tales of copper city

What is consciousness? A preview of coming attractions

The below is a blurb about a book by Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, on the Flipkart book mart website.  I don't know the outfit but I love the description of the book and I will be reading the book next week. I had already ordered my copy from Amazon before I found this wonderful description.

As John Casti wrote, "Finally, a book that really does explain consciousness." This groundbreaking work by Denmark's leading science writer [Tor Norretranders] draws on psychology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and other disciplines to argue its revolutionary point: that consciousness represents only an infinitesimal fraction of our ability to process information. Although we are unaware of it, our brains sift through and discard billions of pieces of data in order to allow us to understand the world around us. In fact, most of what we call thought is actually the unconscious discarding of information. What our consciousness rejects constitutes the most valuable part of ourselves, the "Me" that the "I" draws on for most of our actions -- fluent speech, riding a bicycle, anything involving expertise. No wonder that, in this age of information, so many of us feel empty and dissatisfied. As engaging as it is insightful, this important book encourages us to rely more on what our instincts and our senses tell us so that we can better appreciate the richness of human life.

Listening

Yesterday, on the Fourth here in Bisbee, we had a large crowd at our house, watching the parade, eating, and talking. It was a fun day all around and the fireworks last night were spectacular.  

Our house is on the parade route in Warren, one part of Bisbee.  When we lived here for 10 years before we lived in "Old Town" or old Bisbee up the road and on the canyon walls.

Part of the time during the parade  I spent some time talking with an old friend who has lived in Mexico for a long time and I was asking her about her thoughts on whether and how I should proceed with my Spanish.  

In the middle of this conversation two young people came in who were volunteering in the Bisbee area, gathering signatures for a single payer option and also working as volunteers on the border.  They had been invited in by some of our friends who knew them. They had recently come from Atlanta where she had earned a master's in nursing at Emory.

Of course when they mentioned health care reform, I was off to the races, bloviating about my own experiences and great wisdom in these matters.  It was quite a performance: me talk, you listen, and they were polite, pleasant and altogether too willing to let an old timer have his say.

Death by Democrats redux

This is a revised and expanded entry combing two recent ones.

In a recent column by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, the winner of blogger of the year award in the magazine The Week’s annual opinion awards, Silver predicts the  effect of insurance money on killing the chances for a "public option" for reforming the American health care. 

Nate's column is probably the closest thing we have to an autopsy of the impending death of health care reform, one more time.

An idea for a Newsweek cover

I have this idea. Why doesn't Newsweek, not too long from now, prepare a cover listing the pictures of the 10 or 15 Senators who are wavering on supporting Obama's health care reform plan? 

The point of the cover is that this group could stop meaningful health care reform, and they are all Democrats.

The "tag" should be how 10 to 15 Democrats from small states may ruin health care reform for all of us. 

Inside could be short profiles of the Senators, their financial supporters including health insurers, and information on how competitive health insurance is in each of their states.

As Paul Krugman points out in a recent column, in a number of these states the health insurance industry is virtually a monopoly. 

Inside, you might also include the 2 or 3 Republicans who are not yet locked up in the insane asylum that is today's Republican Party.

These ten members of the Senate thrive on obscurity and we should give them all the publicity they deserve, including rumblings in their own state by powerful state-level Democrats who want to move the country forward and just might jump into the next primary to do so. 

The Democratic Senator from Arkansas

Senator Blanche Lincoln, (Dem., AR) has said recently that it would be a shame if a public plan undermines competition in the health care field.

As Paul Krugman points out there is no competition among health insurers in Arkansas; Blue Cross covers over 75 percent of the market. 

Senator Lincoln isn't defending competition; she defending a highly-concentrated, near-monopolistic insurance provider.

The Arkansas Times also has a wonderful piece on the Democratic Senator from Arkansas with an analysis of some of her other nutty ideas.

As Krugman notes, most of the "blue dog" opposition comes from states where a major health insurer dominates.  Thus, Democratic senators who represent states with tiny populations are blocking a public plan to defend an existing insurance monopoly in their tiny state (population wise), denying the overwhelming majority of Americans a plan that operates like Medicare---and that is available before you turn 65.

Over 75 percent of Americans say they want the option of a public plan but the Democratic Senator from the tiny state of Arkansas (population wise) says they shouldn't have that choice.

On the other hand, not knowing and the Serenity Prayer

I have been thinking about acceptance yet again and its relationship to the Buddhist concept of 'not knowing' lately, and how not knowing helps clarify some aspects of acceptance as a way of life.

Acceptance, at its best, is the practice of receiving life rather than meeting it with a "story"---a slant on reality.  When we in recovery say that acceptance is our way of life we are really saying that we strive to meet each day with fresh eyes, trying not only to live one day at a time but also to live "present to the day." To live present to the day is to greet each as much of our day as we can anew and with gratitude instead of blanketing everything with a glowering "there they go again" attitude when things are not going our way, either in politics or in our personal life.  

Acceptance means remembering "it's not about me."

Death by Democrats

Take the time to read 538's most recent column on the effect of insurance money on killing the chances for a "public option" for reforming the American health care.

Nate's column is probably the closest thing we have to an autopsy of the impending death of health care reform, one more time. The health insurance industry has isolated likely 15 to 20 Democrats and has showered them with campaign money and the upshot is that roughly only 37 Democrats support real reform of the health care system.

This is appalling. I have seen way too much of this "death by Democrats" in my lifetime and, frankly, it's heartbreaking. 

What is happening, in my opinion, is that the health care industry, and particularly the private insurers, are carefully spending a fortune on those senators---Democrats and Republicans---who still cling to the the sectional politics of the past.  That is to say that many Democrats and all Republicans run against government and secure electoral victory by mobilizing political resentment instead of hope.

Lazy journalism

Take a look at Michael Wolff's column in The Huffington Post on why Obama is not working up a sweat on health care reform.  According to Wolff it's because health care reform is so boring, so filled with long, bureaucratic words that fill your mouth with sand.  Words like "single payer."

I remember almost 20 years ago the head of the Op-Ed page of the Los Angeles Times telling me the same thing.  "The winds of reform whip the sands up and they whirl around and around for months at a time and then they die down and nothing happens.  It's so boring."

"The Right to Rave"

In a class today in Spanish at Cochise College in Douglas, AZ, our professor Guillermo Retana introduced us to the celebrated Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, and his beautiful piece, "The Right to Rave."  It is a beautiful piece of writing by an author I should have known a lot more about but didn't. (We saw Galeano read his piece on You Tube, but I haven't been able to find that yet.)

I have spent most of my career in public health writing about social justice in health but Galeano takes that quest to a whole new level, to the right to dream of another world.

It's a gorgeous prose poem, very short, by a writer I intend to get to know much better, and I am grateful for Professor Retana for helping us learn not just a beautiful language but also about a world beyond ours in the Americas that has so much to teach us.

I have already ordered Galeano's classic book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. I believe that it was a copy of Galeano's book that the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez presented to President Obama in a recent meeting among the heads of state of the Americas.

In many ways I see Galeano's dream of a different world as a dream I have dared to reach for in my writing about the gospel of life itself and of the dream of a democracy of days. 

The one article on health care costs you should read

Here is the single most important article on health care costs I have stumbled across recently. Everyone should read it. It is written by Atul Gawande and appears in the New Yorker and its about why health care costs are so high in McAllen, Texas and in so many other places. 

It's a fascinating piece about the culture of doctors using medicine to enrich themselves.  This is predatory medicine, giving the patients what the doctors need: more money.

Paradoxically, places like the Mayo Clinics deliver relatively low cost health care, despite being graded by the experts as some of the best medical care in the nation.

Kevin Drum on the Democrats

See Kevin Drum of Mother Jones on the worst enemies of the Democratic agenda.

Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor

If anyone has foolishly come to the conclusion that racism is not still a huge part of our current politics, and a fundamental polarizing strategy of the modern Republican Party, they only have to attend to the recent outburst of racist outcry regarding the nomination of federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor.

The Republican Party is rapidly falling apart.  At least in the past their racial politics were more artfully disguised.  Now it's right out there, up front.

This is the party of Abraham Lincoln.  Or was.

Obama and Cheney

Kevin Drum has a simple recommendation for the public confused by the media pitching Cheney vs. Obama: read the two speeches.  Decide for yourself who makes the most sense. 

Obama's speech is careful and moderate and cautious. Cheney's speech to the American Enterprise Institute is, well, Cheney, peddling fear and more fear, the stuff of GOP's politics of the last eight years.  I'm sure Cheney got a standing ovation.

Is there any hope for us when our media cannot bring itself to note the difference between a careful analysis and simple fear-mongering, cannot rise above a "let's you and them fight" story line for every issue we face? 

The Republicans and especially Cheney know this, so they keep hammering away, knowing that everything they say will be carried, without analysis.

The exception is McClatchy, always McClatchy.

Good news about health care reform?

Paul Krugman notes the good news out of the White House about health care reform.  He's still worried that the industry groups will use the good will they created with this move to block a public plan in health care reform.

That was my reaction to the news also. 

But there's another possibility.  The public plan could be pegged to the progress in lowering health care costs generally set out in the industry agreements, creating a kind of all payer scenario.

Instead of the public plan along with Medicare bargaining independently to lower rates, the progress in rates payments could be what the public plan offers, eliminating what private insurance terms "unfair competition." 

This could put pressure on blue dog Democrats to go along with a modified public plan.  Of course they will try to argue that with this agreement, which is totally unenforceable, we should take a "wait and see" stance.

Blue Dogs and Republicans will do anything to block genuine progress in harnessing private power for the public good.

It's not the way I would go but I don't have any idea about how difficult this all is. 

When LBJ created Medicare, it would have been so, so, simpler to move the whole nation to a public plan instead of plunging further into the war in Vietnam.

Oh well...we'll see.

Frank Rich on the future of journalism

For an excellent discussion of the turmoil now occurring in print journalism, read Frank Rich's regular Sunday column in today's New York Times. 

Rich argues that whatever format or medium serious print journalism takes in the age of the WWW, we will have to pay for the news we get, and, thus, "we get what we pay for." 

Is the Huffington Post the future of journalism?

If  The Huffington Post is the future of journalism, I worry. 

Sure, Ariana's e-paper contains much that I like, commentators that I support, news about issues that I follow, political views that I share.  But mixed in is the mud-wrestling side of the news business, the blazing headlines, the pin-ups, the gossip, celebrity news---the media that you see on the checkout stand.

If that's what you have to include to get the traffic up and the ads in, we're all in trouble. But until we work out a better model, I will keep reading Ariana's rag, gratefully.

What about newspapers in Europe?

Everyone is wringing their hands over the fate of newspapers.  

What about newspapers in Europe, in England, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway?  Is the same thing happening there? If not, why not?

Why are we always so insular, always so convinced that the experience of other nations have little to teach us?

Health care in Holland

Keven Drum of Mother Jones has a wonderful post about health care in Holland, based on the experience of Americans who lived there for a while.

I was a patient (briefly) in Finland, when on a long trip to the Nordic countries, I had a a crippling back injury that nearly resulted in W.H.O sending me back home from Helsinki.  My experience was that everything was handled quite simply, without a single bill surfacing. 

This was in the late 1970s, and European countries are now more anxious  to collect from U.S. insurers than they were in the past.  Even here, though, U.S. insurers are glad to pay, since the costs are so much lower than the charges for the same procedure in the U.S.

Eat, sleep, read

There's a line in Michael Connelly's novel City of Bones: "Every murder is a tale of a city." 

I love a certain kind of mystery, a mystery rich in the story of a place or time, a story that often serves as an indictment.  

Connelly writes the Harry Bosch series and his books are wonderful tales about a man struggling with himself and a city with its mean streets---Los Angeles.  I'm working my way through his series again and am up to The Closers.

And of course, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.  And the novels of Ross Macdonald, also set in southern California, beginning with The Moving Target. 

I lived in southern California, in Los Angeles County and Orange County, from 1962 to 1967, and, earlier, in Monterey, California, when I was in the Army at the Presidio of Monterey. 

Chandler and Macdonald always take me back. When you read these novels you are transported you to a time or place that you know so well---or  thought you did---and into the worlds of interesting men whose toughness hides a broken heart.

The public plan and health care reform: a rant

And now Senator Specter, (Dem, PA) says that not only will he not support the Employee Free Choice Act to help labor, he will not support the public plan as an essential element of health care reform. 

And every Democrat in DC is welcoming this guy into the Democratic Party?

Offering him chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee in the Senate, in a few months?

Who did he leap over to get that?  Did they know about Souter and they want one more vote?

What were they thinking?  If he didn't give us support for key Democratic proposals, why didn't we let him twist in the wind of the Republican primary a little longer? The New Republic sounds the warning about Specter well.

The public plan and health care reform: what's the debate?

According to Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post, Senator Ben Nelson (Dem., NE) has announced that he plans to oppose the "public plan" as an element of health care reform.  

Nelson says he opposes the public plan because it would be "too attractive" to the public, offering lower insurance rates and ease of use and that, it would harm private insurance companies.  "At the end of the day the public plan wins,"  Nelson said.

My initial reaction to the opposition of Nelson and his ilk is incredulity: We can't permit the public to choose the public plan because it would be liked and widely adopted. We must protect private enterprise even if it provides more costly insurance.

 Only a Senator with a six year term and an inattentive constituency could get away with such a bald-faced "wet kiss" for the powerful insurance lobby.

Step-children of a lesser god

I bought new hearing aids yesterday, probably my fifth set in 20 years, and it took me back to Austin. 

After spending three years in the Army, including 16 months in Korea, I returned to college in Austin in 1959.  I first attended the University of Texas in 1955, but early in my sophomore year, I decided to enlist. I was already tired of college and knew I needed to travel first, maybe grow up a little bit, get more serious.

These were the years of the Eisenhower two-year draft.  If you enlisted and went regular Army for three years you got some choices.  I took the test for the Army Language School and just passed, and was sent for a year in Monterey, California.

When I returned to Austin, for reasons I don't remember, I heard about a job as a houseparent at the Texas School for the Deaf.  I got the job. It was a great job; it didn't pay all that well, but I got free room and board and a small salary, and a nice bedroom and study. I shared a bath with another house parent.

Entering the world of deaf people was quite an "ear opener."

After the war of the divides: a democracy of days?

In 1969, when I left my job in Washington, D.C. and entered graduate school, at Johns Hopkins, one of the first courses I encountered was a seminar on electoral politics taught by  Professor Milton Cummings, a student of V.O. Key, the great scholar of electoral politics in the South. 

We read Kevin Phillip's The Emerging Republican Majority and other works signaling a shift in the ground under the Great Society and the move of the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, into the South. 

Still living in Washington and attending school in Baltimore, I watched as Richard Nixon gradually abandoned the Great Society and began courting a South resentful of voting rights legislation and a war we were losing.

Our eyes were on the war in Vietnam: when would it end?  Protests filled the streets of Washington beneath the windows of the Methodist Building apartment where Carole and I lived, right next to the Supreme Court. We were watching the future being shaped before our eyes.

Here we are four decades later and the question is: Will Obama introduce a new era in health policy? Will we have a new democracy at last?

A fundamentally different capitalism

John Judis of the New Republic has written a post, "Fundamentally Different," that captures almost exactly where I think Obama is headed.  Obama is attempting to reshape American capitalism.

If he succeeds it will change everything. 

If he doesn't we will move in a different and far less pleasant direction, a new version of that old malady, sectional politics.

The key to it all is health care reform. 

The elephant in the room in American politics is redistributing economic power to improve daily life. And a sound national health care plan is the crucial chage driving this shift , determining whether the shift will be permanent, supported by the voters in the years to come.

If reform is achieved we will have a new and progressive majority for permanent change and for a different capitalism.  And both parties wil be changed forever.

Praying with the body

On many occasions I have heard ministers or friends or strangers talk about praying and I've wondered about this.

And then I realize I do pray, in a particular way.

I call it praying with our bodies.

We usually think of prayer as a conversation with God, with us here, and God, well, God is somewhere else. This is prayer as talking to God, a kind of long-distance telephone call.

The silence of God and faith in life itself

I attended a meeting yesterday of Vestry members---a kind of lay council of leadership in local churches---from Episcopal churches in the southern part of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona. The topic was doing a better job of stewardship among the Episcopal church. It was an interesting meeting but the assumption of the meeting was that we need to work harder in "selling" the Episcopal church to our members and others by treating "pledging" or financial support, as a way of "strengthening our relationship with Jesus." 

Having grown up in the South that way of putting things really turns me off.

The passion of waiting

I have been re-reading Henri Nouwen's The Path of Waiting. I think it is among the best of the many books that I have read on waiting, a kind of brief, succinct summary of how large waiting does loom---should loom---in our life.

Nouwen relies on an Anglican priest, W.H. Vanstone, who wrote The Stature of Waiting, also a wonderful book that reminds us that, beginning with the trip to Jerusalem, Jesus "handed himself over" to the Judeans and to the Romans, and waited to see what would be done to him.Wwould they become followers or executioners?

Waiting has for a very long time been a big part of my life. 

I laughingly call the years in New York, from 1988 to 1992, "Waiting for Mario."  These were years of hope for me as I waited for a fine governor to decide whether to run for president and as my staff prepared a universal health care plan that he could use in that race. 

I was waiting for the big universal health care wave to come to shore, the one that Bill Clinton tried to ride. And we are all waiting for that wave, once again.

The elephant in the room of democratic politics

I recently was asked to answer three questions about the future for health policy from graduate students in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health of the University of Arizona:  Will the Obama administration achieve real change? Will these changes create a new public health for future students?  Has the change affected your (my) work? Here is what I will likely say at the school's annual internship conference on April 17.

1. Will Obama succeed?

I predict that Obama will achieve significant change in health policy and much else. However, permanent, lasting change will elude him and the U.S. unless Obama and his party enact a strong national health plan that changes our democratic politics and not just our policies.

The Elephant in the Room of all democratic politics is the redistribution of economic power. A national health plan changes more than policy; properly designed, it changes our politics by redistributing economic power to the public's benefit, giving a politics of division scant oxygen to survive.

To call into existence the things that do not exist

This was first published in 2004 and I am re-posting it to celebrate Saturday's annual Border Procession in Naco, Sonora. Tom Buechele was Vicar of St. John's then and is now in Hawaii. The Reverend Seth Polley is Vicar of St. John's and, along with the Bishop of the Arizona Episcopal Diocese, the Reverend Kirk Smith, will lead the Procession.

We were all standing in a small interior courtyard of a small motel in Altar, Sonora. We were a group of 15 or so emissaries from the faith-based community, as we say today, Episcopalians mostly, including the new Episcopal Bishop-Elect of Arizona, the Reverend Kirk Smith.

Altar is a hot, dusty and raw-looking northern Sonoran town about 60 miles south of Sasabe, AZ, a traditional jumping off point for migrants headed north to the U.S. for decades. We were part of a larger group of about 50 who had traveled to Altar to witness up close the migrant staging area used by many trying to enter the United States illegally.

It was the Tuesday after Easter. We were meeting with about 30 migrants, all men, most from Guatemala, all of us crowded into that small motel courtyard. The migrants were small, dark, and curious. Some stood above us leaning out from the overlooking balcony or hanging out of a second-story window, trying to get a bead on what we were up to.

I wasn’t sure myself.

A new Democratic majority?

Thomas Edsall is a political analyst I respect.  I used two of his books in my classes on the politics of health: The New Politics of Inequality, and Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes. Both books told how how we increasingly concentrated taxing and spending power in the hands of the affluent, as he puts it in The New Politics of Inequality, moving further and further away from the ideals of the Great Society.  In Chain Reaction he showed how race and oppositiion to taxes and more rights for women and blacks were used to create a more conservative climate in both parties.

In writing about health policy, from HIV to national health insurance, I came to call this a "politics of the divides,"  and more recently, "sectional politics" to stress the peculiar role that the South has played from the beginning. in blocking progressive politics.  

They were amazed

Easter in church always stirs up mixed feelings in me.  For me, there's far too much of "Christ died for us" talk and far too little celebration of the life of Jesus the man, the life he gave us and the life he was willing to die for.

That he died for an amazing and scandalous truth is a huge part of the reason that we remember, a truth that disturbed pious Jews, Temple leaders, a mob anticipating another Roman execution, and Roman authorities who were weary of all the trouble the Jews were constantly stirring up. 

The crowds on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, however, were amazed by this carpenter's son.

Frank Rich on Larry Summers

Read New York Times columnist Frank Rich's Sunday opinion piece on Larry Summers, President Obama's chief economic adviser, about Summers's various lucrative dealings with hedge funds. 

Summers, an economist, raked in millions consulting hedge funds in recent years, including the years of his stormy tenure as President of Harvard, all the while excoriating Harvard faculty who dared to make a buck on the side, people like Cornell West who made a spoken-word cd for chump change. 

Wouldn't you know that West is only a philosopher and not in the same league as Summers who, as an economist, possesses knowledge of the foundations of the universe and therefore can do as he pleases and not be subject to questions from any quarter.

A democracy of days

This is from the lovely short poem, "Days," by the British poet, Philip Larkin.

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?...

I wonder if those in DC and the new Obama administration stop to think that what most of us want is our days back, the days where we live, the days where we are not beset with concerns about war, about a planet that is being destroyed, about how to secure good health care for every American, about an economy that seems beyond anyone's ken, about an end to attacks on unions and working people who simply want a job that pays enough for day-to-day living?

The Shadow knows, redux

(I wrote this in 2004, and with some modifications and additions, I am re-posting the piece.  A group of men at St. John's Episcopal Church are exploring the idea of "letting go" as a better way to live, and I thought that some of the ideas in some books I read a few years back might shed light on what might actually occur when we "let go.""The Shadow knows" is Michael Gazziniga's delightful way of describing how much of what we think and do is already a "done deal" in our brain, so maybe we need to learn to stop thinking and "let go" and allow our larger intelligence guide us and play its role in life less impeded. I also think that a lot of what Milton Erickson, the psychiatrist, says about the unconscious is corroborated by this exciting field of science. I wrote about Erickson recently.)

In the past year [2004] I have been reading more and more about one important consequence of evolution: how our brains work and how we think. There has been in the past three or four decades an explosion of the new sciences of the brain and of consciousness and of how evolution has shaped the adapted mind, most of which I knew nothing about.

The best introductions I have found to this field are Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, Michael Gazzaniga’s The Mind’s Past, and Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, all mind-blowing (pun intended) surveys of what we now know about how evolution has shaped our brains, our conscious life, and the categories with which we view the world.

(I wrote this in 2004, and with some modifications and additions, I am re-posting the piece.  A group of men at St. John's Episcopal Church are exploring the idea of "letting go" as a better way to live, and I thought that some of the ideas in some books I read a few years back might shed light on what might actually occur when we "let go.""The Shadow knows" is Michael Gazziniga's delightful way of describing how much of what we think and do is already a "done deal" in our brain, so maybe we need to learn to stop thinking and "let go" and allow our larger intelligence guide us and play its role in life less impeded. I also think that a lot of what Milton Erickson, the psychiatrist, says about the unconscious is corroborated by this exciting field of science. I wrote about Erickson recently.)

In the past year [2004] I have been reading more and more about one important consequence of evolution: how our brains work and how we think. There has been in the past three or four decades an explosion of the new sciences of the brain and of consciousness and of how evolution has shaped the adapted mind, most of which I knew nothing about.

The best introductions I have found to this field are Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, Michael Gazzaniga’s The Mind’s Past, and Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, all mind-blowing (pun intended) surveys of what we now know about how evolution has shaped our brains, our conscious life, and the categories with which we view the world.

How the Republican Party got its mojo back

The other day a prominent Republican political operative called and asked to come and see me.  He needed some advice about health care reform

He said, " I'm desperate.  My party is getting killed. We need to try something different.  Stuff like making fun of Michele isn't working. We're dying because everyone knows what we are going to say next and only the nuts believe it.""

I told him I line up with the other party all the time.  

He said, "I don’t care. I'm told you know some things about health care. This recession stuff in turning everything upside down. We need to get in front of this somehow.”

He showed up the next day about noon, a rumpled, middle-aged man in a blue suit who looked like he didn't get much sleep.  We went to lunch.

If I were a Republican

True confession time: I've voted Republican twice in my life.  First, (gulp), I voted for Ronald Reagan on his first race for governor in California.  And I voted for John Tower for his first race against a Texas Democrat, a crony of the oil industry and a blatant racist.

I voted for Reagan to punish the Pat Brown machine that ran California politics in the 1960s.  I was a supporter of Jess Unruh, the Democratic Speaker of the California Assembly and a progressive figure in California politics.

The vote for Tower needs no justification.

So shoot me.

Trance and acceptance

Okay, this is a big shift away from politics.

I have been reading My Voice Will Go With You, a wonderful book by Sidney Rosen about Milton Erickson.  Erickson was a psychiatrist who used hypnosis and trance in radically new ways. He died in 1980.

To Erickson  hypnosis and trance means allowing the unconscious to help us live more fully, with all that we are capable of or already know and don't know it. 

Unlike Freud, Erickson viewed the unconscious as helpful and wonderfully capable.

In fairness to Geithner and Obama

Here is an article by James Surowiecki of the New Yorker on why it makes sense to treat automotive companies and their executives differently than banks. 

Geithner is getting better and better reviews by many competent people.  But I'm still convinced that Paul Krugman is barking up the right tree.

Bank nationalization 101

See Kevin Drum's excellent article in Mother Jones on what bank nationalization is---and why real capitalists should be for it.

Among the media's many sins

See Krugman's post about the Media Matters finding that the network media almost never reported the thesis held by many prominent economists that the stimulus plan is really too small.  

I'm going to speak with graduate students in public health policy in a month or so about my thoughts for a 'new public health.'

My main recommendation will be for a mission for a new public health that explicity acknowledges that our nation's health is dependent on our democracy's health, including our media's health.

Media Matters is one of our best resources for tracking the media's many sins.