Trav Trivia

Volume 5, Number 11

June 22, 2009 -- It appears that approximately half of the population have progressive views and want a society that is good for everyone while approximately half of the population is regressive and wants to stifle the other half and keep the status quo. But let’s turn our attention away from the U.S. and over to Iran where momentous events are taking place. It appears that approximately half of the population of Iran have progressive views and want a society that is good for everyone while approximately half of the population wants to stifle the other half and keep the status quo.

As popular uprisings go, this is not “one if by land, two if by sea” but more one if by Facebook, two if by Twitter which makes it difficult for the autocratic authorities to quell the demonstrations and keep the news from the rest of the world. Yes they closed down Facebook. Yes they closed down Twitter. Yes they banned foreign correspondents from going out to cover the events. Yet, the discontented are able to communicate, to plan, to gather, to keep the movement going. The world-wide cyber revolution has changed rules on popular uprisings, how to pull them off, how to squash them.

To recap, the Interior Ministry was sealed, opposition Web sites were shut down, text messages were cut off, cell phones were interrupted, Internet access was impeded, dozens of opposition figures were arrested, and universities were closed. People still managed to communicate. One of the tools used has a Chinese origin, The Global Internet Freedom Consortium, censorship-evasion technology concocted to serve the repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong from attacks by Chinese authorities. The site just got 200 million hits from Iran, representing more than 400,000 people, and almost shut it own from overload.

Columnist Roger Cohen, who has lived in Iran and has connections there, is in Iran and is managing to report in the New York Times on conditions: “Garbage burned. Crowds bayed. Smoke from tear gas swirled. Hurled bricks sent phalanxes of police, some with automatic rifles, into retreat to the accompaniment of cheers.” Women in particular are very active, taking beatings and continuing their protests, crowds made up of not just the young but people of all ages. Cohen reports Tehran is a city of whisperers, people whispering to each other where and when to meet. He also reports a kind of human variation of the “101 Dalmatians” Twilight Bark; at the end of the day all over the city people stand on roof tops and shout, “Allah-u-Akbar” — “God is Great,” in protest.

What are we to make of this and how should we react? Best judgment seems to be that we not take this as pro-American, but a desire on the part of probably half the population for more democracy, particularly by women and the young (ages twenties and younger make up the majority) and a protest against being cheated. Iranians harbor a certain amount of ill feelings toward us, and even much more so the British, for past interference in their internal affairs (only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun and overthrow other country’s governments). President Obama, unlike Congress where resolutions are flying faster than butterflies in a wind storm, has been cautious in his response, in part to keep the protesters from being branded American stooges, and in part to keep options open to negotiate the nuclear problem.

It isn’t easy to sort out the players. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is coming across about as lovable as a Mafiosi don, warned of chaos and bloodshed if protests continue. And like British murder mysteries, where always “the butler did it,” in his case the Jews did it as he blames international Zionist media for fomenting unrest. He can just wave his hands and turn each protester into a Salman Rushdie. As NYT columnist Thomas Friedman put it if this continues he either has to shoot his own people or cede power. However this turns out he has lost a lot of esteem with half of his own people.

Then there are three military groups. Not much is being heard about the Army. The Revolutionary Guard is the big power base. It has its own ministry (where the votes are kept and counted), and is thought to have as many as 120,000 members, with its own small naval and air units. The IRGC are thought to control around a third of Iran's economy as well.

They also control the third group, the hated Basij, a volunteer force of 90,000 regular soldiers and 300,000 reservists. Among other things they turn people in for violations of religious rules in their role of moral policing and suppressors of dissident gatherings. More so than riot police, they throw themselves into the beating of men and women demonstrators on the streets. They are thought to be responsible for attacks on university dormitories and an apartment building this week in which several men and women were killed. A fun loving bunch of guys.

Mir Hussein Moussavi, designated as the loser of the presidential election, an insider himself, is considered less liberal than most of his followers, although he was seen holding hands with his wife in public (gasp). If an Iranian student who sent an OpEd piece to the New York Times has it right, although he is a Moussavi supporter himself he admits Obama would probably have more luck negotiating with the current president and supposed winner of the election, Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has been remarkably quiet this week, issuing only one statement to the effect that he loved everybody (does that include Israel?). Moussavi seems to have gotten into the spirit of the thing, perhaps egged on by his wife, who is called the Iranian Michelle Obama for her unheard of outspoken role in the election process, now states that he is ready for martyrdom. R.I.P.

Cohen and Friedman basically agree that Iranians face some tough choices. Unemployment is about 20 percent. Shall it be a “disastrous domestic political situation with Mr. Ahmadinejad but an improved foreign policy, or improved domestic leadership under Mr. Moussavi but near impossible challenges in making relations with the United States better” (Friedman). In Paris, filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s daughter, Samira, said, “Until Friday we had 80 percent dictatorship and 20 percent democracy, and since Friday we have 100 percent dictatorship.” By the time you have read this who knows what more turmoil will have occurred. And “any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind.”

Batons, bricks, and tear gas seem to be the weapons of the street in Iran, which makes you wonder what it would be like if they owned guns as we do in this country. The view of the National Rifle Association is that we own guns not for sport but, as stated in a fund-raising letter in the spring of 1995, “Jack-booted government thugs have more power to take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.” The gun lobby seems to think Obfama is out to take away our guns. There is a Web site called gunbanobama.com, according to NYT columnist Bob Herbert, who writes about the “frightening connection between the right-wing hate-mongers who continue to slither among us and the gun crazies who believe a well-aimed bullet is the ticket to all their dreams.” When some lunatics believe someone is trying to take away his gun, things happen, like the murder at the Holocaust Memorial, the killing of three police officers in Pittsburgh, and the horror of the episode at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, when authorities tried to check on a stockpile of illegal machine guns that had been amassed there. As the executive vice president of the N.R.A., Wayne LaPierre said, “Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.” I don’t find that very comfortable considering the nature of some of the people we allow to own guns and the people who feed their fears.

After 3.9 billion years we are still trying to figure out how to get along with each other. That is the newest date scientists have come up with on when life on Earth began, triggered by a surge of large comets and asteroids that hit and heated the surface of the earth into molten rock and “boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist” the newspaper account said. Out of that rich stew developed cells and membrane. Life. Or as Truman Capote put it, "Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act." I ran across a new expression I can’t say I am very fond of, “investors with short time window.” They’re talking about me. Did they have to remind me of my “short time window?”

The man thought to be the oldest man in the world died this week in his sleep at age 113 (I wish I had his window), in Japan. He left 53 great grand children, which says something about the population explosion. About 225 years ago the population of this country was about 4 million people. Multiply that by 77 and you have the USA population of today.

Our use of the death penalty doesn’t do much to keep the population in check, although our Supreme Court in its usual 5 to 4 decision did its little part this week. It was ruled that prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence, even at the prisoner’s own expense. Since DNA testing came into being there have been 240 exonerations, but the Court led as usual by Chief Justice Roberts, hardly the champion of individual rights didn’t think it mattered. Mr. Prosecutor, you think he’s guilty then don’t be bothered with a DNA test. It might annoyingly prove his innocence.

In other news, with apologies to Burl Ives and his “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she swallowed a fly” we might say “I know an Obama who swatted a fly. I want to know why he swatted a fly.” You saw it on YouTube, you saw it on cable, you saw it on late night talk shows. The comments and commentary that followed this momentous event (yes there was commentary, as there would have been if he had broken a shoe lace) swirled around the reaction of PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals who went on record deploring the event and are sending to the President a “Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher.” No word on their reaction to the issuance of fly swatters to White House staff. This was not the case of the Administration bringing to Washington and rewarding campaign supporters with positions in the White House; the place has been over run with flies for years they say.

I am more interested in interpreting the psychological meaning behind the act. What does it tell us about the President? He acted forcefully to remove an obstruction in his path, after giving it fair warning by telling it to “get out of here.” He did not call a committee meeting to discuss what should be done about the fly; he acted alone, taking personal responsibility. He did not dawdle, but once making his decision moved promptly. He did not pause to grieve, nor show undue remorse, but moved on resolutely to the next important matter. Yes, I believe the fly incident says a lot about our President and I can steal a quote from the late Jack Valenti about Lyndon Johnson, “I sleep better knowing that Obama is our President.”

Volume 5, Number 10

June 15, 2009 -- When I am looking at current events I keep going back to a phrase from the song “Master of the House: sung by Innkeeper Thernardier in the musical version of Les Misérables: “But nothing gets you nothing everything has got a little price.”

We pay a price for some of the things about our society that we hold dear. Taking a little cue from Thermardier we might sing to his tune:

Hate homicides, a blight.

Hate broadcasters incite.

But no one thinks to take them off the airways would be right

Gun homicides may soar

More deaths than were before

But rather than to give guns up we’re buying more and more.

Extremist groups have spread.

By right wing rhetoric fed.

Since no one wants to squelch free speech we live with it instead.

Wouldn’t think about it twice … pure freedom’s very nice …

“But nothing gets you nothing everything has got a little price.”

And so the question is do words count? Should we hold a Bill O’Reilly in part responsible for the shooting of Dr. Tiller? After all on 23 or more programs the Fox Pine of Darkness branded him Tiller the Killer though the doctor was doing nothing illegal, as unworthy of existing in society, raising his profile, setting him up as a target. O’Reilly offers no regrets, takes no responsibility. In the name of free speech, no one wants to turn off the O’Reilly mike. The death of Dr. Tiller is the price we pay.

There was the tragic shooting of the guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. by a White Supremacist. To what degree do the respectable news organizations and political figures are giving aid and comfort to dangerous lone wolf extremists?

In April a report from the Department of Homeland Security prepared previously was released to the public warning of the proliferation of organizations such as the KKK, skinheads, and other groups devoted to the most extreme far-right ideology. Conservatives in Congress and on the air had a hissy fit, accusing Democrats of demonizing them. Whatever. The report said: “Lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous.”

Frank Rich reported in his Sunday NYT’s column on the growing concerns of FOX News anchor Shepard Smith about the e-mails “surging” in to his network, e-mail traffic, hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out …could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact.” Were the lone wolf followers of the far right in Wichita and Washington goaded by the Obama haters?

Frank Rich put it this way. “In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle.” Yet actor Jon Voight says to a gathering of Republican Party members last week “bring an end to this false profit Obama.” Just how should we expect some disturbed person to take Mr. Voight’s call to “bring to an end?”

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman says Newt Gingrich is the ultimate anti-Obama. In the last few days Newt has characterized Obama as “pagan” or “statist” or “socialist” or “racist.” We could provide Newt with some new words, in fact taking them from the column by William Safire in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine section, taken out of context of course. Miscreant. Corrupt. Degenerate. Depraved. Perverse. Rotten. Villainous. And my personal favorite, ”Flagitious.” A new word for me, Flagitious, and I can hardly wait to use it. Words matter. Anti-Obama rhetoric will inspire some self designated super patriot to make another attempt on his life. It’s the price we pay for free speech. Let’s just hope Obama doesn’t have a price to pay for it.

I want no one to take my guns from me, but every hour in America four people are killed by gun violence according to the Center for Disease Control. More people are killed in car accidents (more than would be if we didn’t like higher speed limits, a price we also pay) but gun violence comes next. Some 30,000 or more people are shot to death each year, 80 to 90 every day. No other civilized country comes even close. Our rate is 10.6 per 100,000 population which is more than the entire industrialized world combined.

We have the guns we want but virtually no gun regulations. You can buy a gun in any of 5,000 gun shows without even a criminal background check. There is the mighty gun lobby which has been hard at work getting Congress to pass legislation allowing people to carry loaded guns into national parks. And sadly just when it seemed that at long last the Americans who have always suffered from taxation without representation, the citizens of Washington D.C. were about to get a voting representative to the House, some members killed it by adding a proviso to a credit card bill disallowing the city its strong gun regulations as an entry fee to join because the gun lobby didn’t like it. I will keep my guns, but the tab seems to be approximately 80 to 90 lives a day.

The American Medical Association has kicked in almost $10 million to federal candidates since 2000 and now wants a little something for the price they paid: no creation of a government-sponsored insurance plan. If they get their money’s worth, we pay the price.

About that public health insurance idea. Joe Conason of the New York Observe gave this report: “Studies have repeatedly shown that patient satisfaction with Medicare, the quintessential public insurance plan, is considerably higher than with private insurers. The average overhead cost of Medicare is roughly 2 or 3 percent, far below the administrative costs of private insurers, which range between 27 and 40 percent.” But Joe, that takes the free market fun out of it.

The cost of television signals going to digital is 12 million homes without service. High definition is said to be a mixed blessing. Every little flaw is visible. The entertainment industry has a problem. TV personalities worry about wearing too much visible makeup to cover even small things like five o’clock shadow, and shiny shoes reflect the green screen. Actresses have a real problem, to the extent they are having it written in their contracts that they must be shot slightly out of focus. NYT columnist Maureen Dowd weighed in on this subject as follows: “I prefer life and TV to be a little gauzy. I don’t want to see every blemish in a harsh light.” You should have seen Doris Day at twenty, singing with the Les Brown band. A mass of freckles. High Def then might have killed her career. A fun game now could be looking to spot those imperfections on your favorite entertainers.

I have learned that for twenty-five bucks I can soon upgrade to “Snow Leopard,” the step up from “Leopard” that I now have on my Mac. Do I want to go through another learning curve? I am not sure if I were a computer company I would want to use the word “snow” in association with trying to sell my products. That sounds as bad as an obelisk in the lobby of the Fort Worth Star Telegram around 1970. As a customer I resented being confronted as I walked in by something labeled “The Twentieth Century Shaft.” Be forewarned I suppose. This was the week when the Mac people and those who developed the 50,000 iPhone apps got their heads, or brains, or virtual memory, together in the Mac expo. 50,000. How did the old song go? I’ve got the whole world in my hands.

The iPhone 3G S will have a three-megapixel camera that also records video, an internal digital compass, and voice-control features. At the Taiwan Computer Show new hybrids of cell phones and computers are the thing according to the New York Times, which calls them “Franken-Products.” Igor is now a Chinese name.

On the subject of communication and words, a group here in the U.S. that monitors language announced that the one millionth word or phrase in the English Language is Web 2.0, originally a technical term relating to the next generation of World Wide Web products and services but now has broader meaning. It has appeared, they say, over 25,000 times although I have never heard of it. I need to get out more. I never head of a word that came in just in front of it either, “NOOb,” a derogatory term from the gaming industry for a newcomer. “Coming out now the NOOb’s point is four.”

Their claim is that about 14.7 new words are coined in English each day. I have not coined a word all day, not even a 7 word. It’s time to come up with one. For the name of these pieces I produce, the word TRAVesty comes to mind, but it’s already taken. I will settle, then for “trav-a-blog.”

Volume 5, Number 9

June 8, 2009 -- Milestones. This seems to be the week for marking events past and present that memorably mark the passage of time.

On a personal level, reflecting on this passage of time I have lived through five different hosts of “The Tonight Show,” each a kind of milestone. I remember the first, and introductory show, in 1954. My wife and I had just purchased our first TV set for our little apartment, something of a stretch at the time. On the screen Steve Allen came bursting through a big paper hoop like those used at high school football games through which the teams plunge to enter the field, and the lively, free wheeling silliness began. As I recall at the end the entire cast wandered around the studio singing and dancing to a loose rendition of “Mississippi Mud,” Allen playing a big bass Euphonium. It was a kind of metaphor for early, care free married life.

Jack Paar took over in 1947, a different tone of kind of sober, dry humor, befitting a period when I was trying to get a grip on being an executive, and parenthood. It was the time of life when you realize, as we used to say at the time, that you were not going to grow up to be “President of General Motors.” That was the ultimate job then. Sounds quaint now, when the company is being called “Government Motors.”

Paar left in 1962, to be replaced by an obscure daytime game show host, Johnny Carson, who made what has to be the oddest pre-show PR tour in history. The manager of the local NBC-TV station set up press conferences, as well as a dinner with his biggest advertisers, to which my wife and I were invited since my employer was wisely or unwisely funneling a lot of broadcast advertising dollars through my fingers at the time and Jack Harris, the manager, would have liked to have seen some of that spent on Carson. None of this happened. Carson refused to talk to the press, or go to dinner. A PR jaunt with no PR. It set the stage for the Carson attitude on television that nothing is sacred. That was pretty much my view for the thirty years of the Carson run.

By the time Jay Leno took over in 1992, retirement loomed, along with a kind of mellowness. Leno was the guy standing around in the break room over coffee, telling jokes. Now this week comes Conan O’Brien, much favored by generations younger than mine. If I can learn to appreciate him, I will have reached another life plateau: Second Childhood.

I feel certain that the Obama speech at Cairo University will be recorded as a milestone in history. Cairo University. Did he get a doctorate for this speech at a University? If so I didn’t see it. Whatever you may think of it, it was a speech not to a country, not just to a conglomerate of peoples, but to the world. Gandhi, Mandela, Dali Lama, Obama, all on the world stage.

Of course reaction around the world and at home ran the gamut of attitudes and prejudices, including yours and mine. But reaction it got. Text messages, e-mails, blogs, and tweets raced around the Muslim countries as well as the rest of the world. Obama said, “America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world even if we disagree with them,” and voices are being heard, whether they are law abiding or not.

My view of Egypt is not a clear one, making the location of such a speech seem odd to me. On the one hand, I think of it as I viewed it in the late l940s. I was doing some freelance work for an advertising agency that had as a client one of those typical sons of successful Houston oil operators who inherited a lot of money from their late fathers and did not want to do anything meaningful that smacked of work. All he really had to do was keep his Mother happy, and to do so he pretended to be in business selling little items, using a powerful radio station in Mexico on the border that covered Texas offering for sale things like the “glowing Jesus,” a statue that glowed in the dark. He spent most of his time bedding the office receptionist until he met and married the favorite belly dancer of Egyptian King Farouk. It got him much publicity in the U.S. and in Egypt, which may have been the idea all along (well, maybe not THE idea) but it also got him a lousy marriage and unmitigated hell from his purse-strings holding Mother. To me, Egypt remains a land of Kings and Belly Dancers. It did until my wife and I shared a sight-seeing van in Paris with an Egyptian couple and their son, who like any American kid counterpart spent the tour ignoring the sights and playing with his hand-held electronic game to the ire of his father who reacted like any American parent in the same circumstances. It didn’t fit the stereotype.

However, you read that Egypt is under the thumb of an aging dictator who will pass power down to his son (does he have a favorite belly dancer?), and the country is disintegrating because of autocracy and stagnation.

About the speech, Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative “National Review”, claims “Bush tried to deliver the same message over and over again. The difference with Obama is that people might actually be willing to listen." Time and history will tell.

In Sunday’s New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes it is now Secretary of State Clinton’s turn. He quotes Larry Diamond, author of “The Spirit of Democracy:” “The reason there are no successful Arab democracies today is because there is no successful Arab democracy today.” No model exists. Somehow, Friedman says, Clinton is going to have to convince the Suni, Shnitis and Kurds to learn to share power before we pull out or disaster will return. Of course we are sitting here with one group of elected officials on record of opposing each and every thing the majority party tries to do. Kind of do as I say, not do as I do.

Friedman goes on to say that he doesn’t buy the concept that “Iraq was the bad war, Afghanistan the good war and Pakistan the necessary war. Folks, they’re all one war with different fronts.” Friedman’s column triggered me to Google my own notes and come up with this from June the sixth, from a Bill Moyers program, and I find it startling. If you think about the Taliban as a band of tribesmen, consider this. Pierre Sprey, a former Pentagon official, pointed out that they make up “40 million people spread across Afghanistan and Pakistan who don’t even recognize that border. It’s their land … they all speak the common language. And they all have a very similar, very rigid, in lots of ways very admirable code of honor much stronger than their adherence to Islam.” These are Pashtun territories. “This is a region where people in one valley hate the people in the next valley more than they hate so called foreigners.”

Just to put that 40 million in perspective, Taliban tribes in total are larger than the population of 187 other countries out of 221 …Six times more people than Israel … almost as many as Spain … more than Argentina … or Poland or Algeria … almost four times more than Greece … ten times more than Lebanon ... it’s like being at war with Belgium, Cuba, Portugal and Hungry all at the same time. Makes you think of a line in the last Alamo movie when Bowie looks out a the hoards of Mexican soldiers and says something about “we’re going to need more troops.”

More milestones. This week saw the 65th anniversary of D-Day. In my father’s day in World War I it was “over the top,” out of trenches on to battleground. In World War II it was wade ashore, just as devastatingly dangerous. June 4th was the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, and Chinese massacre of pro-democracy activists. China has made a lot of strides with a managed free market but not yet protect human rights and civil liberties, but odds are it will come to pass before another person has to stand in front of a tank. Too many young people with a better standard of living and cell phones and e-mail are going to some day take one from column A and two from column B and change things.

Next week marks news on the Job front. Not employment but Steve Job. Although he won’t attend the Mac Worldwide Developers Conference because he is still recovering from a heath problem, his presence will be felt. What will be in store for iPhones and iPods? There are 40,000 free or low-cost applications for iPhones and iPod Touches. Ability to record video and an internal compass that will make it easier for them to figure out their location. Soon everything there is in the world will be held in one hand. On that same note bar codes that store more data or can be read off of cellphones, may be coming soon. The packages will be talking to you through your phone.

Friday may turn out to be memorable since millions of households will lose television reception when about 1,000 broadcasters around the nation shut off their analog signals and complete their conversion to digital programming. The government has spent more than $2 billion to make the transition easier but still there is a huge number of sets that will go blank. Talk about your “sweeps week.”

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology claims another milestone. A human gene, called FOXP, the gene responsible for human capacity for language, has been successfully transplanted into a laboratory mouse. That mouse, in turn, was then able to communicate much better to the other mice. How the scientists knew that, I can not say, but one can envision that with more work and a lot more FOXP there will come a day when a mouse will be able to communicate with the human species. The first mouse to communicate directly with humans would certainly become a celebrity, perhaps even worth of a Reality TV Show (if Jon and Kate Gosselin qualify, why not a mouse?) Looking around his laboratory, his first communiqué might very well be “I’m a Celebrity Rodent … Get Me Out Of Here.”

Volume 5, Number 8

June 1, 2009 -- I know there were new stories in the news this week but because so much is held over, unresolved, and still talked about that I couldn't shake the feeling of watching a TV series (it isn’t?) in summer reruns. We still await solutions to the big problems, like the Guantanamo detainees, gay marriage, energy, health care, automobile makers in crises, immigration, so I guess it is up to me to provide the answers.

I still say if we can’t abide having Guantanamo detainees sully U.S. soil with their presence, (and now even General Petraeus would have us close the base) put them on prison ships and set sail for nowhere and never make landfall. The prisoners could spend their time chipping paint. You have to have served at sea in the Navy to appreciate the chore of chipping paint. Lowly seamen are given a short, hand-held metal bar bent at the end, and must get down on the deck and whack away to loosen away the old paint so new paint may go down. The cacophony of steel banging steel in dozens of hands is hard to take, and would probably be banned by the Geneva Convention.

Nobody had listened to me on gay marriage (I’ve only seen one writer make a casual comment on this same point). The word “marriage” describes a religious ceremony. Government has no business being involved in a religious ceremony (yes California is going to continue to recognize those unions already made, but they still call it a "Marriage"). Allow any two people who want to establish a household to obtain a license for a paper called a civil union rather than a marriage license, and if they want to get “married” let them find a religious institution that will perform it for them. Let’s do it, and get on to other things.

Let’s face it. We will never have a health care system as effective as now found in other industrialized nations because we are not willing to give up the profit motive. You can’t blame the health care industry. They are companies in business to make money for stockholders, so it behooves them, or rather compels them, to make every effort to insure only the people least likely to file future claims, and to resist paying as many claims as possible. In a conversation this week with a person whose six-figure job was eliminated due to the recession, it will cost about $1,000 a month to replace health benefits lost. No chance without a job.

Why should the rest of just care? Other than the morality of the thing, there is personal risk in this for all of us. The millions out there without access to health care, particularly preventive care, are on the lower income rung of society and can’t afford to miss work if they can help it, so these are the folks serving you food, handing you change at the cash register, standing next to you in a crowd, passing on to you everything from a mild infection to the swine flu (which scientists are saying can travel on paper money).

Since we can’t eliminate the profit motive dear to the hearts of us all (Senators of both parties are resisting offering a public insurance option in the bill now under development in the Senate), I say let’s turn it around; let’s come up with a plan that pays the health care industry for keeping people healthy. Under this concept everyone would have insurance and compensation to the insurers would be based on wellness. The profit motive would kick in, all those employed currently to deny claims would be urging and goading policy holders to go for checkups and live a healthy lifestyle. In this case the wonders of the free market would shift in to gear to foster a healthier populace.

There are a number of sources of renewable energy out there if we will just get busy and use them, but as I said some time ago there is a source of renewable energy we are overlooking: Kudzu, for the making of ethanol. Kudzu, called the vine that ate the South, covers over seven million acres in the southern states. Traveling through parts of the Deep South you can see miles of it, covering fields, fences, barns, houses, anything in its way; you can practically see it growing and is almost impossible to eradicate. Cut it down, chop it up, it grows right back while you are standing there. I will wager it should make a better ethanol than corn, which makes a very poor product. We could stop the corn subsidies, get the corn growers to turn to other crops like soybeans maybe (in the Texas high country around Lubbock, farmers who used to grow cotton now grow wine grapes for an eight times better return on their money). It would also set up a clash of Midwest Senators versus Senators in the South eager for a new good cash crop in their states and the ensuing battle of special interests might be worth watching just in itself.

The Daily Beast (appropriately in this case) reported a new trend in ranching that is good for the environment and a money-maker as well: genetically engineered mini cows. These small, stocky cattle breeds eat about half as much as a regular cow, but produce up to 75 percent as much steak and plenty of milk each day. Four of them would replace three full size cows at the cost of feeding two. Should mean less gas emissions too, which scientists say are a big factor in the planet’s greenhouse problem. Is, then, Ruth Chris Steak House a polluter by proxy? Eat less steak and more tofu to save the world.

Abortion is another problem we will never solve. Not by legislation. The last time I saw data on this it said that there were about the same number of abortions performed when it was against the law as when it is legal. A pragmatist will say isn’t it better then to have them done safely and regulated than suffer the consequences of botched, unsanitary treatment in back alleys? Some doctors are repelled at aborted fetus; some are horrified when called to treat the victims of botched abortions.

Yesterday in Kansas Dr. George Tiller, a performer of abortions, was shot, as he was serving as an usher at his church, for the second time in his career, this time fatally. By someone who advocates the “culture of life” no doubt. Two quotes from Dr. Mardy’s quotations seem appropriate:

"As far as we can discern the sole purpose of human existences is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." Carl Jung.

"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” Dalai Lama.

The conflict over abortion defies a solution, Roe vs. Wade being about the only reasonable compromise between two positions, yet it is under constant assault. Sometimes it seems we ought to retire a word that has become too inflammatory. “Abortion” is one. Let’s at least call it something else, like a “uterus scope.” It won’t change the procedure, but just like the Bush Administration calling the relaxing of polluting rules which allowed more emissions into the atmosphere the “Clean Air Act” for a time at least it won’t sound so bad.

What will happen to Roe vs. Wade assuming Judge Sotomayor wins her appointment to the Supreme Court?” This sounds like one of those jokes that go “Six Priests, Two Rabbis, and a Minister went out to play golf” etc. She will make Catholic number six in the aforementioned religious makeup of the Court. Most people do not believe it will change anything. Apparently she fits the description of a "cultural Catholic," raised a Catholic, imbued with its values, but does not attend Mass regularly. She does not have a very active religious life, but evidences a commitment to social justice and community service.

Just as it was in the election of 2004, an appointment to the Supreme Court was just about the most important thing at stake in 2008. These appointments shape our lives for years to come. E. J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post unearthed this quote from a speech by a junior Senator opposing the appointment of now Chief Justice Roberts: he rules on “behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.” And Obama got it right at the time. The Chief Justice has ruled against the individual in favor of the big guys every single time such a case has come before the court, at least 33 times, if I remember it correctly. Roberts will most likely serve another 30 or more years.

We are now immersed, as predicted, in a campaign of racist and sexist attacks on Judge Sonia Sotomayor by the radical right. It is not coming to a great degree from Republican Senators. They don’t have to. They let Rush, Newt, and former congressman Tom Tancredo do it for them, calling her racist a bigot and an “angry woman” (the worst sin of them all). Ann Coulter also weighed in. Tancredo told CNN that she is a member of La Raza, which he called a “Latino KKK” (they don’t tar and feather, they just marinate in hot sauce). Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post came up with this great comment: “Limbaugh doesn't ask to be taken seriously. He just asks to be paid.”

If you would like to rub elbows (or scales) with conservative elite, join them on a 10-day cruise in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. There will be smokers featuring H. Upmann cigars (if you go please bring me back one … it’s been fifty years since I last smoked an Upmann), seminars, and intimate diners with celebrities like Karl Rove, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, Dick Morris (he who sucked toes), and Cal Thomas. They are cruising on Holland America’s Noordamin, a ship I once cruised on. I wouldn’t do it again until they fumigated the ship. There are still some openings if you are game, for as low as $5,000 (plus another grand if you want a window and you might need a breath of fresh air).

How can we fix the Big Car Companies crises? Health care reform might get that expense off their backs which would help make them competitive. Foreign car makers were able to go into Southern states in need of sources of jobs, wheel and deal for infrastructure and tax advantages to build new state of the art plants. That is hard to duplicate in Detroit but some kind of offsetting similar breaks should be worked out by the new owners, the Fed (or us). Design new styles but give them new names Do away with names like Buick. Call them something else, brand names with flare. New brands. The old brands are cursed.

Sometimes a new name is all you can do. Until we can have an air-tight border, and lots of luck there, we will have illegal immigration. Meanwhile, change the name to “overextended visitors” and live with it like we have been living with it for years and years, and profiting from it.

According to the New York Times, around the country some principals of grade schools and high schools are convinced they have a new problem: hugging, hugging in the hallway between classes, hugging where ever it is they meet. Hugging has replaced the simple handshake they say. So? (to quote Dick Cheney). These people should have been around in the 1940s and watched us dance. When the number was slow you couldn’t have gotten a butter knife between the bodies. It was the vertical equivalent of today’s lap dance.

When we lived in Rhode Island we occasionally attended a mass at a nearby convent. It was in the sixties when the church was allowing experimentation with the mass, and at the Convent the sisters played guitar, sang vigorously and at the appropriate moment went on a serious hugging spree of everyone in attendance. A lot of pent up affection apparently, but though a little unsettling, very nice.

In an era of violence instead of banning it altogether or enforcing “the three second rule” they should be happy about this. Human contact beats a text message or Facebook. Most young women I know greet me with a hug, and I must say I appreciate it. My talking clock speaks to me in a female voice as does my computer but it’s just not the same. I’ll take flesh on flesh any day. Loosen up, people.

William Safire, the language maven, in his New York Times columns of late has been searching for a universally agreed upon hand signal to thank another driver for a courteous act, like letting you in the traffic line. In Sunday’s column he reported that he had over 700 replies. While there were many reasonable suggestions, there was not one that cried out “I’m the one.” My thought on this is that instead of taking our hands off the wheel and making a gesture, we should invent some device to do it for us. A special horn, like the old klaxon “ah-ugh-guh” might do it if everyone knew what it stood for. Or the old Bermuda Carriage Bell like my buddies who drove little Triumphs in the forties favored. Of course we could invent a devise that, like a Jack in the Box which at the push of a button would jump up and wave, or hold a sign that said Thank You. But it would have to go on the top of a car like a police light, and rotate, sine you wouldn’t know in advance which side warranted the gesture. Requires more thought. And it’s good to see Safire busy with matters of this sort rather than the old days when he wrote speeches for Richard Nixon, or columns beating the drum about weapons of mass destruction and the need to invade Iraq. He is like a toothless old lion but a very articulate one (except for the articulate part, that’s an image that hits too close to home. I’ll have to go brood on it).