The Deal of the Day

Old Bill was a fine fellow, a man about town, caller of the weekly bingo games down at the DAV hall, and a sometime general factotum at the construction company, where I worked back in the day.

Not that he had to work—he was well set after twenty years working for a municipality back up in Ohio, first as a policeman, then as a fireman. “Was you on the force?” he asked enthusiastically. No, I was actually working there for a living, not as a sideline and for pin money as he was.

He came out of Ohio, he said, with full insurance coverage—medical, optical, dental for himself and his family presumably in perpetuity. His generous pension was twice what the average worker in our town was making. In today’s money it would easily be in six figures. He had no trouble keeping his large house up, his two cars on the road, a nice boat in the water, and at least one of his kids college tuition paid.

Sure, Bill had paid his dues, and had every right to cash in on the American dream. I didn’t begrudge him any of it, and to be fair, his attitude was “doesn’t everyone get this deal?”

I’d been around long enough to realize that no, not everyone gets this deal. In fact, if everyone got this kind of deal, it might be nice, but there is no way that our economy can sustain such a thing.

So now, years later, states and municipalities are beginning to realize that a giveaway to what is essentially a select few cannot be sustained—witness the goings on in Wisconsin. A number of local governments, like one with which I am familiar in Florida, saw the ultimate impossibility of paying retired employees full medical benefits for life, and quietly withdrew the “privilege” from new hires, so that new wage slaves would not be getting the same deal as their co-workers sitting a few feet away.

I imagine we will be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing, as local taxpayers realize that, essentially, they have been had.

Don't Tax You, Don't Tax Me, Tax That Man Behind That Tree

Much is the chatter this week about "net neutrality rules. "I see the issue framed not in the argument of government vs. corporate control, but in the age-old dichotomy between authoritarian and democratic ways of thinking.
There is always somebody (sometimes a frightening large number of somebodies) that thinks that everything should be controlled "from the top."

At the same time a few of the more perceptive "talking heads" are warning about unfunded mandates (like pension obligations) precipitating a crisis in state and local governments in the near future. So it is only a natural progression of things to say, "Let's just tax the Internet." A twofold benefit would result. (As our founding fathers knew, "The power to tax is the power to destroy.") Taxing the Internet would allow the government to control content, in a beneficent way to be sure. And at the same time, the tax could yield a great deal of much-needed revenue!

Far-fetched? Some time ago I made the mistake of going to work for a "taxing agency." Someone (with a degree of authority, too much perhaps) came up with the idea of taxing websites. They wanted us to comb the Internet for local businesses advertising on line, and devise a scheme to quantify their websites and assess a tax accordingly.

I maintained strongly that a website is not a tangible "thing," but something that can be created or deleted with the few strokes of a mouse, and therefore outside of the reach of the local taxing authorities. And in any event a website can be construed a free speech, thus protected, etc.

Needless to say with that argument I sealed my own fate as not being a "team player."

But if anyone thinks there aren't people (on the taxpayer's payroll) planning ways to tax (and therefore control) the Internet, that's OK. Maybe you'd be interested in this bridge we have for sale . . .

Cowed by the Nurses

Now the inpatients are easy, they’re cowed by the nurses
[In your case the angels] and they know what’s what in the set-up.

It caught my eye, this thing about angels in that poem. Sure, some of them are angels, or the earthly equivalent thereof, maybe even most of them. But I don’t know. At one time I was thoroughly convinced that at least two of them were trying to kill me.

Ten years ago, around Christmas time, despite a few premonitory symptoms I overindulged myself on a huge amount of food, including a half-dozen homemade Mexican burritos, a half-gallon of bourbon and eggnog, and at least six “Manhattans.”
Waking up in the night knowing something was wrong, I stubbornly spent two days sipping ginger ale and slowly slipping into a delirium, saying, “I ain’t going to no hospital,” making it inevitable that I ended up at the local, small, close-by hospital, where the only guy who could operate the CAT scan was off for the holidays, and even if he were still in town and could be located, he would most likely be too drunk to be of any use.

Ere long I woke up with stitches from sternum to pubis, and tubes coming out of various locations. I was still, thank God, alive, but severely indisposed. The surgeon had convinced himself of the presence of a “mass,” and had pulled just about everything out for an exploratory look. The intestinal blockage or kink relieved itself as soon as he got me “open,” but he performed a resection anyway.

The operating theater of that hospital didn’t have a reputation for being totally antiseptic, a situation they circumvented by giving the patients what might be considered to be extremely high doses of antibiotics as a precaution. They also had me on a morphine drip. The surgeon left for a week’s vacation in Miami.

For a day or two I actually felt OK. The morphine took care of any great pain I might have been having. Someone brought me a book to read: Robert Graves’s I Claudius. I started reading it, and got to the part where Caligula is secretly poisoning Germanicus, when I started to notice that my skin was starting to look yellowish. Then one nurse I called “Roundface,” sort of a Kathy Bates from Misery clone, only fatter, came in the room while I was sipping a small cup of water. “What’s this?” she said, and dashed it out of my hand. WTF? She came back a few minutes later and taped a piece of paper to the door with the letters NPO on it. They had been taking blood samples every few hours, and without telling me anything had determined that I now had pancreatitis. No more food or liquids until it cleared up. NPO stands for nihil per orem, nothing by mouth. Of course Roundface couldn’t be bothered to explain any of this. She just stared at me like I was a dog about to be kicked. In the meantime I was getting sicker and sicker. She’d occasionally burst in and find fault with something I was doing. Another nurse named Karen arrived about the same time. They both acted like my being there was my own fault, and although I couldn’t even get up by myself, they acted like I was some kind of a threat.


Because of the goings-on in the book—Romans poisoning and killing each other-- and the fact that I was partially delirious, I became convinced that Roundface and Karen were going to kill me. The local newspaper provided free copies to the hospital, and every day that I was there someone my own age appeared in the obituary columns. More than likely they died at the same hospital and on the same floor!

Around New Year’s Karen came into the room in a particularly foul mood, and started slamming things around. Her breath reeked of liquor. She announced it was time to take out my nasogastric tube, and that she would be back at the end of her shift to do just that. The damn thing had been in there for days, and it had rubbed the inside of my nose raw. I couldn’t wait to get it out. I was sure she was going to inflict the maximum amount of pain possible by the way she talked about it.

I tentatively pulled at it to see what would happen. Sure it hurt a little, but it seemed like it would be such a relief to get rid of it that I went ahead and pulled the whole thing out. I put it in an empty paper bag I had and put it under the bed. It felt so good to get rid of it, that I had a smile on my face when Karen came back in the room. “What are you smiling about?” she asked. “What’s so damn funny?” My suspicions were beginning to be confirmed. I didn’t say anything. She busied herself putting on rubber gloves, and then she noticed. “Where’s the tube?”

I smiled and pointed to the paper bag. “It’s down there.”

“What? You took it out yourself? You can’t do that!” She was furious. My suspicions were justified. She’d been robbed of a perfect opportunity to hurt me, and she was furious. “You won’t get away with this! I’m telling the doctor!” She stormed out.

Fortunately that was the last I saw of Karen. Roundface still came around, usually to ask embarrassing questions when I had someone visiting me. “Have you had a bowel movement? What color was it?”

Eventually the pancreatitis cleared up and they let me go home. I went without food for two weeks, and lost a lot of weight. Yes, you might chalk my paranoia up to the shock of the operation, the subsequent sickness, and the effects of the morphine. But I don’t know. They sure acted like they wanted to do me in.

The Damp November of the Soul

Was it my imagination? Ever since the time changed earlier this month I’d been feeling sort of blah---no energy, wanting to take a nap in the afternoon, difficulty focusing on work and projects, craving for sweets, putting on a lot of weight, no desire to go out and deal with other people---“social withdrawal.”

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

--Melville in Moby Dick

OMG, these are classic symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a form of depression that occurs in relation to the seasons, most commonly beginning in winter!

SAD was first systematically reported and named in the early 1980s by Norman E. Rosenthal, M.D., and his associates at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Rosenthal was initially motivated by his desire to discover the cause of his own experience of depression during the dark days of the northern US winter. He theorized that the lesser amount of light in winter was the cause. Rosenthal and his colleagues then documented the phenomenon of SAD in a placebo-controlled study utilizing light therapy. A paper based on this research was published in 1984. Although Rosenthal's ideas were initially greeted with skepticism, SAD has become well recognized, and his 1993 book, Winter Blues has become the standard introduction to the subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder

It’s hard to believe that the amount of ambient light reaching your retinas during daylight hours would have such an effect on your mood, but it does. Think about the number of animals that go into hibernation or “winter sleep.” Who is to say that a residual effect of this impulse doesn’t occur in modern humans?

Although they say it doesn’t affect everyone, Subsyndromal Seasonal Affective Disorder, a milder form of SAD, is experienced by an estimated 14.3% (vs. 6.1% SAD) of the U.S. population. The disorder may begin in adolescence or early adulthood. I remember my first twinges of it at that age, just before moving to Florida (from Vermont).

It’s said that the blue feeling experienced by SAD sufferers can usually be dampened or extinguished by exercise and increased outdoor activity, particularly on sunny days, resulting in increased solar exposure. Certainly Florida living with its warm weather and outdoors lifestyle cuts down of the endocrine, hormonal (or whatever) effects causing Seasonal Affective Disorder. But I’ve known people even there who were “victims” of this malady.

Now that we are living in North Carolina, it’s come back. As soon as I realized what might be happening, I started spending more time outside in the sunlight during the morning. Yes, it does seem to be working.

In some northern areas people use a light box. It seems a little ridiculous to picture someone eating their breakfast next to an array of 100 watt light bulbs, but they say it works. And for those who suffer from this syndrome, it enables them to ward off depression.

There was a businessman from Connecticut, who may or may not have been a SAD sufferer, but when he became successful, he built an indoor pool with banks of sunlamps and tropical foliage. There he drank his morning coffee, before the sun even came up. I really think he had the right idea.

Oh, It Counts, All Right . . . .

. . .But sometimes you have to wonder who is doing the counting. It's a lesson we should have learned in 2000, when the country waited two months to find out who would win the presidential election, during which time "hanging chad" worked its way into the American vocabulary.

Many people were concerned when the "fix" seemed to be computerized voting machines that would record the votes electronically. "Technology to the rescue." They pointed out that the only sure way to maintain the public trust was to have a printed ballot, which provide a concrete paper trail. Anyone who has any experience with computers know that a whole database can be extinguished by the click of a mouse or a surge of electricity at the wrong time.

As long as there's a paper trail, election officials can do a recount, even if the ballots are scanned optically by machine. Devices like the Accuvote system proved themselves in numerous recounts, with close to 100% accuracy.

Of course as long as there are politicians, there will be someone who will find a way to gain the upper hand in an under-handed way. In a not-too-distant primary election, someone sent back an absentee ballot which had the box to be filled in next to two of the candidates' names, but nothing next to the third guy's name.

The elections people quickly and quietly corrected the mistake, but left some of us thinking. "That was just an honest mistake, wasn't it?"This year in another election in a different state, yet another disturbing issue came up. The voter signs an affadavit attesting to his identity and right to vote. The affadavit contains a bar code. The voter brings it to another table in the polling place, where a clerk gets out a paper ballot which also contains a bar code. The he scans both bar codes, and hands the blank ballot to the voter.

The question is: does that mean that they can find out how you vote? The official answer is, "No, of course not. They wouldn't do that anyway."

But the computer types we have talked to say, "It'd be a piece of cake." Not every jurisdiction has a political machine that might, say, tinker with the property assessments depending on how someone voted. But it's enough of a threat just thinking that someone could find out, if they wanted to, to have a chilling effect not only on free speech, but on your right to choose your candidates.

It's something to think about. As a retired lawman who was in a position to know once told me, "Free elections are our last bastion of freedom."

Dry Bite

A story related by a friend, found at the bottom of the shoebox:

As an (undergraduate) student of botany I was fortunate enough to take part in several excursions to the Caribbean islands and Central America. One such trip took us to Panama, where an international non-profit organization maintained a research facility strategically located between coast and mountains.

Although we were primarily there to work and learn, I was looking forward to a promised midweek excursion to the nearest town, which would be a chance to have an informal conversation with our professors and visiting graduate students, some of whom were attractive females (but I digress).

After a long day of collecting and cataloguing samples of the native flora, a van and driver appeared to take us into town. In the tropics there is little of what they call twilight in northern zones. By six o’clock night had already fallen. As we made our may down the rough, darkened path to the van, one of the graduate students complained that someone had let a branch snap back on the path and hit her. She thought she might be bleeding.

As we drove into town over the bumpy road, the driver turned on the overhead light in the van for a minute and turned around to look. Something had scratched her above her tank top, right alongside her breast. He snapped off the light and kept driving.

A short time later we arrived in town, where there were lights and the promise of beer. The graduate student was still carrying on. “Boy, that hurts,” she said to no one in particular. “If you’re bending a branch to get by, the least you can do is give the person behind you some warning.”



“No, Señora, that was not a branch,” said the driver, turning to address her. “That is the bite of a fer-de-lance. There is a type here that climbs in the bushes at night.”

“Oh, my God!” she said. “What are we going to do?”

“Nothing,” replied the driver. “You see, they do not always inject the venom. They just bite. We call this a "dry bite." You can get some Neosporin to put on it, if you want to.”

“But are you sure it’s a dry bite?” She was starting to panic.

“Pero sí,” he said. “If it wasn’t, where you were hit, you’d have been dead by the time we got to town.”

Viva, Viva, La Democracia!

So here's a dilemma: which congressional candidate to vote for.

--A long-term incumbent Democrat who has a good record of bringing federal dollars into the district. A large number of local working families benefit from the jobs made possible by this federal largess.

--A nice, "country club" Republican who promises to cut spending, taxes, repeal Obamacare, issue school vouchers, kill the inheritance tax, and make government smaller in general.

--A Libertarian whose platform seems eminently sensible (with a only few small exceptions), but who doesn't have a chance; a good way to "send them a message," but a vote for him may tip things toward the Democrat.

Tough one, eh? There's no doubt the public is in an anti-incumbent mood this year, and you hear a lot of "throw the bums out" talk. But is it a matter of relacing Tweedledee with Tweedledum? Quite possibly it is.

Most political action in English speaking countries revolves around two parties. Other countries may have several splinter parties that come together in a Parliamentary coalition, but the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have two parties. If a third party arises, it usually is based on a single issue or personality, and it's eventually absorbed into one of the major parties.

Once a congressman gets to Washington, he (or she) will have to align himself with one of the major parties, even if he was elected by third party. It's not as if some of the Tea Party-backed start-ups are really going to change anything, assuming they are elected. They'll be expected to pay their dues and "go along to get along" like everybody else.


So who does one vote for? The guy that will get an influential committee assignment? The challenger because change is good? The third party because "they" need a reminder that the "working man" is still out there, and he votes (sometimes)?

And then there's the problem that virtually no one is talking about the real issues. Jim Kunstler, perpetual predicter of doom, has summed things up today better than I ever could.

The proud winners of seats in congress and the senate might as well put on clown suits and little pointed hats on Wednesday morning and drive around the Washington monument in toy cars. There will be a desperate need for a new politics in this country, for people unafraid to tell the truth and act in the genuine public interest. If we can't generate it from the saner quarters of this country where people think thoughts that comport with reality, I'm afraid we could see some generals step into the picture.

Hoping, seemingly against hope, that we will somehow muddle through.