The stimulus bill has grown in the Senate. Many of the social reprogramming contained in the House bill is still there. I'm thinking about health care especially. Although government health care is sold as a benefit, what would the result be? Would you believe possibly lowering the age expectancy...and definitely the "quality" of life of the elderly? Read what Hudson fellow Betsy McCaughey has to say on Bloomberg.com: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mccaughey&sid=aLzfDxfbwhzs#

And here's how government care is working in Canada:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123413701032661445.html

One Canadian responded to the Journal, writing "I'm in Newfoundland, Canada, 74 years old and in need of a hip replacement as it's bone on bone. I have an appointment to see a doctor on October 20th of this year. Meanwhile I carry on the best I can. I would be better off if I was a dog in need of a vet” (Robert McCrindle).

I realize it is also true that many in the U.S. can't get hip replacement surgery because they can't afford it and don't have good health insurance coverage, but shouldn't the answer be to expand coverage rather than to limit proceedures and apply the rule of equal discomfort for all?

McCaughey reports, "the health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Yet the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry." She tries to imagine limiting "growth and innovation" in the electronics industry during this downturn. Moving this back a few years, try to imagine life without the IPOD, smart phones, Kindle etc., to say nothing about the amazing expanding internet.

President Obama claimed he is "a perennial optimist" toward the end of his designed-to-alarm press conference. Before his administration tackles the best health care in the world, I hope his spirits rise, and he sees more good outcomes to increase than hardships to impose.

Plum Duff Updated!

2009-02-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

Here's an updated version of plum duff from Graham Hawkes' Flannagans Seafood Restaurant in Invercargill, New Zealand: http://www.stuff.co.nz/AAMB1/aamsz=300x600/4796158a7774.html.
It looks yummy, even if we're past the Christmas season!

Now, can anyone tell me how to translate grams to cups?

Sunday Morning Blues

2009-02-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

My husband had an interesting thought this morning: Rather than asking "are you better off now than four or eight or ten years ago?" ask "are your children better off than four, eight, ten or more years ago?" I think most might answer in the negative.

Dale's thought was prompted by thinking about the cost of the proposed stimulus bill for future generations. And I'm thinking about educational results that have slid downhill for 40 or more years and of the many aspects of the culture that are toxic to a life to be well lived.

Houses Split Asunder

2009-02-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

I never took one of the Marriage and the Family courses in college, perhaps to my detriment. At the time these didn’t seem grandly intellectual. I think later they gave way to even less intellectual offerings in women’s departments.

Today, I am reconsidering my earlier prejudice. I’ve been reading the latest (January/February) issue of Touchstone magazine (A Journal of Mere Christianity) and the issue’s theme is “Meaningful Intercourse,” and yes, the editors do mean sexual.

The main point of one article, “Phony Matrimony,” is encapsulated in this quote: “Mainstream American society, even as it is statistically somewhat more opposed to same-sex marriage than in favor of it, envisions ‘marriage’ in a way that cannot bear any rational scrutiny of its exclusion of same-sex couples.” The reason is most marriages today are considered revocable; “for better or worse… until death do us part” has become a rhetorical flourish only, and more tellingly, bearing children has become optional.

Modern marriage’s revolving door makes the institution more attractive to the irresponsible “love” bitten and to the commitment phobic, and splitting the roles of “spouse” and “parent” has undermined the necessity of marriage and shaped it as an optional living arrangement, while opening the door of acceptability to any kind of alternative.

If you are like me, there’s pause here because I share the guilt. Along with, I’d guess, a majority of people, I fall short of the traditional Roman Catholic ideal of marriage. I may have some excuse in being raised Protestant, but I am more significantly a part, as are most of us inescapably, of what Oleson terms “our cultural deterioration.” We have been raised so and confirmed so by all the social forces around us. The Catholic church’s position on contraception seemed archaic and alien to me in my child-bearing years, just as the Church’s position on abortion seems archaic, alien, and oppressive to many sexually liberated women today.

However, it’s not individuals that Oleson seeks to condemn, it’s the cultural debasement he wishes to counter. And he recognizes that the task will be long, quoting Alaisdair Macintyre’s After Virtue… “through the new dark ages that are already upon us.”

Don’t expect the government to help. Stephen Baskerville takes on the culture and business of divorce in “Divorced From Reality,” in the same Touchstone issue. This one you can read online: http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=22-01-019-f. Baskerville asserts: “Divorce licenses unprecedented government intrusion into family life, including the power to sunder families, seize children, loot family wealth, and incarcerate parents without trial.”

If this language seems intemperate to you, go the website and read the entire piece. No-fault divorce is seldom a rational decision made by two adults; rather in 80% of cases (Divided Families by Furstenberg and Cherlin), one spouse objects. Such “involuntary divorce,” Baskerville’s term, brings in “an army of judicial hangers-on who reward belligerence and profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, counselors, mediators, custody evaluators, social workers, and more.” And it doesn’t end there: “involuntary divorce by its nature requires constant government supervision over family life.”

Children become “the principal weapons of the divorce machinery.” And the usual result is to remove the father from the home… innocent of any crime and without any burden of proof for justification. A father can be arrested “for seeing …children without government authorization…for not paying child support, even if the amount exceeds his means…and for not paying an attorney or a psychotherapist he has not hired.” Although all this would seem a violation of basic constitutional right, Baskerville points out the “multi-billion divorce industry also commands a huge government-funded propaganda machine that has distorted our view of what is happening.”

Baskerville goes on to outline “Divorce Gamesmanship,” “Cycle of Abuse,” “Trafficking in Children,” “The Child Support Racket,” and finally the “Responsibility of Churches. He believes families need to be protected from government “invasion” and endorses the work of Marriage Savers (http://www.marriagesavers.org/sitems/SavingMarriages/).

I think all of us know there is a crisis in family life in the US and seemingly throughout the Western world. No marriage is ever trouble free, and sticking with a “bad” marriage may seem like suffering through a life sentence, but there are also cycles in marriages; things often get better. And we need to acknowledge also that although “no-fault” divorce makes a mockery of marriage as a contract, there are legitimate grounds (unrepentant adultery and abuse) for divorce in civil society. It’s just tragic that the actual choice is so often made frivolously by one party without due consideration of consequence. Perhaps Marriage and the Family courses need to be reinstated.

Fear Itself

2009-02-07T08:07:00.000-08:00

A friend has sent me a link (http://www1.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=4288&mn=24021&pt=msg&mid=6595729) to a revealing history of the origins of global warming alarmism...and at the same time an extremely informative site for serious investors (not me, unfortunately). It's a story of "follow the [funding] money" coupled with messianic visions of world government and simple lust (to make this summary a little sexier) for political power, all by John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel. You'll enjoy...or grit your teeth.

Light My World!

2009-02-04T08:00:00.000-08:00

I used to muse, when we lived in Port Townsend, Washington (a quaint, touristy Victorian seaport, harshly split between granola crunchers from California and PT-born paper mill workers and others scrambling for a living) that a Hollywood Video store, complete with garish pink and orange neon, was needed on the main street, Water Street—or at least on the road into town—to add a bit of reality and discourage further migration from the south.

Now I learn that Las Vegas wants stimulus money for more neon—off the strip—because there’s not enough glitz “off the beaten path,” says the Wall Street Journal. The project “will revitalize a blighted neighborhood,” says the city’s spokesperson.

Now, I think I was wrong in my earlier thinking. Neon won’t necessarily scare away Californians and others who want to change communities…always for the better, of course. Neon won’t provide many additional jobs for locals in blighted neighborhoods in Vegas, but it might light their way home at night.

Trumped!

2009-02-03T08:28:00.000-08:00

Republican Judd Gregg is the new secretary of commerce...and his Senate seat will go to a moderate Republican and be up for grabs in the next election, all according to a deal made between Gregg and the Democrat governor of New Hampshire (with or without White House participation).

So let me get this straight: it's not OK to sell a Senate seat, but one can be bartered. Pardon me if this seems rather like a hostile takeover of a fragile Republican filibuster card in the Senate.

Sheep's Clothing

2009-01-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

I was feeling a little yucky earlier this week…like the economy, I guess, but in my case due to a new chemotherapy. I’m hoping the chemo is better targeted to shrink my lymph nodes than is the current version of the stimulus package to wake up the economy.

The more I read about the proposed stimulus, the more I think a paraphrase of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is in order: “How much do I hate thee? Let me count the ways….” And then you can take your pick:

1. It won’t work. The Wall Street Journal estimates that business tax cuts ($20 billion) plus $90 billion of genuine stimulus spending add up to only 12 cents of each of the 825 billion dollars in the package. And $825 billion is (a.) “almost equal to the entire cost of annual federal spending under Congress’s discretion” and (b.) more than the entire cost of Bush’s Iraq War. Maybe the public could find this a little more palatable if Congress took an extended furlough for eight years (without pay).

2. It’s more about changing us than changing the economic doldrums. The remaining 87% of the stimulus package fulfills a wish list of socialist and “green” projects from $4.19 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities” (read ACORN and agitprop) to $8 billion for renewable energy funding (exclude nuclear) to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts to $400 million for chimerical research into global warming to $335 million for STD prevention etc. etc. etc.

The objection here moves beyond “can we afford it?” or “will it work?” to “do we want it?” Read Kimberley Strassel’s “Democratic Stealth Care” ( http://tinyurl.com/djvqgr ) on the bill’s major enlargement of government’s foot print in our lives…to be accomplished without public (or Congressional) debate.

How many who voted for Barack Obama last November intended to move on to socialism? Maybe it’s the 42% (Rasmussen Poll) who support the stimulus plan, or maybe it’s the (my guess) 10% or so of these who have actually looked into it…or the 0% (including Congress and the president) who have actually read its 647 pages?

3. It’s more of the same, not change we have hoped for. Wish list projects include $66 billion for education. Consider this a great big thank you to the National Education Association for its endorsement of Barack Obama in November’s election (and to those who still believe, naively, that throwing money at schools improves education). This is money to shore up the status quo, and the status quo is dismal. Our schools need seed money to support change, not billions to support stagnant administration and frustrated or lethargic teachers, to say nothing about state governments whose “for the children” projects need a bailout.

4. It tackles problems backwards. The wish list contains $2.1 billion for Head Start or pre-K childcare, yet studies have shown the Head Start program has had little lasting benefit in educational results, according to The Heritage Foundation (http://tinyurl.com/ca846g). Why not consider instead the Republican proposal to increase the child deduction on the income tax to $5,000 per child…or even the $7,500 that Head Start currently spends per child. This would put money into parents’ pockets, and they could spend it as they determine is best for their kids’ development.

5. It paints a picture of The Ugly American and encourages tit for tat. Before I grow tired of listing its faults, I’ve got to mention the stimulus bill’s adverse effect on world trade. “Buy American” is a you-can-guess-how-poor a way to thrive in a world economy. Look at China’s economy before its despotic rulers opened the door to commerce with the rest of the world. Like it or not, it’s a world economy today, not simply a national economy. And because the U.S. economy is so big, what we do here has serious effect internationally.

Barack Obama was elected on creating a more positive attitude toward the U.S. overseas. He may discover that allowing Democrat protectionist policies to disrupt trade and hit foreign partners in the pocketbook may win fewer friends than overthrowing a genocidal tyrant in Iraq.

And there’s domestic pain as well. Democrats have been more than indifferent to passing a free trade agreement with Columbia that would greatly benefit, for one, Caterpillar, manufacturer of heavy construction and mining equipment, with customers in 200 countries around the world (according to the company website). To sell an earthmover to Columbia without the dormant-or-dead Columbia free trade pact, the company must pay in the neighborhood of $100,000 in tariffs, hardly profitable. Recently, Caterpillar has sought to move into the Chinese market to offset the slowing U.S. economy, but a growing chilliness over trade jeopardizes this venture and the company’s earnings have suffered, threatening the jobs of 12,000 American workers and 8,000 American contractors, according to Investor’s Business Daily (1/26).

This list could go on and on. Robert Samuelson writes in IBD (1/30) that “the decision by Obama and Democratic congressional leaders to load the stimulus with so many partisan projects is politically shrewd and economically suspect. The president’s claims of bipartisanship were mostly a sham…Obama’s political strategy fails to address adequately the economy’s present needs while also worsening the long-term budget outlook…. There were tough choices to be made—and Obama ducked them all.” Well said, n'est-ce pas?

Fewer kids are not the answer

2009-01-26T10:12:00.000-08:00

This morning’s Drudge Report has Nancy Pelosi saying “birth control will help the economy.” This is because, she claims, and a Democrat spokesman on Fox News just echoed her claim, that fewer children will “reduce costs to the states and federal government.”

This idea is a fallacy, of course, and one The Wall Street Journal does not tackle in its own editorial “The Stimulus Time Machine.” The Journal points out that the Democrat controlled Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found only 2/3 of the $355 billion dollar stimulus package would be spent in the critical first two years of the plan and noted in passing that this report has disappeared from the Congressional website, soon, perhaps, to reappear revised more positively.

The Journal’s second point is that $1 spent by the government on stimulus won’t result in a Keynesian $1.50 economic boost, adding that if it did, why not simply “spend $10 trillion” so we could “all live in paradise.” In reality, says the Journal, $1 in government spending takes $1 from the private economy and will only multiply if the government spends it more productively than the private economy—which is a giant oxymoron.

In fact, the Journal finds, the stimulus spending is “about promoting long-time Democratic policy goals, such as subsidizing health care for the middle class and promoting alternative energy.” And let me add promoting “family planning” (which, preponderantly, means abortion) a word Pelosi, a little out of character, studiously avoided, using instead “contraception.”

Where does anyone get the idea that contraceptives are unknown and hidden from the “sexually active” teens and young people most likely to produce children who require aid from the state and federal government? Condoms are handed around like candy, and used for a variety of purposes (water balloons come to mind) but don’t make much of a dent in the out-of-wedlock birth rate, nor, apparently, does the pill. This is the practical argument against spending millions of the billion-dollar stimulus on “contraception” (especially contraception internationally that would have no effect on the U.S. economy).

The ethical argument is that “family planning” really means providing abortions.

Americans are deeply divided on the issue of abortion, most falling into the indecisive middle… “I don’t like abortion; it is killing, but….” The “buts” comprise, mainly, disruption in the life of the mother, i.e., inconvenience, but a few do support abortion to reduce government welfare spending and because of the fallacious belief, dating from Thomas Malthus and particularly from the 1968 book The Population Bomb by doomsayer and entomologist (specializing in butterflies, according to Wikipedia) Paul Ehrlich, which claims the world is overpopulated.

Statistically, this is hogwash. Birth rates are declining worldwide, especially in the developed nations of the West. In 2002 the United Nations predicted world population would peak in 2050 at 9 billion. Current estimates place the population peak at 7.5 billion in 2040. And world population has shifted from the developed West, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (32% of world population in 1950, according to WorldNetDaily.com, to 12% in 2000). The shift has been to the underdeveloped third world. Obviously, as Reason magazine pointed out in 2004, “[f]ertility does not correlate with food availability.” The more food available, statistics show, the smaller the population increase. Indeed, population increase swings into the negative in almost half the nations of the world. For example, Japan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare has predicted a population of fewer than 500 people in 3000 if the country’s average birth rate of 1.4 children per married couple continues, says WND.

The birth rate required to replace population is 2.1 children per hopefully-married couple. Most European nations fail to meet this standard. The United States barely replaces population, but does so only because of immigration. Index Mundi (http://tinyurl.com/5kx9ot) lists the top ten countries in total fertility rates as Mali, Niger, Uganda, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The U.S. ranks 125th out of 220. No European nation matches us (The UK is 172nd; Germany, 190th; Spain 203rd, and Italy 204th.), but every Middle Eastern nation exceeds us. Of course this has a few strategic implications.

And then there is economic fact. A falling fertility rate means an aging population. Fewer children growing to be working adults means social spending programs for the elderly (Social Security, Medicare etc.... the same programs Democrats pledge to shore up) must be paid for by fewer and fewer younger workers. And there is less innovation. When Nancy Pelosi says fewer children mean less cost for the states’ and federal governments, she is extremely myopic…and dead wrong. The inconvenient truth is we need all of our children to continue to prosper as a nation. And we need all of our children to continue to exist as a moral nation.

Play Days

2009-01-24T12:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was “a grandma day,” my 3-½ year-old grandson Maddox told his aunt. That’s synonymous with play day for Maddox although some of the pain-in-the-neck things like taking a nap still apply. And since the birth of baby Ione, now 4 ½-months (newborn in the pictures here), play is more complicated. We are stuck inside, not able to go to park or playground, and juggling Maddox’s high energy with Ione’s schedule (and grandma’s lengthening age) is a bit of a trick.

On Thursdays Maddox is at pre-school, so I have only Ione to adore. The smile that lights her face when I appear in the morning or as she wakes from a nap or as I change her diapers is worthy of adoration; a deep love tugs inside me. Ione, whether due to natural temperament, gender, or birth order (and I suspect all three), is more laid back than her brother even as a baby…which, of course, doesn’t mean there aren’t a few times when she positively throws patience to the wind and screams for her bottle.

On Fridays it is a delight to enter the world of a three year old once again. I enjoy watching Maddox grow and learn about life. And I remember three as a wonderful age of conversation with my own kids. Three year olds are beginning to learn a little about being sly, but for the most part they are open and unequivocal about their observations and opinions. And at three, even little boys are chatterboxes; they haven’t lapsed totally into the male habit of understatement, although they already dislike being pumped: “What did you do at school?”… “Nothing.” Only later does he offer, “Ben fell down, and people ran over him. He had mud on his face, and he was crying.”

Maddox is rambunctious—always. His first choice of play yesterday was to repeat a game about dinosaur lairs. He builds his lair by moving half of his bedroom furniture into his parents’ bedroom (Ione is asleep in the room they share) and throws a pillow on the floor for mine. My role is to sleep and snore. After a very short while, he plinks on his guitar strings to wake me up. I must wake up startled and shaking my head in dismay; this delights him. When he switches from guitar to drums, however, Ione wakes up, and this game is over.

He next builds two castles in his room with his Bob the Builder tools (all of which he can name and use appropriately), leaping up and down a pyramid of wooden storage boxes as he works so the castles rise to the figurative sky. Everyone knows castles should be built on hills. One of these is for Princess Ione; the other is for Princess Fiona, one of several of his imaginary friends (most of them older, beautiful girls).

Maddox and Ione are lucky kids; they have a mother and father who love them and teach them how be behave and be responsible (well, mostly lessons for Maddox so far). Dad participates fully in their care. Yes, he even changes dirty diapers. Saturdays (and Thursday and Friday evenings) he has the kids alone, allowing Mom a three-day workweek. And then their Aunt Lala, Uncle Damian and Nanna and Papa Dave and a slew of boisterous boy step cousins live nearby…and Uncle Dale and Aunt Cris (another of Maddox’s heart throbs) visit each year from London. This isn’t the largest extended family possible, but more than my own kids had close by as they grew—alas.

Family is, I think, the biggest determiner of how well a child gets along in life. It certainly is more important than financial resources, temperament, or even native ability. Some exceptional people survive chaotic childhoods, but too many don’t. This is the best thing about having the Obama family in the White House. Unfortunately, many of America’s truly dysfunctional families are black. The reason for this isn’t racial; it’s social: fathers are absent from the home (and also unfortunately absent in a large number of homes with white and Hispanic single mothers). Having a loving, intact black first family sets a good example for all of us.

Stressing education (the Obamas chose an excellent school for their daughters) is another big plus. Here’s what Deroy Murdock, a black columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, had to say: “Too many black men serially impregnate women who are not their wives, spawning a 67.8 percent black out-of-wedlock birth rate. Obama’s daily presence in the White House finally may repel this foul tide. He also may unravel the ‘Acting White Syndrome,’ wherein young black students who do homework and speak proper English are mocked for ‘acting white.’ Light years more than white racism, this is the biggest cancer facing black Americans.”

Great Expectations

2009-01-21T21:26:00.000-08:00

Today we are hanging pictures. Well, strictly speaking, were hanging pictures. This is a job Dale hates, but one I insist on to make a new house feel like home. How fortunate for the new first family that the task is done for them.

I caught very little of yesterday’s inauguration day. At one point I had to turn the TV off while the president and his wife were walking along the parade route to the reviewing stand. It was the constant background roar of adulation that was disturbing and wearying. Later I watched briefly as the Howard University marching band passed the reviewing stand. By then it was already dark in D.C., and Barack and especially Michelle Obama looked very understandably exhausted and quite human.

This morning when I turned the TV on I was tuned into the national prayer service at the National Cathedral. First off, I heard a black choir sing "He holds the whole world in his hands." Fine enough, they did a good job, swaying etc. The music contrasted a bit with the traditional cathedral setting, but what actually took me back was the applause at the end...as if it were a performance. Next a female pastor got up and said a prayer, then began "Mr. President....that has a great ring to it…" The whole house (pardon, church) burst into prolonged applause. I wondered where these people thought they were. It’s quite appropriate to recognize and honor our new president, but I’ve always thought the purpose of a church service to be affirming and honoring God.

I guess this observation falls into the “different strokes for different folks” category although many may assign it to simple nitpicking.

A "Quality Adjusted"? Year

2009-01-20T21:37:00.000-08:00

How would you rate the quality of your life—or maybe more to the point, how would a government bureaucrat rate the quality of your life?

This question arises because, according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar, now-President Barack Obama, House Democrats, and incoming Secretary of Health Tom Daschle are interested in reducing spending on health care “by allocating medical products based on ‘cost effectiveness’ (Wall Street Journal 1/20/09).”

Gottlieb points to the United Kingdom where a government agency has decided the following: “…$45,000 is the most worth paying for products that extend a person’s life by one “quality-adjusted year. (By their calculus, a year combating cancer is worth less than a year in perfect health).”

This has set me to thinking because I have been combating cancer since 1994. At that time I was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL), and in 1995, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL) was added. In 1994, the doctor told me that a typical life span after a diagnosis of CLL was 12 to 25 years. I’ve never asked about the lymphoma.

But in any case, I am now into my 14th year living with cancer. Since my diagnosis, I began a 12-year, third or fourth career teaching composition and literature at the community college level. In 2002, I ran the Seattle marathon for TNT (Team in Training) to benefit the Leukemia & Lymphoma Association. I’ve written a weekly newspaper column for almost five years, and I’ve had the pleasure of caring for my grandson (and more recently his baby sister) two days a week for 3 1/2 years. These have been some of the best years of my life.

Monday, I begin a new regimen of chemotherapy. I’ve been extremely fortunate so far. I haven’t counted or kept track of the number of times I have had chemo, but I have suffered few side effects. One regimen made me nauseous enough to vomit; most have had little ill effect beyond discomfort or impatience.

I am also fortunate to have good insurance through my husband’s former employment, so I also have not kept track of the cost of my treatments. However, I do remember looking at the bill for the last treatment 18 or so months ago. It was $37,000. I was aghast; there’s no way Dale and I could have paid for this ourselves. I’ll admit thinking about that figure and realizing such care is not available to all mixes feelings of guilt with my gratitude.

My cancer suppresses my immune response, and perhaps for this reason I suffered a serious sinus infection all last fall. I lost my hearing for 10 days before Thanksgiving, which made teaching classes interesting, but happily had the hearing restored by having my ear canals drained and tubes inserted. Nevertheless, the experience and doctors’ recommendations convinced Dale, and finally me, that I should retire.

Now, should I worry? Does retirement knock down my “quality-adjusted” life a peg or two? I’m not sure.

I do know that many of the people I have shared the infusion center room with in the past have seemed noticeably sicker than I am. Yet, universally they smile, sometimes ruefully, talk, and engage with all around them. I haven’t heard anyone speak once with self-pity. And most often those receiving chemotherapy are accompanied by spouses, children, even grandchildren, who obviously love them and value their lives. I might be tempted to say that their quality of life, adjusted or not, might surpass a random sampling of customers at a Starbucks coffee shop.

I can’t claim to have the answer to health care problems in this country or in the UK, but stifling investment in new treatments, which will be the result of restricting access to new drugs, isn’t a humane, nor, I believe, a sensible solution. Giving a government bureaucrat the task of ranking another’s quality of life is even less sensible or humane.

I remember discussions when I was younger about the best way to die. Most of those with whom I chewed over that question believed a sudden death the best. I didn’t because I thought I’d be caught, so to speak, with my pants down—unprepared to meet my Maker. You’d think after 14 years living with cancer I’d have a handle on preparedness, but sad to say I don’t. I haven’t been a great deal better person since my original diagnosis, maybe a great deal more grateful person only.

Recently I read in news stories about Father Richard John Neuhaus’ death of a vision he had earlier in his life, in 1993, when he was gravely ill and near death, although he described this as a “near life” experience. He became aware of two “presences” in his hospital room. They gave him a message: “Everything is ready, now.” Father Neuhaus wrote about this in 2000; he said, “what I have learned, what I have learned most importantly is that, in living and in dying, everything is ready now.”

That’s a bit of a puzzle to be sure. In a way I suppose it reinforces the preferences of my old friends. We don’t, and I believe strongly that we shouldn’t, get to choose the time of our death, but Father Neuhaus assures us that whenever that is, everything will be ready. I’ll guess that remains true even if a bureaucrat chooses.

Martin Luther King Day

2009-01-19T09:56:00.000-08:00

Today is Martin Luther King Day in the U.S., a kind of middling holiday…not everyone has the day off. (Of course, I now have every day off except Thursdays and Fridays when I watch the grandkids.) And of course this MLK day is special because tomorrow is inauguration day for America’s first mixed race (white/black), which in the common parlance translates to black, president. Breitbart.com notes its significance in a nation “founded by slave owners.” Well, not quite all were slave owners, but we won’t quibble.

I won’t be glued to my TV set today or tomorrow, but for those who are triumphant over Barack Obama’s victory in November’s election, I wish them the enjoyment of the event. I do love pomp and circumstance and will catch some of it on the news. I also wish our incoming president well because he will be our president, but I am uneasy because he is both an enigma and liberal. These are the same reasons I had for not voting for him.

Obama arrived in D.C. aboard an armed Amtrak train from Philadelphia over the weekend. This was to underline his self- and media-comparison to Abraham Lincoln, who also arrived in Washington via train. I see that comparison going as far as physique—tall and slender, although Obama appears in better physical condition than Lincoln did—and state of residence: Illinois. But there are differences. For instance, Obama told the crowd after a rock star-studded “musical extravaganza” that he is “as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure—that the dream of our founders will live on in our time…" I think that when Abe Lincoln went to Washington, he was more than “hopeful”; he was determined to hold a union together that was in full crumble.

And then there’s the armed train bit that is necessary in these times but still a sour note. Over the weekend Dale popped in a DVD from the BBC on the Eastern Front campaigns of WWII. Like a lot of men, he is a history buff and enjoys studying the war. I didn’t think I’d want to watch much of this, but ended up finding it very interesting. At one point an armed train sat on the tracks at Moscow all night waiting for Stalin to abandon the city. He decided not to take it but rather to remain and lead the resistance to the Germans. How would history have changed had Stalin boarded that train?

This DVD featured interviews with veterans on both sides of the fighting. After covering the German advance on Moscow, it switched to the story of the Ukraine. There Hitler blew it. Initially, the people of the Ukraine welcomed the Germans—who wouldn’t have after Stalin’s policy of mass starvation caused the deaths of more than 20 million Ukrainians in 1932-1933? But the Germans quickly followed in Stalin’s footsteps and stole Ukraine’s food, starving and brutally persecuting the population. The result was a nasty guerrilla war with no holds barred by either side and many innocents caught in the middle. Graphic film of the atrocities is disturbing, and Dale elected to stop watching.

I admit to some fascination—particularly with the interviews with former German officers. The backdrops, presumably of their homes, looked substantial. One of those interviewed seemed appropriately creepy, but the others appeared quite normal. One Panzer officer in particular seemed humane, and his memories of the war were technical, those of an engineer on honing into targets. When asked about atrocities he blamed “the Nazis,” not the typical German soldier. Yet he was left stuttering and speechless as the interviewer pressed questions about how these could have been ignored.

I wonder about “What were the Germans Thinking?”—which is the precise subtitle of an article by Steven Ozment in the January 5/12 issue of The Weekly Standard—in part because both my maternal grandparents were German. They emigrated in 1898, and so were quite innocent of Nazi complicity, but I often have wondered…what if?

Ozment’s article reviews Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution by Ian Kershaw (Yale, 400 pp, $35). Kershaw found, according to Ozment, that “for the larger population, the persecution of Jews was a rarely entertained part of daily life in the prewar years.” Germans were “self-preoccupied” and “indifferent.” Most didn’t need Nazi propaganda to instill animosity toward Jews because, in Kershaw’s words, “latent anti-Smuts and apathy” pre-existed.

Kershaw writes, “Pessimistically, I alluded [in earlier writing] to the questionable liberal assumptions that human beings under threat will be defended in an open society. In this, my last attempt to wrestle with the intractable sources on popular opinion and the fate of the Jews, I tried to distinguish between what people then could and did not know (quite a lot), what they made of the information (an awareness that genocide…was taking place, though ignorance of scale and detail led to only partial comprehension), and reactions (a spectrum running from overt approval to blank condemnation, the most widespread of which being an apathetic turning away from unpalatable knowledge and events which could not be averted).

There’s no definitive answer here. But it’s disturbing and frightening to consider, especially in light of the latent anti-Semitism that has erupted in Europe and in the United States in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. I won’t go into all the manifestations, but here’s one report from EurActiv.com on January 8: “Assaults against Jews, attacks on synagogues and sporadic violence have been reported in France, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and the UK since the outbreak of hostilities.’ And what was it anti-Israeli protesters in Florida were yelling…something like “go back to your ovens????”

Martin Luther King Day should remind us all, whatever our race or religion or other differences, of our common humanity. But more often the stress seems to be on celebrating diversity. Diversity is fine and dandy, but it is what unites us, what we share that matters, not differences. No person’s life should be denigrated or taken because of ancient or current prejudice. Martin Luther King preached being blind to a person’s skin tone. Diversity advocates preach taking notice of hue. The hope in the country today is that Barack Obama will nullify race consciousness. He may be able to do this if guilty whites and resentful blacks and innumerable other niche groups decide to join the common stream. And as we remember Martin Luther King’s dream; let us not exclude the most ancient hated and persecuted minority, the Jew.

Why Plum Duff?

2009-01-18T21:47:00.000-08:00

2009-01-18T21:15:00.000-08:00

Well, why not plum duff? Actually, as my three-year-old grandson Maddox is lately fond of saying, I owe the title of this blog to Anne Chotzinoff Grossman and Lisa Grossman Thomas, mother and daughter co-authors of Lobscouse & Spotted Dog: which it's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels (of Patrick O'Brian). Write the authors: "Fundamentally, duff is dough. In its plainest form it is no more than flour (half a pound per man) mixed with salt water, put in a bag, and boiled in the coppers with the meat for four or five hours....On Sundays plain duff is transformed into Plum-Duff by virtue of an ounce of mouldy raisins or currants--the opulence of 'double-shotted' duff being achieved by a commensurate increase in the 'plum' ration."

So there you have it: simplicity itself. However, if you prefer your duff a little more refined, try Plum Duff with Rum Sauce from cooksrecipes.com at http://tinyurl.com/2cuvw. I plan to try the latter as soon as I find my pots and pans, which it is regrettable were innocently misplaced in my husband's and my recent move from Fernley, Nevada, back into Reno.

You see this blog coincides with a change in my life. I am no longer gainfully employed (most recently as a part-time composition instructor), and I no longer write a weekly column for my formerly local newspaper The Fernley Leader. But I do retain the itch to write, and Dale retains the itch to eat, so the pots and pans must surface finally.

In the meantime plum duff seems to me to be a interesting variant on the staff of life and one amenable to alteration to suit one's taste. My taste includes politics (although my liberal sister pleads I not write about it), but also much of what is happening around me, especially the curious and the hypocritical (I make faces at myself in the mirror when I find such), and write about all these I shall, adding a few causes and memories. I hope you'll come along and enjoy the excursion.