All posts by Steve Stern

Atrial Fibrillation and Obamacare

Americana, Current Affairs, Obama, Psychological Musings

 

Last week, I had a dizzy, nauseous spell – eposode as I don’t like to call it – and went to my doctor. Then, on the next day, to my cardiologist. It turns out that I have Atrial Fibrillation – and I don’t think that is the right way to put it, although I am or I caught Atrial Fibrillation is certainly wrong – and I am now wearing a new Holter monitor. A   Holter monitor records heart activity over a period of time. In this case seven days, my first one was for twenty four hours and was so big I had to wear it on my belt – this one is just stuck to my man boob and it lasts for seven days. Ain’t progress grand.

 

Speaking of progress, for some reason – maybe because a large percentage of doctors are conservative – the medical profession has resisted computerizing records. I am 71 and my files would require a wheelbarrow to carry around if most of them hadn’t – fortunately – been lost. The file at my cardiologist is probably about an inch and an half thick and I have only been going to her for about four years and she is only one doctor. As an aside; What we really need is a chip similar to the chip our cat has but that is going to be a real fight. I see over at Last Days News – where they tell us that These End Times Prophecies are 100% Accurate! In case you had any doubts- that a The Bible says those who take the 666 Microchip will receive the Wrath of God. I am not a Christian and I am not much of a believer in the Bible as an authority but if it really does mention Microchips, I will be instantly converted. End aside.

Anyway, on to Obamacare and computerized records. This week, both my doctors – well, I have more than two, but both doctors I went to – are deep into switching over to computers and it already seems to be paying off. My primary doctor entered her notes into the computer and my cardiologist has them the next day when I go to her office. I leave the cardiologist with a printed list of instructions rather than oral instructions and an hand scribbled prescription. I have a question about my meds and call the cardiologist, her assistant looks up my files at his desk, and in about fifteen second gives me my answer. Last month, he would have had to call me back.

By the time Obama leaves office five years from now, I suspect that few people will still want to revoke Obamacare.

Western State Lines and Handicap Parking

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

My theory is that the further the people making the law – or rule – are from the people having to obay the law, the more arbitrary the law and the more likely it will not relate to what is actually happening on the ground. The borders of almost all states west of the Mississippi are an example.

Most of these state borders are straight lines following a compass heading totally ignoring any relationship to the topography. Because the people drawing the lines way back in Washington had no idea of any topographic detail. They didn’t know where the streams or mountains were so they couldn’t care. California where our northeastern border runs from some arbitrary point in the Great Basin near Goose Lake, due south to Lake Tahoe, is typical. That corner of California, about the size of New Jersey, is on the Nevada side of the mountains from the rest of California and would have been in Nevada if the people dawing the lines had lived anywhere near the lines being drawn.

A couple of days ago, Michele and I went on a short walk in the Thornwood Open Space Preserve. When we got to the parking lot, I noticed that the Handicap Space was little used and it re-booted my gripe about bureaucratic rules. Having Handicap Parking at the trailhead for a walk that handicapped people can not make is stupid. That is not to say that the people who made sure the handicap space was there are stupid but that the law – made from afar – is stupid.

I do not think that this applies only to government it applies equally, maybe even more so because there is less chance for recourse, to big business. Just think of trying to get something changed through a big bank or insurance company. The rules override reasonableness. I suspect it is even more frustrating to the person charged with enforcing the law that they know does not fit the situation.

Ironically, these arbitrary rules hurt more than they help.

First, they make the enforcer stupider and more likely to make a mistake. When I first started my own building company, our lender was Wells Fargo Bank and our lending officer was a local guy. (His brother was a real estate broker, so the real estate biz was in their blood.) When we wanted a loan for a project, we had to convince him. Wells trusted him to make the right decision and he was responsible to know the project and know that it would work.

Now there are twenty five times as many rules, the decision gets kicked up to a committee and – if the project meets all the requirements – it gets passed with none of the decision makers having to actually visit the site. Nobody really has a vested interest in the project working. That is part of the problem that lead to the bank failures.

If the lending officer – who now is really only a data collector at a large bank – follows the rules and the project doesn’t work, nobody is to blame, they all followed the rules, after all. The rules are made to make the lending environment safer but they really make it more dangerous. Everybody knew there were stupid loans being made, but nobody cared.

Second, this arbitrariness pisses people off and builds disrespect for the government or company. People are more willing to cheat; to design a project to fit the rules rather than be successful. In schools, it becomes teaching to the test rather than educating students.

 

 

We are all heroes

Americana, Psychological Musings, War, What's a man?

in our own minds, except that we are not. When I was about 31 or 32, I read The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. It is one of those book with lots of characters and shows the wind- up to WWII from different view points and if you haven’t read it, I would recommend it – although I may be wrong, as I did read it almost forty years ago and our collective sensibilities may have changed – if you like historical fiction. Anyway, a couple of the characters are Aaron Jastrow and his niece, Natalie. They are Jewish – duh! – and in Europe. From almost the beginning of their part of the story, it became obvious – from my view point of looking back on the war – that they were going to end up at one of the German Death Camps.

When I would get to the Aaron and Natalie sections, I would just skip ahead. I couldn’t read all the bad choices they were making; choices I knew that I would not have made. In my mind – at 31 or 32 – I would have, heroically, made much better choices. Now – forty years later – I know that I would not have made those heroic choices of my fantasies. Now I know that I couldn’t read many of those sections because I saw myself in Jastrow’s mistakes.
These remembrances came up when I read a  blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates today. In it, he writes about how easy it is to think we would do something different than what the slave owners and slaves actually did do, if we had lived in the slave society of the pre-Civil War south. It is a constant theme of Coates and was brought up by an article by some fool white guy saying what he would do if he were a black kid being raised in poverty. Read it, really! It goes directly to the question that people who are raised in poverty tend to stay in poverty and should society try to change that or just say, It’s their fault, with all the ramifications that brings.
By the way, the prison camp photo above is one of the camps we – we being the United Sates of America – built, in one of our racist fits, to intern our Japanese citizens during WWII. I want to say that I would have been against these camps if I had been my parent’s age when they were built, but I doubt it.

 

Dharma talks

Around home

 

On Thursdays, Michele and I usually go to a Sitting and Dharma talk at our local meditation center. IMC, as it bills itself, says that it is a community-based urban meditation center for the practice of Vipassana or Insight meditation….dedicated to the study and practice of Buddhist teachings. One of the things most striking about the Dharma talks is the simplicity of their form. We enter the space quietly, sit on the floor or in a chair facing the teacher on a dais, meditate for about an half hour, then the teacher gives a Dharma talk for about an hour and an half – actually, exactly an hour and an half – then we put our hands together and bow – Gassho – to the teacher, and leave.

If we like, we can stay and mingle with fellow members of the Sangha, help put chairs away, make a donation for the teacher or the Center, and then leave. There is no music, no pomp, no passing of the donation plate, no chatting about the weather with the teacher at the door on the way out. In my imagination, the Dharma talk hasn’t changed in form since the Buddha gave the first Dharma talk or, for that matter, since Jesus gave a Dharma talk on the mount.

I love that. I love the subtle power of the tradition. I love the subtle change that the Dharma talks have made in our lives.

 

 

“A date which will live in infamy.”

Americana, Psychological Musings, War

About fifteen years ago, when the Serbs were trying their best to be the alphadogs of the region, before we were worried about global jihad and the GWOT, the Serbs  justified attacking Kosovo because it was of major historical importance to them. Major historical importance because of the Battle of Kosovo in which Serbia got their ass kicked in 1389.

In the build up to the Clinton”11week air campaign that forced Yugoslavia to accept a Western peace plan for Kosovo” – to quote someone – we were pretty much anti-Serb and, among other things, their 1389 Battle of Kosovo fetish was used as as a reason they couldn’t be trusted. I remember reading a newspaper article – or maybe it was a magazine article – that said something like In The Balkans, the past is never dead, they still remember this loss like it was yesterday. The article was very critical of the Serbian personality that would remember a loss and not a win.

But we are all like that. Certainly we Americans are. We remember the Alamo, and remember Pearl Harbor. Here, in California we even have a special license plate for Pearl Harbor. We don’t have a special license plate for VJ Day or VE Day, or our smashing the Japanese at Iwo Jima or at Guadalcanal which may have been the roughest fight the US has ever been in.

I’m not going anywhere with this except that I find it interesting and I suspect it is pretty much a human trait.