July 7, 2008 archive

(Cross-posted at My Left Wing.)

I hate cars.  I hate them.  I hate driving them.  I hate being a passenger.  I don’t like crossing the street in front of them.  I don’t like being anywhere near them.

Yet, they are everywhere.  Every single time I step from my apartment, there they are.  Hundreds and hundreds of these steal monstrosities flying around, dominating the cityscape.  According to the United States Bureau of Transportation Statistics, every year about 40,000 people die in the US due to auto accidents.

40,000!

{YIKES!  That’s a scary picture, huh?}

Bubbles, Bubbles, Bubbles

The G-8

Doctors Press Senate to Undo Medicare Cuts



By ROBERT PEAR

Published: July 7, 2008

WASHINGTON – Congress returns to work this week with Medicare high on the agenda and Senate Republicans under pressure after a barrage of radio and television advertisements blamed them for a 10.6 percent cut in payments to doctors who care for millions of older Americans.

The advertisements, by the American Medical Association, urge Senate Republicans to reverse themselves and help pass legislation to fend off the cut.

How to pay doctors through the federal health insurance program is an issue that lawmakers are forced to confront every year because of what is widely agreed to be an outdated reimbursement formula.

Wall Street faces the bears of summer

Unemployment, inflation quash second-half rally forecasts

By Matthew Goldstein, Ben Steverman and Ben Levisohn

Business Week

The first six months of 2008 ended with U.S. stock markets in the dumps. Now, with the major indexes in or near bear market territory after touching highs in October, hopes for a happier second half are fading fast.

A toxic brew of sluggish economic growth, rising unemployment, and spiking inflation-otherwise known as stagflation-is prompting market watchers to backpedal furiously on earlier predictions of a rally later this year. Noticeably absent from the discussion are the traditional stock market drivers of strong earnings and interest-rate cuts, neither of which seem to be on the horizon.

USA

With Pride, Californians Step Up to Fight Fires  



By CAROL POGASH

Published: July 7, 2008

ELK, Calif. – When he spotted a small fire two weeks ago atop a steep hill outside this blocklong town, Charlie Acker, 57, the president of the local school board and a volunteer firefighter, jumped inside his stubby red 1965 fire truck and, with a skid and a prayer, drove up the nearly vertical incline to check out the situation.

Knowing that every other volunteer firefighter in this community of 100 residents was battling a larger blaze nearby, he used his cellphone to call his wife. She roused a crew of young kayakers who cater to tourists in this picturesque old logging town at the edge of the Pacific, some 140 miles north of San Francisco, and joined Mr. Acker on the line.

The state fire agency, CalFire, had promised to send a helicopter, but just as Mr. Acker was waiting for the whump-whump of the blades, it was diverted, he said, “to a higher rent district” in another county.

Ex-CIA high official Victor Marchetti wrote:

“A ‘limited hangout’ is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting – sometimes even volunteering – some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

Scott Shane’s New York Times article, China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo (7/2/08), details the use of Albert Biderman’s “Chart of Coercion” by members of the the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program, or SERE, program to teach torture techniques to interrogators. The article is a fine example of how to conduct a limited hangout, or selected revelation, of intelligence-related material. Its headline and story is disingenuous or betrays ignorance. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the nefariousness or deviance of those who taught SERE techniques to U.S. interrogators, and to hide the truth about the derivation of those techniques, and to the history of the their use by U.S. government agencies.

Cross-posted from Daily Kos, at the request of Cassiodorus.

I HAD ORIGINALLY PROMISED SEVERAL KOSSACKS that I would write this diary on the ins and outs of foster care, and becoming a foster dad (or mom) weeks ago. I’m late in posting this because I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the best way into this complex subject.

And then Friday, July 4th, as I made my weekly five-hours-there-five-hours-back trip to visit my (former foster) son in prison, I gave the matter more thought. And then during the visit, a life-changing event took place, and I realized the real nitty gritty of the matter could only be conveyed from a personal perspective.

And though my tale will include the training, the licensing, the minutia of the process, it will be have to be ferreted out from within this true story, the story of a boy I’ll call ‘Jack’, my former foster kid and the son of my heart.

This is a very long diary, and not for the feint of heart or those who want such things boiled down into feel-good four-color brochures and factoids (though it has factoids as well). So proceed if you want to learn a little something about the subject — but like being a foster parent itself, it will take a personal commitment to seeing it all the way through…

So now it’s July, high summer.

I heard Ben Stein today on CBS’s Sunday Morning talking about air conditioning.  While I am much younger than Ben I certainly remember when air conditioning entered my life.

As a wee lad I mostly haunted the Library, but a short walk from my house where I quickly read through the Kids Section absorbing the collections of Hardy Boys, Tom Swifts, and Nancy Drews as well as Science Fiction, History, Biography and miscellaneous other categories until I exhausted the catalog and was booted upstairs to the Adults Section, most of the shelves of which I couldn’t reach, yet.

The Library was air conditioned, but when it was closed I’d go down to the basement (the coolest part of the house) and lie in front of a hurricane fan using a table knife to hold down the pages.  Some nights everyone had to sleep downstairs by parental edict.  I found the enforced togetherness as enervating as the heat.

I in fact spurned other than found air conditioning (pervasive, isn’t it, now that you think about it) until the early 90s when I started noticing persistent heat related failures in my computer equipment.

So let’s just say, I know what a Long.  Hot.  Summer.  Is.

No justice, no peace.

So what’s it going to be like when the rolling blackouts come campers?  When your air conditioning and your fans and your lights and your television and your internets operate but a few hours a day and never when you need them.  When your rationed energy is totally absorbed by scrounging enough to merely survive.

Will you read books by candlelight?