Category Archives: CounterCurrent

The New Confederacy

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I’m beginning to understand how a northern citizen might have felt in the years leading the the American Civil War. It must have been a time of realization. A time when it became apparent that within the geographic boundaries of the United States there were two incompatible nations. A nation is defined by more than geography- it is a unity of history and cultural attributes. The southern states who would eventually form the Confederacy were united in a way of life, a particular view of states rights, and an economic system that relied upon slave labor for favorable economics.

North and south fought a brutal war that finally ground the Confederacy into submission. The north prevailed by virtue of the ability to project sustained force. The south remained in the union, but latent anger and attitudes on racial dominance remain to this day.

Obviously, the electonic media have amplified the 9/12 march on Washington DC in the freakshow manner they are known for. But I sense that our country is experiencing a kind of phase transition in this period. The GOP is allowing itself to be represented by show business clowns like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. These and other entertainers are taking the GOP propaganda battle to our livingrooms and to drive-time broadcasting. But they are merely contractors. The media market is financially rewarding them for their performances. The greater the exaggeration and outrageous claims, the greater the audience share and value to the advertisers.

But these guys are not just obnoxious gasbags. They are very canny. Fans who listen with rapt attention as Limbaugh referred to Jimmy Carter as a hemorrhoid will dwell longer and for the same reason as gawkers will stare at the two headed snake or Eddie, the dog faced boy. This is a benchmark of our civilization.

I really thought that the GOP was more of a class act than the freakshow hawkers they have proven to be. The GOP has shown more aptitude for War Lord tactics than statesmanship. Conservatives respect power.  The democrats have proven to be mere cows who stand immobilized while the mongrel dogs orchestrating GOP maneuvers have their way with large sections of the electorate.

If the Dems understood GOP-style power, they would have been hosting boot parties to kick GOPers while they are down. Instead, they tried the silly strategy of compromise. It is not in the nature of the contemporary GOP to accept that the voters put dems in power. It is just not in their radar.

While the current political freakshow entertains while it disappoints, the important lesson remains unspoken. The USA is not the advanced and enlightened civilization that it fancies itself to be. Insead, we appear to be naked and obese  apes with too many weapons and imbibing too much high fructose corn syrup. Rather than buckle down and work hard at building civilization, we get arrogant and strut around with our hearts on our sleeves.

It seems to me that there is a kind embryonic New Confederacy movement stirring about now. The confederate disdain for taxes and centralized, federal government is alive and well. It’s just that nobody has actually said it in the open yet. But that may happen as disaffected middle aged, tea bagging WASP’s continue to get organized. Something is up.

Chinchilla Bubble

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During the Kennedy years, our modest farm in central Iowa was visited by a chinchilla salesman. I was a young child then and was intrigued by the topic of discussion at the kitchen table. The smooth talking slickster from the city made a presentation to my parents about the ever expanding fur coat market and how farmers could hitch their wagons to this opportunity.

I do not recall what kind of deal was reached, but I do know that soon thereafter we had a dozen south American rodents chinchillas in cages in our basement.  These fluffy creatures were not friendly in the manner of a cat or a dog. They were silent, skittish, and capable of sinking their teeth into you.  Of course kids are irresistably attracted to animals, especially those of the unusual and mysterious variety, and we were no exception.

The chinchillas (chinchillae? chinchillacea?) were constantly rolling in dust and gnawing at stones placed in their cages. We would watch this activity, captivated by the thick furred critters.  Eventually we were allowed to pet them a bit, but always with the admonition that they were going to be made into fur coats. Except for horses, my father was rarely sentimental about animals. They were raised for just one purpose- to fatten and take to market. Cats and dogs were just a form of inedible and unmarketable livestock. To pull a 4-bottom plow, you needed maybe 1000 cats- a real nightmare if ever there was one.

The chinchillas eventually disappeared the following spring. Turns out that the traveling salesman fibbed to us. The lucrative market for chinchilla fur didn’t develop at the right time in the life cycle of our herd of chinchillas. Or ever, for that matter. The real opportunity in chinchilla farming was in selling animals and equipment to the unwary. I have no doubt that they were unceremoniously dispatched out in the field with the very Ruger .22 cal Single Six revolver that I inherited from my father. Caveat emptor.

About that same time, around the same kitchen table, a family friend sat and told us about the sailing boat he bought after selling his farm. He was going to spend his time sailing out of Jamaica, fishing and enjoying the lifestyle. We never heard from him again, but years later we eventually heard about him. He disappeared. The authorities concluded that he was the victim of pirates. Ex-pat Iowegian killed at sea and his boat taken. Caveat emptor.

Thoughts on rehearsal

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We finished rehearsal for the play last night. Full dress rehearsal with lights, sound, props, etc. Tonight we have paying guests.  This is my second production this year. I have to say that I have not been yelled at this much since third grade (or grad school). But rather than being thin skinned about it, I have taken it fairly well. It has been a positive personal growth experience, which is the point of it all.

The best advice yet has been “be a better listener” on stage. If you are present in the moment on stage, you can better cope with the inevitable slip ups and mangled or omitted lines.  Rather than spending your time thinking about your next line, try to be part of the flow. If somebody drops a cue line, you’re better able to improvise a line to steer the dialog back on track.

This is good advice in general. Like many people, in conversation I find myself thinking about what I’m going to say next rather than really listening to the person I’m conversing with. This is a bad habit and reduces conversation to a comingled set of monologs or pronouncements of opinion.

The other bad habit that seems to get worse with age and education is the tendency to answer the question you wished someone had asked rather than the one actually asked. This is an irksome and possibly incurable condition of mine that those around me suffer from. Participating in staged dialog has had the effect of causing me to be more aware of this.

Thursdays Link-O-Rama

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Need/want cheap terabytes?  Backblaze details how they put together 67-terabyte mass storage units for $7,867 each, or $117,000 per petabyte. This is what I like to see: do it yourself, shade tree engineering. Damned skippy!

The trouble with economics.  Caveats aplenty.

Religion. The divine misogyny.

Fareed Zakaria suggests greed is good, sort of.

What do the Russians really want?

Question to Democrats: WTF??

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I really do not understand the manner in which the Democrats are responding to the outrageous lies and fascist propaganda that the Republicans are dealing out. Democrats- WTF??

Democrats should deal with Republicans in the same manner that they were treated in the days of DeLay and Armie.  The Republicans of congress are egg sucking dogs who only understand one thing- the sharp crack of a 2×4 between the eyes. The ruthless application of blunt power. Rough ’em up while they’re down – metaphorically at least. Because the inglourious basterds will certainly not offer bipartisanship when they are the majority again.

American politics is disgusting sometimes.  Especially now.

Health Care and the Bell Curve

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In watching the political turmoil associated with health care, I’m reminded of how populations fall into bell-shaped curves. Some attribute sorted into some kind of frequency is represented as a distribution having a small population of outliers on either side of a larger population representing the mean.  There are normal distributions and distorted distributions. As you might imagine, the details and nuances require a good bit of coursework to comprehend.

So from between our bare feet on the Lazyboy recliner we can passively view on high definition television the spectacle of a kind of replay of The Empire Strikes Back. We can watch as a small cadre of elite influence workers (lobbyists) practice the art of propaganda upon a group of lazy thinkers. Dick Armey is still with us, but now he is stirring up the muck behind the curtains.

Some have cynically observed that what we are witnessing is one group of dumbshits rattling another group of dumbshits. A more polite description might be that it is a matter of the sly and conniving having their way with the analytically challenged. 

People who are vehemently against big government somehow find it acceptable to be shills for big business in this battle.  All in the name of marketplace economics. But the fact is that the medical industry “marketplace” is deeply distorted and is itself far from being a system that can respond to consumer demand. The supply and demand balance is not sensitive to the needs of the patient- supply and demand is a battle fought between insurance carriers (the economic consumer) and medical organizations (the supplier).  

Consumers of medical services have few real choices- be sick or plug into a complex, gold plated system. In order for the medical system to be a functioning marketplace, there must be lower octane choices for the consumer.

That part of the affluence bell curve that cannot pay for modern, high tech, and expensive health services really must have access to a form of care that they can afford. The health care “debate” should focus on new forms of affordable medical services rather than simply new mechanisms of payment for a system that is economically distorted and inaccesible to significant numbers of people.

Medical school needs to be cheaper so that more universities can train more doctors to feed into the market. This is a supply & demand question that we seem to be unable to even define. The professional and business elitism of medicine must be toned down a bit. It is not sustainable.

Is Private Sector Buggery Better than Gov’t Incompetence?

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Healthcare in the USA is wildly expensive and is growing more so at a rate that exceeds inflation. This is well known. The battle for healthcare reform in DC is bogging down under the weight of private interests and infighting.  Soaring rhetoric from both left and right is mistaken for intellection and reason. It is evident that the fix to the problem was started before there was a clear understanding of the variables.

If you look at healthcare as a manufacturing activity with labor, capital equipment, and materials as input and some sort of health benefit as the output, you can start to see what cost inputs may begin to dominate. Of course this is very simplistic, but hang with me.

A round of health care involves attention by highly trained and expensive labor. A health care worker can only attend to one person at a time, though that worker may have many patients under his/her supervision. If a patient is stabilized, the care worker can also attend to other patients and achieve some sort of parallel production for better cost containment. In the heirarchy of medicine, the docs are managers who provide oversight to nurses who manage the patients. Docs also do consultations, examinations, and perform surgery, so they are not pure people managers- they get their hands dirty. Docs are a unique class of management all by themselves.

To exaggerate the effects of labor costs, imagine if you had a doc or a nurse picking strawberries, how expensive would the strawberries be? Even if Dr. Picker was very fast, the berries would be expensive. To have reasonably priced berries you have to find workers who will do the work at a lower wage. Lower wages derive from an abundance of willing labor.

In the end, medical schools control the scarcity of physicians by controlling enrollment. And the enrollment is defined by the curriculum, faculty size, and the particulars of the coursework- availability of clinical experiences, lab space, equipment, etc. But, you have to wonder what would happen to medical costs if there was less labor scarcity.

The most important resource a medical school has, other than faculty, might be the university hospital. What if more hospitals had medical schools rather than the other way around? I don’t think that the existing medical schools have absorbed all of the bright candidates out there.

Health care is a kind of economic chimera. The recipient of medical treatment is not the person in control of the costs. Physicians prescribe the type and extent of resources and the insurance companies release the funds. The medical establishment receives payment for services irrespective of outcome. Insurance companies profit by denial of services. The patient is left to sort out how to get the best value from available treatment.

American medicine is very much influenced by technological triumphalism.  New and expensive materials and devices hit the market all of the time. The question every potential marketer of medically related items must ask is- will the docs use or prescribe it? The most powerful instrument in medicine is the physician’s pen. The question for drug and equipment makers is, how do you get the docs to use their pens to your advantage?

The view that a disease or an injury is a sales opportunity is what drives for-profit clinics and hospitals. Without chronic disease, accidents, and sporadic outbreaks of mayhem, growth and profit in the healthcare industry might be more static.

So in the end, who do you trust? Do you put your faith in the private sector whose avowed goal is to profit on your illness? Or do you trust the government which, though accountable to its citizens, is prone to profound organizational inertia and a lackluster draw to talented staff?  This is the balance of opposing forces the fools in Washington are trying to sort out. Howard help us all.

Out of the ditch and on the road

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I have decided to continue scribbling in this blog. Th’ Gaussling has cut loose some psychic energy sinks that have been bogging me down.  There are too many problematic characters in my work life to welcome them gladly into a volunteer life as well. Many of us (i.e., large, irritable animals) aren’t cut out to be happy and compliant volunteers.

Writing is something I need to do on a regular basis. Writing in a private diary isn’t nearly exciting enough. I enjoy the trickle of commentary and the colorful characters out there in the blogosphere.

The Bitter Barn

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At the recent San Francisco APA meeting, a call was made to define bitterness as a pathological condition. The proposed acronym is PTED – Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder. I guess it covers the range from pissy to postal. Maybe our pharma friends can find an enzyme to inhibit for the treatment of PTED. Better yet, perhaps there is an animal model out there- say, badgers or wolverines. Sounds like a market opportunity!