Accidental Blogger

I'm not sure what this means but it seems to be something of a milestone. 

I go to Starbucks from time to time, but there is apparently a subset of the population that virtually lives there. During the time I was in Korea I saw endless tearooms and met lots of Koreans, but can only recall being in someone's home very few times. The tearoom was the social equivalent to a living room. It was polite without being intrusive, and unlike Starbucks was often economical enough that even someone on a tight budget could pick up the tab.

I'm looking forward to a Starbucks that has table service and brings moist towels to refresh the weary customer, warm in cold weather and soothingly cool in the summer. 

(Originally posted at brownpundits.com)

Many ideologies are dreadful but this one takes the cake (at least in this day and age). Malala's school van was stopped by 2 gunmen. They asked the driver to show them who Malala is. He said he couldnt show his girls to strangers (exact dialog uncertain, but something like that..brave man..btw, will codepink protest this use of patriarchal honor codes to try and protect a girl from terrorists? one wonders). One gunman asked the girls in the van. They looked towards Malala, he shot her in the head (and shot two other girls for good measure). Details here.

The Taliban have taken the time to explain why they shot her and how shooting a 14 year old girl as she comes home from school is the Islamic thing to do (argument from Quran and Hadith, with references):  https://www.facebook.com/boltapakistan1/posts/408721602528919

OK. I know about riots in India. I know child soldiers and suicide bombers were used by the Tamil Tigers. Thousands of Bengalis and Biharis and Punjabis and Balochis have died for Islam, Pakistan, Hindustan, whatever. MANY thousands more die of poverty, disease, malnutrition etc. Police beat up more people every day than the Taliban do.
But in which case has a supposedly modern state failed for more than 10 years to even identify its enemies?
Pakistan is a special case.
That doesnt mean any of Zachary's posts about the great capitalist/IT/education/whatever success stories of Pakistan are wrong. Its still people. 200 million of them. Its a big economy. Its home to ancient cultures that developed many sound survival mechanisms, including our much maligned nepotism and pragmatic determination to help our kith and kin even when they have sinned. But the state ideology was confused and dangerous from day one and the elite's inability to change course has put more pressure on our ancient strengths than those ancient strengths can bear.
The elite will have to wake up before its too late.

I think they will. But they will do it as late as possible. I want them to hurry up a little. Take a few short cuts instead of waiting for every bad idea to blow up in our face before we decide to dump it. Dont take my advice. Take Zachary's. But please, dont take Ahmed Qureshi's and Imran Khan's.
Actually, even take Imran Khan's advice if thats the only way left. A number of Western commentators (especially journalists from cricketing nations; Bob Crilly, I am looking at you) seem to have decided that the poor retarded brown people cannot do any better and its Imran Khan or bust. Maybe they are right. White people sometimes are. Maybe he is exactly the kind of confused moron we need to put up as a distraction while the army changes course more thoroughly. Allah works in mysterious ways.
But please, lets not have codepink visit us again for a few years. And if their need for street cred in NYC overwhelms them again, can we please send them to guard girls schools in FATA instead of making the poor souls suffer without toilets in SUVs on the bumpy road to Tank?
I was going to say nasty things about our upperclass university pomo poco bullshitters as well, but better sense prevailed. It is our fault for paying attention to them. Let them discuss Humera Iqtedar's thesis (summarized with some creative license by history buff Shahid Saeed as: "TTP attacked b/c Malala promoting secularism. She is promoting secularism b/c of Taliban attacks. TTP secularizing public space" ) and let them congratulate each other and thrill to the applause of other equally Western educated members of the elite. More urgent problems deserve attention.

btw, here is the great white hope himself: Imran Khan on live with Talat. Watch near the end (36 minute mark onwards):

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Originally posted at 3qd.

Postscript: Today, 9th October, (afternoon in Pakistan) the Pakistani Taliban sent a gunman (or gunmen) to shoot a 14 year old girl who had become an icon of anti-Taliban resistance in her area after speaking up for female education. Yes, Codepink darlings on your way back from a faux protest march to Waziristan, education! NOT LGBT rights. NOT even complete gender equality. Just the right to go to school and aspire to a role in public life. She is now fighting for her life in a hospital. Another schoolgirl was also shot in the attack. There are reports that the driver of the school van was asked "who is Malala?"; he reportedly tried to stave them off by saying he couldn't identify girls for an outsider (Codepink may wish to protest this attempt to use patriarchal codes of female "honor" to save her life). Details are still murky. The story may change in some ways. But whatever the details, the Taliban's spokesman has called newspapers and proudly taken responsibility. She was shot for certain things she said and kept saying. That's it. She had done nothing else. She had not gone topless or thrown paint at a congressman or organized a little study circle of Tariq Ali's Trotskyite world resistance. She had, in short, committed no other crime even in the eyes of the Taliban. Inability to publicly say what you believe out of fear of this kind of violence is the ultimate restriction on free speech. I know it's too much to expect Codepink to have a clue, but others may wish to keep this in mind while reading this article. (Yes, I am picking on Codepink. In fact, I want to pick on most of the postcolonial-upperclass-university-retard crowd… I know they are mostly irrelevant, but I still want to pick on them, so there. I am probably putting my own happy relationship with the Pakistani super-elite at risk but sometimes you have to upset your friends.)

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I found this recipe in our file. It may be useful sometime over the next few weeks. 
Note the date and notes at the end.
This recipe can be recycled one way or another after every election… 

Saturday, November 18, 2006

New recipe just in time for Thanksgiving: Potted Crow

For those who have been looking, either for themselves or to feed to someone else…Potted Crow

• 6 crows 
• 3 bacon slices 
• stuffing of your choice 
• 1 diced carrot 
• 1 diced onion
• chopped parsley 
• hot water or stock 
• 1/4 cup shortening 
• 1/4 cup flour
• buttered toast

Clean and dress crows; stuff and place them upright in stew-pan on the slices of bacon. Add the carrot, onion and a little parsley, and cover with boiling water or stock.
Cover the pot and let simmer for 2-3 hours, or until tender, adding boiling water or stock when necessary.Make a sauce of the shortening and flour and 2 cups of the stock remaining in the pan.
Serve each crow on a thin slice of moistened toast, and pour gravy over all.

**For future reference, the Democrats took the election, winning control of both houses of Congress, breaking a twelve year lock on all three branches. Lotta pundits eating crow now. With Bush a lame duck, the future looks good for Democrats. Of course they can snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory. It won't be the first time.

Sure enough, they did, four years later, midterm elections of 2010. Even having elected Barack Obama to the White House Democrats fell to a blistering loss of power in both houses.

I'm linking here a post from The Health Care Blog which reminds me of a conversation I had with our pediatrician when our children were born in the Seventies. Having selected what was then one of the metro area's best hospital, I mentioned casually that it seemed to be the best in town. He replied that yes, it was very good, but for any kind of neonatal complications Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital would be the place of choice. This surprised me because Grady was (and still is) the treatment center for indigents. But precisely because it is a "charity hospital" the volume of all types of trauma and complications gives the staff and support facility far more experience "practicing" medicine than most other hospitals. Other than TV programs and a limited time as an Army Medic in Korea in the Sixties, that is my only background regarding high-volume, low-budget hospitals. 

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This was from Dr. Salwitz' post Friday. Go read the whole thing. He's an oncologist and knows more about death than most people. 

A poorly managed end-of-life experience can transform families for generations. I recently heard of a young man who suffered a miserable protracted death from cancer. This resulted in his wife becoming chronically depressed and isolated from her family. She committed suicide, leaving their son a life as an alcoholic and drug addict. The ripples from that one cancer spread out and, through the network of that family, caused pain for many more.

I finally got around to reading the Smithsonian article, The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson. I'm guilty of too much scanning of material, enough to catch the drift, without taking time to get mired in details that I will forget anyway. But this time I printed it out, some ten or so pages, and took time to let it sink in and it was a sad and disturbing experience.  

I already knew, as any good Liberal knows, that Jefferson was by no means the Godly Christian that Evangelical and Tea Party types like to paint. He had a personal copy of the Koran and was a student of scripture of all kinds. His intellect was mammoth. One commenter at the end of the article recalled John Kennedy's quip to a group of notables at a White House dinner that "there has never been a greater concentration of intellectual power here at the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined alone."  I also knew of the Jefferson Bible, his revision of the New Testament which not only attempted to reconcile the contradictions among the synoptic Gospels but meticulously removed the miracles as fables which he felt were invented by the original scribes, products of their superstitious imaginations. And of course the history and recent stories of Sally Hemmings are by now well-known to most readers.

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Story Corps Atlanta aired a great audio snapshot this morning well worth the three and a half minutes it takes to listen. 

This summer and fall, 41 year old Atlanta attorney Kirsten Widner has been living with her biological son, Alex Locke, for the first time.

Alex is now 19 years old. He was adopted as an infant to the parents he calls Mom and Dad, and he grew up on the other side of the country. At StoryCorps Atlanta, Kirsten told Alex about her decision to put Alex in an open adoption, in which they’d still have the possibility of a relationship.

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As I listened to yet another first-person account of how the idea of family has changed during our lifetime, I reflected on my own experience. Mine was a very traditional upbringing. Marriage on both sides meant "til death do you part" and I can't recall even whispers about anybody having to get married because they were "in trouble" (i.e. she got pregnant).  The oldest of my first cousins was the first person in the family to dare marry anyone who had been divorced, a woman with three children, and they never had any together. That was in the Fifties, and since then our family, like most, has come to terms with divorce and more, including gender orientation and racial differences. 

The difference between today's families and those of the past is more about facing realities that have always been there rather than discovering anything new. Attractions between cultural, religious and racial groups have always been around, and not always limited to young people either. The difference in today's global village is that we can no longer remain in denial because the numbers are simply too big. Those old bad apple and black sheep arguments no longer have credibility. 

Following my cousin's example, I married with a divorced woman with two children, one of whom had been adopted by her and her first husband, and we then had two more together, making a blended family of six. In the early years we were also licensed foster parents to several pre-adoptive newborns, one of which was a very promising little boy we hated parting with after more than a year when he was finally placed with his adoptive family. 

We persuaded the case workers to do adoptions from our home instead of the usual family services facilities which despite the toys and other stuff seemed too alien. It was a three-day process. The first day the adoptive parent came and met us as a family as well as the baby, and they spent as much time as possible with the baby. Second day any siblings came along and our two families spent a little time together, but the adoptive family might take the baby for a ride to have more time to bond. By the third day the baby would be going to a new home, not with total strangers but with people he had already known a little while. 

In the case of our last one we did the third day differently. We took our three girls out of school that day and delivered the baby to his new home where our kids played with their kids for a couple of hours before we left. In fact, they weny back once or twice later to visit before we lost touch. That baby would now be about thirty years old and we still think of him from time to time. 

In the meantime, there have been grandchildren and step-grandchildren as the next generation multiplied, with the most recent count being ten, with ages from a few weeks to twenty-six years. The two youngest, aged three and infant, are the result of assisted reproduction because our youngest daughter has no need for a man in her life but wanted to be a mother. She did her homework, found a clinic specializing in these matters, selected a donor from a veritable catalog of candidates, and became pregnant via IUI. Intrauterine insemination or implantation is not the same as in vitro fertilization which most people know about in that there is no deselecting of fertilized eggs. With IUI sperm is injected and timed to coordinate with the mother's natural ovulation cycle.

It's an exciting time to be alive. But it's also a challenge for those of us pushing seventy. When a single mom decides that her firstborn might feel cheated if she doesn't have a sibling, all you can do is pray that all goes well in their lives for the next decade or two. One of the hard lessons we all learn is that you can't tell your adult children how to live their lives. The reassuring part is that we get to watch the drama unfold daily on Facebook where there are literally scores of supportive online contacts, many of whom may never have known each other except on line. It turns out there is a voluntary online registry of siblings for parents who want to compare pictures and experiences! Our two youngest grandchildren (who have the same donor father, by the way, so they are true biological siblings) have at least forty-plus other half-siblings with the same donor/ father. (They are geographically widespread and the donor has been "retired" because the clinic restricts the number of donations from any one donor.)

Now you know why this morning's Story Corps feature caught my attention.  

Stuff you come across on Twitter.

Ikea removed women from the directory in Saudi Arabia
Ikea has removed virtually all women from the pictures in the catalog company in Saudi Arabia.

In most other countries the Ikea catalog quite the same. But furniture giant has made sure to create a separate version for Saudi Arabia, writes the Swedish newspaper Metro.

Here are almost all women, many girls airbrushed away from the pictures. While directories in other countries have four designers at the front, there are only three in the Saudi edition. A female designer is removed from the picture.

In another picture a woman with earrings, bare feet and a small neck had become a man with black socks.

The arch-conservative and strict Muslim Saudi Arabia, women not allowed to drive or walk alone on the streets. The Swedish Trade Minister Ewa Björling think Ikea pictures is a sad example of how the country has "a long way to go" when it comes to gender equality.

This is what happens when corporate profitability collides with social norms. Before we too quickly look down our noses at IKEA it might be better to examine the impact of other less conspicuous corporate policies. Child labor and environmental pollution in other countries come to mind but I'm sure the list is much longer.

I became aware of J.D. Kleinke from a post about abortion at The Health Care Blog almost two years ago. I later learned he is the author of several books, one of which with the clever title, Catching Babies. Anybody who wants to slog around in the abortion debate is invited to read that post and comments (although the comments begin running off the rails about half way down, so don't let that take too much reading time). 

NY Times published a timely opinion piece by Dr. Kleinke yesterday that needs to be part of the ongoing arguments about PPACA. The Conservative Case for Obamacare spells out those market-driven, free-market principles embedded in the legislation. Even if force-fed to Republicans most would react like those with eating disorders with self-ionduced vomiting. But denial of his points won't make them any less accurate. Here is the opening…

IF Mitt Romney’s pivots on President’s Obama’s health care reform act have accelerated to a blur — from repealing on Day 1, to preserving this or that piece, to punting the decision to the states — it is for an odd reason buried beneath two and a half years of Republican political condemnations: the architecture of the Affordable Care Act is based on conservative, not liberal, ideas about individual responsibility and the power of market forces.

This fundamental ideological paradox, drowned out by partisan shouting since before the plan’s passage in 2010, explains why Obamacare has only lukewarm support from many liberals, who wanted a real, not imagined, “government takeover of health care.” It explains why Republicans have been unable since its passage to come up with anything better. And it explains why the law is nearly identical in design to the legislation Mr. Romney passed in Massachusetts while governor.

The core drivers of the health care act are market principles formulated by conservative economists, designed to correct structural flaws in our health insurance system — principles originally embraced by Republicans as a market alternative to the Clinton plan in the early 1990s. The president’s program extends the current health care system — mostly employer-based coverage, administered by commercial health insurers, with care delivered by fee-for-service doctors and hospitals — by removing the biggest obstacles to that system’s functioning like a competitive marketplace.

Read the rest and decide for yourself. 

I noticed Dr. Kleinke is now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. As recently as two years ago I would have held that against him, me being an unreconstructed Sixties Liberal and all. But something has changed over the last couple of years. I can't decide if I am changing or the respectable old digs of the Grand Old Party have finally discovered that nut cases from the Extreme Right have infiltrated their ranks. They are only a few perilous steps short of having racists and others from the lunatic fringe  getting   keeping the upper hand in their base. 

Living in the South I don't follow very many Conservative media outlets. I don't need to. Their messages are like the weather — like it or not I'm sure to be exposed to them. But via Twitter and Daily Caller I came upon something that had to go into my Facebook status.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS.

1.   And it came to pass that on on Sunday, October 7, in the Year of our Lord 2012, preachers in America were organized by politicians.

2.   On that day political types advanced the argument that the "Johnson amendment" to the Tax Code of 1954 was "unconstitutional."

3.   Those same political types, all have a political agenda, to allow and encourage church leaders to join Caesar and his forces in secular conflicts.

This was my inspiration.

In the classic movie “The Sting,” Paul Newman explains to Robert Redford that in the most sophisticated swindles, the victim never even figures out he’s been conned.

Well, America’s churches got swindled big time in 1954. They lost their freedom of speech and a significant part of their freedom of religion.

There are two separate scandals here. The first is that Lyndon Johnson surreptitiously snuck a provision into the tax code that requires the IRS to regulate the content of every pastor’s sermon in this free land, and to threaten the tax deductibility of donations to any church that lobbies or takes sides in elections.

The second scandal is the fact that the churches of America have allowed this blatantly unconstitutional government censorship to persist for 58 years. It’s the most sophisticated kind of sting. Our churches haven’t even recognized they’ve been had.

[snip] There was no notice, no hearings, and no debate. Johnson never mentioned churches. Congress has never voted to impose content censorship on America’s churches. But the IRS immediately swept churches into Johnson’s amendment.

And then the mainline denominations acquiesced in their own censorship! They didn’t stand up and fight for their right and obligation to provide moral leadership in American self-government. That abdication has led to a dramatic decline in those churches’ membership and America’s culture since 1954.

[snip]  Now a group of lawyers, The Alliance Defending Freedom, has organized a campaign to force a test case. For the last four years, pastors across America have banded together on Pulpit Freedom Sunday to speak out on elections one Sunday a year, and send their sermons to the IRS. Last year 539 pastors participated and the IRS blinked once again. This year’s PFS will be October 7. Every Pastor who believes his or her pulpit should be free from government censorship should sign up and participate at PulpitFreedom.org. 

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Dr. Salwitz is a blogging oncologist. Anyone who has cancer, or has a friend or family member with cancer, may find his blog a good place to visit.

…There is confusion that the more side effects a chemotherapy agent produces the more likely it is too work. The patient is saying, “Reassure me that this therapy does have side effects, because I know they are important. I just want you to know I can take it. Doc, you can be the Mohammed Ali of oncology. “Float like a butterfly – Sting like a bee.” Slug me hard and slug my cancer harder. I want to live.”

However, this is like saying that the more pepper you put in the casserole, the more likely your guests are to enjoy it. Too much pepper and the whole mess becomes intolerable; chemotherapy is the same. Use the correct drug for the specific disease and give the correct amount; use too much and life becomes dominated by intolerable complications.