Kill Your Television

 Study suggests sitting-to-exercise ratio.

"Researchers also ran the same analysis for time spent on an activity and mortality for TV watching and found that people who watched television three or more hours per day (presumably while sitting rather than being on, say, a treadmill) had a higher risk of mortality for nearly every amount of physical activity except for those in the highest quartile. But even these super active people could tolerate only so much TV time. Those watching television five hours a day or more still appeared to have a significantly increased risk of death as compared to those watching little TV regardless of the amount of physical activity. This implies that watching TV while sitting may somehow be worse for your health than doing a different type of task while sitting and it's something that has researchers find perplexing..."

The Long Cost of War

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the Senate's only socialist and current chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee, speaks the truth about paying the ongoing costs of America's war's.

“If you can’t afford to take care of your veterans, then don’t go to war,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “These people are bearing the brunt of what war is about. We have a moral obligation to support them.”

He agreed it wasn’t cheap but said the cost pales in comparison to the cost of war for veterans and families who have sacrificed so much. He then described the decision as a choice between veterans and the wealthy.

“If you happen to meet a veteran who is trying to get by on $28,000, $30,000, $35,000 a year and you notice that the teeth in his mouth are rotting I want you to go up to that veteran and have the courage, the honesty to tell him that you believe the United States of America does not have the money to take care of his needs,” Sanders said. “But explain to him why you may have voted for more than $100 billion in tax breaks for the wealthiest.”

Old News

Following links in today's news I came across this 15 month old story on Iran pursuing and mastering nuclear weapon technology.  Here's the money quote,

the new disclosures fill out the contours of an apparent secret research program that was more ambitious, more organized and more successful than commonly suspected. Beginning early in the last decade and apparently resuming — though at a more measured pace — after a pause in 2003, Iranian scientists worked concurrently across multiple disciplines to obtain key skills needed to make and test a nuclear weapon that could fit inside the country’s long-range missiles, said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who has reviewed the intelligence files.  (emphasis added)

Read that quote and recall that American scientists did that very same thing in the 1950's and 60's.  We figured out how to put multiple warheads on a single missile.  Even now, American science and technology combine to create new weapons of war and market them to the world. 

Knowing that history, I find the freak-out about Iran to be less than convincing.  Weapons proliferation and the willingness to use those weapons against others are always a matter of concern but when I look at the record, I see that the enemy is us.

Living with Death

Trolling through earlier posts looking for one that I wrote but don't exactly remember when, I came across a post about the consciousness of death that stays with the combat veteran.  It's worth repeating:

All luck. Sheer luck. As a kid in the 50's I used to wonder how our fathers had survived the hail of lead and shrapnel that was my image of World War II. I found out when I saw combat on my own. It wasn’t the murderous thunder that I had imagined but rather the random explosion of periodic violence that fortuitously never injured me. But in between was the potential, the always lurking threat, not just from a determined foe but also from my buddies and even myself.  I’m lucky to be alive; 58,000 of my comrades aren’t.

The randomness of death and injury in combat has stayed with me since Vietnam. Shit happens. I saw it. Somehow I survived it. It’s still there, waiting to happen. Just ask anyone who was anywhere near the Pentagon and World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 or in the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995 or any parent of a murdered child. Perhaps the risks are less in civilian life but I know that I am never totally safe. In that respect I am still on patrol, hoping nothing will happen but entirely aware of the potential.

After combat, nothing can ever be a complete surprise.  After combat, the veteran knows that the worst is always possible, a consciousness that is never lost. 

Inaugural Words

Wow.  I just heard the President of the United States speak the word "collective" and say that We the People do not want perpetual war.*

Hope he means it. 
________
*  Exact quote:  "We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war."

A Sane Word About Guns

My ideal world is one where people do not kill each other, regardless of method.  Unfortunately, I do not live in that ideal world.  Nor is it likely in any foreseeable future.  So I go with with is practical and, most important, reasonably effective.  Lee at HorsesAss has a good piece about the challenges of building effective policies to reduce gun violence. 

Our problem is now a deeply rooted cultural one. It’s not that I don’t think it can ever change, I just don’t think there’s a set of realistic laws that can bring about that change by itself. It has to be a cultural shift over time. It will happen if the next generation of Americans grows up with a healthy measure of disgust over our obsessive gun culture and firearm extremism.

The best parallel I can point to is with cigarettes. Within a generation, we’ve greatly stigmatized being a smoker, while also passing a number of laws that didn’t outlaw smoking, but made it more inconvenient. It’s likely the laws did less than the information campaign to educate people about its unhealthiness, but both happened in parallel. And cigarette smoking was greatly reduced over my lifetime. (links in original)

One of the commenters suggests a "market-based approach" by requiring liability insurance for owners of certain high capacity weapons.  I would require enhanced purchase requirements and hold gun manufacturers and dealers liable for the consequences of their sales if requirments are not met.  The gun nuts are right about one thing:  bans on weapons will be circumvented; we need only look at the failed drug wars of the past 40 years to know that.  Like Lee, I don't have the answers.  Like Lee, I would look for practical solutions. 

The appeal and myth of guns in modern America will confound any attempts to reduce gun violence.  It's an easy appeal for me to understand and fear.  I still remember the power and authority that carrying an automatic weapon in combat gave me.  Wielding that kind of power is disturbingly satisfying.  That's why I fear it.

That is why I want to see fewer opportunities for others to embrace that  power.  

Solving the Deficit

When given a choice of fixed options to reduce the federal deficit to a sustainable level, most Americans are willing to accept higher taxes, less domestic and military spending losing the state and local tax deduction and even a carbon tax, according to a poll reported in Slate. The poll features an interactive menu of policy options totaling $2,082 billion.The user is tasked to select options totaling $900 billion to reduce the deficit.  Policies individually chosen by 53 percent or more respondents total $943 billion and do not, include reducing Medicare and Social Security benefits.  Those options garnered 34 and 37 percent respectively. 

Of course, the devil is in the details but the interactive menu provides some good thumbnail information, enough to make you think.  I took the poll and found $514 billion right off by choosing cuts in military spending, higher tax rates for incomes above $250K and a carbon tax.  The carbon tax was chosen by 56 percent of the respondents.  It makes perfect sense to tax something we want to discourage; given climate change we need to discourage carbon.

I can get to $731 billion by reducing domestic spending 1 percent a year (same as military) but that leaves me $269 billion short.  Frankly, I think I could get more savings out of the military.  Department of Defense financial management has been reported by the Government Accountability Office as high-risk area every year since GAO began identifying high risks in 1995.  For this exercise, if I get those additional savings, I would use them to offset cuts to the domestic programs so I'm still short.

Choosing a national sales tax would add $406 billion to my total and allow me to reduce those domestic program cuts big time.  Fifty percent of the poll respondents chose the sales tax.  I'm not inclined to.  Sales taxes are regressive and have traditionally been used by state and local government.  The other big money option is tax rate increases for all.  That would add $336 billion and give me some margin.  I don't want that option either.

My next choices would be to eliminate the deductions for home mortgage interest and state and local taxes.   Those two options put me at $943 billion. I would consider those options only as part of a larger review of all tax deductions.  Other deductions could well have less social and economic utility and could be much better candidates for elimination.  But as long as I am willing to accept a reduction in deductions, I can legitimately claim the savings.

So that's how I would solve the deficit.  It's pretty much in line with what most Americans want.  Maybe if Congress would listen to Americans and not corporate lobbyists, the deficit would be no fucking big deal.

Oh, Wow...

Marijuana is legal in Washington State.

Those Electronic Medical Records

...that will reduce health care costs?  Maybe not so much.

Many doctors and hospitals say that computerized medical records encourage the move to higher codes because the software makes it easier for providers to quickly create documentation for charges. One electronic medical records company predicts on its Web site that its product will result in an increase of one coding level for each patient visit, potentially adding $225,000 in new revenue in a year.

Which goes to show that entrepreneurs will always work the angles.  Still, much can be done.  Inefficiencies in the US healthcare system waste about $750 billion per year.  That's right--$750 BILLION.  The Institute of Medicine estimated losses due to unnecessary services ($210 billion annually); inefficient delivery of care ($130 billion); excess administrative costs ($190 billion); inflated prices ($105 billion); prevention failures ($55 billion), and fraud ($75 billion).  These are estimates but even allowing a margin of error they are large numbers.  Targets of opportunity for reform and effective management.

Making a Federal Case of It

Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West strongly argue that the right to marry is a fundamental constitutional right, one that should be recognized and protected nationwide rather than by individual states.  They show that courts have long recognized marriage as a fundamental right.  They also show why leaving the decision to recognize a legal marriage should not be left to the states. 

What’s messy is what we have now—an oddball collection of marriage laws, civil unions, and same-sex bans that stop and start at state lines.  This is simply unworkable in a country where we all have the right to travel (another one of those “fundamental rights”) and there’s no way to ask people to check their marriages at the border.  Add to the mix that nobody has any idea whether the Defense of Marriage Act can overrule the Full Faith and Credit Clause by telling states that don’t recognize same-sex marriages that they can ignore unions from states that do. We have interstate child custody disputes that are Solomonic in scope. And our schizophrenic tax codes treat the same couple as married on one form and not married on the next. Social security, Medicaid, health care directives, estate planning, and immigration all hinge on marital status, which in turn hinges on the whim of the voters. The courts are just now wading into that morass and we won’t lie, it’s ugly out there. 

Lithwick and West know the law along with the practical mechanics, so to speak, of enforcing civil rights in a federal system.  They make a strong case for a national standard.  All that makes for a bold conclusion, using language that reaches deeply into America's constitutional and federal heritage.

It’s time to fight this battle where it belongs, which is on the federal stage.  It’s time to embrace the language of constitutional justice. It’s time to say what is at stake here—true equality, full citizenship for everyone, basic human dignity and, yes, a fundamental right.  The state-by-state rhetoric gives too much credence to the argument that the states have an option to discriminate, sometimes, so long as enough of their citizens cast a vote.  They don’t.  The Constitution forbids it.

When it comes to fundamental rights, the individual states cannot be trusted.  Nor can majorities.  As Lithwick and West note, it’s ugly out there.

We're No. 45!

Another good reason to live in Washington State:

Washington ranks  45th among the states in church attendance according to a recently released study.  We've slipped up from 49th 10 years ago but still better than most other states.

Context

Jonathan Schell has been studying and writing about nuclear arms and and policy for over three decades. That's why you would be well informed about the Iran nuclear weapons "crisis" if you read Thinking the Unthinkable.

You will know attacking Iran is a harebrained, reckless, destructive and self-destructive policy that will be a fiasco, folly and unworkable.

Far from providing a solution to a proliferation problem, war with Iran would almost certainly precipitate an immediate proliferation catastrophe. President Obama has articulated his nightmare that a nuclear-armed Iran would touch off a chaotic nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Yet a military strike would likely trigger an Iranian crash program to build the bomb (just as Israel’s 1981 strike goaded Saddam Hussein to do likewise, as the world discovered after the US invasion of 1991). Why would other countries in the Middle East wait for Iran to succeed? In other words, disarmament war, in Iran or elsewhere, is likely to bring on the very result it is meant to prevent.

Given these realities, the only serious military policy would be the overthrow of the Iranian government and long-term occupation of the country, which alone could produce a more lasting result. Regime change is the necessary corollary to any disarmament war worthy of the name. But merely to mention such a harebrained, reckless, destructive and self-destructive idea as an American occupation of Iran, especially in the aftermath of the Iraq fiasco, is immediately to reject it. What is even more certain is that folly of this kind, unworkable even in a single case, can never provide the basis for the kind of global nonproliferation policy that the world so badly needs.

I could not agree more.

The Evergreen State Shines

Washington State Legislature passes same-sex marriage bill.

My adopted state is very different from my native state.

"Common Sense" for Our Times

...from Ralph Nader, reflecting on the unrest in Egypt,

Here at home, the political system is a two-party dictatorship whose gerrymandering results in most electoral districts being one-party fiefdoms. The two Parties block the freedom of third parties and independent candidates to have equal access to the ballots and to the debates. Another barrier to competitive democratic elections is big money, largely commercial in source, which marinates most politicians in cowardliness and sinecurism.

Our legislative and executive branches, at the federal and state levels, can fairly be called corporate regimes. This is corporatism where government is controlled by private economic power. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called this grip “fascism” in a formal message to Congress in 1938.

Thomas Paine could not say it more clearly.

A Time to Break Silence

Martin Luther King speaks out against war in April 1967. You probably won't hear it quoted today in mainstream celebrations but it's easy enough to find online. It's worth taking the time to read or listen. King's analysis is spot on. It's also timeless. Substitute names and ideologies at specific points of the speech and it characterizes, most unfortunately, America in the early 21st century and in many of the years following the speech.

King's vision was inspiring in the tradition of Americans' highest ideals and aspirations. But America did not pursue that vision. Our legacy, which Dr. King predicted, has been four decades of war and militarism. To the many dead of Vietnam, we have added the many dead of our wars in Central and South America, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Today is a day to remember that in matters of war in peace, Martin Luther King got it right. The rest of us did not

Quotes you definitely won't hear highlighted and discussed today (outside of Democracy Now!*):

Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

[...]

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

[...]

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

[...]

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

[...]

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

[...]

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

[...]

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

[...]

Communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.... A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

Discuss.
_______________
* Free Speech Radio News also quoted from this speech in its broadcast today.

In the News

After four weeks absent from America, my first day back brought news of the Tucson shootings. Aside from the national media frenzy, the shootings got my attention because Arizona is a place I know. It was my home for 25 years. I have fond memories of time spent and friends in Tucson.

In 2006 Gabrielle Giffords was one of several successful candidates who gave us the hope that Arizona could support moderate-progressive politics, hope that real change was possible in Arizona. The attack on her last Saturday following the aggressive 2008 campaign against her and other members of the class of 2006 are a stark reminder that those hopes are not yet achieved, that any gains will always be at risk. Giffords narrowly escaped becoming Sara Palin's third success in her effort to "take back" Arizona Congressional districts. Two other Democrats were not so fortunate Giffords' recovery and return to Congress will be a visible victory for the possibility of reasoned politics in Arizona and perhaps nationally as well.

Not being privy to the medical knowledge involved in treating the wound and damage caused by a bullet through the brain, I am not at all able to predict or know the potential for her recovery. I do know that I've heard the medical professionals use superlative words in describing Giffords' condition including something like "with a bullet through the brain she has no right to be alive." So I'm hoping for a remarkable and miraculous recovery.

A full recovery would be best for all concerned.

A Life Worth Noting

Ronald W. Walters

...who leaves us with this thought,

"If George Bush had been as criticized and interrogated as much as Obama, perhaps the edifice of problems that now challenge the very viability of America might have been stopped."

What Happened to Journalism

Reading a collection of Mark Twain's previously unpublished work, I found his essay, "The American Press". Now I know how we ended up with Faux News and all the chattering heads: the press lost its irreverence.

According to Twain,

Well, the charge is, that our press has but little of that old-world quality, reverence. Let us be candidly grateful that this is so. With its limited reverence it at least reveres the things which this nation reveres, as a rule, and that is sufficient: what other people revere is fairly and properly matter of light importance to us. Our press does not reverence kings, it does not reverence so-called nobilities, it does not reverence established ecclesiastical slaveries, it does not reverence laws which rob a younger son to fatten an elder one, it does not reverence any fraud or sham or infamy, howsoever old or rotten or holy, which sets one citizen above his neighbor by accident of birth; it does not reverence any law or custom, howsoever old or decayed or sacred, which shuts against the best man in the land the best place in the land and the divine right to prove property and go up and occupy it.
[...]
I believe it is our irreverent press which has laughed away, one by one, what remained of our inherited minor shams and delusions and serfages after the Revolution, and made us the only free people that has yet existed in the earth; and I believe we shall remain free, utterly free and unassailably free, until some alien critic with sugared speech shall persuade our journalism to forsake its scoffing ways and serve itself up on the innocuous European plan. Our press has done a worth work; is doing a worthy work; and so, though one should prove it to me...that its faults are abundant and overabundant, I should still say, no matter: so long as it still possesses that surpreme virtue in journalism, and active and discriminating, irreverence, it will be entitled to hold itself the most valuable press, the most wholesome press, and the most puissant force for the nurture and protection of human freedom that either hemishpere has yet produced since the printer's art set itself the tedious and disheartening task of righting the wrongs of men.

Imagine what an active and discriminating, irreverence could have done with the the "smoking gun mushroom cloud" in 2002. Or about Iran these days.

Beer, Beer, Beer!

Tdaoy is the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition, the end of a costly, failed experiment in social control. Of course, bureaucracies do not go quietly into the night and the anti-liquor agents morphed into the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. That failed policy seems to have no end.

America needed only little more than a decade to realize the adverse consequences of Prohibition. It's taking considerably longer to recognize the consequences of our drug policies--the crime, the corruption and their utter failure to change human behavior. What we do know is the this latest experiment has severely warped our priorities as a nation.

If it weren't so early in the morning, I'd go have a beer.

Cheers.

The Truth is Out There

...for anyone willing to make the effort. Chalmers Johnson has the goods on America's wasteful spending habits.