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Obviously Organon is on a bit of a respite–a furlough, as we Californians are fond of having. I’ve discovered to my surprise that one thing that is harder and more time-consuming than packing and moving is to actually arrive at the destination of one’s move. Or at the destination of my move at any rate. Could be another week or two before I get back to anything resembling regular posting.
I Am a Citizen of the State of California
I now reside in the state of California. I intend to stay, indefinitely, in the state of California. Therefore, says the Supreme Court of the United States, I am a citizen of California.
That was easy. The 2500-mile drive and the late-night flat tire, on the other hand…not so much.
Long Haul
I drove 760 miles today, and my bones are vibrating as if I were still humming down the road. It’s like little internal combustion explosions are shaking my innards. Anyway, after two full days and almost 1400 miles on I-40, I am struck by this very obvious fact: the United States of America is a really big country. And it is amazing how much of it is relatively flat and basically shadeless. It’s just out there baking in the relentless, torrid sun.
The Thing about Ribs Is That They Are Not Proper Material for a Sandwich
Dear Memphis,
I would like to bring to your attention a few matters concerning the concept of a sandwich. A sandwich is a 100% edible food item consisting of two primary components: (1) two or more units of bread and (2) sandwich contents enclosed within the bread units, all of which, I stress, should be fully edible by ordinary human consumers. One should not have to worry that part of one’s sandwich will turn out to be wholly inedible, as would be the case with, say, a “sandwich” of tuna on a bun of concrete.
Like tuna on concrete, the stacks of barbecue ribs occupying the content portion of the “rib sandwiches” commonly served in your city arguably violate one of the central principles of sandwich formation. One is forced to disassemble one’s “sandwich” and eat its parts separately.
Such measures, it is true, are adequate to avoid damage to one’s teeth and internal organs as might otherwise result from the attempted eating of the “rib sandwich.” But there are several drawbacks to this approach. First, it undermines the unity of the sandwich, making it rather a meal of bread and ribs. And second, it undermines the utility of the bread buffer. You see, a core benefit of the sandwich form is that the bread shields the sandwich user from certain secondary attributes such as stickiness or greasiness or other non-gustatory properties of the sandwich contents.
A simple change of nomenclature would probably suffice to address these concerns. Perhaps a new city ordinance could achieve this goal and also require that every restaurant have at least one item on the menu that is green, preferably from a plant.
Day One: iPod Fail
Started my 2500-mile drive across the country today. For about two hours I was entertained by Brad DeLong’s American Economic History lecture course from iTunes university (which Austin Frakt turned me on to). Just as it was getting to the good, substantive content of the course, my iPod died. Cause unknown, prognosis uncertain. Hopefully the problem is just the car adapter, not the iPod itself. Otherwise my copious downloading of brain-stimulative entertainment will have been for naught. Perhaps I’ll find a good voodoo doctor in Memphis to help me out tomorrow.
Media Mail
My wife and I are bookish people, even if these days I am more likely to be reading blogs on my iPhone than anything in print. Even after a fairly massive purge of our shelves, spurred by our big move, we have an immense collection of books. We probably threw out (donated to Goodwill, that is) more books than most people, even avid readers, have in the first place.
How many books do we have? I’m not sure, but they fill 81 boxes weighing 1,707 pounds. Actually, though, that’s not even all of them–just the ones we sent by USPS media mail. The movers took several more boxes including those with some of the biggest, heaviest books of all. Because that’s what happens when a bookish person with a PhD in architectural history and a bookish person with a law degree move across the country. Not to mention our three-year-old’s collection, which is nothing to sneeze at either.
From One Broken State to Another Really Broken Mega-State
Kevin Drum says my next home is in a state that is hopelessly bungled and broken, which is about how it seemed when I left in 2003. Georgia is screwed up in all sorts of ways, but California is systemically, inexorably, and constitutionally screwed up. I mean, the government of Georgia consistently exercises terrible judgment, but California’s government is actually programmed to do so automatically. And it does so on a truly frightening scale. California’s budget deficit of $19.1 billion is larger than the entire budget of the state of Georgia.
The Deficit Problem, in One Graph
There are lots of ways we could get the federal government deficit under control in the short and medium term, if we really needed to. But there is really only one way to control the long-term deficit: to rein in the growth in health spending. Look at this:
The yellow line shooting up is the projected growth of the U.S. budget deficit (as a percentage of GDP) if current health spending trends continue. The light blue line drifting slowly downwards is what our budget outlook would look like if health cost trends in the U.S. were scaled down to match trends in other high-income OECD countries.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research declares, “The U.S. health care system is possibly the most inefficient in the world: We spend twice as much per person on health care as other advanced countries, but we have worse health outcomes, including a lower life expectancy.” If we want to fix the long-term deficit problem, we have to address the problem of exploding health spending. In the long term, there is no other deficit problem.
Via Austin Frakt.
Weekend Spillery: Pelican Brief
Is the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico going to wipe out the brown pelican? Not globally, at least, writes Phil McKenna at the New Scientist:
The species as a whole isn’t about to go extinct as a result of the oil spill: as 400,000 out of a total global population of 650,000 live in Peru. Roughly 60 per cent of the subspecies Pelecanus occidentalis carolinensis breed along the Gulf coast, where many nest on the barrier islands off Louisiana that have already been exposed to oil.
The slicks threaten the birds and their fragile wetland habitat only a few months after brown pelicans were removed from the US federal endangered and threatened species list in November last year. The birds had been on the list since 1970 after the pesticide DDT poisoned and nearly wiped out pelicans across the country. At the time Louisiana, where the pelican is the official state bird, lost its entire population. After years of resettling individual birds from Atlantic coast populations, Louisiana was able to boast the largest brown pelican population of any Gulf state, with 16,000 nesting pairs in 2004.
Just a small clarification: it’s true that Louisiana’s brown pelicans were just removed from the endangered list in November 2009. But the Alabama, Florida, and the Atlanta coast populations were taken off the list in 1985.
Pensacola Beach Reporting
This post is mostly for you far-flung Pensacolians out there. The good news is that, as of Wednesday morning, Pensacola Beach is not slathered in crude. The bad news is that there’s a “sheen” of oil moving closer by the hour. The sheen was 7.5 miles from shore when the News Journal went to press last night. “Tar balls” hit Dauphin Island, AL on Tuesday, followed by pancake-sized patties on Wednesday.
Here are two pictures I took with my phone this morning. Take a good look. It may be the last you’ll see of that unspoiled quartz sand.
The Mark of W.
Arjun Jayadev at New Deal 2.0 finds the mark of George W. Bush’s presidency etched into the picture of our national finances over the past decade. Literally. And I don’t mean Joe-Biden literally. But literally literally. That is, the literal letter “W” literally appears on the graph of total revenues over the last 10+ years (supplemented by projections of presumptive recovery).
This observation prompts Mike Konczal, writing at Ezra Klein’s place, to declare the past decade the “W years.” And so they were.
America’s Primary Care Shortage
Here’s a snapshot of America’s primary care shortage as measured in 2008. Red designates counties in which there aren’t enough primary care physicians; turquoise designates counties with partial shortages in certain areas; white means no shortage.
H/t Kavita Patel for the New Health Dialogue blog.
Mr. Churchill, the Quotable
Is there no one alive today as quotable as Winston Churchill was? Or does it just seem that way? Anyway, I really like this one:
You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.
Obviously, at some point a reputation for aphorism begins to be embellished and the subject is mythologized. Like Yogi Berra, Churchill probably didn’t say a lot of the stuff he said. He just didn’t say it better.
Weekend Birdbrainery: Canny Corvid Nutcrackers
A propos of last week’s birdery post, here is video of Carrion Crows in Japan using cars as nutcrackers:
From David Attenborough’s Life of Birds.
Health Reform Lobbying Chart
Via Igor Volsky, here’s a chart from Roll Call breaking down how much money various healthcare interest groups spent lobbying Congress about health reform from January 2009 through March 2010.
Hospitals seem to have been particularly effective in their efforts. See Volsky for the details.