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Medical horror stories, part III

A reader writes: In the short amount of time since I arrived in South Africa, the Peace Corps Medical Officers have changed my medicine about 5 or 6 different times. Last week I was told to come to Pretoria for a day to chat with some psychologist. I thought that they might actually be trying to do something to fix all their mistakes. Well, that didn’t end up being the case. I met with a random Afrikaner (who knows nothing about me, my situation, my history, or my countries of origin) psychologist a single time for a grand total of about 30 minutes and he thought they maybe they should change a diagnosis. The protocol that the Peace Corps has in place is to medically separate me and send me back to DC for a while; and then I can apply for reinstatement. Well, a “change of diagnosis” is theoretically the reason they are trying this, but a diagnosis can obviously not be reached with one 30 minute meeting with someone I have never met... I am normally a pretty relaxed and laid bac

Homebrew

Here you can see my host mom brewing the local hooch, which will soon be making its way through the digestive tracts of a dozen stumbling drunks.  Ah, life in the village. She calls it kaffir bier . Her words, not mine.

Merry Christmas from the States Side

So this Christmas we decided to get a tree anyway,the first in years. Recently, within an interminable month, Grandpa's passed on, Grandma's gone off a cliff with clinical debilitating anxiety and I'm suddenly chronically, critically ill. Every day is a new day - though I might probably have opted for the previous one. So we unload the boxes out of the attic, all the lights and ornaments, all the dust and memories, and pick through the lot. It's not a big tree, on purpose, and there's a lot more ornaments than can be hung on it, so we can be selective, and only hang the best; the tiny saxophone, the exquisite blown glass bells, an exact replica of the Wright brothers first plane.  When the kids had two sets of Grandparents, both sets got them each a commorarative ornament every year and the collection is out of hand.  We barely make a dent in it. One year we had great big tree and we got every darn orament on there and in the middle of the night the thing fell ove

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone is happy, safe, and warm (or cool, as the occasion merits). My gift to you, loyal reader, is some knots I've been working on in the recent past. Here we have a Celtic heart knot, a sailor's cross, and a somewhat-bungled ocean plait.  Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter! They even come in festive colors!

The whirled map

Here's a picture of the map I recently helped my neighbor paint on the side of her school.  I think it looks pretty good, especially considering the surface is about as flat as the Hindu Kush. California's behind is a little pooched out though.

Collected links

1) A profile of the soul of Nintendo. 2) A profile of Julian Assange and Wikileaks. 3) A profile of Richard Holbrooke, the recently deceased diplomat .  His last words were, "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." 4) An essay by Tyler Cowen about income inequality. 5) Kevin Drum responds with some good points.

Random tree picture

At GTOT we witnessed some improvements being done at the Peace Corps office.  Here you can see a gigantic tree that they cut down—it gave some nice shade, but the parking is cramped already and it just took up too much room.  For reasons I couldn't understand, they cut down the tree fairly far from ground level and then spent the better part of three days chopping out the stump with a single axe. Timber!

Medical horror stories, part II

A reader writes: During PST I came down with a UTI. I knew it was a UTI because I have had them before. I told [Nurse A] about the UTI. [A] said [they] would talk to me more about it the next day. The next day [they] did not come to PST. When I called, [A] said [they] would bring me medication the next day. So by the next day I was four days into the UTI. I was peeing blood. Again, [A] did not bring me medication and said [they] would bring it to me the next day. I was urinating blood: urinating blood usually means kidney infection. So, in the end, I had a major kidney infection with blood, fever, chills, and horrific pain. [A] didn't seem to think it was urgent. Eventually I put up a big enough fuss that [A] sent someone to Bela Bela and I got the medication that night. Had I got the medication the day after I discussed it with him initially, life would have been much better along with my kidneys, bladder, and mindset. From then on, I had little trust in the quality of PC healt

Sunset

I got nothin.

Collected links

1. Do cell phones cause cancer?  Michael Shermer takes a hard look . 2. Beijing Egg House . 3. A look at the Wikileaks hacker battles . 4. Can Mormons be recognized just from appearance ? 5. A skeptical look at the GM bailout , at least in terms of the miraculous Wall Street magic.  Seems like they were on pretty solid footing anyway, but the money was probably well-spent. 6. Afrikaans swearing dictionary .  My favorite: Jou fokken kakhuiskriek!

Quote for the day

"But ultimately, what one thinks of Manning's alleged acts is irrelevant to the issue here.  The U.S. ought at least to abide by minimal standards of humane treatment in how it detains him.  That's true for every prisoner, at all times.  But departures from such standards are particularly egregious where, as here, the detainee has merely been accused, but never convicted , of wrongdoing.  These inhumane conditions make a mockery of Barack Obama's repeated pledge to end detainee abuse and torture, as prolonged isolation -- exacerbated by these other deprivations -- is at least as damaging, as violative of international legal standards, and almost as reviled around the world, as the waterboard, hypothermia and other Bush-era tactics that caused so much controversy."  -- Glenn Greenwald .  Bradley Manning is the person who allegedly leaked diplomatic cables to Julian Assange.

Holiday time

Today I'm making my way to Pretoria again, this time for a holiday up to the Botswana/Zambia/Zimbabwe region.  I've queued up a decent number of posts for the next few weeks, but they won't be more than every couple days or so.  I've invited my dad and sister to guest blog; hopefully they can keep the flame alive while I'm away.  I hope everyone has a great holiday season!  I'll see you soon.

New albums

Trying to use up my over-large data bundle for the month I've acquired a few albums that looked promising off Metacritic's best of 2010 list .  Here they are, in no particular order: 1) Swim , by Caribou.  Decent blend of indie electronic with some club flavor.  Recommended. 2) Tron Legacy Soundtrack , by Daft Punk.  If you liked the Inception soundtrack, you'll like this one.  Recommended. 3) Cosmogramma , by Flying Lotus.  Meh. 4) My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy , by Kanye West.  Sort of a weird one, almost avant-garde.  Recommended. 5) Spiral Shadow , by Kylesa.  The best of the bunch for my money.  Highly recommended if you like hard rock or metal. 6) High Violet , by The National.  Good for indie rock.  Mostly avoids the dullness and dragging that turns me off the genre.  Recommended.

Sunset

They just keep getting better and better.

The Geminids!

Apparently there's a good meteor shower going about now .  I went looking last night, but the dadgum clouds were in the way.  If you don't know how to find Gemini, it's above Orion's right (from his perspective) shoulder, the red giant Betelgeuse.  Both Castor and Pollux (the twin stars of Gemini) are part of the Winter Hexagon .  The moon should set about midnight or so.

Republicans and scientists

A Pew poll recently found that only 6% of scientists identify as Republicans, while 55% identify as Democrats and 32% as independents.  I find that totally unsurprising, but it has sparked some discussion.  Daniel Sarewitz, in a boneheaded article for Slate , argues it's the Democrats' fault, and we should produce more Republican scientists (how? are they going to pass through a membrane from an alternate reality?).  Chris Mooney provides the requisite takedown .  Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey pines for the good old days: No, seriously. Remember Republicans? Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science. Remember those serious-looking 1950's-1960's science guys in the movies -- Republican to a one. They were the grown-ups. They were the realists. Sure they were a bummer, maaaaan, but on the way to La Revolution you need somebody to remember where yo

A bizarre storm

Last night we had one of the classic summer thunderstorms.  Lightning flashing more than once per second, a cannonade of thunder, rain coming down so hard it sounded like a battalion of carpenters armed with ball-peen hammers were assaulting my roof.  The strange part was that during these several hours of storming, the power didn't go out once .  Crazy, huh? This was taken from a frame of video.

Some positive environmental news

After years of wrangling, the gigantic wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod has been finally approved : After more than eight years of federal review by the U.S. Department of the Interior through two administrations, Cape Wind was finally approved last spring by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. More lawsuits were filed, but on Aug. 31 a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled against community opposition and granted the Cape Wind energy project the permits to begin construction. Many community members have pledged to keep fighting, suggesting that the wind farm sets a dangerous precedent for private developers who want to open the area to drilling rigs or nuclear power plants. The wind farm is anticipated to be fully operational by late 2012 and is estimated to cost at least $2 billion. It will have the capacity to power about three-quarters of Cape Cod’s residents — many of whom continue to fight Cape Wind Associates. In a surprising twist, though, Texas has been quietly building m

Collected links

1. A profile of Eric Holder . 2. Assembling the global baby . 3. When Larison mentions "liberalism's characteristic indifference to institutions," this is what he's talking about . 4. Carina, Puppis, Vela, and Pyxis used to part of one massive constellation called Argo Navis. I like the original better . 5. Shakespeare's sonnets ! So far I like 18 the best. 6. An interview with a vacuum cleaner salesman .

Online advertising

Online advertising is famously ineffective.  Studies show that the "click through" rates, or how many people actually click on an advertisement out of those that see it, are minuscule.  On the other hand, this is a kind of study that was simply impossible before the advent of the internet.  Yglesias :  To those of us on the editorial side of online media this is a very frustrating dynamic. It’s hard to make money writing online because the advertising rates are pathetic compared to what was historically available in print. And the rates are pathetic because the utilization rates are pathetic. But what kind of click-throughs did those glossy magazine ads get? Something here doesn’t add up. Ezra Klein chimes in : At the beginning of Ken Auletta's " Googled ," Auletta talks with Mel Karmazin, then the CEO of Viacom. Karmazin is aghast at Google's campaign to measure the effectiveness of advertising by tallying clicks. "I want a sales person in the proces

Sunset

This from a week or so back. Who's been combing the sky?

Quick capsule reviews

I've been plowing through books on my kindle and on paper, so the backlog of ones I wanted to mention is getting insurmountable.  Here's some short takes on them anyway. 1) Mother Tongue , by Bill Bryson.  An amusing and surprising pop history of the world's most important language.  Highly recommended. 2) Losing Mum and Pup , by Christopher Buckley.  Poignant and surprisingly hilarious.  I miss WFB, the old scoundrel.  Highly recommended. 3) Blackwater , by Jeremy Scahill.  The subject is important and the research exhaustive, but the preening moralizing is irritating.  Mildly recommended. 4) The Years of Rice and Salt , by Kim Stanley Robinson.  Insanely ambitious yet rather whimsical, for Robinson anyway.  Fun for nerds.  Recommended. 5) Mother Night , by Kurt Vonnegut.  One of the last Vonneguts I hadn't read, and among his best.  Highly recommended. 6) Free Culture , by Lawrence Lessig.  If you think copyright law is boring, think again.  Chapters 13-14

Coffee!

Rise Up Coffee is a company founded by a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and they have decided that they will send a free sample to any currently serving volunteer who asks. Delicious.  Morning coffee is usually my favorite part of the day. I asked for mine a few weeks back, and here it is! I'm excited to try it out in my French press. For other volunteers, to get some for yourself, just go to their Facebook page , like them, and put your address on their wall.  Lovely.  For those of you back home, I encourage you to patronize this remarkable company. Apparently they're on the cutting edge of organic, free-trade business. (Send me free stuff and I'll stump for your company too.)

Swearing in Afrikaans

Trolling the nets I found some choice phrases in Afrikaans.  Be warned, this gets vulgar fast. 1. Jou ma is so besig om te naai, jy's uit haar gat gebore . Your mother engages in such copious amounts of intercourse that it necessitated your being born out of her anus, as her vagina was otherwise occupied. 2. Afrikaners call English-descent South Africans soutpiel , which translates to saltcock, implying they have one leg in South Africa, one leg in England, and their dicks are dangling in the ocean. 3. Piele vleg = braiding penises, meaning to engage in male bonding. 4. Jou mammie naai vir bakstene om jou sissie se hoerhuis te bou . Your mother shags for bricks to build your sister's whorehouse. 5. Hy sal die kak uit jou maag gesteel . He'd steal the shit from your stomach, meaning he's untrustworthy. Via reddit .  Probably my favorite out of them all is referring to Afrikaans as Loldutch.

Medical horror stories, part I

I've edited out names of specific staff, replacing them with Nurse A and Nurse B, and at the expense of some grammatical awkwardness, removed all references to gender.  (Why doesn't English have a neuter pronoun?)  A reader writes: This winter I came down with the flu, although at the time I didn't realize it was the flu because it came on so suddenly. I left school early with a stomach ache, took a warm bath because I was getting chills, and when I got out of the bath was super dizzy and had the feeling I was going to pass out and puke, although I had never passed out in my life.  I remember trying to puke with no luck and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the bathroom floor in a puddle of my own vomit. So I was quite shaken because I didn't know what was wrong with me so logically, I called the duty phone. [Nurse A] answered, asked me a few questions, and said [they]'d call me back in a few minutes once [A] was back at the office. [A] called me

My china!

Here in South Africa "china" is a common slang term for "friend." I hadn't the slightest idea where that came from, but today I learned that it comes from Cockney rhyming slang ! For the unaware, CRS works by taking a word, choosing a rhyming phrase, then (in most cases) discarding the actual rhyme. Example: tiddly = tiddlywinks = drinks. Barney = Barney Rubble = trouble. For china, we have china = china plate = mate. Anyway, that's your etymology for the day.

Collected links

1. Yglesias on the difference between accounting ledgers and a country's budget . 2. The latest Wikileaks dump is worth a perusal, regardless how you feel about it . 3. Wall Street does almost nothing of social utility . 4. Too much security in the airports even before 9/11 ? 5. 20,000 Sacrificed In Annual Blood Offering To Corporate America . 6. The Weekly Standard on Sarah Palin's TV show .

Department of WTF, alien life bureau

NASA has uncovered something truly amazing: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living on planet Earth. This changes everything. At its conference today , NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon will announce that NASA has found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic . All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, shares the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same. But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While Wolfe-Simon and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are en

A preliminary word on medical stories

The response to my previous post has been large even so far.  Before I actually share anything, I want to make clear that I am not doing this out of a desire for publicity or to poke Peace Corps in the eye.  It would be great if I never had this opportunity—if medical care here were efficient and effective, or even just okay.  From firsthand stories I have heard about a great deal of incompetence on the part of PCMOs (Peace Corps Medical Officers), the worst of which led to a medical survey on from VSN, the Volunteer Support Network, some months ago.  But recent events have made it crystal clear that whatever the PC administration is doing to address the issue, it is not working .  Already three volunteers that I know of have left or been sent home based on such foolishness, things that very often do not even rise to the level of medical mistakes.  Rather they are secretarial mistakes like failing to make appointments, know policies, or call sick volunteers back.  I feel it is my duty

A request for medical horror stories

The past few months have seen some truly epic failures on the part of the Peace Corps medical staff here in South Africa, ranging from unprofessional to petty to sheer bloody-minded stupidity. The kind of failures that—and this is no exaggeration—could be easily avoided by an intelligent twelve-year-old.  I have been thankfully free of such experiences, mainly because I haven't gotten seriously ill since arriving here.  But I think the scale of the problem is such that the normal avenues for correction are not working. Thus I've come up with the idea of doing a series on medical horror stories.  So long as you are comfortable with sharing, anything you regard as a failure of the Peace Corps South Africa medical staff, no matter how short, long, or silly, send them to me!  (My email is on the right sidebar.)  I'll collate them into reasonable chunks to be published here anonymously. Note: basically all the problems I'm aware of have to do with the medical staff (co

Quote of the day

"And, indeed, as recently as 1988 one could have witnessed moderate Democrat Joe Lieberman successfully challenging incumbent liberal Republican Senator Lowell Weicker with the support of, among others, William F Buckley, Jr. "But it turns out that Lieberman vs Weicker was something of a dying gasp of a political order that was rendered obsolete by the civil rights revolution. Twenty years later we find ourselves several congresses into a brave new world in which every single Democratic Party legislator is to the left of every single Republican Party legislator. In terms of partisan politics, in other words, we’ve become a normal country. But as Linz observed, the “normal” outcome for a country with our political institutions and ideologically sorted parties is constitutional crisis and a collapse into dictatorship. "So far it hasn’t happened here. The 1998-99 effort to impeach Bill Clinton was sufficiently unpopular that moderate Republicans wouldn’t vote for it. A

GTOT

I'm back!  This training at Pretoria was the general training of trainers, shortened to GTOT in accordance with Peace Corps' acronym fetish (similar to bureaucracies everywhere, I reckon).  The next group of South African volunteers are coming in late January, so they gathered everyone involved to figure out how it's going to work.  There were four PCVs, a few staff, and about 20 language trainers.  We spent the greater part of the time reworking all the sessions they had laid out, making sure they fit into the lesson format that Peace Corps has adopted.  Here are the characteristics they wanted to be sure could be identified in every instance: 1) Performer 2) Performance 3) Standard 4) Condition Performer is who is doing the learning, the performance is where the learning takes place, the condition is when, and the standard is how learning is measured. In my opinion, it's a cumbersome and unnecessarily vague format, but that's not what really tripped us up.

Collected links

1. A professional essayists who writes for cheating students gives his story . 2. A sweet map of America with all kinds of stats . 3. Give me Four Loko or give me death . 4. Before you read the next link, read up on ketosis . 5. Apparently, ketosis can prevent some kinds of seizures .

Thanksgiving

Turkey day turned out to be quite the experience.  I was originally going to be accompanied by another volunteer to the house of the psychologist for the US embassy, but she was unable to make it, so it was just me representing Peace Corps.  There were expats there from Switzerland, France, England, India, Finland, Pakistan, and the US.  They had me stand up in front of everyone and give an impromptu explanation of the history of Thanksgiving.  (I figure if you graduate from college and you can't at least BS reasonably well, you ought to ask for your money back.) I let loose what charm I could muster up, and the evening seemed to go pretty well, though I was often lost amongst the French-speaking bunch.  That's not their fault though, and otherwise the people were excellent and the food delicious.  Now I've got a new friend in Waterkloof (the wealthy section of Pretoria) in case of emergency.

It's a small world

I'm still here at this training in Pretoria, which is going well enough all things considered.  They told us originally that we'd be going out to dinner at the ambassador's house here, but it turns out that there were too many of us for that, so some got shunted off to other American families around town.  Still, great to be getting a free dinner. It turns out that one of the other volunteers here is also a river-running type who has worked around the Southwest for a long time, on the San Juan and others.  Just yesterday my sister called me, and I mentioned this person, and it turns out they worked at the same company and were good friends.  Quite the staggering coincidence, eh? I'll be heading back to my site around Saturday or Sunday, and regularly scheduled blogging will resume then.

Question of the day

Noah's been in rare form over at his place.  See here , here , and here for a series on a sangoma celebration.  The question: how many conquistador helmets full of local hooch (called Umqombothi) does it take to kill a woolly mammoth?  Answer: 33 and 1/3 !

Collected links

1. This study purports to be evidence of seeing the future .  Color me unconvinced. 2. The speech accent archive . 3. Roger Ebert on lonely people . 4. The unsung heroes of human development .  They are mostly Muslim countries.  Apparently empowering women is more effective than democratization. 5. Radley Balko on the unjust imprisonment of Brian Aitken . Count me on the side of the NRA on this one.

Rain!

A few days back we finally got a decent downpour. It was heavenly. The earth drank it up—it's been so dry here they've got the public works folks out cutting brush to save water.

Blog news

I'm going to a training in Pretoria—we're getting ready for the upcoming SA23 and I'm one of five (!) people selected to be part of training.  It should be fun, but posting might be a little light for next week or so.  We'll see if I can find a computer in Pretoria somewheres.

The START treaty

Republicans, specifically Jon Kyl, are threatening not to pass the START arms control treaty.  Larison has been pounding this issue for a long time, but Josh Marshall has probably the best primer I've seen thus far.  Have you heard this? Russia still has a massive strategic nuclear arsenal with pretty much the exclusive goal of being able to devastate the United States and kill pretty much all of us. For 15 years we had pretty robust right to inspect their arsenal many times a year, make sure they only had as many as they were allowed under our treaties and actually get up on the delivery missiles themselves and look at the payloads? Now we don't. In fact, we haven't since December 5th of last year. At first that wasn't that big a deal. Not much can happen in a few weeks or few months. But now it's been almost a year. So all that trust but verify stuff Ronald Reagan was so into? Well, now we can't verify. And for as much as you're worried about some Musli

I did a good deed today

Lest anyone accuse me of being a complete waste of Peace Corps money, for the defense I present the following.  With God as my witness, for Uncle Sam and freedom and democracy, for peace and love and harmony and low trade barriers, today I rescued a baby goat with her head caught in a rusty tin can. Kinda funny, but pitiful. I was walking back along the riverbed from the neighboring village, where I have been helping with a world map project for the past couple days, blasting some Opeth on my headphones.  The poor thing was totally helpless, and tried to run when I approached but didn't know which way to go so I caught her easily.  The issue was her little horns—maybe an inch long—had gotten wedged under the lip of the can, which was bent into an oval shape.  (God knows what enticed the thing to stick its head in the can in the first place.)  At first I couldn't get both of the horns out.  The goat was panicky and panting hoarsely into the can, and kept trying to escape.  A

RIP Gerald H Nelson

My step-grandfather passed away last night. He had been ill for awhile and it was his time. He had had medical issues for a long time, but in the end it was probably good that he went as quickly as he eventually did. It could have easily been one of those deaths that drag on brutally for weeks or months. What I think of now is his cabin in Mexico where he lived for the last several years with my grandma. He bought the place for a song back in the 60s and my family been visiting there since I was a little kid. Somewhere there are pictures, taken in that cabin, of a five-year-old Ryan flying through the air onto a pile of beanbag chairs. I remember also one time riding around in the back of his restored 1944 Willys Jeep (equipped with hand-routed sand tires), sitting on the same beanbags, forgetting to hold on while Grandpa took off from a stop sign, and thus tumbling astonished out onto the sand behind. I wasn't hurt, and luckily the Jeep is not particularly fast, so I wasn

Finished!

Today my Grade 4, 5, and 6 classes took their final exams for maths.  This means I am done teaching in South Africa.  (Imagine me being jubilant right now.)  What better way to celebrate than the Onion : The U.S. Department of Education released a comprehensive, nationwide evaluation of American schools Monday indicating that attempts to teach absolutely anything to these little shits is just a huge waste of everybody's time... "When I first started teaching, I would see the smiling faces in my classroom and get excited about nurturing their young minds," said Melanie Whitman, 35, a first-grade teacher quoted in the report. "Now I can't look up from my desk without wanting to puke at the sight of all those little psychopaths." Secretary Duncan said the study is the first to provide detailed evidence in support of the theory that third-grader Scott Kriesel is a complete fuck-up and perhaps even the living incarnation of Satan.

Nelson Mandela was a secret neuroscientist

I'm really enjoying the NYT philosophy blog, The Stone .  The latest post by Robert Sapolsky is about the way the patchwork, ad hoc nature of evolution makes the brain mix up metaphors and reality: Another truly interesting domain in which the brain confuses the literal and metaphorical is cleanliness. In a remarkable study , Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not hav

Awkward movies

I just watched Superbad for the first time, and while I thought it was decent, and pretty funny in the final analysis, it was hard work to get through.  I struggle with awkward and embarrassing movies, especially of the Judd Apatow formula: completely charmless, pathetic male protagonists that bumble through the movie making complete asses out of themselves.  Or, at least, a movie like that has to be leavened with a great deal of silliness for me to be able to enjoy it (like the police sub-plot in Superbad ).  I thought Talladega Nights struck a good balance in this regard. I'm not sure exactly why it is I have such a reaction to such movies, but it's an extraordinarily powerful one.  It's a visceral physical discomfort.  If the movie is sufficiently awkward, I literally cannot watch.  I had to turn off Old School .  The idea behind that kind of humor seems to be a kind of release from fear—watching someone else humiliate himself as a celebration of freedom from such hu

Collected links

1. TNC on the problem with cops in America. 2. Could the world go back on the gold standard? 3. Krugman on how we're heading for a lost decade. 4. Steve Waldman has a great post on how people like Krugman shouldn't cede the moral high ground, ever. 5. James Fallows on clean coal in the Atlantic .   Let's hope the Chinese can figure it out, because America sure won't.

Sunset

From awhile back.

Busted leg reax

Jenneffer provides an update : Pain management was one of the two most difficult parts of my hospitalization. There were times i felt like Frida, waking from nightmares, screaming in pain, only to be stilled by in injection of strong analgesic. Never have i seen my body tremble so violently from a negative experience. The other terrible part was being alone. I never imagined i would come to need and enjoy the company of others, until this past 15 months of experiences in the peace corps. Especially in such a difficuly time, as being hospitalized, having surgery, and enduring so much pain. Say some prayers to the deity of your choice that she gets better soon (I choose the FSM ). One good thing about crutches is you get massively improved upper-body strength in a hurry.

Quantitative easing

Since additional fiscal stimulus is out of the question, Fed Chairman Bernanke is planning another round of monetary policy action.  It's rather weak tea, but basically they're going to try and push up the inflation rate a bit by buying a huge mess of treasury bonds.  It's the functional equivalent of printing some money.  I think this is an area where people's intuitions (printing money bad! strong dollar good!) can lead them astray.  The usual suspects are howling about "debasing the dollar," but Karl Smith gives a great explanation of why we need this sort of thing, in the context of arguing that Bernanke is not doing enough: Virtually all economists agree that disinflation and deflation are caused by a shortage of dollars in the economy. The majority agree that such deflation is accompanied by a rise in unemployment. If inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, then deflation is too few dollars chasing too few goods. As a side effect some of t

Armistice Day

Since I'm not in the US, that's what I'm calling it.  I just finished the Teaching Company 's lecture series on WWI, and it seems to me the psychic state of the Western world after that mass of horror was much more healthy than the triumphalist attitude that persists after WWII.  Here is "Back," by Wilfred Gibson. They ask me where I've been, And what I've done and seen. But what can I reply Who know it wasn't I, But someone just like me, Who went across the sea And with my head and hands Killed men in foreign lands... Though I must bear the blame, Because he bore my name. (h/t): Sullivan .

Donkey cart accident

Donkey carts are ubiquitous in village life. They're like the jalopies of South Africa. Nearly everyone's got one (or three), they're rickety, and the kids beat the everlovin tar out of the things. Some of the donkeys in the traces are treated with relative kindness (usually by older men who seem to know how to train animals), but far too often I see people, usually younger boys, literally flaying the hide off their beasts. They seem to get the idea that if one is driving a cart, one must be constantly flogging: standing up, brandishing the whip in a sweeping circle, leaning into each stroke. I've seen boys drive their carts into the ditch, forcing their friends to get out and lead the donkeys backwards, still maintaining the constant whipping. The other day walking across the bridge I saw one such boy coasting down the hill to the bridge at a good clip. One of his donkeys—on the right in the picture—either stumbled or came out of the harness and was run over

Can you feel God, ctd

Sullivan has been posting readers' emails on an interesting back and forth between moderate Christians and agnostics.  Count me with this reader: I am an agnostic who does not feel my life one bit less richer because of it.  I acknowledge mystery in the world.  In fact, I see the world at times as a beautiful, mysterious, dreamlike place.  I constantly ask myself what this all means.  However, I know that no one, including myself, has the answer.  I hope there is an afterlife.  I hope that it is a place of love considering all of the suffering that goes on in this world.  But religions created by men cannot tell us these things.  In the meantime, I'm satisfied with the meaning of life as given to us by Kurt Vonnegut: We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. Like most philosophical or theological concepts, agnosticism has many different sub-types, but what it is not is simply saying "I'm not sure" to religious questions. Lay

Department of WTF, foreskin bureau

Deep breath.  *shiver*  Ok, I'm ready.  I find this unspeakably horrifying: There is a market in baby foreskins : Because of this, they’re not tossed out with the rest of the medical waste after a birth. Instead, hospitals sell them to companies and institutions for a wide variety of uses. Companies will pay thousands of dollars for a single foreskin. Some of the strangest purposes they’re put to: Cosmetics: Foreskins are used to make high-end skin creams. The skin products contain fibroblasts grown on the foreskin and harvested from it. One foreskin can be used for decades to produce fancy face cream like the SkinMedica products hawked on Oprah. Emphasis mine. Sweet mother Mary. I guess they're also used for skin grafts, but still.