Epiphytic Notions

CHRISTINA_FORBE

2011-12-21T09:08:00.000-05:00

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Christina Forbes

2011-09-25T21:40:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-09-25T21:39:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

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2011-09-18T20:25:00.003-04:00

Chris Forbes

Sent from my iPad

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2011-09-18T20:24:00.002-04:00

Chris Forbes

Sent from my iPad

2011-09-18T17:54:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-09-15T21:30:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-09-12T10:07:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-09-12T10:06:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

Irene weekend!!!! Aug 27 and 28, 2011

2011-08-29T23:11:00.000-04:00

2011-08-29T07:42:00.002-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-29T07:42:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-29T07:41:00.000-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-29T07:40:00.000-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-21T22:26:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-21T22:25:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-21T22:23:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

Bee yard

2011-08-14T14:05:00.000-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-14T14:04:00.000-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-06T17:45:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-06T17:44:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-06T17:43:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-08-06T17:38:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

Saturday, July 30, 2011 work in the bee yards

2011-07-30T23:40:00.000-04:00

2011-07-30T22:46:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-07-30T22:30:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

My garden

2011-07-30T22:24:00.001-04:00

Christina Forbes

2011-02-08T22:36:00.000-05:00

Christina Forbes

2011-02-08T22:34:00.001-05:00

Christina Forbes

Miracles happen slowly

2011-02-04T20:59:00.003-05:00

Back to my miracle man.

Quick reprise: Four years ago, he was brought to a local hospital in a coma and quadriplegic. Today, he is living in a nursing home and he talks, eats solid food, breaths on his own, is very angry, and is -- I hope -- on his way eventually to being able to sit up on his own. He can use both arms and his upper body is robust.

Yesterday his psychiatrist agreed that we needed for him to not dislike himself so much. This was the last piece of (my) plan: adjust the meds (more on psychotropics below) so he isn't as combative and impulsive. This will allow him to work more effectively with the various therapies. His percutaneous episomething gastrosotmy tube (peg or feeding tube) was removed today. Next, they are to sew up the hole left from his tracheostomy tube. Then, they are to work with him to hold a urine bottle in his hand so he can pee on his own. And after that, learn to both ring a bell to be helped to the bathroom to have a bowel movement and to use a bed pan for the same purpose. After that, work on sitting in a wheelchair. If he has to be restrained into sitting up because of weakness, then put a belt on that complies with the law against unlawful restraints. Finally, I am going to get him some porn magazines. The psychiatrist heartily agreed that we needed to help him with a sexual outlet. If he can hold a urine bottle he can hold his penis and masturbate.

A number of these measures aim to redirect his anger and his impulsive behaviors. He hits and kicks people. Reduce his frustrations from the PEG and the hole in his throat. He drags nurse's hands to his penis. Help him masturbate on his own. He is angry. Give him options for progress. He has made great progress in the last few years from his quadriplegia and coma.

I will work with his family to support these next steps by encouraging him to work with staff. Let go of fear that he is being poisoned. And hope that someday he can go home to a relative.

There are so many details behind each one of the elements above. Too much to tell; too little time.

On psychotropics. There are two options. Put people who have potential and a desire to live out in the world, but who live inside a body tyrannized by an out of balance psyche, in restrained living quarters or medicate them adequately so they can integrate into a socially and personally growthful state. I prefer the latter. A recent post on our estates and trusts (elder law as well) list serve asked what to do with a man living "in the community" but who has diabetes and who is "not mentally ill" but who wanders around town all day and doesn't take his insulin the required 3 times a day. The common answer is that he is mentally ill and that he is a danger to himself and that he should be put in a locked alzheimer's ward. My heart feels a dagger through it when I read that advice.

I would -- and this takes a lot more work for the guardian -- rather keep him in the community, have a mental health team take him on, get him on some serious psychotropics that will allow him to comply with his health related medications and preserve his ability to go out and about into the world. The world obviously means a lot to the guy. He can only continue to access it if he complies with his medical meds. The only way he will comply with his medical meds is if he takes just enough psychotropics to reduce his hostility and rejection. You do need a caretaker for that. And someone making sure that when things go off the rails, which they will, someone will make sure he gets back on. More work but better human.

Dog mottos

2011-02-04T20:52:00.003-05:00

A well behaved dog has a well prepared owner

It takes forever

A happy dog has a happy owner

Teddy Chasing Squirrels in the Snow

2009-12-30T09:16:00.007-05:00

Teddy, my 11-month old English Springer Spaniel, was jumping for joy in the first massive snow fall of 2009. I just watch and grin and occasionally call to him. And try to snag photos.

Some time I will find the words to describe the evolution of my feelings for and relationship to Teddy.

He is named for the lion who died on the same day I brought Teddy home in August 2009. I am happy to let people assume that his namesake is Teddy Roosevelt. Either is a fitting image of this energetic, tail wagging little dog.

My vocabulary seems full of cliches: bundle of joy (when he cavorts in a pre-dawn field, galloping at full tilt)! full of love (when he puts his head in my lap and looks up with baleful eyes and wagging tail)! rascal (when he goes upstairs and comes back down with one of my shoes).

The more serious parts are my evolving and growing relationship with him. I had trouble at first. I think/hope that I have found the sweet spot in the racket (pun intended) of being a good dog mom. Sometime I will chart the evolution

Teddy my Dog

2009-10-20T22:49:00.003-04:00

A video of my new pooch, Teddy.

I love my dog.

He's wonderful.

Sonia Sotomayor, a Gentle Giant

2009-10-20T21:57:00.008-04:00

My 20th law school reunion was wonderful (much to my surprise). Seeing old friends (not enough of them), meeting new friends (not enough of them either), communing with cousins (not enough time) and having the chance to be in this photo. Taken by Bill Eskridge, now on the YLS faculty. It was an awesome weekend. To say the least.

Sonia Sotomayor will grow into being a great Supreme Court justice. For two reasons.

One, she is as solid and constant as a lava flow coming out of a volcano. She simply rises to a level of discourse that is complete, creative, funny, touching, thorough going, brilliant, human, and filled with the gentle self awareness that a grownup has. These qualities give her great, great strength and breadth.

Second, she is an intentionalist. There are two kinds of justices (three if you count the practical centrists, but they aren't really interpreting the laws or constitution, but finding a good middle ground, more equity than law (O'Connor). Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts are literalists. They focus on the text, on the words, on the grammar, on some mysterious concept of "the law," as written in ever more limiting words. Intentionalists, like Breyer and Ginsberg, ask what was the intent of the law, what is it there for, what is its purpose. Breyer has a wonderful, slim, easily readable book, Active Liberty, that lays out in clear terms what an intentionalist does to interpret the law and the constitution. Sotomayor always asks what is this law trying to do. (Look also to Peter Gomes' "The Good Book" about how to read the Bible.)

During an hour long colloquy with the YLS alums and larger school family, she told some telling stories. One was that in her visits to senators before her confirmation hearings, she learned more about them and their concerns than she thinks they learned about her. She talked of her great appreciation of what is on the minds of people all around the country. She is open to the diversity of humankind. Another phrase was "grand clerks" which refers to the children of her clerks. She said, "while I don't have an birth children," I have lots of children in my life, my grand clerks, my god children and lots of others. A lovely way of phrasing it and revealing someone who is interested in others, not just in articulating what she thinks.

She will pave a very wide swath through this area of utmost importance to our country. A number of people have said that she will be more conservative than I think or would want. I don't really care. The actual outcomes are often a lot less important than the general direction of an opinion. She will push toward a more humanistic view of the law and its role in human lives. And, intentionalists, like liberals, always come out ahead, in the end. History is written, by and large, by them.

We are so lucky, once again!

New Posts after a year's hiatus

2009-09-02T23:57:00.001-04:00

So much to say, so many pictures to post!!

A new launch.

2009-09-02T23:34:00.012-04:00

Simon, to be renamed, my new dog. He comes home on Friday.

A solitary finch.

The green roof at Eastern Village Co-Housing in Silver Spring. Note the rooftop cooling accoutrements on the building across the way, compared with the green roof. Go Green!

More caterpillar and parasitic wasp pupae.

Parasitic wasp pupae infesting a caterpillar. The garden books call the wasps beneficial.

I only wish there were a parasite to infest the late fungus that has damaged everyone's tomato plants. The caterpillar was downed by the rain, but he was already dead, having fed the wasp pupae.

A butterfly in Mason's Neck Wildlife Refuge

This year's water lily

A box turtle on the Appalachian Trail

A bee in a thistle

Some new fun photos.

Another Miracle

2009-09-02T23:11:00.002-04:00

I have written about an hispanic man who is my ward (or, I am his court appointed guardian), who made miraculous progress after 3 years in a coma, and who was discovered to be able to point to letters on a large page, and so communicate his real name, his birthplace in a middle american county, and through that, with the help of the consul from his country, locate his local family here in the US.

Today, we leapt over Mt. Everest.

Since that last story, I have battled with hospital doctors to try to get them to put him on an antidepressant and some antipsychotics. They made it to the antidepressants, but never the antipsychotics. After over 2 years in the hospital, some overseeing angel found a way to get him paid for in a nursing home and he was moved.

The nursing home doctors were a lot more understanding and cooperative and immediately did the psych eval to determine whether he needed medication. Answer, yes. This addressed the psychological underpinnings to ease him into a more cooperative mood, so we could work on his physical issues.

He had been on a trache and ventilator as well as a feeding tube ("PEG") for over three years. He kept pulling out the PEG, being sent back to the hospital for reinsertion and then returned to the nursing home. His family, meanwhile, were telling me that he wanted to eat and that they brought him food and that he could eat and swallow, despite the tube down his throat.

When I visited the last time, he had progressed so much that when the doctor was told he had pulled out the second trache, he said leave it out and see what happens. He was able to talk, and greeted me with a very clear "son of a bitch" pointing with squinty eyes at me. He was getting better! One can't take these sorts of things personally, on the contrary, he was communicating. So, I asked him whether he wanted to eat. He nodded yes. I asked whether he wanted chocolate milk, YES. Steak, YES. So, I went to the care team and asked whether they could get him some chocolate milk. They had to call the doctor. Doctor said clear liquids only. Took them half an hour to get two little containers of frozen apple juice. I took it to him, but he turned away.

I persuaded the care team that since he wasn't cooperating with the nursing home staff on passing a "swallow test" that we could have the family come in, bring food, and staff could watch him eat and confirm that we could advance his diet. The doctor agreed and the nursing home director thought it was a great idea.

So next day (today) I meet his mother and brother. They had brought superb smelling soup filled with chuncks of celery, carrots and tortillas. I called the "speech therapist" who had agreed to come to witness. By then he was chowing down the tortillas like a champ. The speech therapist was troubled because the nursing home protocols weren't being followed and she herself couldn't certify that he could eat or recommend that he be moved from being tube fed to removing the tube and eating. But, she would note that she had seen him eating. And that the next steps would be to remove the feeding tube and order regular meals.

Here was a man for whom I had four times recommended we put him on hospice and let him not be fed by tube if that was what he wanted. Now, I am looking for the day that he is sitting in an electric wheelchair, can go home to his family and I can terminate the guardianship.

Hard work over three years. But what a result. !! I am flipped over the moon.

My work is fun and gratifying!

Beauties from my Garden

2008-07-17T12:52:00.019-04:00

Taking pictures of the amazing profusion of beauty in my garden has become a minor passion. These are just a few of the more spectacular ones.

Crepe myrtle

Water shrub on Eastern Shore

Water lily blossoms

Water Lilies in my pond

A bee visits a cone flower (echinacea purpurea)

A visiting butterfly

Stuart

Cranesbill blossom -- it's a rampageous plant!

Second Lotus blossom (note first Lotus seed pod)

First Lotus Blossom

Epiphytic Bromeliad, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico

Recent pictures

2008-07-13T11:26:00.006-04:00

A Fern, El Yunque, Puerto Rico

View from climb of El Yunque, Puerto Rico

Dove, the hunted

Poonsy, the Hunter

2008-07-13T11:24:00.002-04:00

Some Summer Pictures

2008-07-13T11:19:00.002-04:00

My new camera has found some wonderful images:

California Supreme Court did the Right Thing and Took the Right Road

2008-05-20T00:04:00.004-04:00

Today's Washington Post featured a column by E.J.Dionne, Jr. entitled Two Roads to Gay Marriage, wondering whether the right thing was done the wrong way.

Here was my answer: As with the dissents in California and the majority in New York, EJ Dionne is taking the road more traveled in his "Two Roads to Gay Marriage". First, constitutional law is above all about protecting minorities from dominant majorities. Which means to weigh the harm to the minority against the possible injury to the majority.

Second, judicial leadership is just as important as "democratic" leadership, and because operating more often in the realm of facts, logic and law, has a better chance of being more farsighted than voter leadership, be it from electors or elected representatives.

Third, as has become a popular phrase, the arc of history tends toward justice: we will eventually get there; the question is not whether, but when. This case presented a prefect moment in history for the largest state in the union with a conservative bench, to see through the obfuscations and prevarications of the majority, intent as it is to cling to its privileges.

Fourth, the heterosexual majority suffers no harm. As the Court majority in California pointed out, allowing gay men and lesbians to marry takes nothing away from heterosexual marriage. It simply adds the dignity of marriage to those for whom that fundamentally social status has been denied. And that is what the California court focused on as its central premise. Under California domestic partnership laws, same sex couples already enjoy virtually all of the state level rights of marriage of opposite sex couples, but they lacked the basic equality of having their relationships honored in the same way, to the same degree, as opposite sex couples do. And, importantly, their children will not be second class children of a "domestic partnership" or "civil union."

Nattering on about whether the practical effect will speed or slow social progress misses the importance of leadership. The road more traveled is by definition more congested and slower.

Nature, Gardens, Logic and the Future of Earth

2008-05-01T20:46:00.002-04:00

In March I wrote about Douglas Tallamy's book, Brining Nature Home, on the basis of a book review and a pod cast. Having read about 1/3rd, I feel an urgent need to expand on the basic point.

ONLY NATIVE PLANTS SHOULD BE PLANTED. PERIOD.

The reason is amazingly simple: non-"native" plants have not co-evolved with the insects and birds and animals in a given area. They are immune (good selling point in the bad old days) from "pests." They are like plastic flowers to local insects.

Birds need massive amounts of protein, particularly when they are raising they hatchlings. Insects, particularly those that eat leaves, like caterpillars (that turn into butterflies) and the like, are a higher source of protein than beef.

So, when the insects go, can't survive on the plastic diet of non-native plants, the birds vanish. Slowly, perhaps, but vanish.

At the same time, non-native plants, that don't have "pest" insects to keep their numbers in balance by eating their leaves, (and trunks, and sap, etc.), proliferate in their new environment. No enemies. Wheeeee. Plus, the birds that eat the fruit of the non-native plants fly away and poop elsewhere, fabulously spreading the seeds of the non-natives, who begin to flourish in a new area, clear of "pests."

Finally, he makes the point that the importation of non-natives, beautiful exotics, has inevitably brought plant diseases with them. No amount of protective agricultural laws can keep out microscopic infestations. The imported plants co-existed and co-evolved with the imported exotic. But, domestic plants didn't. They had zero evolved protection from predation by the new plant diseases.

And, voila, the death of the American Chestnut, majestic trees that populated the whole east coast, the death of the elms, the approaching death of conifers native exclusively to the Smokies, and so on.

So, we have kudzu, pansies, giant irisis, Japanese Maples, peonies, roses, any plant from any where else but where it co-evolved in the web of local natural life. All of which contribute to the death of nature around us.

Kill all the English Ivy you can find!

I'm Late For Work But Had to Post this: Is Belief in God and in Evolution Compatible?

2008-04-30T08:37:00.004-04:00

The New York Times didn't even bother to make one read the article before submitting a comment. I couldn't resist: are belief in god and evolution compatible? Since I am a compulsive commenter on that topic, here are my comments:

Creationism is not -- and can never be -- science. As a matter of epistemology, one can believe that creationism is true but cannot prove that it is true. Science makes propositions that are testable and turn out to be either true or false, regardless of any belief in their trueness or falseness. For example, believing that a bridge is strong enough to hold up a car is not the same thing as knowing that it will hold up a car: the belief may either be true or not, but knowledge that it is true or not depends on knowing that the bridge held up the car or not (or that it has the tensile strength or doesn't have the tensile strength predictably to hold up the car). With creationism, the notion of "intelligent design" is not a proposition that can ever be proven to be true. Evolution, on the other hand, is demonstrable in millions of ways, the evolution of viruses and bacteria being one example or the devastation created by non-native plant species, where it is impossible to create a balance in the complete cycle between plants, insects, birds, mammals over short periods of time, is another example.

The proposition that god exists is ultimately never provable. However, belief in god's existence does not rest on whether it can be proven to be true or not. It can simply be held in the mind and heart.

The compatibility of science and belief in god will depend on one's definition of god. A god that has direct intervention in the lives of humans is probably incompatible with evolutionary theory. However, a god that exists as inherent in the universe, a spiritual dark matter, a force that exists within all material things, from light waves, to time, to crystals, to viruses, to all forms of life, known and unknown, to a meta morality that springs from the evolutionary nature of the animal and human ways of being, is compatible with science and evolution. But neither belief is a testable or provable proposition.

— Christina Forbes, Alexandria VA

Recommend Recommended by 101 Readers

Cheerio!

I Kept Reading About "Forbs" and Wondered What They Were

2008-04-15T10:09:00.004-04:00

Douglas Tallamy, author of the new bible, Bringing Nature Home (see my earlier post), used the word "forbs" enough times that I had to look it up. Since my blog's name comes from plants (that live in the air, without visible means of nutrition), I had to know what my Scottish family's name came from. Here is is: a non taxonomic (feeling verbally taxed?) name for a grouping of herbaceous, flowering plants, like clovers, wild flowers, grasses and the like. Like my brain.

Here's from Wiki:
Forbs are herbaceous flowering plants that are not graminoids (grasses, sedges and rushes). The term is frequently used in vegetation ecology, especially in relation to grasslands, to refer to broad-leaved (dicot) herbs. Forbs represent a guild of plant species with broadly similar growth form, which in ecology is often more important than taxonomic relationship.

In addition to its use in ecological studies, the term forb may also be used for subdividing popular guides to the wildflowers of a region, together with other categories such as ferns, grasses, shrubs and trees. This approach is not followed in formal regional floras, which are usually organised taxonomically.

Some example forbs: clover, sunflower, milkweeds.

I wonder what my siblings and cousins will think? (My parents are dead.) Without pride of ownership, I think we need a lot more native forbs in this world!

I Think I Can I Think I Can Can

2008-04-15T07:46:00.007-04:00

Bob Herbert in today's New York Times addresses the brouhaha created by Obama's use of the word "bitter." Herbert says it was a surrogate for admitting that some non-middle class whites in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia can't vote for a black man. And that Obama should go back to his uplifting message of hope. Two thoughts.

Below the usual Email Print Save Share links is a link to one of my most favorite groups, Young @ Heart. (I wanted to have the same link but don't have the clip chops to get it. Oh well.) The movie is going to be shown at the E Street Cinema in downtown DC starting this Friday, April 18! I can't wait!

Bitter is a word seldom used in our happy days lexicon. But Obama was right. Herbert may be right, but I think doesn't go to the bull's eye on this one. "Bitter" is what a lot of people are. Whether black, white or any one of our multi-hued humans running around struggling in this economy. We need to admit it, say it, speak about and to it, directly.

Bitter has the connotation of a feeling that never leaves you. That stays in your gut, despite the smiles and the jokes. That includes the obligation to hide it, lest you scare people away.

And a lot of people I know are bitter. Not my well-off friends and acquaintances, not my clients with dementia. But my clients in the middle, those whom fate has pointed a dagger at and said, "not you, you don't get to share in the benefits, in the revelry, in the unbridled joy of our times."

The bitterness of the undocumented aliens who live under the myriad swords of Damoclese that the anger of those who are bitter about a variety of things have hung over their heads. The bitterness of those on the other side, those who pound the table accusingly "they have disobeyed the law," a surrogate for "I want mine, particularly because what is (was?) mine is shrinking."

The bitterness of those who were promised much but who were shoved off the train just as it got rolling. As a white woman sitting on the Metro a few days ago, tired and on my way home, I watched a black man, standing impassively, rocking with the rhythms of the train. And I saw the dual lives black people must live: the black family world and the white world. Two universes separated and in opposition, sistered together like two joists in one soul.

How can a white person -- who has no thought about race, for whom doors close only because of bad behavior or bad luck or the luck of the draw -- understand a black person -- who lives with race every nanosecond of the day, where the color of your skin elicits some kind of reaction, however infinitessimally small and "imperceptible"? And how can a black person feel the insouciant freedom a white person feels at never having to think about race, and if he or she does, it's to say, "well, race doesn't matter. We all swim at our own strength."

I wondered how hard it would be to cross that divide and look white culture in the face and say, "hey, I'm jumping over all that, I'm going to set aside the embedded racism that leaks out of every pore of white society, and play on your team, play by your rules." And I wondered about how it would feel to be solidly within a black family, or a black church, and feel the warmth of myriad common bonds that link the pains of a people, spoken and unspoken because known in the bones, that could envelope everyone. I wondered what it would be like to live in those two worlds. "Bitter" would be only one of many words that come to mind.

Not that Obama and those he speaks of and to are bitter in the overt sense. Bitter is an underlying condition, more often hidden than shown, repressed than felt. For a lot of people. For many reasons. Felt by whites and people of color, equally, for different reasons.

Bitterness is a close cousin to anger, which is born of hurt. How one feels and handles hurt.

And not to say that bitterness is an early bus stop on the road of pain, but just go to my friend Judy's blog, Remembering Matters, to read yesterday's post. A poem about hurt, Death Poem, from Poems from Guantanamo. Hurt beyond bitterness. Bitterness includes a component that says, "I deserved better, and I got shafted." There is an element of being wronged. Death Poem and those in the collection speak of a hurt way beyond bitterness. Beyond post traumatic stress. Victims of torture. For sure. A soul branded for life.

A meditation on pain. For today. For the other end of the pendulum swing, go to Young @ Heart, octogenarians defying both gravity and time (how do you explain that, Stephen Hawking?)

Apology to all who would read racism, bitterness, one-sidedness or other tendentious feelings on my part. Pains live in mosaics of many feelings. None are bigger or better or less painful than another. Take my post at face value. I wrote about these today because these were the ones that came to mind that I could write about.

PPS: Roger Cohen in today's Wash Post looks at the brouhaha from a different angle: Obama's mistake was to link together people "clinging" (that was the poor choice of words) to guns, religion, etc. who are bitter. Truth spoken (from my vantage), but not very political. Ed Koch always supported the end of rent control in his head but opposed any measure to eliminate it with all of his political muscle.

A Miracle Enveloped in a Tragedy

2008-04-06T23:27:00.005-04:00

Juan Augustin was hit by a car. Or perhaps attacked by thugs and beaten and robbed. He was taken to a hospital. He was given a name. Juan Augustin. It may or may not have been his real name. Actually, it turned out not to be his real name.

He was sent to a nursing home, a hopeless quadriplegic, with some eye movement, living on a feeding tube, breathing though a tracheostomy tube, his hands sometimes tied to the edges of his bed to keep him from pulling out one of his tubes.

A few times Juan came down with pneumonia and would be sent to hospital where he would be pumped full of antibiotics, put on a respirator machine and left to get well. Then he would be sent back to the nursing home.

I had been appointed Juan's guardian. That meant that I had responsibility for making medical decisions since he couldn't communicate and to all outward appearances would have had no ability to evaluate the choices.

At the nursing home, I consulted with all of the medical staff to determine what the best regime for him would be. Basically, not much more than was being done. I wondered whether and when he might die. That is part of my job. The nurses, mostly men, said that in the mornings he would perk up and open his eye and respond to questions. I never saw that side of him.

He came down with pneumonia again and was sent to a different hospital. I was called and went to see him. The hospital staff wanted to know what his advance directives should be. DNR, full code, no code, what about other procedures? pain medication, antibiotics, biopsies, all of the myriad questions one faces when in a hospital today. I went to see him in his hospital bed. He was his usual very comatose self. I spoke to him. In Spanish, since he doesn't speak English. When I asked him how he was he remained still and silent. When I asked him -- as I must -- whether he wanted to be kept alive, he reached up and grabbed my hand on the side of the bed. I held his hand for a while, until he let his drop. I told the nurse, Full Code.

A few weeks later, I received a call from a social worker at the hospital. Could I help with his financial information so they could discharge him back to a nursing home. A much more appropriate place than a hospital. I had no information. A week later, the social worker called again. This time to tell me that because he was -- apparently -- an undocumented alien, the city wouldn't pay his medicaid so no nursing home or other facility would take him. He was, effectively, stuck at the hosptial.

I visited Juan sporadically. Toward the end of six months there, I discussed the possibility of starting hospice, since it didn't look as though he would be getting any better and he had been losing weight and showing other signs of "failure to thrive." He was still essentially unresponsive to my talking to him. The doctor said he would undertake an ethics consult, of several doctors, to evaluate what the longer term next steps should be. I would of course be involved.

When I visited a few months later I asked about the ethics consult. The new doctor -- they rotate in and out every month -- said with a big grin, that Juan had shown remarkable progress lately, that a volunteer had been able to communicate with him, that he was from El Guateduras, in Central America, that his name was not Augustin, but Acevedo and that he had family in the region.

I raced into his room, greeted him, found him responsive, took up the paper with the alphabet written on it, and since he opened one eye, started to talk to him. He could take a pen, as a pointer, and hold it in his crippled hand, and point at letters and numbers. He could nod yes or no to questions phrased simply. I confirmed all of the information and learned that he didn't want to stay in the hospital, that he had had a passport, that he had been robbed, not hit by a car as the hospital records said, that he even had a work permit. At one point, he also opened his other eye. Something he hadn't done in two years.

Ecstatic, I called the El Guateduras embassy and spoke to the consul. The consul said he would be willing to visit Juan at the hospital and see what he could do. He thought he could locate the family in El Guateduras, if he knew where he was born and what his full name was.

At the same time, we had to get him documented so he would qualify for public benefits so he could be moved from the hospital. It was also clear that he was very, very depressed, that his body wracking cough was due to his inactivity, and that with physical therapy he could regain some movement. He was, after all, only 37. I retained an immigration attorney.

The consul, the attorney, a relief worker from El Guateduras and I visited Juan. We talked at length with him. Near the end, the consul, who had been on his cell phone for some time, said they had located the information on his passport. He would give that to the attorney who could then use it with Homeland Security. I asked the doctor to order antidepressants, B-12 shots and provigil, a drug given to those with dementia to perk up their mental functioning.

While in my office on Saturday afternoon, I got a call from a woman who spoke virtually no English, and very fast Spanish. She was Juan's cousin. A sister of Juan's in El Guateduras had called her to tell her where Juan was, and to alert his mother, brother and sister, all of whom lived nearby. Juan's mother wanted to talk to me.

I called the number for his mother, and got his brother. We talked a long time about all of the issues. The family wanted him taken from the hospital. I explained that Juan would need insurance, qualifying documented status or a very rich relative. Because there was no safe discharge home or anywhere else without a lot of money. But, that we were working on improving his life.

His mother was at the hospital. She had persuaded the staff to allow her to spend the night with her son. His brother told me that Juan told him he wanted to die. That he was in terrible pain. What could be done?

This was now, not only a miraculous reunion, but one of many tragedies being played out in this country at this time. Whole families living under the dark clouds of fear. And this one anchored, now, to an ailing son and brother, a quadriplegic in a hospital, unable to be moved.

This story isn't finished yet. It is hard to know where it will lead. My hope is that between the El Guateduras government and my excellent immigration attorney, we will put Juan on a road to improved medical care. I see him, in my mind's eye, zooming around in a motorized wheelchair, guiding it with his right hand on a small stick, as so many are doing now. We just need the resources. And lots of luck.

Birds Need Ecologially Sound Gardening

2008-03-22T13:16:00.006-04:00

Puzzled about how to shift our lifestyles (note the presumption of choice that we have in the early 21st century, versus the contingent reality of millenia of human life) from anti-life to pro-(no, not falling into that trap) environment?

I am burning with realizations that all around us we can make changes. The big question is how?

Here's a start for gardening: Douglas Tallamy has pushed the frontier by linking native plant species to the kinds of insects that survive on those plants to the birds and beasts that we love to watch.

You can read or order his book, but here's a clip from a radio interview that says it all.

Finally, Anti War Demonstrations that Do The Job!

2008-03-20T00:14:00.007-04:00

When I walked out of my office building this afternoon to get lunch, I landed right in the middle of this anti-war demonstration, coming straight down K Street, NW.

My heart leapt, I nearly cried with the joy of seeing kids taking up banners and placards -- and later on, their bodies -- to protest the obscene war we wage against . . . who knows anymore? McCain sure doesn't know, and he;s supposed to know. And Bush is so simple minded that we only know that it's against the bogeymen. I guess it's against terrorists, people who are so blown away by American blindness (as well as their own stunted sense of how to lead an effective life) that they strap bombs on themselves and detonate them in crowds of mothers and children and babies and fathers and lovers and shoppers. And kill a lot of people.

It was pouring rain, but that didn't dim the energy and dedication of these youngsters, who have got it right.

Later, when I ran into my friend and colleague, Amina Khan, and we plunged into the intersection of Connecticut and K Streets, the heart of Washington DC's most traffic'd zone, where the kids had chained themselves in a big circle and heavily drummed dance music (if you can call it music, it sounds more like the roars of motorcycle platoons to these ancient ears), we talked a bit with the cops lined up facing the demonstrators. One cop was taking it all seriously and screaming about the billions of dollars this whole thing was costing, forgetting, of course, the billion billions we are pumping into Iraq. Other cops said they were the friendly face of DC police, nice neighbors. The plan was to let the cold and the rain disperse the marchers, not attack, not try to break it all up.

One young woman -- who had a Masters in public policy but who thought she could change people more by teaching yoga and meditation at the Ronald Reagan Building with its banks of government offices -- who took refuge under Amina's umbrella, had her first demonstration against the Ku Klux Klan. Amina was demonstrating against aparthied. And I of course showed my age by recounting the demonstrations against the draft busses entering the Oakland Induction Center, against the Viet Nam war. So long ago.

The display of police power was chilling. They may have been jovial fellows, for the most part, but the massing of motorcycles and cop cars, all with lights flashing, enhanced by the rain on the pavement, was scary.

Why do we need to have so much firepower against our own children, who happen to disagree with some of their parents? Too much money into police power and not enough into education, health care, environmental protection. Where are this nation's priorities?

The Third Phase of Our Lives

2008-03-12T23:59:00.005-04:00

The most important thing is to try and enjoy life—because you never know when it will be gone. If you wake up in the morning and you have a choice between doing the laundry and taking a walk in the park, go for the walk. You’d hate to die and realize you had spent your last day doing the laundry!

—Christine Lee, 67

From:
Wise Women -- a book of photographs by Joyce Tenneson -- is a celebration of the power and beauty of women in the third phase of their lives. These remarkable women from all walks of life were eager to show what it means to be an elder in this new millennium.

Wise Women was the best selling photography book of 2002.

Eat Locally, Eat Sustainably, Where oh Where?

2008-03-11T08:49:00.004-04:00

Switching from tobacco farming to organic farming, sounds great, down in Southwestern Virginia.

I feel like a little girl looking into the window of a fabulous store filled with dazzling delights. But, have a very hard time getting in.

Living in the Washington urbia of Alexandria Va (which when I lived in New York City I thought of as being virtually on the shores of the Mississippi), I would have to travel umpty ump miles to get to a "local" farm from which to buy fresh vegetables and grass grazed chicken or beef or pork.

Yes, we have our "oldest open market" in the country every Saturday, but many vegetables aren't organic and the meat is frozen solid. Wonderful in many ways, but where are the chickens running around? And the goats looking expectantly?

It's a quandary. Not totally hopeless, but when the tobacco fields of Fairfax County have not stopped at Go, but have gone directly to McMansion development, it's harder.

Perhaps the Washington Post should do a Weekend section on all of the organic farms within 60 miles of DC? Yes, they come to us but it would be great fun to go to them, and good for you too.

Why Stanley Fish Writes Columns in the N Y Times

2008-03-10T19:13:00.002-04:00

Stanley Fish wrote his column this morning to explain why he writes his invariably interesting and thought provoking columns. His core message was that he writes to look at an issue in a logical or analytical way, and not to put forward his opinions, or even any opinion at all.

Much of the column was devoted to foiling critics who accuse him of being pro this and anti that and excoriating him for being so obviously wrongheaded to try to look like he didn't have an opinion when in fact his agenda was as clear as a case of measles on a kid's face.

It is a thoughtful, taughtly and elegantly written column. I actually recommend it because it points to a more dispassionate way of at least starting down a path to looking at the building block that could form an opinion about something. And has had me thinking all day.

So, I also post my own comment to his column, from this morning. My contribution to trying to think clearly.

March 10th,
2008
9:53 am

Leaping to judgment is something we humans invariably do before we actually think about something. It is a hard habit to observe in the doing, much less to curb it long enough to actually think logically and coherently about something in order to do a 360 degree look around before we leap.

My question is where in the scheme of things does Dr. Fish square his views with the biopsychologists’ discovery that the human brain functions more as a justifier than as a decisionmaker. That is, action precedes thought; thought describes what we just did, not the reverse, contrary to millenia of belief in our rationality (or attempts at it). In fact, I barely knew what I was going to write before I wrote it, or that I would feel compelled to write something at all.

Yes, mathematics is not an emotionally driven descriptive scheme; logic, presumably, is also not rooted in gut reactions. Perhaps logic, science, clear-eyed analysis are the evolutionary steps of mental evolution from a carbon dioxide to oxygen dominated world, the stromatolites of the human mind.

— Posted by Christina Forbes

My religion is nature

2008-03-09T23:13:00.006-04:00

Oliver Sacks, protean man that he is, had some gems in the Sunday New York Times. Actually, fossils, thoughts about fossils and other gem-like thoughts. This post is cribbed shamelessly from an interview by David Colman.

Sacks collects fossils, and he has a slice of fossilized stromatolite, one of earth's earliest life forms. It dates from the Archean era, more that 3 billion years ago. Long thought extinct, a colony was discovered still alive in Shark Bay in Western Australia.

Stromatolites are made up of large colonies of bacteria, blue-green algae and sedimentary deposits. Stromatolites are thought to have converted the abundant carbon dioxide of early earth's Archean-era atmosphere into oxygen. “Over the years, they made enough oxygen to make life possible for the rest of us,” he said. The stromatolite is the fossil in the middle.

“I am horrified by transience,” Sacks told Colman. “If you’re religious, you can believe in the eternal. For me, the next best thing is the enduring.”

Sacks said he came to the natural sciences as a refuge from a chaotic boyhood. He cherishes these sciences when their integrity is under attack by religious fundamentalists.

“My religion is nature,” he said. “That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”

Sacks also loves ferns and cycads, believing that plants that make a garish show of their sex organs — what we call flowers — are perhaps a bit vulgar. “I feel that flowers are Johnny-come-latelies,” he said, noting that ferns predated flowering plants by more than 200 million years.

Go Hillary Go: Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island!

2008-03-05T01:16:00.004-05:00

Hillary drives the roller coaster. Go girl go!

I still like Barak a lot, but she's turned the tide on him. Which is strategically important, either way. He needs to be toughened up if he is to fight McCain, and she needs to be very tough to fight McCain. The Dems, as Karl Rove said and I have been thinking for weeks, will stay on page one with their titanic struggle between two of the most qualified and brilliant candidates we have seen in decades while McCain will fall to page 8. Not that everyone reads the newspapers, but it's as good a barometer as any on public attention. Just add up the numbers of voters who turn out for the Republican primaries versus the Democratic ones. Astounding difference in favor of the Dems two to one.

Keep the long term in mind. It's security and the economy. She has the right mantra now: national security and economic security. And she's turned the tide on "hope." "Let's turn hope into reality!"

How exciting!

Two Poems by Wislawa Szymborska

2008-03-05T00:24:00.004-05:00

She is my favorite poet for the last several years. Here are two of them:

Instant Living

Instant living.
Unreahearsed performance
Untried-on body.
A thoughtless head.

I am ignorant of the role I perform
All I know is it's mine, can't be exchanged.

What the play is about
I must guess promptly on stage.

Poorly prepared for the honour of living
I find the imposed speed of action hard to bear.
I improvise though I loath improvising.
At each step I trip over my ignorance.
My way of life smacks of the provincial.
My instincts are amateurish.
The stage-fright that is my excuse only humiliates me more.
Mitigating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and gestures that cannot be retracted,
stars not counted to the end,
my character like a coat I button up running ---
this is the sorry outcome of such haste.

If only one could practice at least one Wednesday,
repeat a Thursday!
But now Friday's already approaching with a script I don't know.

Is this right? -- I ask
(in a rasping voice
since they don't even let me clear my throat in the wings.)

You're deluded if you think it's only a simple exam
set in a makeshift office. No.
I stand among the stage-sets and see they're solid.
I am struck by the precision of all the props.
The revolving stage's been turning for quite some time.
Even the furthest nebulae are switched on.
Oh, I have no doubt this is the opening night.
And whatever I'll do
will turn for ever into what I have done.

Translated from the Polish by Adam Czerniawski from her collection, People on a Bridge.

THE JOY OF WRITING

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

trans.: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

And, a link to her Nobel lecture. Nobel for Literature, 1996.

What Jeanne Steig's Husband Saw

2008-03-04T00:57:00.003-05:00

William Steig's drawings always seemed to plumb the depths of the soul. I kept this drawing for nearly five years. And now I have something I can do with it besides look at it every six months as it gained the dust and newspaper yellowing of age on my shelf. Never put away, always ready to be pulled down, in case I could share it with someone.

Jeanne Steig wrote then, right after his death, "Bill frequently drew men thinking. They were often leaning on rocks and their thoughts were somber thoughts. This drawing is a happy combination of rock and man, with a few leftover heads for good measure. Or are all three of them just rising up from the ground, over the horizon, already grim about what they might be letting themselves in for?"

Follow the link. She writes in as lovely a way as he drew. But the linked article doesn't have the drawing any more. It was sandwiched on the Op-Ed page, between Nicholas Kristof's "Secrets of the Scandal" about the Valerie Plame leak, on the left, and David Brooks, on the right, "Bigger than the Nobel" lamenting that Pope John Paul II would never receive a Nobel Peace Prize, even though Brooks quoted the Pope as saying, "the evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverizaion, of the fundamental uniqueness in each person."

I am still going to keep my yellowing copy of the page out at the ready, in case anyone might like to see it.

Run Don't Walk to NYC Before March 16

2008-03-03T08:24:00.007-05:00

We have only two chances to see the William Steig cartoons in full glory: until March 16 in New York at the Jewish Museum and then San Francisco at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
After that, it's the book/catalog.

Here's why we should go.

Drawings courtesy New York Times, March 3, 2008

Which Way is She Whirling?

2008-02-28T23:47:00.004-05:00

My sister Alex sent this image to me. It was accompanied by a discussion of right brain and left brain. I don't remember which was which.

The image is whirling. Either clockwise or counterclockwise. Click on the image to see her whirl. For some reason, she only whirls off-page.

The question is does she sometimes go the other way? Can you make her go the other way? And, if you can, or if sometimes it happens, how does it happen? What is in the mind's eye that makes it change direction? Can you make it change direction at will?

Where is the thing seen? On the screen or in the mind?

The Fear Machine Revvs Up

2008-02-28T22:37:00.004-05:00

The Republicans are building up to a thunderstorm of criticism of the Democrats, and particularly Barak Obama, on the question of terrorism and security. For example, today's Washington Post carried the following lead:

TYLER, Tex., Feb. 27 -- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) accused Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of making ill-informed comments about Iraq and al-Qaeda in Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate, signaling that a general-election brawl between the colleagues would center in part on who has the foreign policy experience to lead a country at war.

The NY Times article about Colonel Davis, the former chief bulldog colonel for the military trials against Guantanamo detainees who has turned detainee supporter, quotes him stating the obvious: top Pentagon brass discussed timing the upcoming trials to match the run up to the 2008 election. Duh. How many salvos of fireworks can they keep coming? Building up to a crescendo in September, with the cooked "evidence" of these dangerous terrorists (who have been held in stinking hell holes in Guantanamo for the last 6 years and must look withered and wizened by now). Another round of fireworks in the hellish bouquet of attacks and fear-mongering being hatched by the Republicans.

The Republicans will run on two themes: security and taxes. On security, not war but security, who can better protect the nation? A McCain who knows the guts of war, who supported and supports the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing war or Obama, who was against the war?

Obama has to posit a totally different mythology of America in the post Cold War, flat earth reality: it has to be rooted in a view of the world that says that the war should not have happened, the it has inflamed rather than doused anti-American sentiment around the world, that it has cost way too many lives and will have mired us in an intractable position in the Middle East for decades to come. And that it is ruining not only our standing among nations but brand "America" and our capacity to export our brain products (no matter how low the dollar sinks). A vision that says that we not only should not have gone to war and brought down Saddam Hussein, but we now have to reverse the outcome, make it all better? Make it so the middle easterners like and respect us (but allow us to continue full support of Israel). Make it so that militant Muslim terrorism calms down to a whisper? A policy that makes it safe to be an American abroad again. That vision is going to not only have to be compelling, it has to SELL and counter act the fearful and fearsome vision the Republicans paint.

That is a tall order, when we are a nation that feeds off the notion of our superpower strength, our righteousness, and are more than willing to defer to the one who pounds the drum the loudest. Bush still dominates the debate. (Is the Democratic Congress impotent or what?) He will have to defend the war all the way to election day. It's his war. And he intends to assure his legacy.

Taxes on the other hand is easier to reframe and change the subject from "it's your money; they will take it away and spend it on bloated boondoggles" to the Democratic fear machine: "health care is a disaster, education is a disaster, the infrastructure is a disaster, we have allowed the richest 1 percent to siphon off all of the wealth of the nation that could go to reducing infant mortality, increasing literacy rates, improving inspection of slaughterhouses to assure humane animal treatment and healthy meat, etc., etc."

How can it be that the richest nation in the history of the world can't afford to pay school teachers? or care for the disabled and the elderly?

My Democratic friends think Obama can bring in enough new voters who aren't going to respond to the Republican fear machine and who will support the Democratic fear concerto to win the election.

I am worried. Fear is a poison and a stimulant. At least the Democrats can point to actual visible problems and actual, acceptable, visible solutions. So the fear can be alleviated. The Republican fear seeps into the country's bones. It aims at the lowest common denominator. It uses bogeymen to scare us. We are a nation addicted to fear and to the aggressive response. All adrenalin all the time. The Swift boating of Kerry may look like amateur hour compared to what will be mounted against Obama.

PS: I am sad about Hillary. She would have made a much better president in terms of dealing with problems. Whether she could lead is another question. She has the chops on the war issue that Obama doesn't. Hillary is a realist. Iraq IS. We have to deal with it. "I was against the war from the start" means Obama has to create a whole new vision that gets us out of the very dangerous quagmire the Republicans have put us into (along with Democratic complicity).

PPS: The issue isn't who is right but who can paint the most compelling vision of how to deal with the world as it is (while painting the picture of what that world IS to suit the proposed remedies). The Republicans will paint a dangerous world that only more aggression can make safe. The Democrats have to paint a vision of a world with different premises and different outcomes. The US has seldom opted for the kinder gentler vision.

The Abu Graib of American Food

2008-02-18T11:32:00.003-05:00

The NYTimes, Wash Post and LA times at least, as well as numerous TV news reports, featured stories about the “largest meat recall,” focusing on the fact that most experts thought there were no safety risks and that most of the meat had already been eaten over the last two years with, obviously, no ill effects. The scare was particularly vivid given that the meat from this particular company is used for school lunches.

A Humane Society of the United States staffer filmed it. If you haven’t already seen some of the footage, here it is. My soul went into anaphylactic shock seeing it. It's rough stuff.

What does this say about our nation? The solution may or may not be to stop eating meat. I'm not sure that gets us into the end zone where the animals that we eat are treated humanely. We need to radically change the way America raises the food it eats and the way we each choose what we eat.

I commend one book on the subject that has a gentle title for a not so gentle issue, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which may be the Silent Spring that helps to turn this ship away from its many cruelties as well as toward much healthier ways of eating. I'm a convert.

PS: Both because of the humaneness issues, but also because of health issues. The meat we eat that comes from mega-slaughterhouses, whether beef, pork, chicken, etc., is not healthy for human beings.

My daisy: Hillary, Barak, Hillary, Barak, Hillary, Barak, Hillary, Barak . . . .

2008-02-16T22:57:00.005-05:00

I must confess to terminal ennui with this election.

I can't tell whether Barak will draw so many new and once hopeless voters to the polls that he can beat the Republican terror and taxes machine. Or whether we need a Democratic candidate with chops on the issue of security, namely Hillary.

Here's how I see it: Actually, Bush said it: they will run on taxes and security.

Taxes is easy: "it's your money, and you know how to spend it. They want to take your money and spend it on government boondoggles."

Security is the anti acid to The War. The security line goes: "we haven't had a suicide or other attack on American soil There is a vast radical Muslim conspiracy that wants to crush America. We need a strong defense. And the best defense is a strong offense." This message will be delivered from every loudspeaker in America, over and over and over and over. Loud and clear. If there is one thing the Republicans are good at creating, it's fear.

So, the question is how does the Democratic candidate either win the debate on security and change the subject on taxes? Or, change the subject on security as well?

Changing the subject on taxes isn't too, too hard. (Our little version of fear): schools are crumbling, millions have no health care, our infrastructure is aging, etc., etc.. So we need targetted investments (shades of Al Gore and the oak tree versus the dandelion schools of economics). More fear of public failures than fear of having your money taken away. That's the easy one.

Security: not war. NO, not war. Only Democrats raise the issue of war, and they do it by being against it. Republicans support strong security. And, we could be attacked any where any time any place by virtually any means. We can all imagine where the terrorists could strike. And kill, maim, create chaos and real fear. Just tweak an American and he or she can tell you their favorite predicted terrorist attack. So, the question is change the subject or be able to point to strength on the security issue.

Being against the war is easy. It's like being against taxes. Against waste. Against, well, evil.
Doing security well, and with visible action and results is hard.

On this last score, Hillary has chops and Barak is weak. He can be painted as McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, Paul Tsongas, Ed Muskie. In a flick of the Republican brush. Obama is weak on security (whisper, he was weak on war). Hillary, on the other hand, voted to authorize the president to use force. And SHE HASN'T APOLOGIZED FOR IT. She has taken a principled stand. She has all of the chops a Democrat needs to counter the Republican fear mongering. And double them on diplomacy and restoring respect for America.

But, here's the rub. Hillary is not an attractive candidate (particularly in the beauty contest with Mr. Universe, Obama). Obama is ravishing. As EJ Dionne pointed out in the Washington Post, Barak Obama has had one message from day one. Hillary has had umpteen and they keep changing. Bill overstepped (he was right in what he said, but he shouldn't have said it (how often are we "right" but "wrong" to say it?)). Her venues look set up. She is distant with the press. She is distant from most everyone. So? And actually, her best message is "we need a president who is ready on day one." But that can't compete with the litany of examples of where hope and courage changed history, as Obama is fond of parading in soaring rhetoric.

So, what's a person to do? Chops on security or mountains more voters?

(PS, if Hillary has to use the super delegates at the convention and twist a lot of arms, she will loose horribly. She can't do that. Lots of the old power politics are off the table for the Dems.)

My ennui has turned to perplexity and a wish to get to go and to have it be over with. (Plus, I haven't even begun the chapter about the horrific sexism that pervades reporting about Hillary that she simply can't charm her way out of. They did it to Geraldine Ferraro as well. It's a kind of pervasive, leering, ever so thin veneer of sneer. Disgusting. And women columnists do it too -- Dowd, for example, but she does it with knives.)

What think you?

Happy Valentine's Day

2008-02-16T22:54:00.003-05:00

Don't You Wish You Were a Dog? I Doo.

2008-02-11T22:53:00.001-05:00

You gotta believe. Another world from mine at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

Going on this very moment while men and women and children are being killed in Iraq, two towering Democrats are dueling for the nomination while Bush sets off his last series of fireworks, to keep the nation on the edge of fear, starting the trial . . why so late? why now? of 6 Guantanamo inmates (put McCain several notches higher on the ladder). That will go on during the whole campaign and beyond. Just to remind us which party is focused on our SECURITY.

How I would love to live in a world where some buttleresque, so very proper gentleman, would stand by me while I eliminate next to a fire hydrant, placed there just for me (and my pals, so we can smell who's been there and leave our scent for the next guy). Wouldn't you?

Or have someone sew me a perfect cold winter weather suit, my favorite warm-ups to keep me toasty AND to handle my hair, every last strand. No more tired, listless hair.

Or to have personal coiffeurs attending to my every look.

I must be in a very curmedgeonly mood right now to begrudge this clan their joys and fun. Yes?

Have I taken too serious a road? Have I lost my joi de vivre? Have I equated grumpiness with virtue?

My main goal right now, in the animal world, is to habituate my very neurotic cockatoo, Cleo, poor thing, to Poonsy, my young Maine Coon boy who circles around her with visions of some atavistic triumph in his eyes. If only they could be friends. Stuart, my other lovely boy cat (domestic short hair) doesn't alarm Cleo. Maybe someday they will be friends.

Art and Copies

2008-02-09T10:04:00.000-05:00

La finalidad del arte es dar cuerpo a la esencia de las cosas no el copiar su apariencia.

Loosely translated: the point of art is to embody the essence of things, not to copy their appearance.

But what about life imitating art?

A Graceful Death; Death with Dignity

2008-02-08T23:30:00.000-05:00

Jany Brody writes in today's New York Times about people who want to die and those who help them (within the boundaries of the law, of course). Her Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit opens the door to thinking and talking about the death of an older person.

I wrote her an email that I quote below because I can't really say it better:
I read your column on a Graceful Exit. I had two thoughts. One is that as I age -- I am now 64 -- I am becoming much more aware of the differences between me and younger people. I have led a very dynamic, active life, and in fact, I believe I look, feel and act a lot younger than I am.

But, the actual fact of age, of having lived a lot of years, of having had hopes and dreams and disappointments, of having invested in love and seen it both succeed and fail, of having an aging body, of the difficulty in rebuilding muscle after a total knee replacement and the like, are inhabiting my mind in ways that makes me look at life very differently.

When I watch young people, the children of friends, young men and women striding on sidewalks, riding in elevators, chatting it up in restaurants, I am struck by a feeling of how little they know of what will come to them with life, with time. Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait.

As a young person, I looked at life from the rim of the volcano, from the front edge of the white water on a wave. Tomorrow was a real but empty concept. My energy and love of life would carry me forward through whatever I aspired to.

As a sixty-year old I see life from the top of a rise on a big long hill, overlooking fields and bays. There are more mountains to climb and valleys to hike through, but it is at a higher altitude.

As I read Ms. Brody's words about eighty and ninety year olds talking about wanting to die, it seems so obvious that from the perspective of the lives they have lived, that death would be the most natural next step. Not something to be feared, or fought against. And that younger people can't really understand how it feels to be that old. Not simply the body feelings but the whole package of awareness, knowledge, understanding of the arc of a life.

Much as people in their twenties, thirties, forties haven't a clue what it's like to be sixty, even at sixty I can only imagine what it would feel like to be eighty or ninety. Not everyone feels that way, of course, but I imagine a lot do and the issue is not with their feeling that they want to die but with their younger family members who can't imagine that state of mind and so translate it into the feelings of a younger person. Of something that must be desperate or depressed or hopeless.

It's not like that at all. Death is not so far away. Not so much to be avoided.

My work takes me close to the dying; in fact, much of my work is helping people to die (not from a medical point of view but as the decision maker when there is no one else). My awareness and knowledge of death is very different from when I was young. It will be much closer still if I live to be eighty or ninety.

Jane Brody closes her column with a plea for her family to have the wisdom to allow her to die with dignity. My reaction was that each one of us must build that into our health care powers of attorney and advance medical directives. And, more importantly each one of us must talk to family members and possible caretakers and make sure they understand that they are not to substitute what they think is best for what you have said you wanted.

So often, so much damage is done to the elderly -- and those are my clients and wards -- by seemingly well intentioned family members (and other court appointed guardians, conservators and trustees) who think they know better.

It is cruel to be stripped of everything in life except one's joy in the moment (dementia having often robbed one of memory) and the ability to decide what one wants. To then have relatives and caregivers dictate what one can or cannot do is truly unkind.

Part of my law practice is pushing back against such misguided caregivers on behalf of an older person or a disabled person, and trying to get the caregiver to align him or herself with the older person they are caring for and not to substitute his or her own ideas and values for those of the older person.

So, I admonish every reader to be very clear and very firm with your family members about their not doing what they think best, but rather what you know you will want and have told them orally and in writing.

See my earlier post on The Right to Folly. Soon I will write a post on the hell of dying in America. Hell is on This Side of Death, not the other. Also, another post on how to think about advance directives and health care powers of attorney.

Peace.

Why I'm For Hillary (and still love Barak)

2008-02-05T09:48:00.000-05:00

Here's my take. I vote on Feb 12, and it may be all over baby blue by then.

However:

1. Until I had to actually earn a living, I loved to fly in the high skies of broad groupings of related ideas, overseeing the globe and the universe, being an idealist, optimist, frowning on the fearful pessimists.

When I started to actually work for a living, I had to abandon my high flying ways and get down into the weeds and look at every detail, every third and fourth order consequence of one or another action. In other words, I became invested in reality.

Hillary is invested in reality.

2 Hillary has been excoriated on her vote on the war. Jeffrey Toobin explained it in great detail in the New Yorker a few months ago and came out thumbs up. She did what she has said she did all along. Many criticize her for failing to admit to a mistake. NO. Holding to the principle that she did the analysis appropriate to the time and making a tough choice (yes, driven by politics, but you can't govern if you can't persuade. It's great to be "right" but better to get things done.). It is much easier to be anti war than to deal with the tough problems of a dangerous world. She says she would vote differently now, had she known then what she knows now. That is very very different from saying she was wrong then with the hindsight of today. Until they invent a future prediction machine that actually works, the best one can do is to do the analysis and make the tough choices. Those who are running against their own records are craven cowards bending with the wind. The principled one is Hillary on this one.

3. One of my favorite lines: don't confuse the arrow on a wind vane with an arrow on a compass. Follow one and you'll go in circles, follow the other and you may get to where you want to go.

VOTE HILLARY.

4. That said, I am thrilled to have such an excellent choice.

5. If Barak Obama is nominated, I will heartily campaign for him (and donate money because campaigning for a Dem in Virginia is a bit like watering flowers in a desert. It takes a LOT of water).

So, enjoy tonight. I am sure that at least twice as many Democrats as Republicans will turn out to vote. That's a tidal wave of change in and of itself.

Aging Smaging, Just Do It Your Own Way

2008-01-31T16:45:00.001-05:00

Two days ago we were told that the older you get the worse your judgment becomes. You are tricked and fooled into making dumb choices. But, by my lights, the study was deeply flawed, since the parameters of choice are different for every individual (by definition).

Now comes news, in the New York Times today in Staying a Step Ahead of Aging, that we can exercise ourselves into being and staying younger. Some people can run faster at 60 than they could at 50!

Apparently the secret is hard exercise that teaches the heart to pull in and distribute more oxygen. Hard and often, if you can. But, if you have to choose between the two, chose hard. Several times a week. Forever.

Of course, as you age and exercise hard, some may say you are making a bad decision because you could get mugged, or have a heart attack, or have some other deadly calamity befall you. Guess what? I'm gonna do what my body wants me to do, whether it's make foolish decisions to stick with a poor choice or exercise like there's no tomorrow, or both!

The Right to Folly

2008-01-26T10:04:00.000-05:00

There are two kinds of people: those who think they know best what an old person needs and those who know that what the old person wants is what he or she fully deserves to get.

Old people have lived their lives. Their resources are their own (whether they inherited them or earned them). Their bodies no longer give them the ability to do everything they can imagine doing. The are going to die sometime soon. The order of priority, IMHO or IMNSHO, should be: 1. happiness. 2. health. 3. financial security.

For an old person, happiness comes from being treated with respect and love and they are allowed to choose what they want: where to live, what to eat, whom to spend time with, where to travel. Even when they are cantankerous, difficult, persnickety, tempermental and what they want is "impossible." "Protecting" them from "hurting" themselves or keeping them from spending their money "foolishly" only adds to the insults of being trapped in an aging body.

But sometimes, mirabile dictu, the law is on their side.* The District of Columbia code requires that:

(a) The court shall . . . encourage the development of maximum self-reliance and independence of a protected individual and make protective orders only to the extent necessitated by the protected individual's mental and adaptive limitations and other conditions warranting the procedure.

In my experience as guardian and conservator and attorney hired to help a person under a guardianship or conservatorship, the biggest challenge is to protect an old person from those who would "help" him or her. BTW, this applies to persons who are mentally ill or mentally retarded, as well.

One lovely man, a veteran, died a lonely death, frustrated and alone in a VA hospital, because his guardian/conservator would not help him to move to where he dreamed of living. Yes, his dream, anchored by dementia, was impossible, but there were many intermediary places he could have been allowed to go to.

My client raged, helplessly, that his guardian wouldn't give him $100 dollars of his own money to spend. When I asked the guardian why not, he told me, in a screeching voice, "I'm not going to give him any money when he is going to turn around and give it to a nurse and ask her to go buy him chocolate. I am not going to be responsible for his dying of diabetes from eating chocolate." So, of course, I pulled $60 cash out of my pocket and gave it to him.

My client was 86. He was alone. He had no joys in life but to call his wife, who lived in another nursing home, when his phone worked. After he died, his guardian sent me his cellphone. It was the smallest cheapest cell phone on the market. This for a many who couldn't see well and who had large hands and big fingers.

Another client got caught up in a fight with his daughters who, in their minds were doing the right thing and seeking court appointment as his conservators and guardians. Yes he had dementia and couldn't remember anything that happened yesterday. And he couldn't walk faster than a turtle, perched precariously on two wobbly legs. But his mind was still roaming the world he had traveled as a scientist, explorer and big brain about town. He didn't want to live in a facility where everyone was "demented, except moi, of course." And, he didn't want either daughter to be appointed his conservator or guardian.

When he wanted to travel to a geological conference in northern New England, his daughters intervened because it was still muddy and he might fall. The conference organizers assured me that he would be fine and all travel in the mountains would be by car.

After a final settlement (third court hearing, with daughters sitting with stolid, fierce anger on one side, my client confused and hurt on the other side), one daughter with forced cheerfulness asked whether he wanted to go to lunch and if so where. He suggested a lovely nearby museum lunchroom. The daughter said, "oh parking is a problem, how about the Italian place you love so much?" He looked at me. I suggested they go where he suggested. She said "that's the only one he remembers." I shrugged and walked away, not wanting to be seen to be the ever hungry lawyer billing her client for trivial hallway conversations and interfering between father and daughter. I should have said, "well, yes, it's the one he remembers because it's the one he likes."

When I asked his court-appointed conservator whether she would approve his travel to Europe next summer to another international conference, she wrote back, "Yes, if his health is cleared and he can do it safely." Was she going to get a doctor's certificate that he could travel? How was she going to evaluate the safety? He wanted to go to Europe! He had been invited by colleagues! He had plenty of money and could afford everything he would need. Who was she to impose her value set on him, her protective fears that he shouldn't be allowed to do anything risky or "dangerous."

Care for someone in need of "protection" -- meaning the person lacks the capacity to manage his or her affairs (which most often means not being able to manage the flood of bills, bank statements, advertising mail, etc.) or make sensible health care decisions (meaning not being able to understand the scope of one's health problems or make reasoned decisions about treatment) -- should be guided by the law: "encourage the development of maximum self-reliance and independence of a protected individual."

Substituting one's own judgment for that of an another, whether an older person, or a mentally ill person or a retarded person, diminishes him or her. Not only is it contrary to the law in the District of Columbia, but it is psychologically destructive and spiritually deadening.

It is the charge of the able to nourish and encourage and facilitate the old, the mentally ill or the mentally retarded. The able need to pull back from judging, from knowing what is best, from intervening to "protect," from substituting what I may think is "best" for what he or she wants. Old age or mental illness or mental retardation are what they are; there is no changing it; one can only accept it for what it is. It is for the able to make the adjustments and recognize the full individuality and right to respect, and yes, right to folly, of the older or mentally ill or mentally retarded person.

My friend Judy posted an awesome clip of life and music in Young @ Heart, a group of oldsters who have raised the bar, raised the roof and raised our hopes and expectations of what is possible. Check it out. It is WONDERFUL!

* Title 21. Fiduciary Relations and the Mentally Ill. (Refs & Annos)
Chapter 20. Guardianship, Protective Proceedings, and Durable Power of Attorney. (Refs & Annos)
Subchapter VI. Protection of Property of Incapacitated, Disappeared or Detained Individuals. (Refs & Annos)
§ 21-2055. Permissible court orders.

When a Relative Dies Abroad - What to Do

2008-01-21T19:16:00.000-05:00

I recently had to set up arrangements for someone who died in Nairobi. It is relatively easy to arrange to repatriate the remains, or alternatively to arrange for cremation.

The United States Embassy Citizen Services -- at least the one in Nairobi, Kenya -- has an entry on its web site for: Assistance to U.S. Citizens who are incarcerated or have relatives who die in Kenya.

In my case, while there was an eight hour difference between Washington DC and Nairobi, and it was a Sunday before a holiday, a very nice, cooperative and helpful duty officer took down all of the relevant facts and said he would get back to me with information, which he did half an hour later.

He gave me a list of funeral services that could make all of the necessary arrangements. As I learned these include transporting the body from the hospital to the funeral home, obtaining an autopsy from a pathologist (required), embalming and packing the body in a body bag which is placed in a metal lined casket which is then placed in a crate.

The cost is around $10,000 and half of that is the airplane ticket. The airlines insist on protecting themselves from the possibility that the fluids from the deceased might, in case of some accident, flow onto all of the rest of the luggage in the hold and contaminate it. I was assured that such an eventuality is virtually impossible, but the airlines have the opportunity to take advantage of the situation and exercise stochastic pricing.

The steps to take are:

Arrange with the funeral home to take the steps you want, repatriation or cremation, or hold the body while family members and the legally responsible person are able to sort through the decision.
Pay the hospital bill so the hospital will release the body to the funeral home.
Assure that the funeral home has all of the relevant information for the death certificate (names of parents, birthplace and birth date).
Obtain a Consular Report of Death Abroad. This last is important to assure domestic entities (Social Security, life insurance companies, etc., etc.) that the death occurred as stated on the death certificate. The consulate or embassy will issue the CRDA on presentation of the death certificate and passport of the decedent.

The hardest part is often getting agreement among family members as to what course of action to take. Don't underestimate the difficulty in finding agreement among family members. Repatriating the remains involves not only transport but then the funeral, which can easily double the cost.

Serendipity is an Angel Flying High Above, or How we Escaped Disaster and Landed in the Lap of Luxury

2008-01-13T09:07:00.001-05:00

My friend Judy and I went hiking yesterday, Sat Jan 12. It was a beautiful day, even perhaps too warm for January, but with a clear blue sky and gentle winds.

We drove out to the Virginia-West Virginia state line to a wonderful, hidden corner of wilderness owned and managed by a Quaker organization. I had downloaded maps of the trail system, I had studied my 60 Hikes within 60 Miles of Washington, and figured out that we could do a shorter hike than recommended in the book because, of course, we were starting late and probably couldn't do the full circuit.

Maps in hand, we strode confidently off into the woods. Judy is my hiking companion and we both love to hike. Particularly now that we have trekking poles, but more on that in a later post. It was truly beautiful: the winter trees spread in every direction allowing the eye to sink deep into the woods, the ground covered with wonderful green plants, blue sky and sun glistening through the naked branches. Clear, wonderful air.

We found the right trail, right off the bat. An easy wide one, following a small power line. We climbed, stopped and extolled the beauty, climbed again, stopped to take off outer layers, climbed again. And kept climbing and climbing. The path got rockier and rockier. We were looking for a trail that went off to the left. We continued climbing. No trail from the left. I took out my Bruntun do everything but whip up an expresso coffee that told me our altitude. Two hundred feet below the cut off. So, resumed climbing. After a while we decided that if we never found the cut off, we'd be OK because we would turn around and go back in time to beat the sunset. So, we continued climbing. Beautiful, beautiful day and hike.

Finally, dripping sweat and trudging ever upward, I saw a clear white blaze to the left. Perfect, here was our trail. The map showed a continued climb of about another 200-300 feet up to an outlook point. So, we scrambled up what by now had become a field of boulders. Deer peering at us, seeming to ask, what are they doing, working so hard at this. We can leap up in a flash. Finally we got to what looked like the outlook point. Wow! Half way home and right on time! The trees obscured the view, but that was fine. we could see the outlines of mountain ranges to the west and valleys to the right. The trail was beautifully marked with white blazes just as far as the eye could see, and some thoughtful person had even put chalk arrows on the rocks in both directions.

So, we pushed on, happy and confident that we'd get back just in time. The rocky trail was still a challenge, but we were on the home stretch. And we kept on going, and going, and going, and going. The trail that was supposed to come in from the left again wasn't just right around the corner. We were hiking along the back side of a ridge that was both beautiful and endless. Trees and rocks and flat stretches. Glorious. Wonderful hike. Soon the turn off would come. Right around the corner. We kept on going, happy and carefree. Except the sun was going down and the light dimming. Only a bit. The trail would be right up ahead.

Finally, it became clear that the trail wasn't going to materialize any time soon. Still guided by those clear white blazes, we pushed on. At some point, out of the back of my mind, I asked Judy, "aren't the blazes on the Appalachian Trail white? Isn't this trail a bit wide and well established for that upgraded deer trail we were looking for?" "Well, yeah, the AT blazed ARE white."

My map showed the same trail we needed to get back home on the left, intersecting the AT as well. So, confidently we plunged forward, picking up the pace a smidge because we would have to do the circuit that I had thought too long to do during the daylight we would have available. And we continued on. Judy said what I was thinking too, "If I were alone right now I would be terrified, but because we are together, I feel fine." Yes. Company dissipates fear.

And so, we pressed on. Finally, we realized that the trail from the left wasn't going to materialize either. So, there was no choice but to continue forward. At some point, the Trail would come to an end at Harper's Ferry. I had a light that I was loath to use because of the boulders and the trees and the distance between white blazes. I had a flashlight but it would be hard to use while both hands were handling the poles. And so we continued on. Not so fast any more, because as wise Judy pointed out, in the dark, we would go more slowly.

We were both imagining how and where we would sleep. We both agreed that we were having a wonderful time, that it wasn't the end of the world, that we would find a cave and spend the night out, if necessary.

At some miraculous point, we came to an intersection of signs and a choice. Back was 9 miles, forward was 13 miles, but, down to the right 0.2 miles was a shelter. Judy thought we should go check it out. It was only a few feet away. 0.2 miles. Easy. So, we started down a steep, zigzag trail as it got really darker, really fast. I kept thinking about the hike back up. But, no problem. plus, there were some lights fairly near, up ahead. The glow of incandescent lights. Hmmmm. As we jumped and leapt the last few feet in what was by now pitch black, it was a house! There were people in the kitchen! It was clearly an Appalachian Trail hostel house for groups. We knocked on the door, seeing about 25 small boys, all in green T-shirts and baseball caps, sitting at a long table, eating dinner. Some men were wandering around a huge kitchen with plates heaped with food.

Was this amazing or what? We were surrounded with offers of food and drink and chips. Judy and I kept saying, "we are lost." Someone brought out a map. Yes, indeed, we were way away from where we had wanted to be. But no matter right now. Dinner! One of the men plonked huge helpings of rice and chile on plates, cleared off counter space, brought up two stools and started asking more and more questions. I was so grateful I was stunned. How could we have gone from being utterly lost and facing a night in the woods to sitting in the midst of 30 Boy Scouts from Troop 994 from Fairfax Station eating dinner in a raucous din?

Finally, a couple of the men said they would drive us back to where our car was. We figured out the way on a map, some surely 15 miles to simply go, what by the crow flies, or even a well guided human walks would be, about 1 mile.

Dinner down, we hopped in a car and off we went. Our driver had worked his whole life in satellites, so we got a bird's eye view of the myriad satellites, some geo-synchronous, at 12,000 plus miles in orbit, the GPS ones, square boxes 15' by 15'. Weather ones, TV ones, military ones, older ones with only one signal, new ones with 4 different frequencies. Some with antennas of 100 feet hanging out in space. Some with more or less propellant that would allow the earthlings to adjust their position.

After several false starts up impossible roads, we made it to where Red Outback was patiently waiting. And the woman behind the glass door was on the phone. She came out. She ran back in to tell the Sheriff that we had just shown up.

We bid goodbye to our kind Scout troop leaders and jumped into Sheila's warm house. We spent an hour chatting about a million things, warmed by her wood stove.

Rested, refreshed, thanking our lucky stars, we jumped in the car and drove home!

What a day.

Targetted Stimulus: Acorns Instead of Dandelion Seeds

2008-01-11T22:58:00.000-05:00

Davie Pearlstein's list of conventional wisdom targeted stimuli for the economy sounded so sensible, that I had to summarize them here.

Instead of further cutting of interest rates by the fed, which risks stimulating the very behavior that got us into this subprime meltdown, a few economy enhancing measures. As Pearlstein says, "this ought to be an easy one . . . we know how much stimulus could provide an economic cushion."

To boost GDP by $125 billion, or 1% of GDP:
1. Extend unemployment benefits by 6 months, temporarily increase food stamp allotments and offer a flat one time payroll-tax rebate to workers with household incomes below $100,000.
2. To assure the support of the states, offer money to the states by increasing the federal Medicaid match can do that.
3. To bring Republican business interests on board, throw in the tax break of accelerated depreciation, "which doesn't reduce corporate tax payments, it just delays them."
4. To address the housing downturn, two measures.
One, advance future federal housing subsidies and make them available now to state housing authorities. This would allow housing authorities to buy some of the growing inventory of unsold properties to rent out to low and moderate income families. It would help stabilize the housing market and in the long run would save money.
Two, create a new type of housing finance -- at zero cost to the government -- to prime the resumption of mortgage lending: create a debt-equity blend, whereby the bank would lend to borrowers and obtain an interest in the future appreciation of the value of the property (think mortgage plus reverse mortgage). This new idea could both increase demand and reduce foreclosures. Homeowners would pay lower premiums and the banks would have a long term interest.

As Pearlstein points out, these are neither complicated nor radical ideas; some spend new money, others shift money from the future to the present, while others cost nothing but shift returns into the future. He says these measures meet the tests of Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard and now entrepreneur, of being "timely, temporary and targeted."

I always thought the debate between Al Gore and his targetted approach to the economy and George Bush's tax cuts all around but mostly to the rich as being the difference in propagation strategy of the oak tree and the dandelion. The oak counts on lots of squirrels to carry their trophy acorns around and bury them, some to be found during winter and eaten, but some to live another day and grow into a mighty oak. The dandelion puts its faith in the winds, by creating beautiful flying umbrellas to spread around the world.

And while gardeners may say that strong but delicate dandelions have a very successful reproductive strategy, in the long run, the mighy oak provides housing for birds, squirrels, various insects and food for all of them. I always thought Gore had the better argument.

"Let Wallace Hang"

2008-01-10T00:01:00.000-05:00

Says evolutionary biologist, Olivia Judson, a familiar denizen of these environs. On his birthday, January 8, she went to the British Museum, where busts and portraits of all of the great scientists of the 19th century are lionized. But Alfred Russel Wallace's portrait was in storage.

By way of signaling Wallace's great contribution to science -- as one who sent Darwin a letter containing a manuscript outlining the ideas evolution by natural selection and who thus stimulated Darwin, who betook himself to the drafting table to publish "On The Origin of Species" eighteen months later -- Judson makes two great points.

The first is to point out that the infelicitous phrase "survival of the fittest" is a tautology: Who survives? The fittest. Who are the fittest? Those who survive.

The second is to explain natural selection so that anyone can understand it. She writes:

"The idea is simple. Far more organisms are born than can survive. Among small song birds such as blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus), for example, each female can lay as many as ten eggs in a clutch, each year. Yet the blue tit population doesn’t grow gigantically every year; on the contrary, it stays more or less the same. Every year, then, most blue tits die. They become food for squirrels, or cats, or maggots. Any bird that has attributes that help it to survive — sensitive hearing, a beak well suited to breaking into seeds, a knack for catching spiders and caterpillars — will have an edge over its less endowed fellows, and will be more likely to leave offspring. If those attributes have a genetic component, the offspring may (depending on how the genetic dice roll) inherit them. Over time, different populations of the same species will face different pressures and begin to diverge."

And, the rest is history. That divergence leads to the gradual evolution of different species and the profusion of life forms that inhabit the Earth today. And, it evolves by dialectic, as it were, and not purpose.

I'll leave you to read Wallace's entreaty of 1863 to preserve nature, in language as urgent as any written by Al Gore.

From a Voter's Perspective, Not a Fight, But A Feast

2008-01-09T11:30:00.001-05:00

What we have is not a fight between two great candidates (except for between each campaign because there can be only one president) but an embarrassment of riches. Democrats and Independents are enjoying one of the most rich fields of presidential candidates in more than a generation: two great Dems, each of whom deserves my vote.

I will vote for Hillary in the primary because she is the stronger, more knowledgeable candidate. But, I will be a very enthusiastic supporter of Barak Obama if he is nominated.

My hope is that either one, as president, will take a page from Lincoln's presidency and as so brilliantly described in Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, appoint her opponents to her cabinet: Obama as Vice President with a huge portfolio (a la Gore); Edwards at Justice; Dodd at Treasury; Biden at State; Richardson at Defense; Kucinich at Labor and HUD; McCain at United Nations; Giuliani at Homeland Security.

O happy day!

Why My Friend Judy Wants to Go to Santa Cruz

2008-01-09T00:31:00.000-05:00

My friend Judy is exploding out of her former life as a mother, artist and wife. She is creating a new life. She is imagining all sorts of wonderful futures.

Her daughter Julia is going to Mills College in Oakland. Judy is falling in love with California. And especially with the idea of Santa Cruz.

She told me the other day that one of her classmates who comes from California told her that California is always 15 years ahead of the East Coast. She asked him about Santa Cruz. He told her that if California is 15 years ahead of everwhere else, Santa Cruz was 25 years ahead of everywhere else.

I actually agree. I went to high school in Santa Cruz and after wandering and hitch-hiking around the country and Mexico for several years, went to and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz has come a long way from being the Coney Island of San Francisco, a place for lower middle class summer tourists to come and enjoy the Boardwalk and the French Fries and fried fish and cotton candy and stale popcorn and the smells of Coppertone and wafts of sea salt smells. And drag races down the main street and making out in parked cars along Steamer Lane. And listening to Elvis Presley and Nat King Cole.

I would love to go back to Santa Cruz.

How to Bake Bread in a Bread Machine

2008-01-09T00:08:00.000-05:00

Having exhausted all possible choices of what bread I wanted to eat -- it has to be whole wheat, but I love white French bread, it has to be chewy, it has to have some, say, raisins and some seeds, you know, the sophisticated organic kind -- I decided to make a loaf of bread myself.

I used to bake bread in my bread machine once a week. I used to be able to make a perfect loaf. Perfect because it was just what my palate wanted.

So, after having eaten a humongous brunch and gone on a too long hike, I rushed to Whole Foods, late, to buy the flours, the yeast, the gluten, and the sunflower and flax seeds. Whe nI got home and looked at the recipe, I realized I was missing the powdered milk. Raced off to the store, realized when I got there that I had forgotten my wallet. Raced home, left the car running with hazard lights blinking, raced back to the store and couldn't find the powdered milk for hours.

Returned home I carefully measured out all of the ingredients. The recipe calls for putting everything into the baking pan in order. Water, salt, honey, then the flours, then shortening, then yeast. I decided to put all of the flours together mixed in a bowl. But then I decided that I should hold back on the yeast so it wouldn't hit the water first and start fermenting before being thoroughly mixed in with the flour. So I scooped out a teaspoon full and set it carefully aside. Then I joyfully poured all of the flour into . . . the bread machine itself, not the baking pan.

Freakout time! What HAD I done? How was I to fix it? Holding the machine in my arms to keep it from banging to the floor, I held it up first to pour the flours into a bowl and then to shake the flour out from behind the heating elements, trying to keep it all flowing back into the bowl. After transferring it all into the bowl and wiping out the machine I started to look for the yeast. I looked everywhere. No yeast to be found. That meant it must have found its way back into the flour mix in the bowl. But, since the flours by then were looking peaked and spotted with 5-year old stale crumbs, in a paroxism of decision, I poured the whole mix into the garbage. And started all over again, with the flours, gluten and yeast.

Of course, the bread came out at midnight, but it was truly delicious. Worth it? My hope next time is to avoid dumping the mix into the wrong container. Of course, some new and unexpected calamity is sure to creep in around the corner. Perhaps a cat will jump up on the counter and land in the carefully set aside butter.

She Won!! Go Girl Go

2008-01-08T23:58:00.000-05:00

Say what you want, Hillary did it!

I am so proud of the Democrats: we have two fabulous candidates. I like Hillary better, but I could fall in love with Obama in a flicker.

So, congratulations Hillary. Powerful victory. You blew the men pundits out of the water. Even Chris Matthews was respectful and even humbled by her performance.
May she grow and rise as a candidate and become the first woman president of the United States. I can confess that having these two candidates makes me proud to be an American again. After a long, long time -- it seem like aeons -- of being ashamed of the behavior around the globe, the treatment of those least able among us and the pandering to the rich of the hyper Christianized Bushies.

The end is in sight, and it is a glorious end!

Who Are Those People Stumbling Through the Woods?

2008-01-06T23:55:00.000-05:00

Why, they're geocachers, of course. And if you aren't one of them you are most likely a muggler, without even knowing it.

Geocachers can be detected in the woods by their singleminded focus on a hand held GPS, usually accompanied with someone who is either plaintively asking "how close are we?" or berating them with "did you put the right coordinate in?" And both of them or more, are often stumbling through the underbrush and over wet logs poking into odd and secret places.

In search of loot! Well, baubles, post cards, plastic trains, a small doll. Plus a log book and possibly a stamp. And if you're lucky a pencil or pen to write in the log book your name(s), date, time, etc. All in a tupperware container, hidden under bark and leaves in a hole in a tree.

Geocaching is a rare mental disease that combines hiking with hunting with a GPS. Geocachers are a dedicated lot. They are global. You find out all about it on the internet and other sites, particularly THE geocaching site. Treasure hunt in Italy, France, Arizona, Virginia!

I was indoctrinated today, on a hike with my cousins from California. We went slipping and sliding through the woods, up and down wonderful early January trails in Fairfax County, VA, surrounded by mugglers. We had to be very careful not to alarm or intrigue them. Under cover of daylight and a bit of a mad and random look, we avoided being caught. And, while I was still on the hunt, we found two sites.

It's great fun! Thank you Ralph and Carol.

Site under reconstructions. Jump to:

2008-01-04T20:03:00.000-05:00

My temporary site, Epiphytic Notions 1

Where Did the Word "Lynching" Come From?

2008-01-04T19:30:00.000-05:00

A couple of years ago, I was able to view the New York Historical Society's extraordinary exhibit of postcards, collected with singleminded purpose by James Allen, of lynchings, mostly, of course of black men and boys.

This collection is now online at Without Sanctuary with deeply moving narration by the collector, including stills as well as a narrated movie.

These postcards bear witness to an almost unthinkable capacity for pride, enjoyment and sense of moral righteousness of the the men, women and children in the mobs that surged to kill, in many cases by burning, castrating, cutting off ears, whipping, and finally hanging.

The unholy center of the photographs is the hanging body, but the action is in the faces of the crowds and the eagerness of the photographers to shoot, print and quickly sell these dark souvenirs. Many senders noted where they were standing in the picture. With self-satisfied pride of doing justice. As the psychologist William James wrote: “for all sorts of cruelty, piety is the mask," quoted in an on-line CrimeLibrary history of lynching.

Where the verb "lynching" came from is the subject of some controversy. One story has it that a slave owner named Willy Lynch gave a speech to white slave owners over 300 years ago exhorting them to dominate their slaves with cruelty, fear, and dividing and pitting negro against negro. This cruel and heinous speech as the origin of the word is debunked by other sources and not mentioned in more mainstream coverage.

Spellman College historian William Jelani Cobb says the Willie Lynch speech emerged fron the wellsprings of the internet a few years ago, and points out the many neologisms -- like self-refueling, for example -- and concludes that "There are many problems with this document — not the least of which is the fact that it is absolutely fake."

An on line etymological dictionary ascribes the word to a William Lynch, an 18th century magistrate who organized a vigilance committee to keep order in Pittsylvania, VA during the Revolution.

A more scholarly review of lynching can be found in the curriculum of the on-line course, The Negro Holocaust, offered on line by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Other historical analyses are worth looking into, including a post from Long Island University.

In the end, these gruesome postcards not only bring us into the realm of the immediate and universal grip of tragedy and grief, but also call us to look deeply into the social forces and follies that pitted so many angry whites against people they had already beaten down, convicting them without any humanity or law.

Where Did the Word "Lynching" Come From?

2008-01-03T23:49:00.000-05:00

Why Death is Essential to Life

2008-01-02T16:41:00.000-05:00

Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London, who writes for the Economist, Nature, the Financial Times, the Atlantic and Natural History (and now the New York Times) has written a superb post on death. The role of death in nature. Why death is essential to life. In fact indispensable.

The post is so good, it makes you want to try it. Not permanently, of course.

The one question she doesn't answer is why do we humans focus so much on the hereafter. Or at least on living indefinitely -- viz Ted Williams. Of course, she doesn't explain why we have an imagination, either. But that is surely for another post.

Jump Starting Evolution

2008-01-02T15:33:00.000-05:00

Great new blog on evolutionary biology, The Wild Side. Actually, the resumption of an earlier one.

Today's post is about how to breed Bluefin Tuna in a Mackerel mom.

And for those of us who worry about basic sexuality, it turns out that germ cells and even spermatogona -- which are the germ cells developed a bit further down the road of complexity -- will turn into ovaries if implanted in a female and continue being male if implanted in a male.

All of which shows that the basic genetic drivers are the same even after many millions of years of separate evolution. But, read on . . .

How to jump start evolution

2008-01-02T15:03:00.000-05:00

Why Death is Essential to Life

2008-01-02T13:28:00.000-05:00

Iraqi Journalists on the War in Iraq

2008-01-01T11:23:00.000-05:00

Inside Iraq

is a blog by Iraqi journalists who work for the McClatchy Newspapers. These journalists are based in Baghdad and outlying provinces. These are firsthand accounts of their experiences. Their complete names are withheld for security purposes.

A must read blog.

Benazir Bhutto -- A Great Loss

2007-12-30T20:30:00.000-05:00

Benazir Bhutto was the most dynamic and charismatic female leader the world has seen. She leaves a gaping hole in the center of a hope that a woman of energy, brilliance, grace and beauty could in fact change the course of a country that is at the center of both terrorism and the possibility of seriously diminishing it. As Peter Galbraith wrote in the Washington Post on December 30, My friend died. Now her country may not make it. A human being and an indispensable leader.
Her recent, brief return to Pakistan, where she rode from suicide bomb on arrival to house arrest by the illegitimate General Musharraf, to candidate to lead her party into elections in a few days, and her assassination, telescoped in a brief arc the whole of her life.
Born to wealth and elite standing in an impoverished country, educated at Radcliffe and Oxford, elected prime minister at 35 and again at 39, she also spent five years in prison (much in solitary confinement), was married to a man who spent over 8 years in prison for corruption, and spent the last years before her return raising her children.
Many were skeptical of her bona fides going into her next campaign, but as Amina Khan, a lawyer and colleague of Pakistani heritage stated, when she heard Bhutto speak last year at Johns Hopkins of her record in office and commitment to fighting terrorism in Pakistan, "I really believe from hearing the tone of her voice, and the fervor of her voice, that it was a renewed and a very courageous leader," Khan, 38, said. "That's why I think this is especially sad. Because she was, I think, a great leader-in-the-making this time around."
For me personally, and as my friend Judy Shapiro pointed out, Bhutto's assassination contrasts hugely with that of Princess Diana. While the world may have mourned Diana's death in deeply emotional ways, we will mourn Benazir Bhutto's death in larger ways and for longer. She was the best hope of this generation to bring Pakistan out of deepening chaos, and her death is a tsunami that will trigger instabilities not only in Pakistan, but in India and Afghanistan as well as across the Muslim world and beyond to global oil and related markets.
Her death will ultimately be laid at the feet of the Bush administration that cynically brokered her return to balance out the failed presidency of Musharraf while allowing her to be under protected in a climate of extreme danger. Her death was avoidable, and neither Bush nor Musharraf took the necessary measures to prevent it.
Would she have been an effective Prime Minister again, this time around, we will never know. But her death leaves a gaping hole that will be impossible to fill. The next weeks are unpredictable. There are no good options and all of them are high risk. One can only meditate strongly to wish a return to centered coherence. And keep working to make it possible for disputes to be settled by negotiation instead of violence.

Help for the Mentally Ill: NY Law Looks Good

2007-12-30T12:21:00.000-05:00

New York leapfrogs over many grinding tragedies by permitting judges to order mentally ill persons to take their meds and to order them back on their meds if they stop.

What may at first quick blush look like a return to the paternalism of four decades ago when the mentally ill were warehoused in barren bedrooms in far away institutions, this new approach looks like it has just the right amount of muscle and the right amount of freedom. At least one person, Susan Wezel, interviewed for the article, is an enthusiastic benefgiciary.

The New York law is definitely not a shoo in for families or the police to force treatment on the mentally ill. Rather, as the Washington Post writes today, to qualify for forced treatment under the 1999 law, among other criteria, a person must "have been hospitalized twice within the previous three years; must have shown violent behavior toward himself or others in the previous four years; and must need treatment to 'prevent a relapse or deterioration which would be likely to result in serious harm to the person or others.'"

As a DC attorney who has watched numerous wards, for whom I have been appointed guardian or conservator, ride the rollercoaster in and out of the mental health system, or bump along the painful lower edges of instability, delusion, unhappiness and poverty, a similar law would help to bring a lot of people back to life.

One current ward leaves endless voicemail messages filled with detailed lists of needs and demands, ranting threats of violence to anyone who would help her and finally pleas for help and declarations that she is very very ill and unhappy. And, of course, she claims to have something very, very wrong with her, that most definitely is not mental illness. She once was a happy family member who took her meds, worked and had a life. When she stopped and refused to take them, she fell into a life on the edge of eviction because she can't keep any order in her apartment, with no income for the time being, and and suffers misery and loneliness, depending entirely on her family and her court appointed conservator.

And she is one among many many such persons.

The mentally ill in the District of Columbia, which has a more useful threshold for involuntary committment than Virginia, for example, could benefit immensely from an expansion into something like the New York law.

Such a law would have to establish threshholds for commitment, including prior failures of less intrusive measures, a present danger to self and/or others, and a likelihood of continued danger and instability. Such a law would also have to be accompanied by a revamping of the mental health system and its funding to free case workers to actually have few enough clients to be able to monitor successfully the clients they have and to provide the support system of health care workers and medications to maintain essential levels of service.

What a liberating law! DC officials -- from the doctors at St. Elizabeth's to the lawyers assigned to help -- now simply must shrug their shoulders, with sympathy, but helplessness, at the rollercoaster life of those they are charged with caring for.

Such a law would go a long way, also, to bringing a number of the homeless off the streets. Not that clearing the streets of the homeless is the objective, but that giving people back the choice of living a life they choose freely rather than being driven by their demons into dungeons of glassy-eyed despair is the right and the kind thing to do.

We have the medications. Do we have the sensible wisdom to give the law the possibility of nudging those who can't admit their illness into a better orbit?

Help for the Mentally Ill: NY Law Looks Good

2007-12-30T00:02:00.000-05:00

New York leapfrogs over many grinding tragedies by permitting judges to order mentally ill persons to take their meds and to order them back on their meds if they stop.

What may at first quick blush look like a return to the paternalism of four decades ago when the mentally ill were warehoused in barren bedrooms in far away institutions, this new approach looks like it has just the right amount of muscle and the right amount of freedom. At least one person, Susan Wezel, interviewed for the article, is an enthusiastic beneficiary.

The New York law is definitely not a shoo in for families or the police to force treatment on the mentally ill. Rather, as the Washington Post writes today, to qualify for forced treatment under the 1999 law, among other criteria, a person must "have been hospitalized twice within the previous three years; must have shown violent behavior toward himself or others in the previous four years; and must need treatment to 'prevent a relapse or deterioration which would be likely to result in serious harm to the person or others.'"

As a DC attorney who has watched numerous wards, for whom I have been appointed guardian or conservator, ride the rollercoaster in and out of the mental health system, or bump along the painful lower edges of instability, delusion, unhappiness and poverty, a similar law would help to bring a lot of people back to life.

One current ward leaves endless voicemail messages filled with detailed lists of needs and demands, ranting threats of violence to anyone who would help her and finally pleas for help and declarations that she is very very ill and unhappy. And, of course, she claims to have something very, very wrong with her, that most definitely is not mental illness. She once was a happy family member who took her meds, worked and had a life. When she stopped and refused to take them, she fell into a life on the edge of eviction because she can't keep any order in her apartment, with no income for the time being, and and suffers misery and loneliness, depending entirely on her family and her court appointed conservator.

And she is one among many many such persons.

The mentally ill in the District of Columbia, which has a more useful threshold for involuntary committment than Virginia, for example, could benefit immensely from an expansion into something like the New York law.

Such a law would have to establish threshholds for commitment, including prior failures of less intrusive measures, a present danger to self and/or others, and a likelihood of continued danger and instability. Such a law would also have to be accompanied by a revamping of the mental health system and its funding to free case workers to actually have few enough clients to be able to monitor successfully the clients they have and to provide the support system of health care workers and medications to maintain essential levels of service.

What a liberating law! DC officials -- from the doctors at St. Elizabeth's to the lawyers assigned to help -- now simply must shrug their shoulders, with sympathy, but helplessness, at the rollercoaster life of those they are charged with caring for.

Such a law would go a long way, also, to bringing a number of the homeless off the streets. Not that clearing the streets of the homeless is the objective, but that giving people back the choice of living a life they choose freely rather than being driven by their demons into dungeons of glassy-eyed despair is the right and the kind thing to do.

We have the medications. Do we have the sensible wisdom to give the law the possibility of nudging those who can't admit their illness into a better orbit?

A Great Loss

2007-12-29T23:34:00.000-05:00

Freedom or Folly: Who Is or Should be In Charge?

2007-12-25T14:50:00.000-05:00

The New York Times article about an elder scam or elder caper, depending on your point of view, raises a lot of excellent questions about the degree of intrusion the so-called able should have in the affairs of the not so able older person.

The story is familiar: an older person with a reasonable amount of money decides to undertake one or another project and ends up loosing all of his or her money. The loss is often due to a combination of larceny on the part of those who are aiding and abbeting the project and more importantly, of the freely chosen desire of the older person.

Benny Kass, who writes for the Washington Post on a number of related topics, described the process for the appointment of a conservator where a grandchild is worried that Grandma is spending her money foolishly. And yes, the courts will perform a thorough inquiry into the question of whether Grandma is really so incapacitated that she can no longer handle her money.

But how do we decide, before Grandma or Dad lets their bills go unpaid and a huge mess accumulates, that he or she is spending their money foolishly, or associating with flatterers who are actually trying to fleece them?

Example, Grandma has a tidy investment, she is well cared for in an assisted living facility. She is lonely and a very nice handyman befriends her. He fixes all of the equipment in her apartment, repaints her living room, to her delight, takes her on shopping trips to buy a new rug, he takes her out to lunch on these trips (of course, she pays the bill), visits often and entertains her. She really loves being with him. She would much rather be with a younger person than the doddering biddies in her facility.

Everyone in the family, all of whom live across the country, is delighted at first. Grandma has a companion who seems just right for her and who is useful to boot. Gradually, of course -- you can see where this is going -- disquieting signs begin to appear. Grandma wants to buy him expensive presents, wants to help him with his medical bills. She has a certain amount of dementia, but on the surface has nothing alarming.

What are family members to do? They have their own lives, children, jobs, friends, in their home towns, far away. Do they visit and take Grandma to visit a gerontologist? Get an evaluation of her mental capacities? One grandchild will argue that Grandma has the right to spend her money as she sees fit, it's hers afterall, and it gives her a pleasure she would never find elsewhere, to shower gifts on her new found friend. A son will argue that the handyman is taking total advantage of his mother, that he needs to be run out of dodge and that a conservator should be appointed to manage her money. A daughter will argue that she has the power of attorney, that she can step in a control Mom's spending.

Mom is flabbergasted at the concern of her children and grandchildren. She retreats into anger. Children, becoming more and more concerned, hire a lawyer. Lawyer advises that they should seek the appointment of the nearest living child as conservator and guardian. They file the petition and get Mom's internist to state that Mom has enough dementia to be incapacitated as defined by the law. Mom gets very alarmed, stops trusting her children, hunkers into her friendship ever more tenaciously. The court appoints a attorney to represent her.

The story ends in tragedy. Mom is alientated from her children; handyman is more closely entrenched in Mom's heart; even if a conservator is eventually appointed, the conservator inherits the problem: how far should he or she go in yielding to the desires of his or her ward? The law mandates that the conservator and or guardian provide the maximum amount of self-determination to the ward.

The children put pressure on the conservator to get rid of the handyman. Mom of course, begins to dislike the conservator and becomes ever more anxious, angry and ensconsed in her idea that she and her handyman should buy a house together and he will take care of her.

Assume that she is able to buy the house and Grandma willingly and happily puts the handyman's name on the deed.

If she were to later change her mind or if her children wanted to reverse the deal, what legal recourse would they have? Can Grandma or the children claim that her dementia should excuse her from her bad deal? If a child can get a contract voided for lack of capacity, can a dementer older person get the same benefit? How can the older person prove that -- despite their desire to enter into the transaction -- they lacked the judgment to do so and a court should void the deal? Does it make good public policy to allow certain states of mind a pass on the liability of freely chosen but later regretted transactions? Where does a legislature and then a court draw the line.

An alternative scenario is for one of the children to bring Mom to live with them. They shower her with love. She loses interest in her handyman as she plunges into the world of her grandchildren.

There are, of course, many other scenarios that could play out. Grandma here is lucky to have children and grandchildren. Many elderly persons have no one. The unscrupulous can take advantage very quickly.

The fundamental questions remain: how to balance the competing interests of the individual, the family (if there is one), the sanctity of contracts freely entered into, the medical and legal definition of incapacity that could help to define the boundaries of a new legal opt out. If medicine and law find that a line can be drawn, what are the risks of endless litigation?

On the more human level, what right does a child (heir or legatee) have to direct the way their parent lives their life or spends their money? Where does love and responsibility intersect with a parent's need for and right to autonomy? How healthy is it for a child or social worker or attorney or conservator to say, "I know better what is good for Grandma than Grandma herself" regardless of her "mental capacity" or judgement? How can an elderly person be protected from the wiles of the unscrupulous, when the elder person is gaining tremendous pleasure in the company of that villain or in donating large sums to televangelists? Should they be protected from themselves? At what point?

The longer we live, the longer we will enter into dementia, the more children and professional caretakers will be called upon to care for aging parents and the more difficult decisions will have to be addressed. With love, compassion, self-awareness, a sense of humor, and a dollop of common sense.

Fwd: God and evolution

2007-12-22T10:54:00.000-05:00

-----Original Message-----

From: cforbes@forbeselderlaw.com
Subj: God and evolution
Date: Sat Dec 22, 2007 10:15
Size: 1K
To: Chrisforbesblog.blogspot.com

A friend gave me a book of that title. I will read it but first here is my take: religion is as much a product of evolution as the eye or the opposing thumb or the cockroaches susceptibility to peer pressure.

Religion is the expression of human love that like a giant basket carries many of our deepest, most ineluctable questions . . . . And some of our similarly ineluctable answers.

Religion flows from the conjunction of the human mind and human heartm reaching out to make sense of the world around us.

The problem comes when, as with many human enterprises, we capture those instincts -- like fighting over property or bartering or teaching the young -- in a large organized group, called a bureaucracy, which goes to work to create outcomes, which in the case of religion is to enshrine answers to those questions into a uniformly adhered to set of truths.

What is "true" for one religious bureaucracy is different from the "truth" of another. And in a shrinking world, those truths are held by people in mixed groups. Some become ecumenical and absorb other truths and grow, while others become defensive and inward turned and reject all others.

But the root of the religious impulse is the same: the human expression of a form of love.

Love itself as expressed in the human is the same love seen in all natural forms, a drive for replication. The watermelon has an incredible love of its seeds to create that huge body of fruit flesh to nourrish as compost, its little seeds.

It is the sme love as that of the grandmother who cares for her grandchild, freeing her daughter to reach out to forrage for better and more food.

So, religion is that branch of human love that seeks to create harmony among people and to ask and answer questions about the mysteries.

God is as much a creature of evolution as my cerebral cortex.

Take Thirty Minutes of Light or Take a Vacation in the Sun

2007-12-18T09:41:00.000-05:00

Today's Science Section of the New York Times illuminates the mysteries of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), now admitted to the ranks of a true disorder, that evolved in many many life forms, floral and faunal, to respond to the tilting of the earth during its annual rotation. When it gets dark and cold, the body seeks to hibernate, leaves fall off trees, annuals die having long ago sent their seeds -- hardy survivors over the winter -- on for next year's rising. Why we have named it a disorder baffles me, since it would appear to be adaptive. But why quibble.

Some people get very depressed by SAD during the winter months, when days grow shorter and it gets colder. You can evaluate your own body's propensity to respond to short days/long nights by taking the tests, for free, at the Center for Environmental Therapeutics (not a crank site).

It turns out that the best cure for SAD is (drum roll) more light! Apparently, once you have identified the cycles of your receptivity to light, all you need to do is shine some thirty minutes of bright light, and voila, in a few short days, the depression lifts. Much faster results than from taking an antidepressant.

Or, you could take a vacation to a spot on the globe where the sun shines longer.

I couldn't test for my circadian rhythms because the CET site was overloaded. Try again later. Good luck.

Fish on Two World Views

2007-12-17T13:55:00.000-05:00

Stanley Fish, who I always thought of as a provocative sometimes infuriating (ly wrong) law professor, and who was also a dean of arts and letters at the University of Chicago, writes today of two quintessential New York experiences, one the endless refractions of character and choice, the other the endless fascination with contingent chaos.

What do I mean? His look at The Fugitive, a 60s TV series that breathlessly propelled its main character into the nooks and crannies of ordinary lives magnified through their stresses on choice, morality, mortality, a later movie (which sounded an awful lot like a low-budget Woody Allen sketch) of the same, but even more plotless spotlight on conflicts between inner worlds, and a new museum of contemporary art that looks like a crash pad after everyone sniffed cocaine and then went out to eat.

And, of course, I liked his admittedly retrograde view of the tensions of the soul as they soundlessly and furylessly confront their mute inner stresses brought on by brief, intense contact with others.

If you have time for a longish read.

From Ancient to Modern: the Meaning of a Clause

2007-12-17T09:12:00.000-05:00

The heart of the Second Amendment is to be found the the Latin Ablative Absolute.

As Adam Freedman writes in today's New York Times, forget about the commas and focus on the words: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Freedman points out that "the founders — most of whom were classically educated — would have recognized the first two clauses as stating the foundation for the conclusion. Thus the introductory clause "is [a] rhetorical device [known] as the “ablative absolute” of Latin prose. To take an example from Horace likely to have been familiar to them: “Caesar, being in command of the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence” (ego nec tumultum nec mori per vim metuam, tenente Caesare terras)" The main clause flows logically from the absolute clause: “Because Caesar commands the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence.”"

Freedman argues that "when the justices finish diagramming the Second Amendment, they should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the originalist arguments to the contrary."

We can look forward to a lot of hand wringing as we await the Supreme Court's decision on the DC hand gun ban that was struck down the by Court of Appeals of the DC Circuit. Freedman's view seem by far the most logical. I can't imaging the Founders arguing over the placement of commas. But more likely worrying about the right of the people to protect themselves through local, well regulated, militias and their need for arms.

(My only question about Freedman's argument is that the Latin places the premise after the conclusion. It really reads, in Latin, "I fear neither civil war nor death by violence, because Ceasar commands the earth." It is the English translation the places the causal premise first. So, I would translate the Second Amendment into modern English as: "People need to be able to own guns in order to protect themselves through well regulated militias.")

How Imperfect the Eye

2007-12-15T00:53:00.000-05:00

Many say that it is impossible for the eye could have evolved, because it's too complex and too perfect and elegant. Evolution could never do that (thousands of monkeys on typewriters couldn't write King Lear). Thus, some author, God, must have created it.

But, the eye isn't perfect. Not by a long shot. In A Fin is a Limb is a Wing, in the November 2006 National Geographic, Carl Zimmer points out the comic flaws. The light gathering cells point inward, not outward toward the light. And the optic nerve is in front of the retina -- getting in the way of seeing -- and right in the center of the eye, the nerve plunges through a hole to the brain. Creating the blind spot.

Which is why if you want to clearly see a star, you have to look to the side of it, not at it.

The Mobius and the Circle

2007-12-14T16:58:00.000-05:00

A thought for the day, or maybe longer:

"If I am who I am because I am who I am and you are who you are because you are who you are then I am who I am and you are who you are, but if I am who I am because you are who you are and you are who you are because I am who I am then I am not who I am and you are not who you are."

Found on a wonderful blog while hunting for some of those word combinations. It also turns out that the play, "Art" in which this is spoken, was written in French by Yasmina Reza, the same writer who followed Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France, for a year during his campaign and who will be publishing her observations and jottings next spring.

Comment on Co-Housing as a Great Retirement and End of Life Alternative

2007-12-09T13:42:00.000-05:00

Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach, Planning for Sustainable Communities, Berkeley, CA,

Posted an excellent comment on co-housing.

Thanks for including cohousing on your list of options for alternatives to Nursing Homes. A lot of the types of "experts" you list probably won't be aware of it, because it is a member-led ground-up community movement, only recently forming communities specific for a senior population, and the idea that "we can do it ourselves" is threatening to some of the institutions and even to professionals established in the "industry of aging".

You are fortunate in the DC area to have a large number of built (multigenerational) communities, and a strong regional association: Mid-Atlantic Cohousing (MAC) , which links to communities in the area, both built and forming; the group's leader, Ann Zabaldo, was my classmate in learning about Denmark's "Study Group 1" model curriculum that has led to the proliferation of Senior Cohousing there and is doing some talks in preparation for offering such a class in your area.

Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach, Planning for Sustainable Communities, Berkeley, CA
writing from the Positive Aging conference at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, FL, where there's a lot of excitement about alternatives including cohousing and the Beacon Hill Village model I've also studied.

The Joy of Writing

2007-12-08T23:33:00.000-05:00

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

By Wislawa Szymborska
From "No End of Fun", 1967
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

NURSING HOME SEARCH

2007-12-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

A number of newspapers recently reported on the list of the worst nursing homes in the country. Only one was listed in the District of Columbia, but the list should remind us to do a thorough evaluation of all options for housing for the elderly and disabled.

The first line of defense is to start early preparing for later disability, whether for yourself or a parent or family member. This includes developing a network of family and friends whom you can rely on. If you are a child, helping your parents think out ahead. If you are the parent, thinking about how to create or find a network of like-minded support family members and friends.

The second is to begin exploring a lot of options while you or your family member is still able to get around and make choices for themselves. There are many resources on the internet, including co-housing, elder co-housing or finding a vibrant community -- some empty nesters even return to city center to be near shopping, movies, lively restaurants and community centers -- to move into or live near.

The third, when one hasn't been able to do advance planning, is to research the assisted living and nursing home options where you or your family member wants to live. One of the best places to begin is with the ombudsman in your area who monitors these facilities. That person will have tremendous knowledge of the facilities and what level of care they provide, especially what quality of care.

Be prepared to look at a number of places. Also, identify what you or your family member is most interested in in terms of social interactions, setting, environment. Cost is only part of the picture. Expensive places can be sterile and cold; "poor" places can be rich with life and a caring staff. Ask questions of the staff and ask to talk to people who live there. Ask many questions about the things in life you care about. My mother would ask "how many people read the New York Times?"

Consult with experts who may know a lot about the various choices, such as geriatric care managers, the area agency on aging, and elder law attorneys, among others. Perhaps there is a local citizen commission on aging and city office on aging. When you visit, all nursing homes are required to have a book that records the record of performance. Read that.

The two most important things to do are 1. define what kind of a life you or your loved one wants to live and 2. do a lot of comparison shopping as early as possible before your choices are limited by disability or lack of money. And, check on the many resources in your community.

Personal Religion and Professional Performance

2007-12-06T12:34:00.000-05:00

Mitt Romney should have a simple answer, the same one for all of us whose professional requirements sometimes may conflict with a personal religious tenet, and that is:

* My religion is personal.
* All religions have the golden rule at the core: do unto others as you would have them do unto you (and variatons on that phrasing).
* That single value infuses my professional actions.
* If there is a conflict between my religious beliefs (and duties) and professional responsibilities and duties, actions in the professional sphere will (must)be guided by the reciprocal kindness rule and performed as required in the professional context.

Separation of church and state should inform the separation of professional actions from religious beliefs, observations and actions.

A deeply devout Christian who doesn't believe in the death penalty may still enforce it if that is the law. He or she can work to change the law, but must obey it until changed.

A pharmacist who doesn't believe in abortion must still sell morning after pills approved by the FDA to those qualified to buy them. The personal religious belief should not override professional actions and responsibilities.

A president of one faith may fully pracitice his or her faith, but must be religion-neutral in dealings with the world's people who hold diverse religions or no religion at all. Advancing a pinched view of religion serves neither religion nor public professional performance and leadership.