The 95th addition is up at Skeptimedia—go and learn!
Month: September 2008
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Another anniversary
I fear for this anniversary. Like everyone else, my memories of 9/11 are vivid. It is a shared experience for Americans, but as time goes on, it is losing its shared meaning. Some of this meaning will, I’m sure, continue to be shunted into political ends, even more so with the election coming up.
I have no interest in 9/11 “Troofers”, the conspiracy theorists who have all kinds of outlandish ideas about the attacks. I don’t need them—the real truth is more frightening.
9/11 wasn’t Pearl Harbor. We didn’t wake up on the 12th to find ourselves at war, despite what the president may have said. When we entered a real war in ’41, we sacrificed. We gave up material goods, we stopped driving, we grew vegetables. I have a box full of ration coupons that my grandfather refused to use as he thought is would be even more patriotic to increase his sacrifice beyond what was asked. After the 11th, we weren’t asked to sacrifice—quite the opposite—we were told the best way to fight was to keep our way of life unchanged, to show the terrorists we cannot be cowed out of our cars by a few thousand murders.
What we weren’t told was that even though we would not be asked to sacrifice, we would anyway. By becoming entangled in unwise military engagements, diplomatic fuck ups, and petrocracy, we’ve played right into the hands of those who attacked us.
You see, with this so-called “asymmetry”, Islamic extremists can do very little to harm us physically. One mass murder can’t destroy our economy, our values, or our way of life.
Unless we let it.
And we did let it. What we sacrificed was our Constitution, our privacy rights, our economy, and our souls. We imprisoned people without due process, we tortured, we extraordinarily rendered, we wire-tapped. We didn’t fight terrorism by showing the example of our constitutional democracy, we gave in to terrorism by diminishing it. We fucked up.
As the GOP runs a campaign on the need for strength, I hope both parties remember an important lesson from American history. Our peace hasn’t only come through our strength; our strength has come through peace—a peace that has allowed us to prosper, build, innovate. The prosperity engendered by peace has allowed us to retool for war when necessary, and to fight these wars with little damage to our home soil.
Wars of choice don’t show the world our willingness to win, they show the world our willingness to be duped into playing by someone else’s rules. The rhetoric spouted by both candidates is ultimately meaningless. Either one will be faced with a world where American power and wealth has been diminished by reactionary decisions. Whomever takes the helm will have to find the strength to face the world based on our core values as a nation, and based on deliberate thought, and by action rather than re-action. We still have a chance to learn from 9/11. Let’s use this anniversary to start doing it right.
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Crankish Signs from the Tree Sitters
All, I’m sorry for abusing you with posts concerning the Berkeley Tree Sitters. For those of us at UC, this has been an enduring pain. And it’s been embarrassing. Why? In part, because this is the type of rhetoric common to the debate:
And of course…
I promise, this is the last posting on the tree sitters. Thanks be to Zombietime.
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So, would you do it again?
(I felt Doctor Signout deserved a more complete answer, so here it is.)
I’m surrounded by cynicism. Doctors make particularly good cynics (although not always the best skeptics). Why are we cynics? Pehaps because we see human behavior in the raw. On a daily—no, hourly—basis, we see people making decisions that destory their bodies. People who make good decisions end up at the doctor, but people who make bad decisions seem to end up at the a lot doctor more. Much of the pathology I see is preventable disease.
Still, doctors’ cynicism is often tempered by a good deal of compassion. I’ve seen the most hardened docs talking trash in the back office, only to moments later walk into the room of a patient, hold their hand, and find a way to reach them.
Medicine is a diverse set of professions. A radiologist can go through their career (nearly) without speaking to a patient, or can choose to spend extra time with a patient before a procedure explaining it, calming fears, in short, being a doctor. Other fields, such as mine, are dominated by interpersonal interaction. In the past, these interactions made up the bulk of useful medicine, as the “medical stuff” didn’t actually do much. The last few decades have seen remarkable advances in preventing and treating many of the big killers. In the past, it was the surgeons who perhaps had the best shot at saving a life. Now, we internists share that glory.
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Berkeley Tree Sitters Come Down
It’s been an exciting day here at UC Berkeley. Four helicopters have been buzzing the office since about 8 AM, because the UC decided to erect a scaffold around the lone tree left in order to extricate the tree sitters. I got to watch about 12:00 today. There were probably 400 observers for the final hour, where workers assembled the scaffold and started to pick apart the encampment near the peak of the tree.Apparently the remaining four tree sitters negotiated with UC officials, and came down voluntarily, which is good, because the risk to personal safety was very high. If the tree sitters were injured, the police would not be found liable, absent unreasonable or abusive behavior (but, a lawsuit would be expensive). If the police were injured by virtue of the sitters’ actions, on the other hand, the tree sitters could be criminally liable. I’m glad it didn’t come to pulling people out of the trees!
Part of the negotiation includes the creation of (you guessed it) a committee to deal with land use issues, but the tree sitters are not immune from criminal or civil prosecution. Charges could be quite serious. The cost to the UC is estimated to be $750,000. And at times, the tree sitters hit workmen and police with bottles and urine and feces.
I imagine the next stop for the tree sitters is the hospital. This protest started in December 2006. While some sitters rotated in and out, access to the tree grove has been limited by police for a long time, meaning that the men removed today from the trees have been up there since at least August 2007. I wonder what health effects one experiences from being outside 24 hours a day, in a tree, in cold, foggy weather! From the looks of the pictures, it’s not good for your hygiene.
Nor was it good for the hygiene of UC-Berkeley. Now that our friends are down from the trees, I hope that they remove the encampment established next to the law school. The ground crew for the tree sitters was large, and they had a more or less permanent presence on Piedmont Ave. Perhaps you were imagining something quaint, like a group of campers. Nope. Here’s a typical example of the type of junk that gets collected by this crowd. You might get an idea of what my school has had to deal with… -
Berkeley Tree Sitters Shake Down UC for $6M!
The nerve! Carolyn Jones of the Chronicle reports:In their most recent demand, the tree-sitters said they would come down if the university gives $6 million to environmental and Native American groups, creates a public committee on campus land use and allows protesters to use the stump from the oldest tree in the grove, which protesters dubbed “Grandma,” for a Native American drum.
The university offered to give protesters the stump and allowed them three two-hour meetings with high-ranking campus officials to discuss mitigating the loss of the oak grove, long-term plans for the southeast corner of campus and other related issues.
I generously offer the university my services: I will personally cause the tree sitters to leave the tree for a mere $1 million. Where can I buy a few hungry monkeys…
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Million Comment Party
So, due to circumstances beyond his control, Ed over at Dispatches won’t be able to plan our Michigan party, so we’re going to do it in the Detroit metro area on Saturday, Sept. 20th. I don’t have the place yet, but I’m getting the idea that there are a few definite maybes. Let me know (again if necessary).
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How will the candidates fix American health care?
I don’t know. There was a pretty good piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, but it’s really not clear enough for most readers (including myself).
The McCain and Obama websites give fairly comprehensive looks at their health plans, but nothing useful for a lay reader.
The good news is that both campaigns have a plan. The bad news is that it is virtually impossible for anyone who cares to make heads or tails of the two and compare them effectively.
Well, gentle reader, I’m going to do you a favor. As an educated and knowledgeable professional, I am not going to try to parse through the various written statements, all of which leave me with more questions, in order to help you understand the issue.
I’ve left requests with both campaigns to ask to speak directly to other human beings, and if all goes well, to present to you an unbiased look at both plans and their implications.
Don’t hold your breath. Obama’s website has a pretty easy way to leave press inquiries. McCain’s not so much.
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Small family, big family
Like many Jewish families, tracing our history is often a sad and difficult task. Three of my four grandparents escaped Europe to found new families in America, giving me the illusion of having a small family, as Hitler uprooted and burnt the rest of my family tree. But the networks formed by immigrants were close, familial, and geographic, facts that were so obvious to them that they often didn’t talk about it.
For example, my paternal grandfather comes from a small city in Poland called Ostrow-Mazowiecka. His mother died of cholera shortly after he was born, and he was raised by various aunts. As a (very) young man, he escaped Poland and came to Detroit alone—I thought. It turns out he came here with his cousin. Each of them founded a new family in the New World.
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