A simple plan

So here is a story from KVAL in Eugene, OR, about a woman with terminal cancer. Her doctor "offered hope" (for more time, as I understand it, not for remission or recovery) in the form of an expensive chemo drug. The Oregon Health Plan denied her request for that drug, but offered "comfort care" including - of course, it being Oregon - assisted suicide.

Sigh.

Saha [the spokesperson for the plan] said state health officials do not consider whether it is cheaper for someone in the health plan to die than live. However, he admitted they must consider the state's limited dollars when dealing with a case such as Wagner's.

"If we invest thousands and thousands of dollars in one person's days to weeks, we are taking away those dollars from someone," Saha said.

Uh-huh. If they don't consider whether life or death is cheaper, on what basis are they making this decision? They prefer death, or opiate haze, to an extension of life? Saha says that if the woman believes they're only willing to cover her suicide, she's misinterpreted their letter. Clearly. The article says right there that they'll offer "comfort care" (that would be the pain pills Pres. Obama has gotten into such hot water over) too. But that spokesperson can't claim that the plan doesn't cover assisted suicide. And the woman appealed the plan's denial of the drug twice, losing both times, so obviously if they somehow misspoke, they did it three times.

(The drug company that makes the drug is offering it to her for free now. God bless 'em. I assume they've done so with some conditions, such as her allowing them to collect data on the progress of her cancer. It seems to me that they have every right to ask such a thing in return for the charity they're offering, and that she has every incentive to give it. I know I would...)

My question: How can anyone who knows about Oregon, who knows about Massachusetts, who knows about Canada, who knows about Great Britain, believe that this little story isn't a vision of the United States' future, if government becomes primary health care provider? Why is it that those on the Left insist that history doesn't repeat itself? It isn't as if what they're proposing hasn't been tried.

Oh, except in this one respect: if the US goes the way of Canada and Great Britain, there'll be no more US health system to rely on: no more hideously-expensive-to-develop US drugs that Canada can buy at a deep discount and crow about offering cheaply; no more new surgical techniques invented and tested in US operating rooms that can eventually be learned by foreign doctors; no more life extension research that can maintain a Stephen Hawking or a Robert Heinlein far beyond their "natural" span; no more super-NICU techniques that can sustain a baby weighing less than a pound, giving that baby a shot at not just life but normal life (and raising US infant mortality rates in the process, because a one-pound baby only has a shot at life, even here).

There is rationing in health care now, just as there's rationing in, say, real estate (in good times!) and hybrid cars (when gasoline gets expensive): demand exceeds supply. But who decides? What's better, a bureaucratic process far removed from the beneficiary, a bureaucratic process closer to the beneficiary (that would be private insurance, wherein individuals can decide how "Cadillac" a plan they want to pay for), a lottery? If Oregon objects to spending $4000 to add a month to this woman's life, but is happy enough to cover her $100 death (a prospect that makes me shudder even as the economics make plenty o' sense), what on earth gives anyone the idea that the Federal government won't offer the same care, or lack thereof?

Please, Texas, it's in your Constitution: pull the secession trigger before this horrible thing takes effect. I have two anchor children...

And now to answer the actual QUESTION...

Sorry, Anonymous; I got onto my soapbox there. You asked about sustainability and I went on and on about the environmental movement, leaving out several areas you mentioned specifically.

Okay, here's the thing: conservatives do not, in principle, object to paying for necessary services, such as garbage collection and waste management, such as disposal fees for hazardous wastes, such as water and air quality monitoring. They expect that the costs for whatever filtering-style processing a business must do in order to meet reasonable and agreed-on standards will be passed on to them, the consumers. What they (we) take issue with is this type of situation:

"Save the spotted owl!" was an environmental rallying cry in the Pacific Northwest; logging was destroying the birds' habitat, it was claimed. When pressed, however, environmentalists taking up the owls' cause admitted that the owl itself was not so much the issue; it was that old-growth forests were being logged, and the owl was a convenient "face" for the forests. Human beings were going to lose their jobs, the price of wood was going to rise for all buyers, and all under the auspices of "saving" a critter.

Honesty would have been a policy behind which more conservatives could have rallied, if they agreed with the principle that we ought to seek our wood from places other than old growth. (Old growth, by the way, is not a static forest condition; like all conditions on the planet, it's transitory. By geologic standards, it's a flash in the pan.) But the more-regulation playbook seems to require certain tactics:

• Appeal to the cute: children and animals sell.
  
• When possible, use anecdote, not data, to make your point, and search as hard as you have to to find the anecdote that tugs hardest at the heartstrings.
  
• When you must use statistics, present those with the most shock value. (Think "global warming" - oops, I mean "anthropogenic climate change" here.) Bury those that don't bear out your point.
  
• People have short memories and little capacity for reasoning, take advantage of these facts.
  
• Use the Watergate school of journalism to help you: journalists have seen the Promised Land of Changing History, and they want it bad. If you can pitch your story as an opportunity to let a journalist Change History, that journalist will probably go to the mat shouting your point and shouting down opposing ones.
  

Et cetera. It's not that conservatives "don't care" about sustainability; it's that they, like most humans, do have memories, they do have the ability to reason, and they resent and distrust organizations and people who seem to be trying to make an end run around them.

"Issues of Sustainability"

Okay, you got me, Anonymous...

I was taking a stroll down Memory Lane this fine morning, rereading old posts of mine, and to my great surprise there's a post down there with FIVE comments! Two are from my old friend Kirbside, but three are from Anonymous, who says, "I'm curious to get your opinion on issues of sustainability." He or she goes on to add,

Sustainability doesn't seem to be a very popular topic among conservatives. There appears to be an attitude that "God will sort it all out", so we don't need to worry about carbon emissions, or resource depletion, or infrastructure renewal, or ecological impacts, or even garbage collection.

...

From what I gather, it goes something like this: existing business structures don't want to change their established methods, so they oppose sustainable technologies and deny deny deny environmental impacts. They then convince the God-wing of the party that it's all hogwash and that God is in control.

I -get- that. Nobody wants to be forced to do something that is costly. It's up to people to demand sustainable technologies from businesses, to essentially speak with their wallets. The thing I don't get is why Republican/Conservative leaders don't actively promote sustainability, rather than ignore the issue? Why don't they care?

First let me correct a misconception: the "God-wing" is not anti-environment; in fact, serious Christians (I won't speak for other sects) believe that humans are created by God, somehow (many, including me, believe that this creation took place in an incremental fashion - i.e., through evolution, a process likewise created by God), in God's image, with an inescapable duty to be stewards of the rest of Creation. What we conservatives (taking that subgroup of American humanity apart from any "God-wing" stuff) often object to is the contention that the environment is either coequal with or actively trumps human interests. We believe that the human sphere is the business of the human sphere, and that the environment is the backdrop against which we (religious reference coming up) live and move and have our being - a backdrop that adds great value and often beauty, without which the play is impossible to produce, and that must be maintained appropriately, but which is not as important as the actors.

That said, we who believe that God takes an active interest in God's creation do tend to believe that God looks after not just us but our environment (and all aspects of creation, whether or not they benefit or affect humans). But that's not exactly the same as "God will sort it all out," since Christians believe that we are God's hands. (We just don't believe we're God's only hands. We're not that arrogant.)

So - sustainability. Depending on your definition, businesses large and small are all about sustainability; none, except those absurd dot.com "businesses" that mistook an exit strategy for a business plan, intend to put themselves out of business. Therefore it makes no sense for them to kill whatever is their golden goose - to destroy that which makes their business possible. Sometimes it's more clear than others how to create sustained production - in timber, for instance, where it's pretty easy to see that planting trees to replace logged trees helps to maintain production, and a healthy environment for those trees one day to be logged themselves. And often, growth in both knowledge and technology leads to improvement in the area of sustainability; take timber again: hand-cutting used to be the only method available for logging, and trees could be chosen one by one for their grain, size, etc. Then, with mechanized logging, clearcutting was the only efficient means, and ALL trees fell - not pretty, and less sustainable, but necessary to meet demand. Now, it's again becoming possible to do selective logging, which improves the logged forest's health because it more closely mimics nature, but is still capable of meeting demand - partly because on the demand side, engineered wood products are in much wider use than ever before, since growing super-fast-maturing trees, loggable in ten years or so, in farmlike fields, and which are then chipped and made into strong building material, is another innovation of the last few decades.

In oil and gas, it used to be that only the oil that basically bubbled to the surface was produceable. Technology grew with demand, and deeper and deeper resources became reserves (a resource is something you know exists; "reserves" is a subset of resources that denotes produceable resources, and is very closely tied to price). Oil and gas drilling has a small footprint and a small ecological cost, compared with oil and gas refining - but even though refining technology hasn't been allowed to proceed very readily in this country, air quality, for instance, around refineries has drastically improved via technological advances. (Refinery footprints haven't shrunk; I assume this is because refineries know they'll never get land back if they relinquish it, and therefore keep on occupying it whether or not their processes have or could have decreased in size.)

Mining removes bulky material - ore - from often scenic places. That stinks, I say as a person who likes going to scenic places. But coal (for instance) is an overwhelmingly important energy source in this country and elsewhere; it's energy-dense, easy and safe to transport, easy to burn to create electricity. It will continue to be produced until a better thing comes along (and no, solar and wind aren't "better" in any respect that counts in this discussion). Mining companies strip-mine where that's the most efficient way to get at the ore. But erosion problems downstream as well as public relations concerns cause them to enter an area only with a rehabilitation plan in place. And miners' working conditions have dramatically improved as well. There is a societal cost to to mining; but it's not the same cost as it was even fifty years ago.

At this point, Anonymous is hopping up and down, waiting for a chance to point out that many of these changes wouldn't have taken place if not for tighter environmental regulations and collective bargaining and so forth. I think the timing would have been different - probably quite a lot different in some cases - but that these same changes would have taken hold in the absence of governmental and union involvement, if the marketplace had been allowed to work. Here's why:

The capitalist marketplace of the conservative is not just a place where things are bought and sold; it's - very importantly - a marketplace of ideas as well. Good ideas are not judged by some Idea Board; they're evaluated by the innumerable entities, individual and corporate, that make up the marketplace, and the winners are, tautologically, the ones that win. "Organic farming" is an old idea made new again, and in the Western marketplace of ideas, it's taking hold. (It'd be a recipe for global famine if its staunchest supporters got their way and it were implemented everywhere, but heck, what's affluence for if not to indulge your personal preferences? No harm in having organic food in the produce bins and on the shelves, as long as less expensive, high-quality "non-organic" options are available for those who can't afford or don't choose the "organic" stuff.)

Hybrid cars - finally, an option better than the plug-in one! It used to make me crazy that so many electric-car advocates seemed to believe that the magical stuff that comes out of outlets in their homes was free, both to them and to the environment.

And generally improved environmental conditions - this, again, is an idea of the marketplace that has resulted in, for instance, BP's "It's a start" campaign. Regulation has forced more stringent environmental standards (sometimes ridiculously more stringent, down to "below detection limits" for compounds never definitively shown to be harmful), but it's the marketplace that makes companies take the step of doing better than the regs.

If "environmentalists" embraced the idea marketplace (they use it, certainly) and largely abandoned regulation-seeking, there'd be many more conservatives who would join their ranks, working assiduously to bring those ideas to fruition. Who likes the thought of living in nineteenth-century London with its yellow-gray sulfurous fogs? But convince - don't force - and your ideas have sustainable force. Or else they're not worth implementing.

The juvies

My brother-in-law steered me to this blog post about Heinlein's juveniles, presumably to tempt me into sharing my own thoughts. (He must be bored.) I have thoughts. Here they are:

Gosh. Which Heinlein juvie is my favorite? The blog post mentions several that I've enjoyed mightily through the years: Door Into Summer (though it has one creepy element), Have Space Suit, Will Travel (I still quote Shakespeare I learned first from that book), Farmer In the Sky (my mother, a science teacher and not a Heinlein fan, uses that book in an ecology unit she teaches), The Rolling Stones (first of the Heinlein red-headed twins, and my first introduction to twin-banter - great fun!), and Double Star, which I've never thought of as a juvenile. It left out Space Cadet, which I read over and over and over as I considered my eventually relinquished appointment to the Air Force Academy. And Podkayne of Mars, his earliest novel-length story in a girl's voice. And Tunnel In the Sky, and Between Planets. But which is my favorite?

Hmm. All I can say is, it varies. For fun, The Rolling Stones. For technology and sociology, Tunnel In the Sky. For heroism (which we all know by now is a big touchstone of mine), Between Planets. For foreshadowing of the infamous Three-Stage Heinlein Character, hmm, tie between Between Planets and Podkayne. For politics, Citizen of the Galaxy. For totally unrealized romance, Have Space Suit, Will Travel. For insight into an unfamiliar field (acting), Double Star, if juvie it is.

But if I had to pick a favorite Heinlein opus, it might be "If This Goes On...," a novella from his so-called "Future History" series that appeared in The Past Through Tomorrow. Johnny has it all: he's a first-stage Heinlein character with a second-stage buddy, he's Galahad with Lilith tempting him all the time (to mix my metaphors), he's no-nonsense competent but a complete doofus. He's great. And throw in a Moon Is A Harsh Mistress-style rebellion against a charismatic Stranger In a Strange Land-style pseudo-religious leader, and baby, you've got plot.

But what the non-Heinlein fan out there may be tumbling to is that Heinlein tended to stick to certain themes. Uh-huh. What of it? Joseph Bottum the blogger, referring to the ever-recurring theme of kinky sex (or maybe not kinky exactly, but certainly highly promiscuous) in Heinlein books, says, "As one commentator on Amazon notes: 'Robert Heinlein is a great author. But let’s face it. Sometimes you want to a read a good Heinlein book where characters do *not* spend most of their time having sex with their computers, children, mothers, and female clones of themselves.'" And here I depart from the Amazon commenter.

It's not that I want to read more promiscuous and/or kinky sex scenes, believe me. It's uncomfortable enough that it was my dad who introduced me to Heinlein! No, I disagree with the commenter's contention that Heinlein is a "great author." Heinlein himself, from what I gather (and I've gathered quite a lot about Heinlein over the years; his remarkable wife is the so-far-very-poorly-followed pattern for my life), would have laughed raucously at that statement. He considered himself to be a good storyteller - an artist, yes, because it was his aim and his craft to cause his readers to experience emotions of his choosing ("pity and terror," he said); that was how he defined "artist," scorning abstract forms of art as "pseudo-intellectual masturbation." Not sure I fully agree with him there, having just been pretty ooged-out by an O'Keefe exhibit at the San Francisco MOMA. But he saw himself not as "great," but as working.

If Heinlein has importance in any area other than science fiction, where his contributions are unquestioned, it should be in his values. He was a family man who couldn't have children, so he wrote (laughably ignorantly, but with great commitment and earnestness) about the centrality of the family to human society. He wrote characters who purported to be lazy but were only happy when they were working on something, and his life story indicates that he wrote from experience there; he was, by example if not by statement, a staunch advocate of a strong work ethic and (this by word and example) an unwillingness to accept charity or the dole. He believed - or I infer that he believed, based on his writing about it all the time, and on his very long marriage to his third wife after two brief youthful marriages - in commitment in relationships; even the most promiscuous sex in his books tends to result in marriage - lots of marriage. Marriage to lots of people. Almost nobody in a Heinlein book is fornicating, or not for long at any rate.

And he believed in our future. He talked boldly about humanity as the toughest, meanest, smartest critter in the universe - stated that if we were ever to meet our match, all right, we might die in the encounter, but we wouldn't die with our hands in our pockets. He believed that we should try, try as hard as we could, to spread ourselves around, to make the human race unkillable by undertaking a willing Diaspora that would scatter us too widely to be wiped out by anything. Technologically speaking, this goal is far out of reach. And frankly, I'm married to a man who wouldn't want to be a pioneer, so that even if it were possible today, I'm constrained to stay here on the cool green hills of Earth (that's a Heinleinism, for the unfamiliar). But what a goal: to defy the cold equations (not a Heinleinism but a science fiction staple) of natural law, to outlive our own extinction!

Last, I think Heinlein was an unwilling Deist. I infer the "unwilling" part, certainly. But his writing and his life seem to suggest that he wasn't like Houdini, looking for a "supernatural" survival of the spirit beyond the body; that he wasn't like Sagan, proudly declaring his atheism as he lay dying. Perhaps he was Christian; he did, in any case, appreciate the power of the Christianity story. But I think it's clear that he either did believe or couldn't help but believe that there was a watchmaker. I read my first Heinlein juvie when I was perhaps eleven or twelve, if memory serves; because I was exposed early, frequently, and comprehensively, I sometimes go back to the Watchmaker myself. Does it interfere with my Christianity? It sure does... but at least it means that even in my darkest valleys, while I may not perceive myself to be walking with my Brother Christ, I do perceive that the universe is on some level benign and purposeful. I hope that Heinlein died in at least that confidence.

I need a hero

Via Omnivoracious, a review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

The first thing we see in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is the face of the hero (Daniel Radcliffe) filling the screen, looking grim. As a row of flashbulbs goes off, he flinches, like a criminal exposed. ... [W]hat of Harry? Well, he has committed no crime, so there’s no call for a brooding mug shot. And he’s long been a star of the wizard firmament, so there’s no reason to drape him in fresh celebrity. In short, we are left to ponder this dour and heavy style, and to wonder what sort of film—and what new trouble with Harry—it foretells.

Spoken like a man who knows nothing about the wizarding world. I mean nothing - including the last ten minutes of the previous Potter film. In short, we are left to ponder this puckish and condescending style, and to wonder what sort of reviewer of an installment in an unabashed film franchise fails to realize, or at any rate to note, the ways in which this installment fits with its predecessors.

I'm sure Mr. A. Lane has already been inundated with hate-mail from young teenagers on this point. But I ain't no teenager, I am a Potter fan, and in spite of my undoubted redundancy, I'd like to add my two cents.

Mr. Lane. Harry flinches because that scene comes on the heels of his godfather's (perhaps more accurately, his surrogate father's) violent death and his own brief possession by Voldemort. Harry was a "star of the wizard firmament"... until he witnessed, and testified to all and sundry, the rebirth of Voldemort at the end of Goblet of Fire, at which point he became an object of scorn to the Ministry of Magic and a lot of the wizarding public. Get your background straight, goofball. If you found the film unconvincing, say that - but don't review it as if it's intended to stand alone, because it's not. Even for first-timers, it's intended as an entree into the Potter collection, not as a one-off.

As for my own review, then: I looooved it. I saw it first at midnight on opening day with my twelve-year-old, who hadn't read the book; he was a little confused, but more by the adolescent romance stuff than by the plot twists. (Side note: I'm loving these midnight premieres! It's VERY fun indeed to get up in the middle of the night and go to a movie. And the frisson of post-midnight caffeine from the big old Diet Coke only adds to my ability to suspend my disbelief!) I came out of the theater declaring it the best Potter so far, and absolutely chomping at the bit for #7 and #8.

I saw it a second time a few days later with my midnight Twilight buddy, who had read the book at least as long ago as I did, and at last achieved a little distance. A little. The Potter universe is so fully realized by now that it's no effort at all for a fan like me (meaning, I've seen all the movies and own the last one, continue to re-watch the earlier ones at my parents' house - because my dad's a bigger fan than I am - and have read and reread the books, but not committed them to memory) to achieve that suspension of disbelief; Hogwarts is familiar territory, the Burrow a second home, Neville Longbottom (who has all of maybe two lines in this movie, but I'm glad they kept those two lines in) an old friend I'm just a little too busy to sit down with right now, Quidditch a game I seem to remember watching just last season - right?

So it's hard for me to be objective, because the Potterverse is a place I'd really like to be, even with the danger of persecution and death and all. But I'll say this: This movie found a way to reveal a great deal of the book's internal action. Compare it to the horror known as Dune, in which every thought (of course the thoughts in Dune were vital to the plot, so they had to be revealed somehow) was voiced over: Half-Blood Prince took some significant liberties with faithfulness to the book in order to move the viewer through plot points that otherwise happened only in, say, Harry's head. Oh, I know that this movie could take those liberties because the franchise is solid, and the Dune people knew that they were up against insane fans and had to stick as closely to the book as possible (just as the first Potter film, and Twilight too, had to), or else alienate those insane fans who were likely to be the film's biggest money. Suffice it to say I'm very glad that at this point in the Potter narrative, when so much in the books does happen either in thoughts or out of sight, the film franchise is strong enough to maintain enough creative control over how to bring out the most important points.

Another saving grace (that phrase overstates the case, but it's the best I can do) is that there's been enough time now since the publication of Half-Blood Prince (the book) that those of us who didn't reread the book in preparation for the movie are not all that clear on the details of those plot points. I came out of the theater both times contented that all necessary items had been hit, that all necessary setups had been set up - but not remembering for certain whether they'd been respectively hit and set up as they were in the book. It was all good; the next movie can begin with impunity.

[NOTE: Spoilers below, if there's such a thing as a Harry Potter spoiler.]

Things I loved: the kids had a chance to try out some fairly subtle acting chops, and they did well at it. The teenage angst stuff that confused my kid so much was spot-on: Hermione's pain at Ron's dalliance with Lavender, Cormac's overconfident vileness (oh my Lord, was he vile), Draco's terror and doubt warring with his pride and arrogance... And a point that I thought the movie actually did better than the book: Harry and Ginny repeatedly encounter one another here and there, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design, and the viewer can see the attraction growing between them. More: at least twice, Ginny becomes the first one to break from the group (of course we all know that Harry stands alone a lot) to go to Harry at times of danger or distress. We start to see how it is that this minor character, Ginny, might actually be the love of his life - not a pretty feebly depicted cardboard cutout, as she is throughout the books (yes, including most of Half-Blood Prince), but the witch who's good enough, brave enough, interesting enough to ensnare Harry Potter.

There's scene between Harry and Ginny that's actually shocking. Harry's standing on a landing of one of the Burrow's many stairways, and Ginny, coming up the stairs, notices that one of his shoes is untied. She gestures at it and murmurs, "Shoelace," then, before Harry can do anything about it, kneels at his feet and ties his shoe. Watching it is almost like walking in on their wedding night - it's wrong somehow, too personal, to see her tenderness and his wonderment - even though they don't touch any inch of one another's skin, they don't even brush sleeves in passing, at any time in the scene.

So let's get to Harry. In this movie, Harry (who looks nothing like Daniel Radcliffe any more, oddly enough) takes up the mantle that's been waiting for him: he's the Chosen One, the only one who can destroy Voldemort; he knows it, he accepts it, and he actively participates in it. He has no idea how he's supposed to accomplish the impossible - and at the end of the movie his despair over that lack is palpable - but he's a real hero, not going forward without fear but going forward in spite of fear. Heroism, thrust upon Harry in the first four movies, reluctantly chosen in the fifth, is something he walks right into, bespectacled eyes wide open, in this movie.

Heroism is so rare in movies, especially Harry's brand: Mission Impossible without the deus ex machina, which is odd, considering that magic ought to be the ultimate deus ex machina. Harry faces killing odds without more than a brief physical flinch, because he understands (or believes he does) that the purpose of his life is to lay it down for his friends. (I certainly hope that phrase sounds familiar.) There's a similarity between Radcliffe's portrayal of Harry, which I find utterly true to Rowling's writing of him, and the My Sister's Keeper story: Harry believes in every cell of his body that he was spared death for just one purpose, to kill the creature who killed his parents and who threatens his world.

At the end of the movie, he's appalled to learn (or to think he's learned) that Dumbledore died in vain: the Horcrux is a fake. But what he doesn't yet know is that Dumbledore's death serves Dumbledore's own greater purposes, that ultimately the war can't be won without it. And that's also what Harry doesn't know about his own life: that it's not just the endgame that counts. His saving Ginny when he was twelve, she eleven, not only destroys Riddle's diary (and, we find in Half-Blood Prince, a Horcrux) but also, eventually, gives his life a new and happy meaning and focus. God writes in crooked lines.

I wish I could quit you, Lipstick...

First, a wee post to acknowledge the fact that I'd planned to let this little blog slip into an obscurity even greater than it enjoyed even in its heyday, such as it was.

And now, for something (almost) completely different. Politics is depressing me; Pres. Obama is outdoing my most pessimistic expectations in both his ham-fistedness and his no-longer-masked socialist tendencies and policy prescriptions. And there's a new Harry Potter movie coming out, and New Moon, the first Twilight sequel, is in post-production. So on to pop culture!

How to stimulate an economy

Again with the NPR. Today I was listening to a segment that was billed as a "report card" of sorts on how the "gigantic stimulus bill" was working out in the actual economy - "All Things Considered," I want to say. This report card focused on three areas of the economy: energy, health care, and government services - noting in passing that "stimulating" aid to the government services sector represented "one of the biggest" pieces of the pie. (I have to wonder - no, I mean I really have to wonder, since the information isn't public in this, the most transparent administration ever - just where in the Top Ten it sits.)

Let's start there, at the three sectors NPR chose to highlight. Energy: okay, that's possibly a good choice, since I gather that Americans spend somewhere between seven and ten percent of their household income, on average, on energy, and because the energy industry has undergone a ginormous runup followed by an even more ginormous crash (my family is living through said crash right now; it is indeed MORE ginormous than the runup). But NPR, in what I immediately and confidently assumed would be its tireless effort to promote the Obama "stimulus" plan as an actual source of help to the economy, chose to cover not the great bulk of the energy sector - traditional energy sources, that is - but the teeny-weeny wind-and-solar bit. Apparently wind and solar providers and facilitators are absolutely thrilled with the President's plan as well as the quick disbursement of funds therefrom.

Of course they are. Stimulating? Certainly - to the maybe three million people worldwide who work in renewable energy - directly or for suppliers. (Note: my source calls its "2.3 million" number, as of last July, "in all likelihood a conservative figure." It doesn't say why the figure's conservatism is likely. Seems to me it's just as likely that it'd be a rather optimistic number, especially considering that the figure includes "indirect" employment in renewable energy, meaning firms that might or might not actually provide renewable energy services if the market turned against them.)

NPR's grade for Obama so far? S for Stimulating. Let's move on to health care.

Datum (or, as some might call it, "anecdote"): a free clinic in Seattle's Pike Place Market. The stimulus money arrived just in time, according to the report, to keep the doors open - and what do you know, now they're hiring! Yes, it's true! Two doctors "and support staff" in unnumbered hordes (or possibly a horde of one, I'm thinking, since the horde was in fact unnumbered and referred to only as "support staff"). Why? Because they're seeing so much more walk-in traffic from people who have lost their jobs and, with them, their employer-provided health care. So the stimulus bill has "created" something in excess of two jobs in that clinic - jobs utterly unnecessary if the clientele of the clinic had jobs themselves sufficient to pay for their own health care. And those jobs will be, or at any rate, should be, in jeopardy when those clients do go back to work.

NPR's grade? An enthusiastic S for Stimulating. On to government services.

Is there really any need to discuss it? Naturally using tax money and horrific debt to create and support government jobs and jobs dependent on government, such as the much-touted roadwork and construction of federal buildings, will receive NPR's unironic S for Stimulating. But they did have a reason for choosing this economic sector. Even some NPR devotees must feel a little uncomfortable about the whole robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul nature of "stimulating" the economy by creating government makework, so NPR had to address the point somehow; the obvious way to do so was to present a case, at least one compelling case, that would either tug at the heartstrings or engage the common sense bone, wherever it is, to prove that these jobs aren't makework after all, but real, good, sustainable jobs. So their example was Chicago road maintenance.

They began by noting that Illinois hadn't had the money (read: tax base; can't imagine why that'd be short of what was needed) to do the necessary work on its potholed roads. The stimulus bill's money apparently results in projections of an OK construction season, which the newsreader was quick to point out stood out in sharp relief against the 20% unemployment in all types of construction (versus the 8-ish percent unemployment overall at present). Why the fellow thought it'd make his point better to emphasize the "all types of construction" bit, I don't know; seems to me it only undermines his argument. As if it needed undermining; it's, again, specious to say that only through the Obama plan could these roads be repaired. If Illinois simply had enough tax revenue - voila, the problem is (or could be, provided Illinois legislators had their priorities straight - not necessarily a slam dunk, I admit) solved. Real jobs for real people, real taxpayers - that's stimulating. Road jobs that will dry up as soon as the money does - possibly short-term relief for those folks, but the opportunity cost remains uncalculated.

And that's the rub. Opportunity cost: we'll never know what any alternative to the Obama wealth-redistribution/power grab could have accomplished, because all such are lost to us now.

Say again?

So last night's speech on the state of the economy. First impression: We're going to do everything at once: recover from this downturn while simultaneously hitting every item on our wish list! And how will we pay for it? Well, defense will be cut a lot, and the rich people will pay for the rest. After all, they have an endless supply of money, so taking more from them in taxes won't in any way affect their expenditures elsewhere. (There's a little straw in my restatement, for the sake of illustration, but show me where else we were told the money's supposed to come from. When the President said that he and his advisors had already started going through the budget "line by line" and had found places to cut $2 trillion over the next ten years - by the way, always extend your time horizon too far to be checked, and don't say whether your cuts are cuts or simple lower increases than currently planned - the only places he mentioned were defense and "big agribusiness," if memory serves.)

In other words, typical (post-Cold War) Democrat.

But then Pres. Obama reached the part where he "challenged" every American to commit to at least one year of higher education, and I was brought up short. Who the bleeping bleep does he think he is, telling me I should seek more education?

It so happens that I want more education. But I want it for me, not to fulfill some putative "duty to my country," as an earlier generation's or a different nation's politicians might have told me it was my duty to produce more children.

If this nation was founded on anything at all, it was founded on the right of individuals to chart the course of their lives. My high school government teacher, the gifted and beloved Mr. Grover, may he rest in peace, illustrated it in time-tested fashion by swinging his arm and walking toward a student - demonstrating his right to swing his arm until the point where it intersected with the student's nose. Of course, the principle he was demonstrating was the limit of an individual's rights, but whether he intended it or not, he was also demonstrating the right to do something other people consider silly or stupid.

Unfortunately for interlocuters who might insist that education is an unalloyed good or that its lack is costly to society, Heinlein, in his late work Friday, posits an independent California in which the government has noted that college grads make a premium over non-college grads. The inequity is quickly corrected by awarding everyone a bachelor's degree, and there's great rejoicing. Except that now, it's being observed that people with master's degrees are making more than those with mere bachelor's degrees, so there's a ballot initiative in process to upgrade everybody to a master's, backdated some years. What's the purpose of "challenging" everyone to seek more education than they have at present? If they're adequately educated to do their current jobs, what's the plan? The newly unemployed aren't lacking education; they're lacking jobs because the jobs aren't there at present. Prior to this downturn, unemployment was below the level considered to be "full employment"; education doesn't seem to be the problem. So this "challenge" does nothing except up the ante for what's required for a given job. Why? To provide more jobs for teachers? Are they pounding the pavement in disproportionate numbers?

In other words, from both a practical and a philosophical standpoint, it's a stupid idea. Encouraging education - sure, why not? While we're at it, let's encourage fewer abortions and more fruits and vegetables in the diet. But either to mandate these things (which Obama stopped short of doing) or to present them as a "duty" (which he did imply) is overstepping government's proper bounds.

I agree with everything but the last bit

Here, Charles Krauthammer discusses the recent (stunning, wondrous) provincial elections in Iraq. A summary:

There was no Election Day violence. Security was handled by Iraqi forces with little U.S. involvement. A fabulous bazaar of 14,400 candidates representing 400 parties participated, yielding results highly favorable to both Iraq and the United States.

Iraq moved away from religious sectarianism toward more secular nationalism. "All the parties that had the words 'Islamic' or 'Arab' in their names lost," noted Middle East expert Amir Taheri. "By contrast, all those that had the words 'Iraq' or 'Iraqi' gained."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki went from leader of a small Islamic party to leader of the "State of Law Party," campaigning on security and secular nationalism. He won a smashing victory. His chief rival, a more sectarian and pro-Iranian Shiite religious party, was devastated. Another major Islamic party, the pro-Iranian Sadr faction, went from 11 percent of the vote to 3 percent, losing badly in its stronghold of Baghdad. The Islamic Fadhila party that had dominated Basra was almost wiped out.

The once-dominant Sunni party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and the erstwhile insurgency was badly set back. New grass-roots tribal ("Awakening") and secular Sunni leaders emerged.

In other words, the garden we planted back in 2003, beset in times and places with marauding insects, hailstorms, thieves and ill-wishers, appears to be taking root. Krauthammer notes that - as always in the Middle East - Iraq is not out of danger; he points to three possible threats: military coup a la too much of the post-colonial world, strongman a la Chavez, and collapse due to a premature withdrawal of U.S. support. Iraqis, he reminds us, are responsible for ensuring that neither of the first two occurs; but we are responsible for ensuring that the third doesn't. Rather, President Obama, the will-o-the-wisp, the weathervane, is. Hurry up, Iraqis; you may not have much time to adjust to our absence.

Krauthammer ends his piece thus:

When you become president of the United States you inherit its history, even the parts you would have done differently. Obama might argue that American sacrifices in Iraq were not worth what we achieved. But for the purposes of current and future policy, that is entirely moot. Despite Obama's opposition, America went on to create a small miracle in the heart of the Arab Middle East. President Obama is now the custodian of that miracle. It is his duty as leader of the nation that gave birth to this fledgling democracy to ensure that he does nothing to undermine it.

The only part I take issue with is the "small miracle." American policy under Bush appears to have brought about an unprecedented miracle in Iraq, and in record time. I only hope that when the President is alone, he's both humble and sensible enough to realize the magnitude of what's happening there, and - his short public statement about the elections, "[Iraqis] should continue the process of Iraqis taking responsibility for their future," which Krauthammer correctly calls "ungenerous," notwithstanding - appreciates and accepts his responsibility for this child he didn't father.

Yes, I know I've grossly mixed my metaphors. Sue me.

Well, it's "change" at any rate...

What's this about the census?

As required by the Constitution, every ten years the federal government undertakes a massive effort to count and gather information about Americans. The information impacts hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions about federal funding and policy. But most importantly, it will be the basis for the redistricting which determines Congressional representation.

The White House has proposed that the director of the Census, a Commerce Department employee, report to the White House. The White House contends this is no big deal.

"No big deal": the decision about whether to perform an actual count or use a sampling method, for instance. Mmm-hmm.

On the topic of sampling methods, I'm sure we're all familiar with the Lancet's excess-deaths study from 2006, now quite thoroughly discredited. This is the result of improper application of statistics, and particularly agenda-driven improper application of statistics. There are situations wherein it's impossible to perform an actual count of something or someones; where that's true (and I believe it was indeed true in Iraq), those hoping for true answers ought to be especially cautious in their methods, since the factors that make a real count impossible can also contribute to out-of-whack sampling error (as in the Lancet study - and this is giving them a lot of benefit of the doubt, as it seems that the misstatements in that report are all in support of the principal author's personal views).

This is the census. The basis for allocation of Congress representation. Should it be contained in the White House? Would Bush have been applauded for making this move - or vilified (more)?

Of means and ends

I'm far from the first to suggest that the American Left takes a page from Marx. (Far from the first.) I do try to avoid histrionics about "Democrat==Commie" and so forth, but when evidence like this presents itself:

The health care crisis means we must have Daschle and make an exception to the new raised ethics bar. The financial meltdown means that we must have Geithner and make an exception to the new raised ethics bar. The war in Afghanistan and the comfortability level of Secretary Gates means we must make an exception to the new raised ethics bar and have Deputy Secretary Lynn. The vital need to restore the Constitution (Whoops! Renditions, FISA, the Patriot Act, and maybe Guantanmo are, well, still here.) means we must make an exception to the new raised ethics bar and have Attorney General Holder. So what happened to Bill Richardson? His value to the nation in times of crisis did not justify an exception?

Now, this is Victor Davis Hanson's interpretation of events in the Obama Administration, and so we can infer partisanship. But what reasonable interpretations are possible? Occam's Razor gives us, I think, two: that President Obama called on these people because he thought they were best for the jobs and was willing to overlook their ethics issues as long as they didn't reach the public eye, or that President Obama owed or felt he owed some plum positions to these people (and was willing to overlook their ethics issues as long as they didn't reach the public eye). Neither one is very admirable.

And then we have The New Editor's Tom Elia, who sums it all up thusly:

At the dawn of the Obama Administration we have witnessed: four high-level appointees blow up over various issues, tax and otherwise (Richardson, Daschel, and Killefer get axed; Geitner stays); the appointment of at least 12 lobbyists to positions in the Administration -- in direct contradiction of campaign promises; a pork-laden economic stimulus bill without precedent in US history; and the reversal of campaign positions concerning controversial policies like rendition.

Let me say that I don't believe President Obama and Congressional Democrats are the only guilty parties with regard to the ridiculous "stimulus" situation. Congressional Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for going along to get along.

But there are two points I want to make about these observations. First, the subtext Hanson sees is obvious: if so many Obama appointees have ethical "challenges," shall we say, then how many whose lives aren't in the spotlight must have them? And second, and this harks back to my post on functionalism, when one openly allows the end to justify the means by making decisions that clearly place ends ahead of all other considerations (this is giving President Obama the benefit of the doubt by assuming that he really did believe he was choosing the best people for these positions), one runs the risk of being reasonably accused of ruthless Marxist-like pragmatism.

(The difference I see between these appointee missteps and the Bush Administration's Patriot Act, or better I should say Democrat pundits' response to the Patriot Act - that it was stomping all over our civil liberties, etc., etc., using fear as a motivator to convince everybody that we needed to allow the end to justify the means - is that objectively, the Patriot Act hasn't actually stomped all over our civil liberties, whereas admitted tax cheats really have stomped all over the US Tax Code. For instance.)

UPDATE: But wait - there's more! From the LA Times (to my surprise): "In Washington's culture, unlike the lives of most normal obviously naive Americans, that's [that is, questions of right and wrong] hardly ever the issue. It's about what works. It's all about strategy."

Where is the whirlwind?

This week is the seventh anniversary of Daniel Pearl's murder. (via Instapundit)

Do you remember when it happened? I should say, "when he was slowly beheaded on video," just in case the name rings a bell but the details escape you? I do. I felt suddenly numb; I said to my husband, "They've sown the wind now." As Mr. Pearl's father says in the Wall Street Journal editorial I'm linking,

Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

And yet even in the immediate aftermath, the signs were all there that there would be no lasting outrage, no repudiation of the fundamental error of placing Pearl's killers and, oh, let's just say Israel, or possibly Bush's America, on the same moral footing. The moral-equivalency trap. No sense that being poor and downtrodden was not an excuse for being terrorists. No acknowledgement that being Palestinian, for instance, doesn't afford tacit permission for a person to strap on a vest full of C4 and walk into a bus station. No whirlwind.

Instead, we got a little horror - how not? - followed by a lot of explanation and excuse: what other choice did Pearl's killers have, after all? They needed their message to be heard, and no one was listening, so in a sense Pearl is a martyr not for civilized humanity but to the inexplicable vagaries and far-too-explicable injustices of the global information marketplace. He died so that they could be heard. Terribly sad, but in this unbalanced world...

No. He died because we silly Westerners believe that really, down deep, everybody's basically nice; some people are "driven" to "acts" of evil, but to call the people evil is un-nuanced, simplistic, plebeian. My parents took this tack when I was a kid; even right before the spanking, the line was, "I love you but I dislike your behavior right now."

That hair-splitting was absolutely true when my parents used it. And parenting is perhaps a good place for it. In geopolitics - do we really have to mind the tender sensibilities of those bent on our destruction, either retail (like Pearl, one at a time) or wholesale (via violent jihad, as its proponents understand it)? Is it not appropriate, and a whole lot less patronizing, to assume that our enemies are grownups, capable of hearing and understanding our outrage, and then to evaluate their response at face value - that is, as if they are capable of saying what they mean and doing what they say? Is diplomacy always a game of metaphor and hyperbole?

We all know it isn't. But they, whoever they are in whatever era, know that we prefer to think that "We will bury you!" doesn't mean, "We want and intend to destroy you!" but rather, "We have chosen a different path and think yours is lame!" And they, whoever they are, have learned that they can use this sweet propensity of ours against us, by using the metaphor and the hyperbole to soften us up so that we won't react, or won't react in time, when they actually do what they say they're going to.

In other words, global diplomacy is a lot more complicated than the Left seems to think, because sometimes - not every time, but sometimes - there really is an enemy, there really is no common cause to which to appeal - or at least not without a cost too high to pay, there really is the will to do evil. And no amount of negotiation, no matter how "high-level," can change these facts. Daniel Pearl didn't "pay with his life" to bring this lesson home; his life was not what he was offering, so we could say he "paid" only in the sense that the victim of a robbery "pays" the robber. Daniel Pearl died, innocent and out of his time, and from his death we should have learned about enemies and evil. Did we?

New template - someday I'll customize!

It's funny; I've built (let's see now) somewhere around a dozen websites for one organization or another, never using Frontpage or any other spawn of Satan like that... yet I just blindly accept Blogspot's templates. The fast food of layout.

Sigh. Someday I'll have time to dink around with it.

Turn back, O man...

...as opposed to, "Go West, young man."

Chicago Boyz, a great economics blog, raises the question of whether California has passed an important tipping point:

I think a threshold or tipping point exists in the ratio between the political power of those who pay taxes and those who consume taxes directly. After that tipping point is reached, those who pay taxes become the economic slaves of those who consume taxes.

The power of unions is intrinsic to the question; a union aggregates the concerns as well as the influence of however many members it has toward particular political and economic aims. Shannon Love, one of the boyz, notes that

California has ~2.3 million unionized government workers and ~18.6 million civilians. With so many people organized with a laser-like focus on increasing taxes and spending, the private working citizens of California find it nearly impossible to prevent government workers from voting their own paychecks.

And more:

As far as the state government is concerned, people in the private sector work merely so that they can be taxed for the benefit of the tax consumers. They’ve entered a condition not unlike like that of pre-industrial serfs.

Of course no one is being whipped, but in effect an ordinary citizen of California cannot get their desires for reduced state spending implemented due to the disproportionate power of the State’s employees and allied interest. It appears now that the government unions will not accept any solution to California’s budget crisis except increased taxes in a declining economy. Ordinary citizens have no choice but to either emigrate or just lie there and take it.

I'm conflicted. On one hand, my family and my husband's all live in California; we'd love to return there if we could, not just so that we could see them all more often but so that we could stop spending so much money and vacation time on our too-short, too-infrequent visits. Furthermore, California really is just about the best place in the country for people like us: pleasant climate, beautiful scenery, cosmopolitan all the way down to many of the small towns but still with lots and lots of wilderness ranging from unspoiled to complete-with-cabins for those who want flush toilets, all kinds of outdoor and indoor recreation readily accessible. But on the other hand... I don't really want our household to work for (sorry, bro) my brother's. Real estate, though down from recent years, is still too expensive for us to consider committing income to a mortgage when we have so little control over how much of that income will never hit our pockets.

From the Sacramento Bee, I see that Schwartzeneggar's proposal to have all nonessential State workers take one day off every other week, accruing vacation time but not pay for that twice-monthly furlough, has been axed by the State Controller as being outside the Executive's authority. And here, the Bee speaks with a labor leader from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) about what's "on the table" for labor negotiations in California's current serious budget crisis:

So what's changed [that Ms. Walker sounds "upbeat" about upcoming negotiations]?
Well, we've been trying to be part of the solution all along. But having the controller validate that furloughing isn't legal helps. Maybe now the administration is ready to sit down and have the hard conversation.

...
And money will be part of the "hard conversation"?
It hasn't been so far, but it has to be (now).

What about furloughs?
That I don't know. Certainly you have to recognize it's not something we'd bring to the table, but we're not opposed to talking about it. People need to recognize that we're not just people who take from the general fund. We're taxpayers, too. We understand what's at stake.

So are you saying that holding the line in terms of pay would be considered a win, given the state's money troubles?
That would be good, wouldn't it?

Emphasis mine. I don't get how we reconcile the last two Q&As: "We're taxpayers too, not just feeding at the public trough," and "It'd be good if our pay can stay exactly the same."

This is a loooooong post. But I love California, and its condition today saddens and frustrates me. Sigh.

That which works

Back in oh, freshman year of college or so, I had to do a paper on an important psychologist, with emphasis on his or her philosophy of treatment. Not wanting to go with the obvious, I chose William James, functionalist, who summed up his own therapeutic philosophy as "doing that which works." I'm a fan of that kind of thinking in many cases, but I do think it needs to be tempered by sane judgment and ethics. President Obama is taking a functionalist approach, it appears:

In practice, we know what this [Obama's statement was "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works"] means: Obama wants more federal spending, more federal regulation, more federal mandates, and more federal prohibitions. It means the president—like all presidents—wants more power.

And objecting that the Constitution limits his power, or that more federal or presidential power is inherently corrupting or destructive—that’s out of line. The only legitimate question to ask about the new powers the president wants is “whether it works.”

But that raises another question: Works for whom?

Tim Carney's question isn't the only one. Parents and schools could make a case for corporal punishment's "working" because yes, conditioning does actually "work" in terms of specific behavior change; does that make spanking, caning, hitting with a belt, ruler, or wooden spoon the right way to change a child's behavior? Or is it simply the expedient (and sometimes most satisfying) way, with possibly harmful longer-term consequences? (Not intending to get into a spanking debate; it was just the first example that springs to my mind. My parents spanked, wooden spoon method usually, and not frequently or as their first choice; they are kind and thoughtful people who believed with all their hearts that (a) they were acting in our best interests, and (b) they would do us worse psychological damage if they struck with a hand, because it'd personalize the action. My husband and I don't spank, which makes discipline of our children very challenging and repetitive sometimes, but we believe the research is in and have made our choice.)

So my question is not "Works for whom?" but "At what cost?" We've just been through seven years of argument about the cost of Bush's foreign policy decisions to our status in the world, our national identity, the Constitution... Are we supposed to pass on that question when the maker of the policy is not Bush?

From a CBC News article, first one I found with an image worthy of the day. Congratulations, Mr. Obama, and God bless you and the United States. You're now entrusted with the hardest job in the world. All we can ask of you is that you wake up every day determined to do that job to the best of your ability.

Just a reminder...

...which I sincerely hope will not be required by my side of the aisle: Andy Levy's To-Don't list. An excerpt:

DON’T make it personal. We don’t need another Derangement Syndrome. We don’t need people doing things like emphasizing Obama’s middle name in a derogatory fashion. How anyone would think that’s beneficial to their cause, or to the country as a whole, is beyond me. Also, it’s not even clever. Neither are smushwords like BusHitler, or sillywords like Rethuglicans and Dhimmicrats.
...
DON’T use the word “divisive.” At this point, all that word means is “You disagree with me,” and the English language gets mangled enough these days.
...[and finally:]...
And finally, DON’T use the fact that many on the left behaved abominably for the past eight years as an excuse to behave the same way. America needs adults. And if it bothered you when they did it, it’s a good sign that you shouldn’t do it.

The husband and I got into quite an argument last night about the outgoing administration, I maintaining that Bush had been treated so abominably by the "loyal opposition" and its enablers in the media that it was impossible to tell what the American public's independent opinion of his policies and actions at the end of his tenure would have been, and my husband correctly, but infuriatingly, pointing out that BDS, ridiculous and unjustified as it is, was nonetheless the card the Bush administration was dealt and that it would live forever in infamy for not having done better against it. In other words, my husband believes that the Republican party over the last eight years managed to lose everything - House, Senate, White House, conservatives, moderates, everybody but the quixotic such as myself - because Bush didn't effectively get the party's message out. I believe that no Republican could have done so. He believes that a reincarnated Reagan could have. I don't know whether that's true; Reagan's time was two decades ago and lots has changed, not least the average age (and therefore era) of the media folk who run the 24-hour news cycle (another difference between our time and Reagan's).

But Levy's point, and it's a better one than either mine or my husband's, is that all of it now is history, and that Republicans must remember to act like the grownups they are, no matter how much we'd like to give in to our inner child as the other side has been doing for eight years.

And that's all I have to say about that. Phthththbthh.

Maybe things ain't so bad after all...

...if CBS thinks $35 is a "shoestring" budget for a home-cooked dinner.

The menu?

Menu

• Beet Salad with Crushed Pistachios & Soft Goat Cheese
  
• Lamb Ragu with Rigatoni and Fresh Ricotta
  
• Greek Yogurt with Blood Oranges, Honey & Mint
  

Ahem. Let's start with the premise: that in a time of economic downturn, recession, financial catastrophe - take your pick - $35 constitutes an acceptably low dinner budget for a family of (I'm guessing, based on quantities) four. As several commenters in the (now closed) comment string point out, this dollar amount totals almost $13,000 a year - for dinners only. Whew! Some shoestring.

And next, the food choices: First let me say that I'd eat this dinner - oh, yes. It sounds delicious. But it doesn't sound like the way to train a palate, particularly a palate on a budget. When I say "train," I'm not talking about training someone to be a food critic, or an Epicure (God help us all if that horrible heresy is returning); I'm talking about raising children who will eat things. All kinds of things. This menu has, I freely admit, "all kinds of things" - and for every child I've ever known, would result in an awful dinner debacle and nonstop post-dinner begging for a "snack," because the child wouldn't eat half enough to feel satisfied until bedtime. Fights all night? Not my idea of a great evening, no matter how much this menu tries to promise that budget constraints needn't mean any kind of pain.

Here's a problem we have with our children: one "doesn't like bread." "It's too dry," he says, but won't use any kind of condiment or moist filling in a sandwich. Hence he rails against sandwiches for lunch. Of the three, only one eats macaroni and cheese in any form; the other two want, respectively, plain noodles with nothing on them and noodles with butter and grated Parmiggiano. All will eat lettuce and certain other salad veggies - but only one will eat only one kind of dressing. All will eat certain hot veggies - but none with any sauce whatsoever (except the butter their grandmother considers God's gift to all foods, no matter how often I tell her they actually like plain vegetables). The point: they all expect ALL food to be delicious, by their own standards, and have trouble downing anything they don't "love." What happens when they eat with a friend? Same thing that happens at our house when friends of theirs come over for dinner: as often as not, we have one of the Big Three, pizza, hot dogs, or chicken.

We are in a now two-year campaign to introduce them to the concept that you eat what you're given, always with the idea that a new palate-pleaser may be on your plate.

The way to accomplish this goal is NOT - repeat NOT - to give them an entire meal of "interesting" flavors. It's to give them a meal they can and will eat without complaint, with one or two twists. The CBS menu stinks for this purpose.

Furthermore. I was disappointed with some of the commenters because they proudly stated that they'd be happy with spaghetti and a can of tomato sauce, etc. - at which the CBS people will snort, roll their eyes, and immediately dismiss their underlying point, which is that CBS has no clue about a "budget" dinner. An alternative:

Make your own sauce. It's cheaper than jars, it's easy, a good tomato sauce can be made in the time it takes to cook the pasta, and if you have a windowsill for herbs you can really up the taste ante with those. A little olive oil, some crushed or whole plum tomatoes from a can, some crushed garlic, a little red wine if you have some that's been open, dried or fresh oregano and basil - I minced my summer basil and froze it in olive oil and now use that as the basis of any winter red sauce; dead easy.

If you're going to eat an expensive entree (or salad, or dessert), make the other courses simpler and cheaper. Spread that budget.

Don't eat dessert every night unless it's fruit (this one is, sort of). As for Greek yogurt? We referred to my hips as "tzatziki" for a good year after our long-ago trip to Crete because that's right where it went; I LOOOOOVE Greek yogurt. But lowfat yogurt, drained in a paper-towel-lined strainer, is a great substitute. And (everybody now) lots cheaper.

CBS, still bringing you quality stories... right?

Health care: a subtext

I saw a billboard the other day, here in the sometimes-chilly western suburbs of Philadelphia, concerning PA CHIP - the Pennsylvania Children's Health Insurance Program. The ad proclaimed that now no uninsured child, no matter how much the family's income, can be denied CHIP coverage. My immediate thought was along lines of "misaligned incentives": taken at face value, this program would seem to disincent parents from insuring their children privately. I emphasize that I had no knowledge of premium costs, requirements that parents who had private insurance available actually use it, or any other details - just this ad, which says in essence, "Don't insure your child; Pennsylvania will take care of it for you."

So today I googled "Pennsylvania children's health insurance" - the search I performed is here. The first item that came up (and Google being what it is, it may not be the same one now) was this - the website the billboard sent people to, to learn more. Reasonable.

But the text accompanying the link on Google? That was interesting. I quote:

All wealthy uninsured children and teens not eligible for Medical Assistance have access to health insurance. It doesn't matter how much money your family...

I goggled. (At Google.) Surely they couldn't really have said "all wealthy uninsured children...", could they? I clicked the link. Here's what I read:

Don't assume that you earn too much to qualify.

All uninsured children and teens not eligible for Medical Assistance have access to health insurance.

In other words, somebody at CHIP had the same thought I did, and had access to the metatags. Interesting indeed.

Well, it's "change" at any rate...

The whole Blagojevich thing, I mean. Such as here.
Because so far as even the most rabid of Bush-haters has been able to tell, W.'s gubernatorial seat was not on the auction block once he was president-elect.

Sigh.

You'd think that after this long, politicians on both sides of the aisle would be wary of speaking in absolutes. They have so much faith in our short attention span, though, that the never-to-be-fulfilled promises just keep coming (cf. "Most Ethical Congress Ever"...)

I don't fault a politician for making promises to try things that ultimately fail as long as he or she actually does try them; as everybody knows, the President does not control the pursestrings and so has limited influence over the budget (although in this case even less-rabid Bush-haters seem to believe W. is, again, both blindingly stupid and a malevolent genius), for instance. But when a politician promises to deliver on something that's in his or her basic control, such as how, ethically speaking, he or she will govern if elected, I do expect results.

Bush promised "compassionate conservatism." It's not an approach I think makes much sense, but he did indeed deliver on it. Obama promises "hope and change" (again, what kind of stupid idea is that? But it's what got him where he is); we'll see how well he does. So far the scandals and the Clinton-era appointees and so forth don't bode all that well. I'm willing to cut him a good bit of slack because he has to actually govern, not just pander to the nuttiest among those who voted for him, but I do expect to see something different. Bring it on, Mr. President-Elect.