Missing, still.

I find myself missing Robin today. It is a day early, though it was a Sunday, it was the 31st. I should be over everything, but somehow I am not.

Sat with my mom and talked about dad some. She has always had such exact schedules, and this time nothing goes in easily planned or predicted increments. It can be hard for her.

Anyway, it was a couple tough days, remembering my daughter who died, when the third time was not a charm, but a third death, more than I thought I could ever take. Perhaps it was.

Bought another Elgin Print

It Knows Where It's Going Print 11 $25.00 Now that I've bought mine, I'll link to it for anyone else who is interested. The print I received was much better than the catalog appears. George Elgin has done a fine job with Suzette Haden Elgin's artwork and the prints. This one reminds me a lot of the boat used in some of the stories at http://adrr.com/story/

Honesty and Recovery

I was reading on PTSD when it hit me that there is a concept where grief recovery, twelve-step programs and a number of other things converge. That concept is honesty.

The best place to begin with honesty is when you are wrong, promptly admit it. When you have failed to get something done, do not hide, instead acknowledge it. I try to train staff who work for me to do this (it is extremely rare for any mistake they could make to do more than be an inconvenience -- if they tell me so I can fix it). When someone else fails, look for solutions, don't waste time on blaming or anger.

Part of this is letting others express their anger without cutting them off or making excuses. You can explain later, much later, and always in the context of "I mess up by ... and this is how I will avoid it in the future." If the excuse is really good, you won't need to make it (e.g. I missed a hearing because I was rear ended and my care caught on fire. When my office called the Court ten minutes before the hearing was to start and said "Mr. Marsh will be delayed, his car is on fire" no one neeced an explanation or excuse later.).

Avoid legalisms or strained constructions. "Sure I practiced piano today [in my mined, while I was asleep]" is not honest, truthful, persuasive or useful. Looking for someone to blame is even worse than not useful.

As a place to start recovery, honesty is essential. You will have real trouble finding truth if you are not honest. The truth is that recovery can come. The honest truth is that it takes honesty for recovery to happen in a real sense.

Dad is down twenty pounds in the last thirty days

My dad's Parkinson's disease has moved into the wasting stage. He can no longer walk, and doesn't have strength for much. Has begun to not eat much at all. The last candy I bought him is still there. The drop off in appetite was extremely precipitous. He remains happy and pleasant.

Seems so sudden, but considering the time they gave him as an estimate, guess it is not.

Not much else to say.

Gravity and Levity

http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/

An interesting blog.

For example:

... my eight lifetimes. In it, I postulated that we measure time relative to our age, and as a result each length of time wherein our age doubles carries an equal psychological weight. There’s nothing scientific about this discussion — it’s just an idea. But it has absolutely changed the way I think about my life and the process of getting older. At the risk of being a shameless self-promoter, I highly recommend reading it.

The argument about “my eight lifetimes” can be summarized this way: in your life you will undergo roughly eight major transformations. That is, you get eight “lifetimes” during which you become a new and different person. If you’re reading this blog, chances are that you’re already on your sixth or seventh. This is not to say you have one foot in the grave: having an entire lifetime ahead of you is still a big deal. For me, a 25-year-old, the two remaining lifetimes are the transformation from a 20-something-year-old to a middle aged man, and then from middle age to an old man. Both of those time periods are a big deal, and each of them contains plenty of living to be done. I just imagine that the time period between age 6 and age 12 was a similarly big deal.

All of this brings me back to the Gompertz Law of human mortality. The Gompertz Law is already an extraordinarily fair statement: no one escapes mortality, which becomes exponentially more probable in old age. But if you subscribe to my idea of time progressing relative to itself (of life being composed of “lifetimes”), then the consequence of the Gompertz Law is an almost extreme level of fairness. Look at it this way: about 96% of people survive to age 48 (the beginning of the “eighth lifetime”), but only 4% make it to age 96 (the end of the eighth lifetime). If you try to come up with an equation for probability of survival vs. number of lifetimes lived, you get an almost absurd exponential within an exponential within an exponential.

Veganism crosses the line into a moral error ...

An interesting argument by a law professor.

He concludes (I'm taking an excerpt, read the whole thing by clicking on the links):

my own view is that veganism is a kind of harmless and in many ways sweet eccentricity (who can get mad about people who love animals?), but it crosses the line into a moral error insofar as people think it is morally obligatory or morally superior to non-vegan lifestyles.

I expect stating this plainly will open me up to lots of abuse, but since vegans do not, as far as I can see, have any arguments that can appeal to shared background attitudes, they probably have no choice. As A.J. Ayer noticed long ago, "It is because argument fails us when we come to deal with pure questions of value, as distinct from questions of fact, that we finally resort to mere abuse."

But, he is a liberal, at Chicago via UT. He is used to some abuse.

The overall point, those who do not have arguments that can appeal to shared background attitudes, have only abuse to argue with. Combined with the triumph of value ethics, every disagreement becomes a proof of moral failing in those one disagrees with, rather than a disagreement.

Interesting to consider.

Why Loyalty Matters

Management fads are often driven by the conflict of interest that bonus structures create. Sunbeam had massive downsizing which resulted in extreme riches to managers who battened on the health and wealth of the company to its harm. Texas Instruments had its culture ravaged by the same sort of thing and has been striving to make things right. In every case the company involved betrays the loyalty of its workers to benefit often transitory and predatory managers.

It goes back to business schools. I had a friend in the early 80s who expressed his unhappiness that to continue in his then area of choice he needed to find a plant and close it to demonstrate toughness. He needed to sacrifice the careers and lives of hundreds of employees to have a resume item. He noted that probably more than 75% of plant closings at that time in the 1980s were not justified – they were betrayals of worker loyalty for modest personal profit for the managers closing them at the expense of the corporate entity and the loyal employees.

It is no surprise that after about thirty years of this type of treatment, older workers tend to lack loyalty and younger workers (often their children) see loyalty as foolish. That is one of the gifts that elite MBA schools and management consultants have given modern America – an erosion of loyalty. That same experience has bled out into consumer relationships.

I can compare a small business I know with Volvo. When the UPS strike hit, in order to make his commitments to clients to make thirty day delivery turn-around, John paid for overnight express delivery and ate the loss. He was and is loyal to his customers and a man of integrity. Volvo, I bought a car from them (two actually). The paint was bad. They kept promising that they had fixed it when all they had done was buff and use colored wax that would hide the problem for 2-3 months. Finally, they offered to pay for half of the cost of repainting – if I used their provider. Of course they wanted me to pay about $2,500.00 for my half, up front, for a paint job that should have cost a total of less than $1,500.00 (same color, one color, no primer needed). I actually had the job done for $800.00 and it has lasted several years and is still excellent.

In other words, Volvo offered to make only a $1,600.00 profit at my expense for fixing their problem. Did that show or inculcate loyalty, honesty or trustworthiness? Obviously not at all. I’ll never buy a Volvo again and would advise anyone I know not to buy one.

Yet, there is a reason people are happier when they are loyal. Companies that are loyal have more satisfied and effective employees and better served customers. Now loyalty alone won’t do the job, but without loyalty in the mix, the job does not get done well.

As you might suspect, I’ve been enjoying

Why Loyalty Matters: The Groundbreaking Approach to Rediscovering Happiness, Meaning and Lasting Fulfillment in Your Life and Work by Timothy Keiningham, Lerzan Aksoy, and Luke Williams (Hardcover - Jul 7, 2009)

If you pick it up, it is easy to mistake it for a book length advertisement for a web 2.0 application. Of course access to the application is free with the book and only tangential to the book itself (in other words, it is an effort to provide “value added” material, not a cheesy attempt to get you to pay for a book length advertisement for a web app).

Once you get past the short aside for the web based service, what you get is an explanation of what loyalty is, why it is important, how to measure loyalty (rather than how to make superficial guesses like most “loyalty programs” do) and how to nurture and integrate loyalty with the other elements that lead to corporate and personal success, and that are essential for individual satisfaction and happiness.

The book is honest. For example, 80% of your loyal customers are ones you are losing money on and will never turn a profit on (which is one of the reasons they are loyal).

However, it is important to realize that your life will be more satisfying and you will be happier if you have areas where you can be loyal. Understanding loyalty is a significant point in finding happiness in your life.

I’ll write more on the book and on loyalty, but it is a worthwhile read.

A sidenote, link to some beautiful art

http://bysuzettehadenelgin.com/store/print8.html for example (the one I just bought).

On the left hand side of the page there are three buttons:

• Suzette's Art Prints:Homepage
• Print List
• Friends

The first takes you to the home page. The second is a list of the prints available (not a link to print the list). The third will change names, it is the next print on the list. You can scroll through the prints by just clicking on that link over and over again. Oh, and I cheated on the links -- instead of Friends (the text on the page I've linked to) taking you to that print, it jumps to another one I really liked ;)

If more people read my blog, I'd probably have had second thoughts, since I expect I'll go back and buy that one too and I would want it to sell out before I get the chance ...

But just scrolling through the prints can enrich your day and make you smile, even if you don't buy one.

Suzette is a living saint, btw, one of the Elachi.

Remembering that there is always another side.

There is another side. There is always another side. Sometimes it takes a long time to hear it. But hearing it is essential if we are to be “no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens…of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19).

That is a great truth.

Also of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Survival

Adjusting to Brilliance

Child rearing advice [cross posted from http://www.adrr.com/srm/adjusting.htm]

For the most part, in the competing memes of talent and practice, I side with the [Talent is Overrated] camp. [1] However, real talent does exist [2]. If you or a child you care for is brilliant, this essay is about how to cope with it. I'm using links to sub essays to keep the bullet points direct and succinct.

*Make sure you are as bright as you think you are. [3]

* Look for places where you are compensating. My brother Daniel is brilliant. He has severe dyslexia that was undiagnosed until he was a senior in college because he was compensating (well, he was first in his department). Had he been properly taught and helped in grade school, his life would have been much better. I have mild number dyslexia. I learned about it, and to compensate for it in 2009. Economics would have been easier if I had taken care of it thirty years earlier.

* Believe in yourself. I'll note that Daniel has brilliant ideas, still. Sometimes he shares them with me. I'm always impressed that the only weakness in his ideas is that he does not believe in how brilliant they are.

* Expect and excuse mistreatment. If you want to succeed in life you need to realize that in some contexts you will create and prompt people to be unjust and unfair and that the only successful response is to forgive them and move on. [4]

* Practice. In a study of outliers in math ability, it was discovered that by engaging in practice, the brilliant learned better than the traditional belief that the brilliant could learn best by skipping the practice. They can, but that is compensating, and they learn better with practice.

* Don't rush yourself. I started college at 17. I resisted things that would have pushed me into college at 15 or 16 or younger. My life was better for the delay.

* Learn social skills. The pretty, the social, the pleasant get better treatment in life. Kind of like learning to dress for success or how to bath regularly, you should learn how to have a social demeanor. [5]

[Afterword]

Rachel's surgery went well, she is doing better and better.

Had a jury trial (we won), Rachel had surgery (got up at 5:00 a.m., they were supposed to report at 7:30 so I could leave by 7:45, I got out for a deposition at 8:45 instead, but the other side got delayed at the airport).

All is well.

All is well, except this morning Rachel got up and decided to jump rope, seeing as her doctor had told her she should refrain from running for a few days but did not mention jumping rope ....

She is safely asleep now.

Until I get that book review up this week end, here is a post to tide you over

The Media's Role in a Loyal Society
By Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy,
Authors of Why Loyalty Matters: The Groundbreaking Approach to Rediscovering Happiness, Meaning and Lasting Fulfillment in Your Life and Work

In the late twentieth century, the traditional social networks of Western society visibly weakened. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam chronicles the deterioration of American social connections -- to family, neighbors, communities, and country -- in the second half of the twentieth century. Our lives are becoming less socially interactive. The book's title exemplified this observation: "More Americans are bowling than ever before, but league bowling has plummeted."

Putnam lays much of the fraying of our social fabric on the "individualizing" nature of our electronic media. He laments, "Electronic technology allows us to consume this hand-tailored entertainment in private, even utterly alone. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, low-cost entertainment was available primarily in public settings, like the baseball park, the dance hall, the movie theater, and the amusement park . . . As the poet T.S. Eliot observed early in the television age, 'It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.'"

There is no question that we now have tremendous opportunities to be both connected to others via electronic media, yet remain completely anonymous and unaccompanied. We can even build synthetic identities, complete with virtual wives, jobs, and mortgages. As the real living, breathing wife of a cyberholic laments, "This other life is so wonderful; it's better than real life. Nobody gets fat, nobody gets gray. The person that's left can't compete with that." If only it were real!

Fortunately, most of us know the boundary between the virtual world and reality. But our ability to satisfy our own distinct appetites has led to increasing fragmentation of our personal lives. A study by Deloitte reports, "In recent years, the number of media formats and channels has exploded -- changing the way people consume content and splintering the mass market into smaller pieces . . . that translates into a fragmented world of increasingly scattered audiences."

Furthermore, this fragmentation abets asocial ideas. The ability of the media to provide subject matter on virtually any idea means there is ready access to content for the lunatic fringe of society. A study conducted by the New York City Police Department states, "The Internet is a driver and enabler for the process of radicalization . . . It also serves as an anonymous virtual meeting place -- a place where virtual groups of like-minded and conflicted individuals can meet, form virtual relationships and discuss and share the . . . message they have encountered."

Whether or not the decline in social networks is primarily attributable to the individualizing aspects of modern electronic media is clearly debatable. But let's assume for the moment that it is. Should we give up our iPod, our satellite TV and radio, our Internet access to live in a more cohesive society, where loyalty to other citizens is as obvious as it is fulfilling? For many (if not most) of us, the idea of moving backward to a technologically simpler era sounds too severe an action to bear.

But we should realize that if we don't moderate the effects of our electronic entanglements, we put at risk our most basic and common humanity. There is a definite connection between our level of personal interaction and our social selves as citizens. Alexis de Tocqueville's observations more than 150 years ago still ring true:

When men are no longer united in any firm or lasting way, it is impossible to persuade any great number of them to act in cooperation unless you convince each of those whose help is vital that his private interests are served by voluntarily joining his efforts to those of all the others. This cannot be achieved usually or conveniently except with the help of a newspaper, which is the only way of being able to place the same thought at the same moment into a thousand minds.

De Tocqueville reminds us that civic loyalty was once tied to the news we received from our media. Unfortunately, modern news is often driven by the ratings it will generate, filtered by political ideology, and narrowly broadcast to like-minded constituents. So instead of producing the "same thought at the same moment into a thousand minds," we now transmit different thoughts at the same moment targeted to those who already believe. We no longer interact with the community at large but only with those portions of the community with which we agree.

The Founding Fathers of the United States believed strongly that free societies required a free press. Thomas Jefferson famously said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." But Jefferson also added, "But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."

The First Amendment grants freedom of the press in the United States. And while all countries do not provide constitutional protection to the press, Western countries provide news organizations with great latitude so that reporters are able to uncover and report the truth. But with every right comes a responsibility. The free press is supposed to remain loyal to the people. This requires offering the public a forum for open, honest political discourse.

Hence, it is ironic that parody news programs -- namely The Daily Show and The Colbert Report -- are viewed by many Americans (specifically Americans under the age of forty-five) as truly honoring the media's duty. A key responsibility of the press is to challenge truthiness with the truth. (Truthiness is a term that Stephen Colbert, faux-conservative anchor of The Colbert Report, popularized, defined as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.") In an out-of-persona interview, Colbert laments:

Truthiness is tearing apart our country . . . it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be [that] everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty . . . What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?

So what part of the equation has changed? Why do we find that people are willing to accept gut instinct over verifiable truth? Well, this type of skewed media has always been available. But nowadays, intellectually honest debate is sorely lacking. Debates in the news are choreographed and the true essence of debate is spoiled. Often, conservative and liberal representatives merely repeat the party line so that they simply talk past one another without listening to or addressing the legitimate concerns of citizens. So, perhaps it is the fleeting concept of open and public discourse that allows the proliferation of "truthiness" to go unchecked.

To quote Jefferson again,

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press.

In other words, Jefferson believed that the press is the primary means of ensuring our liberty. And, as de Tocqueville observed, it is also the primary means of ensuring our loyalty to our communities while maintaining our individual rights.

Therefore, the press must exercise its great power to bring honest discourse to the people, recognizing its vital role in maintaining liberty, and fostering civic loyalty. And it should do so with vigor.

The above is an excerpt from the book Why Loyalty Matters: The Groundbreaking Approach to Rediscovering Happiness, Meaning and Lasting Fulfillment in Your Life and Work by Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.

Copyright © 2009 Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy, authors of Why Loyalty Matters: The Groundbreaking Approach to Rediscovering Happiness, Meaning and Lasting Fulfillment in Your Life and Work

Author Bios
Timothy Keiningham is a world-renowned authority in the field of loyalty measurement and management, and Global Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President for Ipsos Loyalty, one of the worldÂ’s largest business research organizations. Lerzan Aksoy is an acclaimed expert in the science of loyal management, and Associate Professor of Marketing at Fordham University. They are coauthors of a new book, with Luke Williams, entitled Why Loyalty Matters (BenBella Books, 2009, www.whyloyaltymatters.com ), and creators LoyaltyAdvisor (www.LoyaltyAdvisor.com), a web-based tool that analyzes your loyalty across multiple dimensions proven to link to your success. LoyaltyAdvisor is the product of a global effort, the most comprehensive study of loyalty ever conducted.

Being Yourself

I was recently reading about someone who had lost themselves in trying to be what someone else wanted. Obscuring their self, they failed in the relationship and failed in loving who they really were. I don't think in that specific case that if they had not hidden who they really were it would have changed the outcome, but it made me think, because it happens so often.

Being yourself does not mean being a collection of your flaws. That sort of definition would define a floor by the dirt on it. But being yourself does mean expressing what you really are and not something else. The the extent that you work on yourself, it means improving rather than changing yourself.

A long time ago, being yourself was considered a core part of having integrity. It was a significant part of the trope "to thine own self be true" and it meant avoiding pride and pretensions.

Now, being yourself seems to be used either as an excuse for annoying problems (e.g. "I'm a motor mouth and I don't show courtesy or respect to anyone else, but that is just the way I am") or a call to "free yourself" from trying to be someone you are not.

The later sense, that of freedom to be (rather than freedom to annoy) is important. We have gone from people who are being pretentious from an excess of pride to people who are submerging themselves because they do not love themselves the way that God does. I find myself wanting to tell people "You should allow yourself to be the person that God loves, not someone else." Nurture the person God loves.

Be that self. Then what love you give and receive will be true. But be there for God to love as he loves you and not something else. That is what being is all about.

Thomas Jefferson this 4th of July

A quote or two, starting with this:

In the Spring of 1781, Jefferson was finishing up his second term as Governor of Virginia, the office to which he had been appointed following his service with the Continental Congress and his justly-celebrated work drafting the Declaration of Independence. It was a very difficult and unhappy time in his life. His infant daughter Lucy Elizabeth died in April; his wife Martha, who had never quite recovered from the pregnancy (her fifth in seven years), was also, slowly, dying Martha Jefferson died the following year (September, 1782).

Which led to this when he was informed of the death of Abigail Adams, Jefferson sent his condolences to her husband — with whom he had just a few years before resumed correspondence after nearly fifteen years (fifteen years that had been filled with rancor and bile on both sides):

The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of Oct. 20 had given me ominous foreboding. Tried myself, in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that, for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines. I will not therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more, where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant at which we are to deposit, in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.

From: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_06_28-2009_07_04.shtml#1246369069

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Third of July I took Rachel to Six Flags. With a few exceptions, no lines reached five minutes in length. A long day, from 8:00 a.m. when we left to 12:00 midnight when we arrived home.

We are well, just haven't felt like typing up the thoughts I've written down.

Blueberry Banana Nut Bread Recipe

The party was a success. We had over sixty people, including lots of kids in the pool.

The surprise was how much people liked my brownie alternative, Blueberry Banana Nut Bread. I was asked for the recipe, so here it is:

• 1/2 cup margarine or butter (I tend to blend them for a better baking taste, but it probably doesn't really matter).
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs.

Melt the shortening, blend with sugar and eggs.

• 2 cups oatmeal
• 1/2 cup Wheaties or 1/4 cup bran
• 2 regular size bananas

Blend in until the bananas are no longer forming any lumps and the Wheaties are broken up enough that they are like bran (you can crush the Wheaties pre-blending if you prefer to do it that way).

• 3 cups flour
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Mix separately and then blend in with the banana mix.

• 1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla
• 1 cup to 1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts (depends how much you like nuts)
  

Blend into the banana/flour mix

Spoon about a third in a layer into a 9x13 glass pan. Half the recipe if you want to use a smaller pan.

Coat with blueberries one berry deep.

Spoon over the blueberries the remainder.

Cook at 325 degrees for an hour. 350 degrees if a metal pan. Can be served cold or hot. Vanilla ice cream goes well with it when cold.

It was surprisingly well received. I like the effect the oats had on the flavor (most recipes call for no oats and a lot of bran and I'm not as fond of them). Heather saved a little for breakfast the next day and reported that it was still good the day after.

I'm looking forward to the next party at our house. We really enjoyed this one.

---

On a completely different topic:

Nobody worries that a child ignorant of the various theorems of thermodynamics and incapable of solving an equation of motion would be unable to ride a bicycle. Yet, why is it that we made the Euthyphro mistake with our understanding of quantitative products in the markets? Why should traders responding to supply and demand, little more, competing to make a buck, do the Girsanov theorem, any more than a trader of pistachios in the Souk of Damascus needs to solve general equilibrium equations to set the price of his product?

For more: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

---

A great essay on staying happy in a marriage: http://lchan.blogspot.com/2009/05/staying-happy.html

New Phishing Scam 877-364-2950

I got a text message asking me to call 877-364-2950. When I did, a "bank" wanted me to give them information to "reactivate" a credit card. Of course I don't have a card with that bank.

Reverse Look-up reflected that 877-364-2950 doesn't belong to anyone listed. It was another fraud scam.

I surely want to find a way to block text messages sent by e-mail addresses.

I'll note that it is a known issue for Sprint http://www2.sprint.com/mr/gp_dtl.do?id16=I_want_to_stop_spam_and_phishing_text_messages&article=680#__highlight they just don't offer any tools to block text messages from people not in your address book.

Barbecue at the Marsh Home June 12

We are having a sort of housewarming party. As my wife says

The floors are mostly complete, the walls are mostly painted .. curtains are not up and very little is hung on the walls. But .. We are tired of working and we are ready to take a break.

So:
Friday June 12
6:30
BBQ at the Marsh home
Bring a side dish if you think about it.
Bring your kids.
Pool and spa are available
(I doubt anyone but the kids will swim)
Drop us an email if you can make it.

Yes, if you are in the area, you are welcome to come by.

Al Anon and Me

I don't have an alcoholic in my life. I'm not one myself. But I have really found a great deal of meaning in much of the Al Anon literature.

Al Anon is a twelve step fellowship for those who have alcoholics or addicts in their lives (vs. Alcoholics Anonymous which is for Alcoholics). But more, it is a framework or philosophy for living, acting and becoming in spite of the devastating things in your life you can't control (e.g. violently alcoholic parents).

Much of what it leads to is that you may be powerless, but you are not helpless. You may not be able to control some things that seem crucial, but you are not controlled by those things or persons.

From a grief perspective, that is a shared need and meaning. I enjoy the literature. Maybe some day I'll attend a group, though I hesitate.

But the core is finding courage and belief and strength to change and improve the things that can be changed. The antithesis, the rejection of their approach is the philosophy captured in the statements:

• "Yeah, I offend people, but that is just the way I am;" or,
• "I just can't change and you shouldn't expect me to;" or,
• "I know that I'm doing xyz wrong and my life is toxic, but that is just the way I am;" or,
  
• "I'm just helpless."

Those statements are not true. You are not your defects and you do not need to let your flaws mold what you are or choke the life out of those around you. Just because there are things in life that render it uncontrollable does not mean that life remains unmanageable or without hope.

There is a higher power and there is always hope.

On Health Care Reform

I'll be back to my my normal blogging in a little bit. I just wanted to blog, a moment, about an approach that seems to work in both cutting costs and in improving health care. It is the model that produces the best results in the world, happens to be working in the United States and produces higher quality and lower costs.

From http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande

This approach has been adopted in other places, too: the Geisinger Health System, in Danville, Pennsylvania; the Marshfield Clinic, in Marshfield, Wisconsin; Intermountain Healthcare, in Salt Lake City; Kaiser Permanente, in Northern California. All of them function on similar principles. All are not-for-profit institutions. And all have produced enviably higher quality and lower costs than the average American town enjoys.

When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction to McAllen—and the almost threefold difference in the costs of care—you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine. Somewhere in the United States at this moment, a patient with chest pain, or a tumor, or a cough is seeing a doctor. And the damning question we have to ask is whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, first and foremost, or to maximize revenue.

….[this is just an excerpt] ....

… isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.

This last point is vital. Activists and policymakers spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about whether the solution to high medical costs is to have government or private insurance companies write the checks. Here’s how this whole debate goes. Advocates of a public option say government financing would save the most money by having leaner administrative costs and forcing doctors and hospitals to take lower payments than they get from private insurance. Opponents say doctors would skimp, quit, or game the system, and make us wait in line for our care; they maintain that private insurers are better at policing doctors. No, the skeptics say: all insurance companies do is reject applicants who need health care and stall on paying their bills. Then we have the economists who say that the people who should pay the doctors are the ones who use them. Have consumers pay with their own dollars, make sure that they have some “skin in the game,” and then they’ll get the care they deserve. These arguments miss the main issue. When it comes to making care better and cheaper, changing who pays the doctor will make no more difference than changing who pays the electrician. The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care. Otherwise, you get a system that has no brakes. You get McAllen.

Also, on the same topic,

The cause of the American health paradox is American inequality. America is more unequal than other countries. Everywhere, in every country, the powerful prefer the status quo but in America the rich and elite are especially powerful relative to the poor, so the status quo is especially entrenched and innovation especially well-squelched. America has a lot of health problems building up unsolved. Perhaps the most obvious is obesity, which affects the poor far more than the rich. The further the rich from the poor — that is, the more inequality — the more the rich can ignore it. And they have: The healthcare establishment’s record on prevention and treatment of obesity is terrible. Staggeringly bad.

In one tiny example, when I proposed a rat experiment to test an idea behind the Shangri-La Diet, I was denied permission by the UC Berkeley Animal Care and Use Committee: My idea couldn’t possibly be true, I was told. Had there been plenty of poor people on the committee, instead of none, I think the outcome would have been different. Problems such as depression, allergies, autoimmune disorders, and autism are likewise building up with no real progress being made. An example of a real solution is home glucose monitoring for diabetes. This came from outside the healthcare establishment — from Richard Bernstein, an engineer with diabetes.

http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009/05/29/the-american-health-paradox-what-causes-it/

What could be better than economics and comic books

http://www.eco-comics.blogspot.com/

Most recently, "Kal-El (formerly Superman) is having trouble negotiating a peaceful resolution to a very dangerous hostage situation. Members of the planet's labor guild have"

...

In fact, the labor guild likely adheres to the social code for one or all of three reasons:

1) Civic duty or a utilitarianism
2) Deep sense of Kryptonian tradition
3) Self-interest: they work in exchange for the right to be citizens, to enjoy the planets public resources (the only one I can think of is pretty crystals), and to be protected by the military guild

Neat stuff.

As is this, from a series of comic strips about someone trying to find a church (click on it for more):