Blog of Jeff

Afghanistan really is a damned if you, damned if you don’t situation, so I guess Obama’s plan is as good as any at this stage. But one thing about his speech that really, really bugged me was his reference to this being a multinational effort. Bush tried spinning that nonsense also, but it is stupid. The first issue is that most of the nations have provided non-combat troops, such as mechanics, truck drivers, etc., that do not participate in counter insurgency missions or leave their base areas.

The second issue is just plain numeric. Yes, forty-something countries have people there. But that means counting Ukraine’s 10, Iceland’s 8, Luxemburg’s 8, Ireland’s 7, Jordan’s 7, Austria’s 4, Singapore’s 2, and last,and least, Georgia’s 1.

After the increase that Obama just announced, the US will have over 60,000 troops there. The UK will have 9,000, Germany will have 4,200 Canada 2,800, France around 3,000, and so on down the list. If you only count countries with 1,000 or more troops, there are less than 10 in Afghanistan. After the increase, we will have 62,000 of 100,000 and the vast majority of the combat responsibilities. The only real forces there are those sent by our NATO partners that felt that they had a moral obligation to provide some level of support, but they’re doing their best to keep it minimal.

The third issue is that these numbers break down into a war of Christians against Muslims, European tourists against the locals, light-skins against the dark-skins. Compare these numbers to those of the first Iraq war and there is a huge difference. Saudi Arabia, Egypt , Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Niger, Syria, Sierra Leone, and Singapore put troops and/or money in that war. Yes, we were still the largest force, but there was clearly much more diversity in continents, ethnicities, and religions. Perhaps, most importantly, there were countries FROM THAT REGION involved. There were troops that knew the local culture and customs. There were troops that looked like the locals and worshiped in similar ways. How exactly are a bunch of touristy, white-skinned Christians from Europe and North America supposed to convince the locals that they are more trustworthy that the local Taliban fighters that have lived there for their entire lives?

The bottom line is that this is a war of Christians against Muslims. It is also a war of hearts and minds. We have to look more trustworthy, more committed, more compassionate, more intelligent, and more resourceful than the locals. I’m sure we can look like the nice guys compared to the Taliban, but cultural barriers and distance are a real problem on the rest. It sure would help if we really did have a lot of multinational help from nations in the region. But all we got is Anglo-Europeans and not enough of that beyond ourselves.

I was watching another Palin interview yesterday and it suddenly dawned on me why I dislike her. It’s not her partisan attacks on all things Obama, because there are plenty of partisan attack dogs on both sides that frame and spin every issue as “we’re right and they’re wrong.” It’s definitely not her family, because I pretty much think that all politicians have screwed up families. It kind of goes with the job. It’s not even that she sometimes seems completely uninterested in learning anything about anything. Bush shared that attribute and though I didn’t like his policies, I can’t really say I hate him. In fact, he’s still got a likability to him as a person.

No, what really, really bugs me about Palin is the complete lack of loyalty and respect to McCain and his staff. This woman was virtually unknown to most of the country when McCain picked her. Now, she’s famous, making money, and a national power in her party. She owes all of that to McCain taking a huge gamble on her. He could have played it safe, he could have picked someone more well known, but instead he picked her.

Even if she really does think his staff treated her badly and blew the election, the classy thing to do would still be to be publicly grateful for the incredible opportunity they gave her. I think that is one trait of Bush’s she would do well to emulate at least a little. He was loyal to a fault to those around him. In contrast, Palin seems ready to trashy anybody and everybody in order to make herself look good.

There are limits to how far anybody should go out of loyalty, but Palin’s disloyalty is really unbecoming. It is just tacky. Considering where she was two years ago and where she is today, just about every sentence out of her mouth should start with a thank you to Senator McCain. She’s just so negative about McCain, his staff, the media, Obama, and everyone around her. She’s now on top of the world. And she talks like she earned it in spite of all the people that helped her get there.

Congress actually proposed something useful today. CCN Story here.

It has zero chance of getting the two-thirds vote needed for a constitutional amendment but it the single best idea for fixing the US political system. Their proposals calls for a limit of 3 congressional terms and 2 senatorial terms. It was proposed by Senators DeMint, Hutchinson, Coburn, and Brownback.

Career politicians are a horrible cancer on democracy. It is absolutely impossible for anyone to live at that intersection of special interests, money, and power without becoming biased and indebted to all kinds of groups. And once a politician has name recognition and milks his committee memberships for special interest money, he is almost invincible because of the money needed to overcome those advantages. Twelve years is plenty of time for a person to serve honorably and then get the hell out before they become slaves to the system. And from the special interest perspective, buying a politician might not be nearly so attractive if the investment would only have so many years worth of return on investment. People like Dodd who have been on the insurance and financial lobby payrolls for years might not be worth millions of dollars in campaign contributions any more. We don’t need limits on the money in campaigns, we need limits on the people in them.

The political argument for not having term limits is that the politicians supposedly become better informed on the issues and gain valuable experience performing the political work needed to pass legislation. That’s right. They say that what we’re seeing right now in the health care legislative process is a bright shining example of highly skilled and knowledgeable professional politicians doing their thing. Just think about how much worse it could be if they didn’t know what they are doing. HA! Amateur politicians might actually write some lines of legislation without angling for a special interest contribution, committee memberships, partisan advantages, or worrying about their next re-election. They might actually write some legislation because they think it would be good for the country. That would kind of make the US like, oh, what’s the word? Oh yes, a DEMOCRACY!

The response to the H1N1 virus hasn’t been terrible, but I don’t think it has been reassuringly good either. Below are some links regarding H1N1 that go into my opinions on it. Mainly, I think it once again shows that Americans are self-absorbed and selfish with a lot of our policies and we won’t even stop and consider the impact of our policies on other countries. Even for ourselves, though, it doesn’t show much intelligence or competence.

· http://www.slate.com/id/2234342/ - This article summarizes a lot of h1n1 information.

· http://www.slate.com/id/2228700/ -This article summarizes the US decision not to use adjuvants (boosters) to cut in half the amount of vaccine we would need.

· http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/story?id=8296948&page=1&cid=yahoo_pitchlist – ABC News article about the US not using adjuvants because of fear of vaccines.

· http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2009/09/07/revere-swine-flu-adjuvant-essential-for-global-equity/ - Health blog that includes good adjuvant discussion and quotes from officials.

The way this plays out is more about World Health Organization decisions than by the US but the choices made by both fit together badly.

The World Health Organization recommended that production of season flu vaccines be completed in all major production facilities before shifting to H1N1 production, due to the set-up time that would be lost and have to be duplicated to switch back. That decision was made with awareness that H1N1 would peak sooner than seasonal flu, but they thought the timeline would still allow enough H1N1 vaccine to be in the world prior to peak. That decision is open to a lot of second guessing for several reasons.

The first reason was technological, in that it took longer to successfully implant and grow the virus in eggs than expected, eating into the available time window. It was a misjudgment to assume that the timeline of production of a brand new strain of flu vaccine would be exactly the same as previous strains. to The second reason was political. The WHO also recommended using booster agents, which would substantially reduce the amount of active ingredient needed for each dose. If the US had followed that piece of advice, there would now be more than double as many doses available right now. However, fear of vaccines in general and boosted flu vaccines in particular, led to the US choosing the path of least resistance and utilizing only unboosted vaccines. A third consideration is that most people have never been exposed to this H1N1 variant, meaning there is zero native resistance. However, many people have previously had the seasonal variant in circulation this year. Therefore, it would have been better to be late or have shortages on the seasonal flu vaccine, peaking probably in January, rather than the H1N1 flu, which is peaking now.

The anti-vaccine community thinks that any complications or deaths from vaccines are unacceptable. But they aren’t willing to accept the consequences of thousands, possibly millions of deaths from a planet that isn’t properly immunized. The Gates Foundation is one group has been very vocal in saying the US decision to not use boosted H1N1 flu vaccine will result in many people dying in the rest of the world that could have been saved with the use of boosted vaccines to reach a lot more people a lot faster. The other side effect is that because of delays in getting a substantial percentage of people immunized, the risk of the virus mutating into something worse will be increased.

Most likely, everyone will come out of the H1N1 scare thinking the response was good enough because H1N1 is not significantly more fatal than the regular seasonal flu. But if the disease had turned out to be as deadly as it first appeared in Mexico, this response would not have been good enough by a long shot. The next time a potentially deadly pandemic is discovered, the US (and the rest of the world) need to be able to move a lot faster and be willing to take more political risks or we could be looking at millions of fatalities.

In retrospect, it would have been better to shift some portion of the main five production facilities in the world immediately into H1N1 so that the obstacles to incubation could have been identified right away and some doses of both types would have been available to vulnerable populations and health care personnel before either peak hit. We also could have encouraged people to get H1N1 first, which makes much more sense. The US also needs to start some public awareness initiatives to explain that boosted vaccines are critical to being able to respond quickly to pandemics and start making boosted vaccines available at least as an option, possibly even a cheaper option to encourage it. If even just 10% of the population willingly chose boosted vaccines, it would still be a major benefit for everyone in the US and the rest of the world in stretching out limited supplies and reducing costs. Fear and ignorance are terrible reasons to condemn a lot of people in other countries to an avoidable death.

This is one of those public policy issues that won’t get much attention in this country and most people won’t ever really think about it. But it has major consequences on the rest of the world. In some ways, we are still the same country that handed Native Americans blankets infected with smallpox and thought we were doing them a favor. Part of what is frustrating is that this wasn’t even an intelligent public debate. The Health Department and CDC simply decided Americans are too ignorant, fearful, and uncaring about other people to even bother having a discussion. They may have been right, but that sure doesn’t sound like a policy decision based on hope, change, or better international relations, like those advocated by a certain candidate not so long ago.

Republicans don’t trust him. Democrats don’t like him. But Connecticut likes having a well connected Senator, so they keep voting for him. It may be Connecticut’s intentional way of screwing the rest of the country. And he just announced his opposition to allowing health care reform go to the senate floor for a vote. Mind you, he isn’t saying he’ll vote against it. He’s saying he won’t vote to allow it to go the floor for a real vote. Such is the senatorial dance that they can block anything without actually voting against anything.

Of course, I’m talking about Joe the “I like Republican wars and Democratic unions” Lieberman. The only things that schmuck can be trusted to do are find an angle to stay in office and milk his office. It now looks like he’s jumping into the opening vacated by Senator Dodd to be the insurance company’s lapdog. Dodd is such a huge corporate sellout to the financial industry (as his election opponent keeps pointing out) that he is now willing to take on the insurance companies that have given him millions over the years just to show he’s not on their payroll (Despite a well established reputation as the Senator from Aetna …) Of course, he might not vote for the bill either; he’s just willing to let it go to the floor.

But anyway, this gives Lieberman the perfect opening to milk a new corporate constituency. The insurance companies come out against the current bills under consideration and the next day, Lieberman comes out against them also. He claims it is for budget reasons but the CBO is still saying that the public option (any variant under discussion) will save money. Of course, he’s also in the perfect position to get Obama’s attention as the new Olympia Snowe to be bought. See articles here and here.

It is absolutely clear that congress is run by professional politicians that don’t give a damn about good policy. They care about sticking around long enough to get power and money, so they can get more power and money. There are two huge obstacles to democracy in this country right now. Gerrymandering in the house and a lack of term limits in both houses. Those two things create the Lieberman’s, Dodd’s, and Hatches’ of the world. Most of these guys aren’t even partisan because they believe the crap coming out of their mouths. They do it because the road to the sweet committee positions lies in being the majority party and being a good footsoldier in that party. So, if policy A is good for their party today, great. If the same policy is good for the other party, forget it. The entire health care debate comes down to individual politicians trying to get good deals for their own self-interests and trying to make the other party look bad. That’s it. Sure, there are a few actually trying to have constructive dialogue and enact sound policy. But they are so few, that they might as well not be there at all.

If the Tea Party movement ever actually decides to throw all the bums out and promote term limits, sign me up. I don’t care who is in congress as long as they are not allowed to stay more than 12 years. No more being bought and sold by special interests, no more years of wheeling and deeling for committee positions, no more congressional pensions. Our founding fathers would be confused by a lot of things in the modern world, but more than anything, they would probably be flabbergasted at professional politicians. Politics was supposed to be a low-paying, serve your country, miserable job, from which you would soon go home in a few years. You weren’t supposed to get rich doing it or spend years there. You weren’t supposed to want to be there. Now it is filled with power-mad egomaniancs who can’t imagine being anywhere else, just like Joe.

So President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It seems like I really ought to have a strong opinion about this, but somehow I am feeling really indifferent about it. It isn’t the horrible insult to humanity that it was to give the award to Kissinger or Arrafat, but it isn’t exactly the well deserved awards of Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, or Lech Walesa either.

It seems sort of like an award for potential. If he closes Guantanamo, if he successfully prevents Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, if he gets North Korea engaged in diplomacy, if he successfully puts Iraq on the road to being a solid member of the international community, if he keeps Afghanistan from falling apart, if he gets Pakistan to truly engage the terrorists in their country, if he improves Israel-Palestine relations, if he improves health care in the US, and/or if he moves the world along on environmental issues, then he would absolutely be deserving. Any of those things would be Nobel Peace Prize candidacy material. Getting rid of don’t ask, don’t tell would also be a solid human rights move. But he hasn’t successfully done any of those things yet. And it remains to be seen if he will accomplish any of them. On the surface, it seems really weird to give a man who is running two wars and possibly preparing to escalate one of them, any sort of peace prize. You would think the peace prize would go to someone leading a country, in you know, peacetime.

I think the best observation on the issue came from a viewer of Lou Dobbs. The viewer emailed a comment noting the irony of President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on the same week he refused to see one of the world’s most notably peaceful men, the Dalia Lama, because of concerns that it might upset the Chinese. Considering all the people who could have won the peace prize that risk their lives every day to make the world aware of Chinese oppression, particularly in Tibet, this award for President Obama feels awfully hollow. He won the award in the same week that he was showing how little courage we have in our dealings with China.

But, on the plus side, it means some foreigners like us again. Sure, they’re weird Norwegians, but considering the last 10 years, we can’t be too picky about who likes us. So, all in all, I give the news an emphatic, “ehhhhhh.”

William Saletan’s blog about artificial hymens is an interesting mix of dark humor and insanity. The basic idea is that the Chinese have invented a neat little $30 bag of fake blood that lets a woman bleed like she is a virgin. In some countries, that’s a neat little kinky sex toy. In some countries, it can be the difference between life and death, due to certain religions’ belief that a woman must bleed on her wedding night. Either from sex or from a rock, either one will do.

The Egyptian piece comes from the following quotes from an Associated Press piece, “Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation. He demanded the government take responsibility for fighting the product. … Prominent Egyptian religious scholar Abdel Moati Bayoumi said anyone who imports the artificial hymen should be punished. “This product encourages illicit sexual relations. Islamic culture forbids these relations except within the confines of marriage,” Bayoumi said. … “If this thing enters Egypt, the country is going to go to waste. God protect us,” commented a reader on the Web site of Egyptian newspaper Al-Youm Al-Sabie.”

Normally, it is multi-million dollar American movies that are threatening to destroy civilization. I can understand feelings of imminent cultural collapse when they are directed at Tom Cruise. But any country that can be brought down by a $30 Chinese sex toy really ought to go ahead and collapse now, so we can go on with life in the rest of the world.

This is also a great reminder of how moral relativism can fall really, really short. Cultural norms such as an afternoon siesta are fine. I’ve got no problem with a culture that naps. But beating and killing women on their wedding nights should be universally condemned. But it’s not, because the UN human rights council is a complete farce and nobody wants to tell another culture that their practices are barbaric, primitive, and unacceptable in the civilized world. (They have feelings. They are sensitive. They have such a long and proud history of killing women. We need to support them and nurture them until they learn better. Plus they sell us oil.) It’s also another issue that all those millions of peaceful, law-abiding moderate Moslems that we are always hearing about never stand up and address. We have plenty of wacko Christians around also but we also have no problem calling them wacko. And we certainly don’t let them kill their spouses on their honeymoons.

It is also a reminder that Egypt is one of the US’ best allies in that part of the world. With friends like these …

MSNBC had an article last Friday talking about new changes being proposed by Obama’s team because it turns out that they weren’t 100% confident that illegal immigrants wouldn’t receive services under the proposed health care reform. Story Here. The basic idea was that the original plan said undocumented Americans would not be allowed to participate. However, there was very little in the bill about checking their documenting status so it would have been easy for some percentage to slide into the system. The revised White House plan adds some of the additional verification mechanisms that Representative Joe Wilson wanted.

So, calling the president a liar can get you somewhere.

The sad and ironic part is that we are being completely stupid and short-sighted by NOT covering illegal immigrants. I am a staunch anti-illegal immigrant person, because I believe that undocumented immigration is a security threat and reduces wages of minimum skilled Americans. I want fences and strong enforcement against employers that hire illegal immigrants. With all that in mind though, I believe health care policy trumps immigration policy. Immigrants will still receive more expensive emergency room treatment and they will still spread contagious diseases. Making sure that all the people in this country, regardless of immigration status, have access to basic medical care and vaccinations lowers costs and risks for all of us. Also, they would be paying premiums into the Exchange. If there are any government program where we should be OK with undocumented workers participating, it should be the one that requires putting money into the system.

I’m not normally very religious but in discussing health reform with my aunt, I started to wonder what Jesus would think about the current debate. She is strongly a small-government conservative who wants government to stay out of health care altogether. She also has a very strong christian faith.

To me, it is very hard to reconcile the current conservative love of free-market based health care and the image of Jesus as a person who always promoted reaching out to the sick, regardless of economic condition, and without regard to personal risk. He treated the poor; he treated the contagious; he never asked for payment; and he encouraged his followers to do the same. He also promoted paying taxes and giving Caesar his due.

With all that in mind, Jesus strikes me as a very public option fellow. He did not believe that a person’s income should determine how much or how good of care they should receive. In fact, he sometimes healed the rich just to show how irrelevant income should be and that he believed in helping all people. And he felt that taxes for governmental services were legitimate. Let’s see, what would we call a system that finds all people equally deserving of health care, regardless of income, and involves paying taxes? I believe that term of art is socialized health care.

Helping the sick was a very, very big deal in the New Testament and Jesus specifically helped rich and poor alike to make the point that their lives were equal before the eyes of God. There is no way, no how, that anyone can make the case that Jesus would have approved of a system where access to health care is based on economic status. It is an absolute contradiction to his teachings. In fact, I think it is fair to say that Jesus would have frowned mightily on the whole notion of people making money by deciding who does and who doesn’t get treatment. You can’t “love thy neighbor” and simultaneously cash a bonus for denying his claim due to a pre-existing condition. Jesus would have passed on the bonus and approved the treatment. We all know that’s what he would have done, because that’s the kind of guy he was.

Conservatives are always talking about how we’re a Christian country, but they sure don’t endorse practicing it in our real public policy. They just want the cosmetic Christianity, with the Ten Commandments monument at every courthouse but they don’t want it any real policy, because Jesus was not a big free-market guy and that just doesn’t work in today’s world. Apparently for conservatives, the free-market trumps Christianity, which trumps government in the pecking order. That’s a shame, because I think some liberals could embrace Christianity if they got to see some conservatives approach health care like Jesus did. (I am pretty sure that Jesus would even have treated illegal immigrants, but that’s a fight for another day …)

The uproar over Obama’s address to school children is so crazy that it is somewhat overwhelming. First, other presidents have done it (republican ones at that). Second, he is the American president and should get some respect as a duly elected leader. The fact that he is our first minority president and that his life story is inspiring makes an address to the schools more interesting but the bottom line is that the president should be able to address the nation’s school kids just because he is president. In fact, it would be a fine tradition for every president to address the schools once every year just as a nice civic-minded, encourage education kind of tradition. I have disagreed with many policies of our last several presidents from both parties but I would never block my child’s opportunity to hear any of them talk.

The media keeps interviewing people who kept their kids home and are all bent out of shape over this. I just wish the media could drop the whole “fair and objective” piece of the story and call these people stupid to their face. Anyone who kept their kid home to avoid the speech is teaching their children what exactly? That our president deserves no respect, that our president is evil, that black people shouldn’t be on TV, or that the president and his ideas are so dangerous that exposure to him may cause instant, uncontrollable changes in behavior? I can’t think of one positive message that comes from telling your children that they should not be exposed to their president. It’s a close-minded, “we don’t agree with him, we don’t like him, and we aren’t going to listen to him” message of stupidity/bigotry. For all of those people always complaining about biases in the media, this was an opportunity for the children to hear Obama’s message without CBS/FOX/ABC/CNN tilting the message in any direction. And some people took that opportunity away from their children, an opportunity to learn. What kind of quality parenting involves taking opportunities to learn away from their children?

The only people who are indoctrinating our children with anything are the ones that are “protecting” them from hearing our president’s message and ideas. Those kids get to hear their parents’ views of the world for the other 99% of their childhood. Education ought to be about learning and learning comes from being exposed to new ideas, whether we agree with them or not. I can fully respect a parent that sits down with their children and tells them why they don’t like Obama’s policies and ideas but hiding their children from those policies and ideas like they are an infectious disease is disrespectful and unpatriotic. You can be a patriotic American without agreeing with the president but you can’t be a patriotic American if you don’t know who your president is and what he believes. Neither can our children.