The Republic of T.

I have to agree with Auguste, this is perhaps the best time waster ever. I won’t say how long I spent playing with it last night after everyone went to bed. It was time I probably should have spent sleeping. But it was the most undirected, unfocused time—time that’s not dedicated to doing what someone else needs or wants me to do—that I’ve had in a couple of months.

The rules are:

Here’s what you do: The article you get when you click this link is your band title.

The last four words of the last quote on this page is your album title (you will probably need to reload the page if you do more than one, if you’re like me.)

And the third picture, the upper right hand, will be your cover photo.

I’m adding a rule that you have to square off whatever picture you get, so that it’s a realistic album cover.

I did several of these last night, and these are the best of what I ended up with.
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Everyone has heard at least one “health care nightmare” story, like the death of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkysian hours after her insurance company approved coverage a liver transplant, following repeated denials. Before that, it was the death of Diamonte Driver, for want of an $80 dental procedure. These stories naturally provoke outrage. What happened to an anonymous 68-year-old man, however, is categorized as weird news, even though it’s as much about our failed health care system as the familiar “nightmare” stories.

The abstract of the article published in Journal of Emergency Medicine, in December 2007, is about as dry as you might expect a medical journal to be.
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Ed. Note: This started out as a response to Marissa’s thoughtful comment on a previous post, related to the one before it I decided to let it stand on it’s own, as a post.

The thing is, I’m a late bloomer.

A late bloomer is a person who does not discover their talents and abilities until later than normally expected. In certain cases, the individual may be as old as 60, and retirement may lead to this discovery.

Maybe it’s due to my 30-plus years of untreated ADD. Maybe it’s just because I have a late blooming brain.

Indeed, until quite recently most researchers believed the human brain followed a fairly predictable developmental arc. It started out protean, gained shape and intellectual muscle as it matured, and reached its peak of power and nimbleness by age 40. After that, the brain began a slow decline, clouding up little by little until, by age 60 or 70, it had lost much of its ability to retain new information and was fumbling with what it had. But that was all right because late-life crankiness had by then made us largely resistant to new ideas anyway.

That, as it turns out, is hooey. More and more, neurologists and psychologists are coming to the conclusion that the brain at midlife–a period increasingly defined as the years from 35 to 65 and even beyond–is a much more elastic, much more supple thing than anyone ever realized.

Far from slowly powering down, the brain as it ages begins bringing new cognitive systems on line and cross-indexing existing ones in ways it never did before. You may not pack so much raw data into memory as you could when you were cramming for college finals, and your short-term memory may not be what it was, but you manage information and parse meanings that were entirely beyond you when you were younger. What’s more, your temperament changes to suit those new skills, growing more comfortable with ambiguity and less susceptible to frustration or irritation.

Sounds nice. But it doesn’t quite resolve some

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So goes the country? Well, probably not. But who knows how gay voters feel anyway? Not the media, which can’t make up its mind if we’re unexpectedly satisfied:

For the first time in two decades, gay voters find themselves in an unusual, if happy, predicament. The three leading Democrats have staked out similar positions on issues that resonate with gay men and lesbians. Although none of the three candidates back gay marriage, they all support same-sex civil unions and say they would fight to repeal the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. And each of them says he or she would champion a federal anti-discrimination law that would protect lesbians and gay men.

“You would need a magnifying glass to see any real or substantive differences between the three candidates,” said Alan Van Capelle, the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender civil rights group in New York.

Or ultimately frustrated.

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Evidently, there’s a new trend underway in some churches. But it’s one that seems, at best, to be a strange way to make church more appealing: to fill the pews by emptying them.

First, you have to imagine being arrested because you went to church. Then you have to imagine a 71-year-old woman showing up for church, one she attended for 50 years, and being arrested because she refused to leave.

On a quiet Sunday morning in June, as worshippers settled into the pews at Allen Baptist Church in southwestern Michigan, Pastor Jason Burrick grabbed his cellphone and dialed 911. When a dispatcher answered, the preacher said a former congregant was in the sanctuary. “And we need to, um, have her out A.S.A.P.”

Half an hour later, 71-year-old Karolyn Caskey, a church member for nearly 50 years who had taught Sunday school and regularly donated 10% of her pension, was led out by a state trooper and a county sheriff’s officer. One held her purse and Bible. The other put her in handcuffs.

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Since turning 18, I have never not voted. In every election in which I’ve been eligible—local, state, and national—I have cast a ballot.

Maybe it’s because I had parents who lived during the civil rights era. They made sure I knew what me right to vote had cost. They encouraged me to vote even when there are no good choices. My dad used to say to me, “If you cant find someone to vote for, find someone to vote against. But vote.

Now it appears that in the Maryland primary on February 12 I’ll have no one to vote for.
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Based on what I’ve been reading as the primaries lay out, there’s a struggle going on in the Democratic party. Actually, more than one. At least two. One is obvious to be discussed in the media; the candidates’ battle to win over core constituencies of the Democratic base. Namely, African Americans, Latinos, and women.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were pitched yesterday into a struggle for the key components of the Democratic power base – women, African-American and Latino voters – as the race for the White House fans out across a national stage.

…While Obama had overwhelming support from African-American voters, Clinton was strongly backed by women and Latinos. She was also the preferred candidate of voters who see the economy as the main issue in the coming elections – a distinct plus amid deepening concerns about recession.

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I take it all back. Al Gore should run for president.

Then again, if he were running he might not have the freedom to say that and still be taken seriously by his own party.

[Via Andy.]

I’m at home with Dylan today and working from home. (Dylan’s doing very well, by the way. He’s nearing 2 months old and has gotten so much bigger! He was just under six pounds when he was born, and he’s just over 11 now; and he’s got a few extra chins, chubbier cheeks, and chubbier legs. He likes watching Parker play, and likes to be held upright and walked around the house.)

So between taking care of him and getting some work done, there may not be much posting here today, except for this post—which I stayed up last night to complete after getting Dylan to sleep—and possibly one more that I’ve been working on for a bit. (That’s if I can finish it.)

I haven’t been able to do as much writing as I’d like to lately, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading. (It’s relatively easy to read news & blogs online while rocking Dylan in my office chair. And there’s a lot out there I’d blog about if I could manage to find the time and the energy, and get them to synch up. In lieu of that, today seems like a good day for a roundup.
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It’s inevitable that, since the poisonous parenting series started, someone who drops into the the middle of it without reading the previous posts (or perhaps without reading any of it) completely misunderstands the point of it. That’s what seems to have happened with one commenter on the previous post.

I am a black hetrosexual woman who reads your blog often. It is really bothersome that you choose to highlight the worst of the worst of hetrosexual parenting. How can we have meaningful dialogue about our differing views when all you do is degrade and mock hetrosexual parents?????

Of course, the point is not to “degrade and mock heterosexual parents.”
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When you’ve got a newborn in the house (and you’re still trying to get work done) you miss a lot. In fact, it’s took me the better part of a day to write this blog post (and that’s just the part above the fold), and another couple of days to get it posted. So, I didn’t know about the Tom Cruise Scientology indoctrination video until I read about on Gawker after the furor died down.

You have to watch this video. It shows Tom Cruise, with all the wide-eyed fervor that he brings to the promotion of a movie, making the argument for Scientology, the bizarre 20th-century religion. Making the argument is an understatement. The Hollywood actor, star of movies such as Mission Impossible, is a complete fanatic. “When you’re a Scientologist, and you drive by an accident, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you’re the only one who can really help… We are the way to happiness. We can bring peace and unite cultures.” There’s much much more. Let me put it this way: if Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.

Well, I watched the video and even though I’ve made fun of Tom Cruise in the past, I’m starting to see him and his beliefs in a whole new light.
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I gotta hand it to the ACLU, they take all comers. Just about. And usually I understand that. By protecting the civil liberties of groups many people despise, they’re protecting all of our civil liberties. By defending Rush Limbaugh, they are also protecting me in some way. By defending Fred Phelps and family, they are in some way protecting me and my family. By defending the fights of convicted sex offenders, they are in some ways defending mine.

But now they’re defending Larry Craig?

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Is there anybody still out there listening? Just thought I’d ask. It’s been four days or so since I’ve done any actual writing, or at least what I’d call doing my own writing, and it’s been making me a little crazy. That’s partly because I’m always a little concerned that falling silent in the blogosphere for too long is the same as disappearing altogether.

Granted, with a new baby in the house, I might be forgiven for blogging less than I usually do. It’s definitely not easy. I suppose I could take a leave of absence for a while, at least until Dylan starts sleeping through the night, because it’s mighty difficult to keep yo with what’s going on and to string together even a coherent thought or two when you’re suffering from lack of sleep.

And when I do get around to writing, I’m just catching up and writing about stuff that was news four days earlier. I’ve got about three posts in various stages of completion, and as I sit writing this post on Sunday night, to be posted on Monday, Dylan is here in the office with me, sleeping. Before to long, I’ll “top him off” with a diaper change and a bottle before heading to bed myself, in hopes that he’ll sleep a little longer before it’s time for another bottle, etc. In the meantime, I’m sitting here trying to decide which of my unfinished posts is even worth finishing. All the while, I’m trying to keep from nodding off.

And it’s brought to a realization that kind of alluded to in an earlier post.
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Lemme get this straight. This may be the lack of sleep talking, but did these folks really go to school for years and years, and all they can tell me is something that I already know? Like, I need to sleep?

After a few restless nights, most of us can’t even think straight. We are less able to make sense of problems, make competent moral judgments or retain what we learn, even though studies show our brain cells fire more frenetically to overcome the lack of sleep. Lose too much sleep and we become reckless, emotionally fragile, and more vulnerable to infections and to diabetes, heart disease and obesity, recent research suggests.

…The consequences of too little sleep can be dire. Almost half of all heavy-truck accidents can be traced to driver fatigue, while decisions leading to the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor meltdown and the Exxon Valdez oil spill can be partly linked to people drained of rest by round-the-clock work schedules. Weary doctors make more serious medical errors, while sleepy airport baggage screeners make more security mistakes, researchers reported at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

All told, the frayed tempers, short attention spans and fuzzy thinking caused by sleep deprivation may cost $15 billion a year in reduced productivity, the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research estimated.

I have an excuse for not getting any sleep in the next couple of months. What’s keeping everybody else awake?

What I have learned as an adult with ADD and a working parent.

I have to become my mother.

I have to become my father.

I have to learn what they learned.

It does not matter what I want.

It does not matter how I feel.

It does not matter if I am happy.

It does not matter that I am unhappy.

It matters that it does not show.

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Score one more near miss for a progressive candidate After being shut out of the ABC debate, Dennis Kucinich won his court battle to be included in the MSNBC Democratic presidential debate. Then the Nevada state Supreme Court ruled that the debate could go on without Dennis.

I think this opinion piece from The Nation about NBC’s desire to exclude Kucinich from the debate is intended to be satirical.

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I can’t be entirely certain, but I’m pretty sure that kicking a photographer for taking a picture during a prayer is not what Jesus would do.

Carrying a family Bible, a state representative-elect kicked a photographer who took a picture of him during a statehouse prayer — then was sworn into office.

Douglas Bruce went to the House floor Monday morning as a guest of Rep. Kent Lambert, a fellow Colorado Springs Republican.

When Rocky Mountain News photographer Javier Manzano took his photo during the traditional morning prayer, Bruce, who was standing, brought the sole of his shoe down hard on the photographer’s bent knee.

“Don’t do that again,” Bruce told him.

Later, Bruce refused to apologize.

“I think that’s the most offensive thing I’ve seen a photographer do in 21 years,” he said. “If people are going to cause a disruption during a public prayer, they should be called for it. He owes an apology to the House and the public.”

Rocky Mountain News Editor John Temple said the photographer had a right to take Bruce’s picture. Temple said he would speak with House leadership.

Well, if that’s the way it’s gonna be, then Hindu cleric Rajan Zed would have been within his rights to deck the whole group of protesters who disrupted his delivery of the morning invocation in the Senate last year.

Or maybe it’s only Christian prayers that should never be disrupted, and the sanctity of which is to be defended with a swift kick. In that case, the photographer is lucky Bruce didn’t clobber him with his family bible.

I took a swipe at Robert Johnson yesterday, but a couple more people scored direct hits.

Chris, at AfroNetizen, put it politely.

The answer isn’t for us to all act like Tiger Woods or Barack Obama and then racism would disappear. It’s a far more complicated problem than that and besides we shouldn’t be required to be clean cut Harvard grads, world class golfers or multiracial citizens in order to be incorporated into the American dream. But it also isn’t the case that Bob Johnson (who is responsible for the proliferation of some of the most oppressive images of Black women in the 20th century) or Al Sharpton should be assumed to speak for the majority. They too have exceptional and privileged experiences vis a vis the majority of black people and it should not be assumed they “know” what black people think” especially given that we think a lot of different things.

Meanwhile The Angry Independent put thins more bluntly at Mirror on America.

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I held forth earlier about the creeping of “states’ rights” into Democratic campaigns, but I didn’t put it quite the way Amanda did.

It’s important to have long memories, because the language about “small government” and “states rights” is with us today, and there’s no reason to think the basic meaning has changed significantly from the days when it was about stopping black people from voting. “States rights” dresses itself up as anti-tyrannical language, but it’s actually pro-tyranny. It’s about crafting a nation that makes it the easiest to use government power to override individual rights. Remember this picture every time you hear someone waxing on about the inherent nobility of “leaving it to the states”, because odds are they’re beating the same drum they have since the South lost their war to preserve slavery.

I’ll say it again. In the history of this country, states rights have never been invoked in the service of extending rights and protections to more people, but has always been invoked in the service of restricting the rights of and denying protections to—or restricting rights to and preserving protections for—particular groups of citizens.

Put another way, “states’ rights” has never been a means to advance equality, but has always been a tool for preserving inequality.

Back to blogging meta, I guess. I don’t know what’s going on up there at the pinnacle of blogging. From where I sit, it’s impossible to see beyond the clouds to the peak. But something’s going on. First there was blog related stress and heart attacks at GigaOm. Now the New York Times is again covering the travails of top tier bloggers, this time with an article suggesting that Gawker may have “jumped the shark.”

“THE ideal Gawker item,” Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote in an instant message last month to a prospective hire, “is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

“And it’s 100 words long.

“200 max.

“Any good idea can be expressed at that length.”

A few weeks later on Gawker.com, the news-media gossip Web site that is the flagship of Mr. Denton’s online publishing empire, he spent 339 words explaining changes at the site, including his decision to take over as managing editor after three senior bloggers had quit, and the hiring of Richard Morgan to cover television.

One day later, on Jan. 3, Mr. Morgan also quit. In an interview, he said that Mr. Denton, in his fixation with attracting new readers, was letting the site degenerate.

The next day a new Gawker blogger assigned to cover pop culture posted 406 words summarizing some of the most popular scatological sex videos on the Web, with links.

Within minutes, some longtime readers were posting comments asking, in a reference to the cliché that has come to mean something or someone has lost touch with its roots and has no more cultural relevance, whether Gawker had jumped the shark.

100 words? Well, that just one more reason I’ll never write for Gawker. But if you read beyond the first 200 words the article gets really interesting when it suggests that Gawker slipped into “Perez Hilton mode” and thus began it’s decline.

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