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Big Time Unintended Consequence - A Prediction

The Creative Director of the ad agency GG&C (Grabbem, Goadem & Closem) addresses the partners’ committee of the employee rights law firm LL&C (Litigious, Litigiouser & Cohercer) with PowerPoint on one screen and digital video on the other. “This is it, gentlemen and ladies, the new era!” exaltes the Creative Director. The PowerPoint screen flashes a print headline in the unmistakable italicized font of The Wall Street Journal: “High Court Limits Time For Filing Bias Lawsuits.” Then another graphic replaces the headline. It is lifted from the text of the story: “Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision is good news for corporations…..” The Creative Director chortles. “And hot damn good news for us! Here’s the rough of our first commercial.” He turned to the digital video screen. Woman in cubicle at computer terminal: She casts a clearly suspicious glare at a man in the cubicle across the aisle working at an identical terminal. Woman’s Voice Over: “I hear they pay him 8% more

Abstinence Only = Oral Sex = Throat Cancer

Uh Oh, Another Unintended Consequence The lead story headline in the May 12 Science News magazine reads like this: Risk Factor Throat cancer linked to virus spread by sex The virus is the very same HPV (human papillomavirus) that causes cervical cancer and about which there's so much controversy concerning the new HPV vaccine Merck has been pushing for young girls. The article says throat cancer patients were "more apt to have engaged in oral sex with multiple partners over past years..." And there is more research showing it's because of HPV. Granted, people of all ages engage in promiscuous oral sex, but the big scary thing is all the new info about how teens who have committed to Abstinence Until Marriage don't consider oral sex to be a violation of their pledge and treat it as just "making out" or "messing around." If those same teens got their sex education in the "abstinence only" mode, they have been spared the truth abou

This I Believe

Things Are Looking Up When National Public Radio launched its re-make of Edward R. Morrow’s “ This I Believe ,” I was almost motivated to take a shot at making an entry. I say almost because I just never got around to doing it. I thought about it a bunch. Even my subject and position were clear in my head. Never happened. Darn. Not to let a well formed idea go totally unpublished, here ‘tis. It’s simple. Things are getting better. Generally speaking and on a long time scale, that is. Of course some things are getting worse; they always are, but most of the downers are on shorter time scales. And any such judgment on the better/worse balance has to reflect a cosmic perspective, no small task in our quarter-to-quarter, Wall Streetish culture. I have to admit, attaining cosmicity hasn’t been my strong suit. If you riffle through all the posts on this blog, you can’t help but note that I’ve been much more vocal on worsenings than betterings. Drought, wars, political chicanery,

Something Completely Different 2 (Update)

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Learning to Love Dandelions (Update) Speaking of being demonized (as in the Wolfowitz post below), how about the poor dandelion? Noxious weed. Besmircher of perfectly manicured lawns. Victim of hyper-gonadal gunslinger types advertising weed killers (akin to Agent Orange) on TV. I have to admit, I have shared the reflex to slaughter dandelions on sight - after all I lived in Dallas for 20 years. When you become addicted to Saint Augustine turf... But now I live in the country, yea the woods and meadows of Albuquerque's East Mountains, eastern slope. Wild flowers abound. And, truth be told, dandelions are wildflowers. Real beauties at that. They decorate the meadows with brilliant yellow sunburst flowers and serrated leaves that look like mediæval lance blades. Or lions' teeth in some opinions; can't see that myself. Soon the flowers morph magically - overnight, I think - into amazing puff balls of seeds on parachutes. The first illustrated story book I fell in love with (

Wolfowitz the Witless

Wolfo- Whatz ? What a record What a legacy A career based On sheer fallacy Chief architect Of the war in Iraq Deep in the red Never the black Got the foundation wrong So the structure is gone. Number One among NeoCons Famous for saying (The rest of us praying) They’ll welcome us as liberating Anyone at all With any sense Saw from the start The incompetence Cheney’s creature It is said Grinning Familiar To the Deathhead Embarrassed us all At the old World Bank Another Bush Baby Down the tank Helped write the words Of W’s song “I may be mistaken But I’m never wrong” He pushed to the metal The dead wrong pedal Guess he will get The Freedom Medal

A Terrifying Picture

Read (beg, borrow or steal) the Opinion piece in yesterdays [4-23-07] Wall Street Journal (my favorite newspaper) by Jonathan Kellerman called Bedlam revisited . (subscription) It's dynamite. And it has an absolutely terrifying illustration by David Klein. I was moved to write a letter to the editor about it. Of course the odds of getting a letter published in the WSJ are pretty skinny. The nice thing about having a blog, is that I can publish my letter! So here 'tis... Letter to The Editor The biggest question raised by Jonathan Kellerman’s powerful “Bedlam Revisited” is this: Can our country reverse a truly monumental mistake? When “institutionalization” morphed into “community psychology” in a few short years, and we quickly developed the witches brew of mass homelessness as Kellerman notes, and prisons full of psychotics, there was not so much as a “woops” from the political class. Huge mistake? What mistake? We had several recent instances here in Albuquerque in w

Canadian Health Care Better and Cheaper

Inject this , anti-universal-health-care people! The most common argument from the right wing “free market” health care advocates is “just look at Canada.” Well a big, well-designed research project (I should know – 30 years owning a market research company) did just that. Guess what? Canadians spend half as much per capita and get the same or better results as the U.S.A. See an abstract of the study at: http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1 Here’s a press summary from The Toronto Star : Apr 17, 2007; Anne-Marie Tobin; Canadian press "In looking at patients in Canada with a specific diagnosis compared to Americans with the same diagnosis, in Canada patients had at least as good an outcome as their American counterparts – and in many situations, a better health outcome," said one of the 17 authors, Dr. P.J. Devereaux, a cardiologist and clinical epidemiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton. "And that is important because in the United States, they'