Things that might help

“Louise, people in this country aren't interested in details. They don't even trust details. The only thing they trust is headlines” Senator Keeley, The Birdcage

If it is not obvious, I am in another spell where I have not written ahead, so am still playing catch-up, which makes me feel less organized and like the quality is worse. (Though I have knocked many things off my to-do list!) This one seems to be morphing into multiple posts.

My original thought is let’s say that you are feeling like you want to be more informed and open to different points of view, but you are not sure where to start. It’s an interesting question, I thought, but it looks like it might actually be as many as three interesting questions: reasons we don’t engage, ways of getting better information specifically for politics, and also just opening up a mind to other points of view.

I think I am going to start with news. I refer back to the study that found that Fox News viewers are less informed than people who watch no news at all. The best informed were the ones who watched Sunday morning news shows. The speculation was that this was because those shows will generally have the entire show focus on a topic, so it can be explored in more depth. Honestly, it may also be that people who are more informed are more likely to watch those shows, but it’s worth trying out. I have three on the DVR now for investigation. If I find any to be particularly better or worse, I’ll pass that along.

NPR listeners and John Stewart viewers also got better scores. It is saddening that the comedy show keeps viewers better educated than the channel that’s nothing but “news” but I think you have to decide at this point that Fox actually intends to mislead. There is a documentary about that, Outfoxed, that is interesting viewing.

One thing I like about the internet is that while you are there it is easy to look up additional information, but the internet is nonetheless very much a mixed bag in terms of accuracy and balance. Huffington Post, which gives AOL its headlines, has some good articles and some pretty ridiculous ones, but what I really hate about them is how misleading the headlines are. If you just read the headlines and think you know the story, which a lot of people like to do, you are lost.

That’s a big part of the problem right there. There is so much information, with varying degrees of slant, and sorting through it all requires some time and effort. I know many days I don’t even feel like I have the mental energy to care to put in the work. It doesn’t last, but I can see why people would give up.

I would like to put in a plug for Wonkblog, Ezra Klein’s blog on the Washington Post site. Don’t let the “wonk” part put you off. Yes, he is into fine details and charts, but his results are usually quite readable and relatable. (Also, relatively short.)

I don’t watch Rachel Maddow, but I sometimes see clips of her where I am very impressed by her research too. Maybe that’s one thing to look for—someone who does the research, and is using reputable sources, and multiple sources.

One other thought, and this kind of goes into where I think we are going tomorrow, consider watching other news sources. I remember when I was studying Spanish in high school I would watch Univision, and I didn’t get everything because they talked too fast (soap operas were great for being able to get the gist), but they sure did talk about the Contras differently than American broadcasts did, and they did not seem to consider them freedom fighters. Consider sometimes checking with Al Jazeera, maybe, or BBC. And it’s not necessarily that they won’t have their own slant, but still, you get to see a different side.

More thoughts from my weird disordered mind tomorrow, but give me a few more days and we’ll get to comics. After all, it makes sense to let the dust from Comic-con settle before we go there.

How I’ve been lucky

I feel like “blessed” is more accurate than “lucky” for this topic, but it didn’t sound right for the title. I was thinking about how lucky I am to have been able to get to know different types of people, specifically on my mission. I served as a missionary with Laotian refugees in Fresno and Modesto.

I have mentioned working with the Lao before, especially when talking about racial prejudice, because they said that they did not think of us as white, which was sweet, but also a sign that they some preconceived notions about Caucasians that were probably not ideal. That comes from not that many white people getting to know and be known by them. As I hear more stereotyping going on, I think more about the effect on me.

There were many things that could get you into trouble with the Communist government, where you might find yourself as a refugee, and where your only other option was death. If you helped the Americans, of course that was dangerous. Obviously, if you were loyal to the king or the old regime, or related to the king, that was dangerous. Between those, a lot of soldiers were affected. Also if you were educated, that could be a problem. Being Catholic was bad, but also if you worked for the Catholics, that was enough, and getting an education often meant associating with the Catholics, so it all went together. Being rich was not helpful either. I think that covers most of the people I knew.

A lot of them spent time in reeducation camps before escaping. Those were bad. If you were caught trying to escape, you were beheaded right there as a deterrent, but people did still try, and some made it. If you were lucky, you ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand, waiting for some country to take you in.

While I was doing this (1993-1994), I think there was one camp left and it was scheduled to close soon. This is years after the war, and I knew one family who was able to safely go back to Laos and visit relatives, so that should give you some idea of how complicated getting everyone settled was.

It was important to get people out quickly, and you could not always spend a lot of time on teaching them English and getting them settled well. I knew one man who had been a doctor there, but was working security at a meat packing plant here.

Many of them also had health problems after their ordeal. I remember one woman who could not sit up for more than twenty minutes without having horrible headaches due to a back injury. Actually, I am pretty sure that there was always some pain there, but it got a lot worse when she tried staying up. There was another woman (whom I did not meet, but people I worked with did) who had a bullet in her brain and it caused her some perceptual problems that resulted in some real hygiene issues but she was generally very cheerful about them.

There were also emotional issues that they carried with them. Some had post-traumatic stress disorder, some had depression, and there was a weight they carried with them. One woman had to walk with her four young children through the jungle on their way to find the husband and father, and there were mines. Even though they made it safely out, even then, years later, she would still have nightmares about her oldest son stepping on a mine.

I mention this because a lot of them were on welfare or disability of some kind, and it was common for people to just think of them as leeches and as a drain on society.

That was hardly a fair view. First of all, many of them did get schooling, or work through different programs. There was one couple that, if I understood correctly, were making jumpsuits for the prison system in their apartment. There were two sergers and lots and lots of bright orange fabric. There were people who could not get regular work, so they did day labor at farms, or they did their own farming or gardening and fishing to try and supplement what they had.

I’m not saying no one ever made any bad decisions. It was not hard to find groups of men smoking, drinking beer, and playing cards at various times of day. However, Griffin says some interesting things in Black Like Me about how people in despair, with no hope of improvement, will give up and seek pleasure where they can, and yes, that seems to be largely true.

I have been thinking about it largely because of these postings on Facebook like “If you can afford beer and cigarettes, you don’t need food stamps”, and things like that. It goes in with the assumption that these people are just wasting it. I bet if we looked around we would find a lot of people who are not drinking and smoking, and are using food stamps. I know that some people also don’t get very much. Maria had a friend who got $10 a month, which I think basically meant that she could eat ramen every day.

“Oh God, to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.” (A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens)

I have had a lot of good associations, besides that, but often they were limited, or where we might have some differences, we had other strong similarities. Here, I was participating in another kind of life. I never even left the country, but there were times where it was like I had. I am a better person for it.

It is really easy to judge others. It’s easy because you can do it in ignorance, and it keeps looking stupider all the time.

Why I am so disappointed with Mitt Romney

I think I have been pretty clear in that I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as Mormon. It is quite well known that Mitt Romney has a similar religious background. Because of that, I suppose I expect more of him.

The truth is, we have had two prominent LDS candidates for president, and both have been inferior to their fathers, and neither of them have been people whom I would choose as representative of my faith. I would also rather that no one judges us by Glenn Beck, or any of the Osmonds.

Perhaps the real problem is that becoming famous twists you in weird ways, and that wealth can corrupt you as well. Obviously, I am grateful to be poor and unknown. I should remember how lucky I am more often.

With Romney specifically, the thing is that I know he can do better. He apparently was quite competent with the Olympics, and in Massachusetts he reformed health care in a manner that was quite successful, and did become a national template as he suggested it should. I could totally vote for that Mitt, even though he is a Republican. That Mitt is long gone.

The current Mitt has turned around on everything that was moderate about him. Actually, it was kind of funny because there was a quiz where you had completely opposite statements on five topics, and you had to guess which candidate said them. All ten were from Mitt. That would be so crazy if it were not true.

As it is, Romney just seems to have no core. Was he faking moderation and common sense to gain support in Massachusetts? Is he faking harsh neo-conservatism now to win support from his party? Or is it all fake? Does he truly care about nothing but gaining support?

Now, someone with no actual beliefs except for political expediency would be scary under any circumstances, but he’s active in a church that really asks a lot of its members. Not only are there the meetings and the service and the tithing and the abstaining from alcohol and things, but you are supposed to be really seeking after truth, and it is really easy to just give up and not go if you are not into that. At some point, he should have developed some spine and some passion and it really bothers me that he missed that.

Believe me, I get that it’s nice that he does not seem crazy, something that was lacking in the majority of the Republican slate. Probably his flip-flopping helps with that, because people just don’t believe that he will be as severe as the Republican platform would call for. I think they are wrong, because if he wins in 2012, and wants to keep his party behind him for 2016, Romney will need to be Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell harsh.

I had blogged in 2008 about my fears that he would turn out to be the Anti-Christ (and other things—the piece was not 100% serious), but I’m taking some comfort in the fact that I don’t think he’s charismatic enough to pull that off. As it is, he’s just kind of embarrassing and a little scary.

To be fair, again, he is the least scary of the options. Imagine Santorum there, not only saying that Kennedy’s saying he would not be swayed by the Pope nauseated him, but saying it when you have someone like Benedict in as the Pope. That’s terrifying.

I will say that when we were coming back from Mexico, in one airport we were watching a Republican debate, and I had to at least find it gratifying that the candidates seemed to be dropping out in order of craziness, except that Santorum really should have dropped out before Huntsman, but that Cain and O’Donnell were already gone seemed promising.

(Of course, we still don’t know Romney’s running mate, or what’s going to happen in November, so I suppose the terror could still be on.)

There are plenty of disturbing things in today’s political environment, and perhaps Romney is a victim of those, in that maybe he does have real values, and he is suppressing them in order to be popular. Just the fact that he can be that tone-deaf and still be politically successful is kind of a testament to how off priorities now. However my personal problem with him is that he should know better, and whether the actual issue is his values or his integrity in upholding those values, he is not fit to be president.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2008/07/procrastinators-lament-3315.html

In sickness and death

I want to go back a little bit to support of the death penalty. The line that I quoted was only part of a paragraph about people who support it. I am now reproducing the paragraph in full:

“ Solicitor Jones was a member of the same Episcopal church as Dorothy Edwards. But he wasn’t looking for Episcopalians, because their church is opposed to the death penalty. Jones wanted Southern Baptists, members of the most conservative church in a conservative region, among the staunchest believers in capital punishment. Get more than four Southern Baptists on the jury, and once your client is convicted, he’s doomed to be sentenced to die, death penalty lawyers say. Whites tend to support the death penalty more than blacks, men more than women, married persons more than singles, wealthy people more than poor people, suburbanites more than urbanites. And individuals who believe in capital punishment are generally more inclined to convict, to believe the police and the prosecutor.” (Anatomy of Injustice, Raymond Bonner, pp 50-51.)

As I indicated, it was the last sentence that really chilled me, but there are some other interesting things there. Generally speaking, people who believe in the death penalty are those at the top. Setting aside the Southern Baptist thing for now, you have white, male, and wealthy. Those are people for whom society has tended to work out pretty well. Maybe that makes it easier for them to believe that the police and the prosecutors, the enforcers of society, have it right. Married versus single may indicate that they are more financially established, or more conformist.

The suburban versus urban surprised me, because out here in the suburbs we are not particularly wealthy, but there may be two factors here. I believe back East it is more of a thing that people who can afford some property, and can afford cars to get to the property, are the ones who move into the suburbs. In the West we have the whole sprawl thing going on, and also poor people are getting priced out of the city by urban renewal, and moving out here. I suspect in the sense used in the book it is still, hey, society works for us, it’s a good thing, surely they wouldn’t be accusing this person of murder if he didn’t deserve it.

Now I want to take this mindset over into healthcare.

Remember, I spent eleven years at Intel, but I think less than two years of that was as an Intel employee. During that time period, the health plan was great. I had a $5000 hospital bill that did not cost me a dime. Yes, I was a good employee for them, but I still have to consider that basically being lucky. I was a really good employee for the various contracting firms too, and none of them had a health plan like that. I know people who are excellent Intel employees now, and they don’t have health care like that. I didn’t even have a monthly premium back then!

I remember sometimes discussing the issue of healthcare back then, and it was a common refrain that if people didn’t like they health plan that their employer offered, they should just look for another job. There was a strong subtext of “I deserve this.”

Well, let’s fast forward a few years—how many of those people are still completely satisfied with their employer offered healthcare, I wonder? I’m a strong believer in demand-side economics, and I promise you, those great perks of the late 90’s were due to a thriving economy where lots of people were hiring, and so employers had to make themselves attractive. Yes, being a good employee was helpful, and gave you more choices, but employers offered those perks because they needed to, not out of the goodness of their hearts or their deep love for you. (Oddly, this all happened before the Bush tax cuts.)

I am truly grateful that I had that good health coverage when I needed it. Even at the times when I had kind of crummy health plans, I was grateful for those. When I was unemployed though, in a down economy, I did what so many others too, couldn’t manage maintenance care, and ended up in an emergency room. I did not personally deserve that anymore than I deserved to have a free hospital stay ten years earlier. A lot of it was due to forces completely outside of my control.

It truly bothers me when people find it so easy to assume that the problem is that other people are lazy. The laziest person I’ve ever known has been pretty steadily employed, actually, as well as one of the most incompetent. (It’s kind of amazing what some management will put up with to avoid admitting that they have made a mistake.)

One of the things I appreciated about Wealth and Our Commonwealth, by Bill Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins, is that they acknowledged that much of their success was possible due to services and opportunities that were provided through the government, ranging from transportation infrastructure to army and police. It’s not that they didn’t work or that things were handed to them, but they realized that their success did not come in a vacuum.

And there are so many places one could jump off from here, but for today, I am stopping.

And that’s when I gave up on the death penalty

What I have noticed in the case of many wrongful convictions (not just where it seems wrong, but where there is enough evidence to get the conviction overturned) is that generally the side of the law and the victim's family never seem to be convinced.

In the case covered in Anatomy of Injustice, the prosecuting DA still thinks he did it. I had also recently read about another case in Texas where DNA found at the scene did not match any of the four people convicted. They were released, but the DA's office was still convinced it was them and was going to look for more evidence to retry them. (If they were found innocent you cannot retry them, but an overturned guilty conviction is fair game.)

There are a lot of examples of this. I guess the best term for it is confirmation bias, and it is something that really worries me--that people get a wrong idea in their head and they will just not push it out, regardless of reason. So what I wanted to know from Bonner was if he had found anything to be effective against this.

He said "no", but he had not really thought of it. With Bonner, his mental training is geared towards the law and justice, and his morals are that the death penalty is wrong, so he is not thinking about that question, and that makes sense. I am geared towards psychology and motivation, and how to get people to be better, and so I have different questions. That's okay.

Marquis answered too, though, and said you could not generalize because he had victims' families who asked for him to not seek the death penalty. That wasn't really my question, so I tried to explain, and he still answered a different question. I gave an example of another wrongful conviction, from a book, A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger. In this case a black man is convicted of the murder of a woman whose home he had worked at earlier in the day. However, she was strangled, and the man who was later arrested as the Boston Strangler had been working a few blocks away that day at the home of the Junger family, which is what personally drew Junger to the case. There were later doubts, which led to the original man, Roy Smith, having his sentence commuted, but he died in prison before he could be released.

Anyway, Junger had originally interviewed the murder victim's daughter, but she later demanded that part be removed from the book, and he complied with that. Despite that, when he came and read at Powells the Multnomah County DA and a victims’ rights group came and disrupted the reading because he still had the audacity to think it was a wrongful conviction, I guess.

This was a good example because Marquis was familiar with all of it. He had reviewed the book and was familiar with the case, and sort of familiar with the group at the reading, though he said they just wanted to ask the author some questions. That's not how the newspaper described it, but okay, fine.

Anyway, Marquis felt like the book was dishonest. As an example of that, he said that Junger wrote what was in the daughter's mind on a specific day in the courtroom, and she wasn't even there, and the thing is, I do not remember the daughter being mentioned. I remember that specifically because of the issue with her wanting her content removed. Also I remember that the book was very frank in that there are some things that are impossible to go back and know. Roy Smith is dead. Albert DiSalvo is dead. Bessie Goldberg is dead. I thought Junger was very balanced and fair. All of that stuck in my mind, because it offended me that they were acting like Junger didn't have a right to write about this story.

I don’t think he Marquis was lying about the book. As a reviewer, maybe he read an early draft, before the excisions were made, if that’s possible, but mainly, I think he was mistaken. Without going back and reading the book again, I can’t say for sure, and maybe I should to that, but in this context, my question was clearly pointless, and I did not want to be derailing things like the people I wrote about yesterday, so I gave up.

Marquis, without answering the question I wanted, certainly illustrated it. His mind was not open. Actually, even with Bonner's book, which he complimented, Marquis never came right out and said that he still thought the guy was guilty, but there were different points that he raised that would lead one to believe so. For example, the way this man, Edward Lee Elmore, got out of prison was that after the most recent conviction was overturned, he entered a plea that is not accepting guilt but not denying it either, and Marquis' point was now that he has a good lawyer, and he would certainly not be sentenced to anything worse than time served, why not go for it and prove innocence? Well, from the point of view of the legal team, the prosecution played dirty three times in a row, and they did not want to risk it again, and maybe Elmore would just like to be out after 28 years in jail.

Marquis gave several examples of people who swore they were innocent and later when DNA testing became possible they were not exonerated. Actually one of his points with the Elmore case was that it was not a capital case, so yes, the a lot of these overturned convictions are ones where the death penalty was not in play anyway. Well, good, but some of these people who have spent thirty years in jail for something they didn’t do might still have some complaints, no matter how grateful they are to be alive.

The funny thing is, I went there not one hundred percent against the death penalty. I do think there are crimes where death is a reasonable punishment. However, I have grave concerns about the way we carry it out, so that while I may not be against it in principle, I tend to be against it in practice, and least how Texas does it.

To be fair, Oregon is pretty good. Very few criminals are even considered for the death penalty, they are usually ones for whom it seems to make sense (I don’t think Fanus should ever have been a death penalty case, but most of them make sense). We have a careful appeals process and give them good lawyers, and really are pretty responsible with it.

Here are the problems. First of all, most states are not like Oregon. Some are awful. Oddly, that seems to be especially true in the South. I do somewhat share the concerns about making society an executioner. Again, it seems that if it can be morally right for people to die, then it follows that it must be possible to for that to happen in a way that does not degrade society, but I don’t know.

For the issues with wrongful conviction, if we focused on abolishing that rather than the death penalty, that would be more useful, because a lot of these horrible stories you hear of people being exonerated after years in jail are not death penalty cases.

Where I came away firmly against it is in the practicality. Oregon spends $3 million on the average capital case, because in a case that serious they want to make sure that they have good lawyers, and that costs more, and then you have the three appeals. Okay, what if we used that money to get better legal representation for the non-capital cases. You know that court-appointed lawyers are not the cream of the crop. And those are things that Marquis feels good about, and I am glad that we are careful about our capital cases, but I'm not sure it's enough to justify it.

I think a large part of the motivation, at least here in Oregon, to be careful with the death penalty, is the knowledge that it would be awful to be wrong. So when I see people unable to accept that maybe someone has been wrong, that just seems like a recipe for disaster. Actually, that trait goes badly with a lot of situations, but where lives are at stake, maybe it’s more. And here is the thing that truly chilled me:

“And individuals who believe in capital punishment are generally more inclined to convict, to believe the police and the prosecutor.” (Anatomy of Injustice, p. 51)

One thing that I should make clear is that I truly believe that Marquis is an intelligent man and a good man and he knows the law well. Some of the other things I have been reading about are good people doing horrible things and not seeing any contradiction.

I’ll have to see if I can write coherently about that. In the meanwhile, I guess I just think that maybe there are better crusades out there than one for the right to execute.

You people are embarrassing

While this year’s reading was not typical history reading, that is especially true of Anatomy of Injustice, by Raymond Bonner. As I mentioned a few posts ago, there was a review of the book in the Oregonian that was intriguing, and I was available to go hear the author at Powell’s, so I went for it. That was in March, and I am going to write about that in two parts. This is not so much about history or racism, just about people being awful, but it all relates.

Just to give you a brief summary of the book, it is about a black man who was convicted of murder in Greenwood, South Carolina and sentenced to death. It featured all of the death penalty concerns: racism, mental retardation, incompetent defense, contaminated evidence, snitch testimony, and prosecutorial misconduct as well.

Bonner was really likable (and he inscribed my book). He had the Clatsop County DA, Joshua Marquis, with him. Marquis is a prominent death penalty advocate. Bonner has written extensively about the death penalty in his newspaper career, and is against it. Despite the different viewpoints, the two men respect each other, and I guess the bookstores no longer want the authors just to read and answer questions, so they were both there to talk about the book.

If it had really just been the two of them it would probably have been fine, but some people managed to be truly awful, and I did a lot of thinking. First of all, Bonner himself said right at the beginning that it was not a debate on the death penalty, and none of us were going to convince anyone else one way or the other, but some people did still feel a need to try and debate Marquis on the death penalty, and take him to task for it. Then there were three that were different from that, and kind of amazing, in an appalling sort of way.

One was a young guy who kept interrupting to bring up the name Randy Guzick. Guzick is a multiple murderer who has received the death penalty several times, but then they call mistrials or appeals, so he has been in the system for years. Anyway, he kept interrupting, to where even the author, who was extremely patient, asked him to please stop, but he did it again saying something about a sentence that Guzick's father got, and the DA said he had put him in jail on another crime, and the interrupter said "I know. My buddy beat him up." Okay, you have a friend in jail with one criminal who is the father of a worse criminal. Was that the entire point? To be able to get that in there?

There were two others who were particularly bad. The one said that he was okay with us not having the death penalty and getting any of these small fry, and he even considered Dayton Leroy Rogers (serial killer) small fry, because as long as we don't have those war criminals from this administration or the previous administration on trial in the Hague these guys are nothing.

Okay, he thinks our government’s military conduct is criminal. Got it. That had nothing to do with the book, or what people were there for, and it deeply offended Marquis because he does not consider any of those dead women unimportant where their killers are small fry. And he is right on this. If you don't value an individual, it is way too easy to not value the large numbers either.

Then this other woman at the front asked Bonner if he would like it if an innocent person was executed. At first I think he was too shocked to really grasp what she was saying, but he just looked stunned and said "Why would I like that?" She said "It would make a great story." As it did sink in he became very offended because he has served in war zones and seen a lot of death, and he mentioned no one in journalism liking that, to which she claimed to be a journalist, and he was not impressed. Sorry lady, you may be a ghoul, but he is not.

I have been at open question sessions before, so I know that it is common that people will ask questions to show how special or smart they are, and that's usually not too big of a deal, but these people were something else. It was embarrassing, and really, they were disrespectful to the guests and the audience.

So then I got a chance to ask my question, which ended up having its own problems. More on that next time.

In the name of science

“Only human love keeps surgery from being an act between two madmen.” -- Richard Selzer, Letters to a Young Doctor

I have often noticed a sort of convergence when I get into one of my reading spells. On the 4th of July, my sisters and I and a friend went to see The Amazing Spider-Man. There is a scene where someone impatient for scientific progress plans on taking the new serum to the veteran’s hospital to test it on some of the people there. I’m not sure if the idea is more appalling if you think that no one would ever do that, or if you know that it’s happened a lot.

I enjoyed the movie, but I may lean towards the Tobey Maguire version, and I’m going to quote from that one: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

At some point I need to quit quoting stuff and say what I’m trying to say, but I am finding it difficult. Okay, here is a trait about me where I am not sure whether it is good or bad: as many times as I think I can’t be shocked anymore, I am always wrong. It does matter how much I read about greed and corruption and arrogance, and how low people can go, and I still shocked when people do it.

In theory a doctor would be all about healing. With research scientists, they could be researching weapons or destructive forces, but the ones that pertain to the reading were medical researchers so the focus should still be on conquering diseases and being able to make people well. That’s not always how it works out.

Let’s start with Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, by James H. Jones. Under the original terms of the experiment, the plan was only to withhold treatment for six months, to observe the course of untreated syphilis. Since there was no really effective treatment for syphilis, you could even argue that it would not be particularly harmful to the men, because participation in the experiment was getting them other medical treatment that they were unlikely to be able to afford, and six months is not a terribly long time that disease.

You can almost feel comfortable with that, even if some qualms come up. However, it stretched on past the six months, all the way from 1932 to 1972. Even after a quick and effective treatment became available in the 1940’s, it continued. Again, it only ended because of the right person in the right place: Peter Buxtun, a CDC employee with a conscience and contacts in the press.

It was not merely a failure of people to follow up and see that the original terms of the experiment were followed—the experiment was questionable from the get-go. First of all, if they really wanted to test untreated syphilis, they should have used a different pool, because these men had all received some mercury treatments. Also, they lied to the patients. They were not only led to believe that they were receiving treatment when they were really only being monitored, they were not even told that they had syphilis. They called it “bad blood”, and it looks like the first of the doctors to do that was merely trying to simplify things, and make it less confusing, because they were calling it that before the experiment started, but clearly there is no informed consent.

Actually, for more information on the history of informed consent, that’s when you read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. She covers that in great detail, and there are stories of cancer cells being injected to uninformed patients at a hospital—not for veterans but in the one case for elderly Jews, so you did have Holocaust survivors.

There is not the same amount of abuse in the Henrietta Lacks case specifically. She was not told that her cells were being taken, but she received the traditional treatment for cancer. It did not work, but the traditional treatments of the time were not that great, and she had a particularly tough cancer, leading to the ability of the cells to reproduce indefinitely and to infect other cell lines. (Seriously, it’s a fascinating book.) Also, the original doctor did not profit from the cells (he was giving them away), though other people did. That was frustrating for the family, but the refrain that they kept coming back to was that these cells have made millions of dollars and led to all these advances in science, and they can’t even get health care.

I’ve said that all of this comes down to human issues, and there are a few here. On the one side is pride, where people are so sure that what they are doing is good and vital that other considerations are just not important to them. As information would come to light people would make comparisons to the experiments conducted on people in concentration camps, and the parties involved could never see it. They weren’t like Nazis! Well, they were a little bit, and the difference between being sadistically evil and carelessly arrogant is important, but you can still do a lot of damage either way.

The other thing that is really important is how poverty and ignorance make these things possible. Doctors and staff could lie, and no one knew any better. One of the great things about participating in the Tuskegee experiment is on “treatment” days, you got a hot meal. That meant something. The incentives they were offered were so minor to many of us, but in the rural South, they were huge. One of the perks was that the subjects would be given bottles of aspirin and iron tonic, and for undernourished people with common aches and pains, that was great stuff.

I was in an institute class about twenty years ago, and the instructor wrote on the board:

inequity=iniquity

Inequality equals sin. It makes it easier for it to happen, and sin was probably a key factor in putting the inequality there in the first place.

The Lacks family should be able to go to the doctor, not because their mother made a contribution to science, but because they are human beings, and good health is important. It’s not that they didn’t have jobs—the jobs don’t pay enough.

When the Tuskegee subjects could not afford medical care, or hot meals, or aspirin, that’s not because they were lazy. They were living in an environment where it was impossible to get ahead, and decades later John Griffin Howard found situations like that and getting close to a century later you can still find it.

There are racist attitudes involved. Studying syphilis among black people seemed like a reasonable thing to do, because everyone knew they were immoral and animalistic, so they had a high infection rate. Sure, if you compared it to the white rate of infection at similar income and education levels, it was pretty similar, but don’t let facts get in the way of science.

It’s more than racism though. There is a completely skewed sense of values. People are devalued. Sometimes the culprit is mere pride, but usually greed is at the back of it, and that again is something that is very much alive today. I think I’ll be getting back to this.

Black Like Me

Returning to yesterday’s theme of people being in a perfect position for what they end up doing, the best example may be John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me.

I’m sure I must have read something about the book in college, but I had forgotten all about it until I read the article. Now I think I understand a SNL sketch I saw once with Jane Curtin (not the Richard Pryor one; she was the author in this one).

One thing that I found interesting is that Griffin had an extended period of blindness, and had first spent time in New Orleans, his starting point, while blind. So first he was there as a blind man, and then he got to know it again as a sighted white man, and then he got to see it as a black man. It’s an extraordinary thing to experience so many different perspectives, and I think maybe that made him ideal for this project.

Griffin had already demonstrated his courage and commitment to serving others as a medic in the French Resistance, smuggling Austrian Jews to safety. He had already had the experience of being a racial minority and of going in to another culture as the only Caucasian on Nuni (one of the Solomon Islands) for a couple of years while serving in the Army Air Corps. It would appear that his Catholicism was also a helpful factor at the time, because Catholics seem to have been more invested in the Civil Rights movement in the South of that time. Also, he was able to take the Oxsoralen without showing liver damage, which did matter for him being able to complete the experiment.

There were a few things that were surprising for me. One is how much the skin color mattered even for people who knew. The shoeshine man knew, but it was as if he forgot. Howard was now just one of them. Howard knew, and yet he felt alienated from his family, even for telephoning or writing a letter where there would be no visual contact. He felt alienated from himself. Perhaps part of the staying power of racial prejudice is how strong a hold our visual image has on our mental image.

That image is important as it relates to bigotry, but I think it is important in how it relates to other areas too.  It is frightening to think that if something major happens to alter my appearance how hard it will be mentally to adjust, and that’s never having been crazy about my appearance in the first place. Think how it must be for people as they age, but at least that happens gradually. Then think of it in relationship to someone with an eating disorder, or someone who is addicted to plastic surgery, or to piercings or tattoos. Think of burn victims. Those are thoughts that can be sad or scary or just interesting, but then think of someone who is trained to believe that their skin color is bad, or that theirs is better than someone else’s, and then it just makes me mad. Well, it makes me sick too.

I was also surprised to find out how quickly he gave up, to some extent. That was not just for the length of the initial experiment, but also that there was one city that he just could not stay in. There are ways in which it seems incomplete, because he really only saw certain areas, and the focus is on the South. At the same time, I can’t begrudge him that. It was a hard thing to do, and lonely, and most people wouldn’t do it at all. Also, because he quit taking the pills when he did, he had a period where he was able to go back and forth between passing for white and passing for black, and that gave him additional insight.

The version I read had an epilogue about what happened afterward, which had some sad parts, as there were shifts in the movement that were necessary, but offended many of the previous supporters, combined with the fact that there is still so much prejudice and inequality. I will sometimes take breaks between certain books, because too much in one vein will really leave me feeling that life is “nasty, brutish, and short”, and that is kind of true, but there is so much more to it than that.

One thing that is important though, and that I have been thinking about a lot lately, is how no matter how bad things get (and he writes eloquently about despair), it is the small kindnesses to each other that make things bearable. That is true across the board, and if there are times when they are not enough, perhaps that’s because there needs to be still more kindness. (And of course, I don’t just live for this world either, which helps.)

These things that I am writing about are not really particularly racial, but they are human, and that’s what I keep finding over and over again. It does not mean that there is no point in at times focusing on a specific group—I believe I get a lot of value from that—but always it comes back to us being human, with all the bad and good that entails.

One criticism I have read of the book is that “It’s a good book for white people.” That is completely true. People who receive “the hate stare” don’t need to be told that it exists. The point is that there were a lot of people who did need to know, and I think the book did a good job of telling them. Of course there were people who didn’t want to hear it, and still haven’t heard it. I guess that’s why reading history keeps on being timely. We just keep on repeating it.

First Thoughts on Black History Month

Not long ago I wrote about how it was disappointing to me how there were so many things that had not come out of the feminist movement. Yes, you can find women in pretty much any type of job, but there is not pay equality, there is not even close to equal representation in terms of positions of power, and there’s still plenty of chauvinism going around.

There is some wrongheadedness that doesn’t help, like the woman who writes about realizing that she can’t have it all, without apparently realizing that no one can have it all, or that she has a lot more than most.

I had blamed some of the lack of progress on competition among women, where instead of being mutually supportive of each other, women occupying different spheres inside or outside of the workforce seemed to be judging each other, and resenting each other, possibly due to some jealousy of each other, which would really show insecurity about themselves.

Sadly, one thing you find when studying the history of racial minorities is that progress is often lacking there too. Slavery ends and Jim Crow starts. The Civil Rights Act officially ends Jim Crow, but then the War on Drugs starts, and also human attitudes remain the same. It’s not that there isn’t any progress, but the progress written down in the law books doesn’t seem to translate to real life quite how it should. Some of it is possible because those who benefit from the status quo also benefit from infighting among those who don’t.

These are the sort of things that could make it a very discouraging world. Actually, I had been getting very discourages with things, though I am going to get into that more when I start writing about Danger Days, eventually.

There are other things, though, that are kind of inspiring, and it generally happens with individuals. No matter how often society will accept something wrong, there will still come times when there is someone who will not turn away, and has the opportunity to make a difference.

For example, one of the key figures in King Leopold’s Ghost is E.D. Morel. He was a man of great moral conviction and opposition to slavery, but he also ended up as a shipping agent in a position to see and have proof that Congo was a slave state, despite Leopold gaining support for his presence in the region through his anti-slavery stance. (Well, there was a lot of manipulation going on in that, but also deep hypocrisy.) In addition, Morel was a remarkably capable person who could produce a great deal of literature in a short time, which was necessary for the work before him. He also found helpful friends and he had a supportive wife.

It doesn’t necessarily work to make these people your heroes. Morel was blind to the similar problems of British colonialism. Another figure who was kind of amazing was George Washington Williams, who was very capable and the first to even begin reporting the atrocities, but also somewhat of a habitual liar, which weakened his case. However, it can be very inspiring to see just what a single person or a few people working together can do. And then you see that it didn’t do very much, but there are still things that help you go on.

There will be more on that tomorrow, and later.

Black History Month 2012

Now that I am caught up in my month-specific reading, I would be pretty sure that I could stay on track now—starting my Native American Heritage month reading on time in November and totally finishing before February. However, I know me, and something else will probably come up. I may not be in sync with the world, or the calendar, but I eventually get there.

Anyway, this year’s reading was largely formed of things that I just had wanted to read, and it was not necessarily true history reading, but history was a part of it.

I had been meaning to read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot for some time, so I decided to read that, and it got me thinking about something else I should also read up on, leading to me reading Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment by James H. Jones. I also immediately decided on reading King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hothschild. I had been meaning to read that since it came out, I guess, in 1999.

Often I will have three books that kind of relate, and being domestic, and then have one that is international. I felt like I should add a third medical one. However, I read a review on another book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong by Raymond Bonner, and went to hear the author speak, and even though that is not specifically on African American history, the events were possible because of the history. Also, I had been meaning to read The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (by Wes Moore), and so I added that.

Finally, I was reading a Smithsonian article about Black Like Me by John Griffin Howard, and I had not been aware of it, but it seemed like a good thing to read.

It was nearly worse. First of all, reading Black Like Me, it occurred to me that maybe the counterpoint would be to read Harlan Ellison’s The Invisible Man, but reading more about it, it sounded like it would be irritating, because you have one real character and a bunch of stereotypes, and I did not need that. Also, I had decided the third medical/science book could be The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

Adding those last two books would have made my reading take much longer, as both are over 500 pages. (Add the notes, and The Bell Curve is over 800.) I have already mentioned that I was feeling overwhelmed, and the thought of adding more was just not working for me. Usually I will pick four books. (This is generally more than I read in a single month—that is more like two months—hence my tendency to fall behind.)  This was already six books, and it was a lot.

In addition, these had been good books, that I enjoyed reading. They were well written and interesting. I did not feel like I was going to enjoy those other two, or maybe relate to them.

They may not be off the table forever. Discussing my dismissal of The Invisible Man with one friend, she agreed, but also said that because it is an important book to the racial discussion, and because I care about things like that, I will end up reading it eventually. Maybe it is necessary, but also she clearly found it to be inevitable. Well, that can be okay. Maybe it will fit in better with a different year’s reading, or after I have read other things.

For The Bell Curve, my initial reaction when it came out was that it did not deserve to be read. It came out in September of 1994, just after I got back from my mission, and there was a lot of discussion about it when I started college again the following spring. What we decided at the time is that they were mistaken in their beliefs that IQ could be measured without bias, invalidating their key point.

When I was looking for something else medical, I remembered the book, and reading more about it sounds like there are actually a lot of good points in the book on what to do because of the social inequality that exists, and that people ignored those points because of their anger over the racist nature of their IQ conclusions. That made me lean towards reading it, and it could have fit in well with studying about the HeLa cells and the syphilis experiment, where maybe you have people with good intentions and aims, but other things prevent them from having good implementation or results. It could have worked, but I just felt like I would end up too annoyed. It may not be off the table forever, but I just can’t deal with it now.

Still, it’s a lot of books with a lot of information, so there will be multiple posts on the things I have taken away from my both late and extended (May 6th through July 5th—thank you Goodreads) Black History Month 2012 reading.

I think next year I will focus on the Harlem Renaissance, but like I really know.

Minor Adjustments

I have been feeling really overextended these past few days. Obviously the volunteer work has put me over the edge. No, that’s not it.

I don’t know if it’s obvious, but keeping up with the blogging has been really difficult lately. I have really liked this system of having multiple posts ready. Not only is having several day’s worth of content a stress reliever, but then I get multiple chances to proofread, and it makes them better. 

It is easy to do that when I am developing a theme, but lately I have been struggling. There are a lot of series that I am almost ready to start, but with things that I still need to do, so it was bugging me. I couldn’t start my Black History month writing because I was not done with the reading, and I wasn’t done with my graphic novel research, so I could not get started on that, and I was not done writing my own graphic novel, so I could not get started on that. Oh, and I am totally not prepared for the next round of music writing either.

There have been some good things about the past few days. I forced myself to get a few things (Legacy of Ashes and writing to my cousins in Italy) done that I have been procrastinating for a long time, mainly because they were things I could do relatively quickly. Also, I was not expecting to do the Trump thing, but I am kind of proud of that. It had 49 hits within two days, which is a lot for me, and I can see from the stats that people are trying the same searches I did, and so I am glad I could help. I still think someone else could do it better, but I nonetheless feel like my effort had value.

Anyway, I only had one book left for my planned history reading, but it was a long one, and I just decided not to read it, and suddenly everything feels better. I know that’s the right decision, because I was worrying over lots of things that I had to do, and none of them seem as stressful now.

Part of the issue is mission creep, and I can explain this easily with the graphic novels. I made a list of ones I thought I should read to get a good overview, and it was a decent list, but obviously it did not take everything in, which would be impossible. I kept thinking of others. I had no Gaiman on the list! How could I feel like I had even given the genre a fair shake if I hadn’t read any Gaiman? Or Miller? But did I want to read Miller?

The point is, I have given up on The Bell Curve, maybe permanently, maybe not, but why it was on the list, and what else was there, will be covered in the next post.

Blues Fest

Remember I said that for me Blues is something you listen to sitting on the grass on a summer day? I lied.

I’m never sitting on the grass because I am always doing some kind of volunteer work. I guess my initial thought was that it would get me in free, but then by the time the shift is done, even if there was more to listen to, I need to get going. It also works well, because I tend to feel awkward in festival situations, and having something to do keeps me focused. And I like helping people.

I had thought initially that I would probably blog about Blues Fest, but that I would wait until both of my shifts were done, but then I realized maybe if I write about it today, more people will go, and if I waited until after my Saturday shift, that leaves them less time for that. So, music fans in the Portland area who are reading this, my craftiness is directed at you. (There are people who travel for this, but I imagine that would have to be less spontaneous.)

I’ve said this before, but the Oregon Food Bank is my local charity, and this is their primary fundraiser, so it’s a natural fit for me to be there anyway, but it’s also a really good festival. Last year I remember talking to someone during my shift who does travel for festivals, and he has been to a lot of different ones and he said ours is by far the most organized.

To be fair, I was working green team that day, which means I was helping people get their waste in the right bin based on whether it was compostable, recyclable, or none of the above, so he could have been referring to our green efforts, and that would be a fair compliment. They are very environmentally responsible. One of the cool innovations with that this year, is that they have used the old stage banners to make tote bags, so that is practical and cool, and green.

That being said, I think it would be fair to compliment the organization of the festival as well. One thing that amazes me is the acoustic setup, where you can walk the length of the area, and hear different performances, but they do not overlap. Flow works really well too, where people can find what they need and get there without a struggle.

It could so easily be utter chaos. There are multiple stages, tons of food and beverage booths, lots of people, most of them carrying around cups of wine or beer, and so you could expect utter chaos with stench and litter and fighting, and that’s just not what you get. Families attend together, and people from all walks of life, and it’s fine. It really kind of is the best of Portland.

I was in the merchandise tent last night, and you know, I am there because I believe the festival is a good event for a good cause, so I am there to help people, but then you end up literally helping people too. The layout is a little different this year. I think the organization is probably better, but it’s different, so my job, with one other person, was to greet people and answer questions.

There are smaller items like pins, magnets, and water bottles, but the big items are the t-shirts. It is the 25th anniversary, so there are three designs this year, and each one is available in a few different colors, and a few different styles. The standard is a unisex short-sleeved t-shirt, but there are some long-sleeve and tank options, as well as a few for women. They are all on display with a sign about what sizes are available, and then when you know what you want, you go to the register and they will get it for you. This means people do not have to hunt for their size, but it is new, and some people get a little confused.

The other thing that can add to the confusion, but again, it is cool, is that they have some retro shirts from past festivals for sale also, and those are in stacks on shelves. Those are $10 each, which is a great deal, but some people do come in and think that’s all there is, and there are limited sizes available there (nothing bigger than large). So we would help people know what was what, and also fold and organize the t-shirts as people rummaged through them. Not only did that help things look better, but doing so gave me a better idea of what we had, and where it was, which made me better able to help people.

There was one woman I could not really help. She was getting a shirt for a high school student and she did not think getting him one with the devil on it was appropriate. I found one without the devil, but then she was not sure about the color. I admit, the devil shows up on those t-shirts a lot. I was blaming Robert Johnson, but I can’t find that he ever said he did. Other people came up with that years later. They were probably mixing him up with Tommy Johnson, who did say that he had sold his soul, but it seems to have been more of a marketing ploy. Musicians!

I admit, I was pretty tired by the end of the shift, but it was fun, and we could hear Booker T Jones perfectly. I’m listening to him right now. Actually, he may not know it, but he made some friends in the merch tent, because at one point he asked if anyone in the crowd was hungry, and then he started talking about the food bank and how it only cost $20 for the show, and everyone reach into their wallets, and he called it the Portland Food Bank, but you know what, he’s still cool.

So give some thought to attending the Safeway Waterfront Blues Festival: http://www.waterfrontbluesfest.com/

And even if you can’t make it, you can still give: http://www.oregonfoodbank.org/Donate

No one should ever have to go hungry.

Task: Legacy of Ashes

Here’s another one where my procrastination is embarrassing. In this case, I cannot actually complete the task. At all. (One the plus side, for yesterday’s task, I have already heard back from Roberto!)

The procrastination did not go on quite as long on this one. I finished reading Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner, in December of 2009. It is a lengthy book on its own, but I also felt compelled to read the notes, because they were so fascinating. There were all these little stories tucked in there that enriched the material, and yet which would have completely dragged down the main text if included there. (The book is also fairly dense, as well as long.)

There were two places in the notes where there were web links for more information. One was an audio archive from President Kennedy, and the other was some writings of General Petraeus. I intended to look both of these up. Now the links have changed. I suspect the material is still up, but I cannot find it now. This is my own fault.

The incident happened at a time of transition. I had been in a book club for a while, which had ended up being really good for me. It got me reading fiction again, where there were definitely some books that I would not have read on my own, but I was glad to have read. It gave me some monthly socialization, and conversation about books. That was all pretty good. Then people started getting married and moving, and it disbanded.

This happened around the time I got onto Facebook (late 2008), so one thing I started doing on Facebook is posting a note with a review after I finished a book. Remember Notes? Anyway, it wasn’t quite the same as a discussion, but I was putting my thoughts on my reading together, and it was something.

Somewhere around this time period I also got onto Goodreads, and then I started reviewing my books there. This made a lot more sense than doing the Notes. Reviewing books was exactly how you were supposed to use the site. I got on it for convenience in tracking books that I wanted to read eventually. (I’m afraid I still can’t escape the 3:1 ratio on books that I wish to read versus books that I’ve read, even adding the graphic novels, so easy tracking is very important.)

Legacy of Ashes was transitional. It was right around the time period where I was shifting, but also in the review I could mention things that conspiracy theorists would find interesting, going on the assumption that probably at least a few of my Facebook friends fit that category.

Ah, but I was waiting to cover those two last bits of content before posting that last note, and now I never shall. But hey, the regular review was posted ages ago, and for those who are interested, here goes:

Truthers, sorry, but there is no reason to believe that there was any US conspiracy to bring down the Twin Towers. There is no evidence of it, there is evidence against it, and frankly, there is no need for a conspiracy, because there was so much arrogance and incompetence and lack of cooperation among the different agencies that it was all enough to allow the plot to succeed. Look, once Charlie Sheen started saying it, that should have been your first clue that the story was not sound.

However, while it appears most likely that Oswald was a single shooter, it does appear that he was hired by the Cuban government in retaliation for CIA led attempts on the life of Fidel Castro. So that’s kind of interesting, right? Kennedy just keeps looking worse incidentally. I’m kind of a Johnson fan though, so I’m good.

(And please appreciate that I referred to the Kennedy assassination without making any Umbrella Academy references, but the opportunities were totally there.)

On the book itself, yes, it is a difficult read—you can’t just breeze through it at the beach—but there were two things that it did for me that I really liked. One is that it filled in a lot of blanks for things that I kind of remembered but did not understand at the time, like Grenada and Lebanon.

The other question that had persisted, even when I was older and understood current events better (Gulf War, Noriega, Iran-Contra) is why the US kept betting on the wrong horse. We would get people into power and then have to remove them, over and over again. A lot of that was simply the narrow-minded anti-Communism focus, because even as it kicks into high gear after World War II, we do not seem to understand that fascists and nationalists are not inherently better. That being said, of the previously mentioned incompetence and arrogance, it does seem like at any given point, there is always at least one of those in play.

Sometimes knowledge can be discouraging, but I can’t give up on it. So hey, if you like books, get on Goodreads, and if you are on Goodreads, friend me! The Goodreads Bookshelf on the right will take you right to me.

Task: Scrivere a la famiglia

Actually, I guess that should be “Scriva”, making it an imperative command, not an infinitive. “Scrivere” is what I wrote down, though. I am sort of partial to infinitives. It’s always the first thing that you learn.

Anyway, I am telling myself to write to the family, and this has been something I have been meaning to do since my first trip to Italy, in October 2006. Okay, maybe it was the second trip, in May 2008. That’s quite the procrastination streak either way.

The deal is that I really love my mother’s family. They are such good people and so loving. With my father’s family, I don’t think that any of them specifically wish me harm, but there’s not really a lot of warmth among the aunts and uncles, except for Don and he died when I was two.

With Mom’s family though, they loved me right away. It’s like they loved me all along and had just been waiting for the chance to show me. To them I am brilliant and beautiful with a smile like the sun. Ragazza stupenda. I admit it—it gets to me. Sure, the hugs and the kiss-kiss are kind of traditional, but they still mean it.

At the same time, we are losing Mom’s generation. One brother and one sister died since the last time we were there, and they were among the younger and healthier. Of the three left, we have two who are very old, and one who has Alzheimer’s. If we want to keep those connections alive, it has to happen with the younger generation.

Younger may be a misnomer of sorts. Mom is the youngest in her family by a lot, so her oldest nephew is only six years younger than she is. Nonetheless, the majority of them do have email, which I cannot say for my aunts and uncles. Some of them are even on Facebook, though they don’t really use it. And, they don’t need it to keep in touch, because they all call each other and see each other. This is not really practical for us.

I thought sending an email to all of them every month would be a good plan. They know what’s going on with us, they can write back, and it keeps my Italian from getting too rusty. I just did not realize how hard it would be to start.

Switching languages is not necessarily easy. Well, I can always get back to English pretty quickly, but into anything else is harder. Knowing what to say, especially the first time you do it, can be hard. Doing both together kept seeming impossible. But today I was going to do it.

Sometimes when the computer is not feeling right I will get some paper. I started writing some notes in English. It felt stupid. I thought maybe I should read something in Italian first. I did not have time for that. Finally I just went on the computer, wrote a short note in English, and then brought up Babelfish, which is now Bing translator.

Actually, I was initially pretty impressed. I could see some things here and there that weren’t quite right, but it seemed pretty good. That’s when I printed it and took it to Mom. We spent about 45 minutes fixing it.

It’s not even that it provided the wrong words, but there are expressions that do not mean the same thing when you translate them literally, and also things that they just don’t say. That is part of what makes changing your language hard. You aren’t just changing the words, but you are changing the mindset. It is valuable to be able to do it, but I do not have a simple on/off switch.

Nonetheless, we were able to get it fixed, and with still enough time left that I could send the message before it was time to leave for the movie. (My sisters and I went to see Spiderman!)

I am not completely happy with this process, because I like to think I am capable of more, but involving Mom is probably good, and at least I did get something sent off, after meaning to for many years. It is a workable system, even if it is not completely ideal.

What can I say? Tanti saluti e bacci.

Affiliated

I have created two new online profiles today. You can see where I might shy away from that, seeing as I have recently had my checking account compromised, but these were both things I have been planning to do for a while.

One is on Mormon.org. Technically, I already had an account because I have one through other aspects of the web site, but I had not created a profile for this specific part yet. I had intended to, but every time I tried the site was unavailable.

I had always intended to try again, but the reason I made a point of getting around to it (besides today being a slow day) is that our new ward mission leader suggested having a profile and linking it to your Facebook page, just to have another opportunity to share.

The way the profiles work is that visitors to Mormon.org can search on locations or ages or things to find people they have things in common with, and see what they have to say about their faith. Mine is not actually up yet because there is an approval process, but I doubt it will take very long, and then I will do the appropriate linking.

The other motivation is that I am going to be teaching on missionary work Sunday, and so it seems reasonable to get that done. I worry sometimes about the balance of being open to others and being pushy, but things like this can increase the openness without pushing.  Just in case, though, you can always ask me questions about my faith, and I will answer them.

The profiles are under “I’m a Mormon”, and this charity I do, Plan, has a campaign called “Because I am a Girl”. Anyway, the two titles became conflated in my mind and I would sometimes think, “Because I am a Mormon”. A lot of who I am and how I view the world comes from my faith. It is an undercurrent to everything I do. So, it is important, and I am willing to share.

The other site I joined up with is mychemicalromance.com. I’m not sure how much I will be posting on it, but I have been thinking about doing it for a while, so why not? It gets me on the mailing list. I love them, and if you want to ask me about them, that’s cool too. It is a different level of significance perhaps, but still important.

Donald Trump is a Big Fat Idiot

So many of these posts start with me being annoyed.

The nuisance this time is a post that many people are sharing on Facebook with a picture of Donald Trump and a quote by him criticizing the Affordable Care Act. It’s fine that people have political views different from mine, and certainly it’s fine that Trump’s views are different, because we don’t have much in common. However, there is some inaccuracy in the statement, and people are just so supportive of it that it makes me sad.

I would normally wait for someone to write a good article on it, because there is a lot of good information on there already, and surely someone will take up the challenge, but I guess they’re just not going fast enough.

Here is the quote:

“Let me get this straight. We're going to be “gifted” with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don't, which purportedly covers at least 10 million more people, without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it, but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a Dumbo president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, for which we'll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke.”

Let’s just work our way through this.

“We're going to be “gifted” with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don't”

You will not be forced to purchase any specific plan. You are required to have health insurance, and you can choose from several plans, with a better option of finding one in your price range, especially if you have a pre-existing condition, which matters a lot to me. Also, there are several exceptions and allowances available. Trump did not say you will be put in jail, but others have. For more on the rules, and the way the penalty will work, see the flowchart at http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002881604.

“which purportedly covers at least 10 million more people, without adding a single new doctor”

While the act does not require more doctors, it does have provisions for working out greater efficiency and innovation. Furthermore, you don’t necessarily need more doctors to have more access. For an interesting take on this, see http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2011/11/11/america-needs-different-doctors-not-more-doctors/.

“but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents”

Even the GOP web site on this only says “may” and “could” and “as many as”, given that the IRS will have some involvement with the mandate. It’s definitely misleading.

“written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it”

I can’t find any reference to the chairman saying he does not understand it. I suspect it is true that many of the voters did not read the entire act, but I suspect this is true with most acts. Have you tried reading one of those things? While that is not necessarily a good thing, it is no worse for this act than any other act of Congress.

“but exempted themselves from it”

As the purpose of the act is specifically to extend health coverage to people who can not already afford it, which is not an issue for members of Congress, I find this statement misleading.

“and signed by a Dumbo president who smokes”

The use of the term “Dumbo” made me wonder if maybe if this was fake, because it is so classless, but it seems to be legit. I may have been giving the Donald too much credit. Also, while you can argue that he should have quite smoking sooner, President Obama has successfully quit smoking, and kudos to him for it. Overcoming nicotine addiction is almost as hard as passing health care legislation.

“with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes”

This is a gross overstatement. There was never an issue with paying income taxes, though for a few years Social Security and Medicare taxes were not paid, because even though he had an employer, the IMF, with that being an international organization he needed to file as self-employed. This was corrected. He also took some childcare deductions that were not allowable, another common mistake. There are many people who weasel out of paying taxes more effectively, and I bet Trump is one of them. Read “Perfectly Legal” and “Free Lunch” by David Cay Johnston for more on that.

“for which we'll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect”

Completely false. One benefit that has been in effect for a while now is that dependent children can stay on their parents’ health plans until the age of 26. Previously that varied by state (for Oregon the age limit was 23). As more young people have a more difficult time finding jobs, this is a big help to them. Some other benefits relating to preventive care are in place as well. I believe the only part that does not come fully into effect until 2014 (which is not four years away) is the setup of the health care exchanges.

“by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare”

Neither program is bankrupt. It is very common to claim they are going bankrupt, but the dates keep getting pushed out, and even if those claims of several years down the road were true, which they aren’t, the “already” would still be a lie. Patently false:

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=628

http://www.factcheck.org/2011/04/ryans-muddy-medicare-claims/

“all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese”

My first thought on this is that “obese” seems a little harsh. She is not thin enough to be eligible for Trump’s fifth wife, but that’s no loss. However, people all over go to doctors who are overweight, and who smoke, and even ones who abused drugs (or at least did during medical school/residency) because none of us does everything we should do, but we do tend to defer to people who have knowledge. Dr. Benjamin has a medical degree, directed a non-profit medical clinic, served on the board of trustees of a medical school, so has a broad range of experience. Also, I have a feeling Trump would not have said this if we were talking about C. Everett Koop, but he wasn’t exactly a swimsuit model either.

“and financed by a country that's broke.”

One thing that you will see if you do go through the 2041 pages of the act is that the financing is pretty well worked out. It’s was more specific and logical than the Ryan plan. Beyond that, the country is not broke. The country has debts, but it also has assets. Given Trump’s experience with bankruptcy one would expect him to understand this a little better, but maybe that’s how he got the experience.

The rant also fails to cover the most glaring omission of all—that Obamacare is basically Romneycare, only on a national level instead of state, and that for that state, it has been working pretty well, and that Republicans who praised it in 2007 are vilifying it now.

To be fair, a lot of the things Trump is saying are things that are commonly said. They’re inaccurate, and misleading, so he could be blindly parroting them back or he could be willfully contributing to the atmosphere of ignorance and misunderstanding. People sharing and liking this, though, reinforces it. They are accepting the ignorance, and spreading it. They are acting like Donald Trump is intelligent and eloquent, neither of which is even remotely true. Is this ultimately the greatest sin of reality television? That it legitimizes horrible people and gives them fans?

I know there are people out there who are more wonkish and could do a better job. I hope someone does. When they do, I will link to it on Facebook, and re-tweet it. Until then, I am doing what I can, with one final plea. If you haven’t seen the studies, people who watch Fox News are less informed than those who watch no news at all. That is a bad thing. For the love of all that is good and holy, turn off Fox News.

Despite its imperfections, you are welcome to share and like this.