Fiat Lux

Two bits of good news to start off 2007:

1) Welcome to blogland, Leo. YAF,R?

2) Starbucks to drop trans fats from menu items. Starting Wednesday, all donuts, muffins and other breakfast stuff in half of Starbucks' US stores will be completely free of trans fats. The other half should go TF free by the end of the year. Yay!

By way of Paul the Spud, this bit of news is worth spreading around:

Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.

Yet the holy book at tomorrow's ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We've learned that the new congressman -- in a savvy bit of political symbolism -- will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

"He wanted to use a Koran that was special," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison's 5th District, was happy to help.

Jefferson's copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson's collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn't the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies -- the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.

Very nice touch, linking to Koran to the author of the Declaration of Independence. I like it.

Insomniac edition. This is an archive shot of Tommy, from May 2005.

Scott's surgery was yesterday & went fine. He is home from the hospital and resting more or less comfortably. He'll be home all week, and phone calls are welcome.

I suppose it would be ungrateful of me to complain much about the experience, since the staff at Kaiser were all very nice and helpful, but it seems to me that hospitals in general are sucky places for people to actually get better.

So much noise, light, activity -- and the practice of sticking multiple patients in the same room means that even when you're being left alone, someone is coming in to check on your neighbor. The first room Scott was put into was so small that there was barely room to squeeze a chair in next to the bed -- the only reason I could was that Scott was in the corner next to a sink, so I was able to wiggle a chair into that small alcove. His neighbor on the other side of the curtain didn't even have that much extra space. And the third guy in the room had a very noisy case of pneumonia; you could literally hear him snoring 30 feet down the hall. After a few hours of that, and some words with the head nurse, Scott was moved into a larger, quieter room, but even so he didn't get much sleep.

I know there's reasons why hospitals are set up that way -- and aside from trying to cram too many people into a too-small room, I'm sure there are good reasons for just about all of it. But it does seem to me that the whole calculus is off somehow, and is designed more to make things eaiser on the hospital staff than on the patient. Shouldn't allowing patients to experience restful, healing sleep be a part of the equation?

All complaining aside, I am grateful that he got good care and that he's back home where he belongs, sleeping in our bed with Tommy cuddled up next to him.

Only in America would the idea that corporate sponsorship of healthcare services be seen as a bold, innovative approach to help make healthcare more affordable. If our system weren't so screwed up in the first place, we wouldn't need to discuss whether Google, Yahoo, or Ask.com would be a better sponsor of test results.

Why the discussion? This piece by David Lazarus in the SF Chronicle today:

On Monday, [Gov. Arnold] Schwarzenegger took the wraps off a plan that would require all state residents to have medical insurance.

"Everyone in California must have health insurance," he said. "If you can't afford it, the state will help you buy it, but you must be insured."

Among other things, Schwarzenegger's plan would require employers with at least 10 workers to provide insurance or pay 4 percent of their payroll into a state fund that would buy insurance for such people.

It would also prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone because of their age or a pre-existing condition, and would force insurers to spend at least 85 percent of premiums on patient care (as opposed to administrative costs).

One catch, however, is that the governor's plan relies on an infusion of about $5.5 billion in additional federal money, which isn't a sure thing. It also raises a possibility that contributions from employers to a state insurance fund would lag annual increases in health care costs, thus creating a shortfall for lawmakers to deal with.

That's where corporate sponsorship would help.

Although, as the article points out, companies would have to position themselves carefully to make sure that their brand is nowhere near any part of the healthcare system that delivers bad news. So, expect lots of jockying for support for children's immunizations or well-baby initiatives, but not so much for things like chemotherapy or surgery. Because after all, providing corporate sponsorship for inexpensive immunizations will help fill in budget shortfalls so much faster than offering financial support for expensive things like chemotherapy.

Yes, that was sarcasm. Sorry. Haven't had my coffee yet and I'm feeling cranky.

Seriously, who thinks this stuff up?

And who buys it?

Starting off the morning, I noticed that Glenn Greenwald links to an NPR audiocast wherein longtime conservative Rod Dreher expereinces a crisis in his political faith.

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool's errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic. But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.

In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did. The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government's conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.

I turn 40 next month -- middle aged at last -- a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully. I did not expect Vietnam.

As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.

I had a heretical thought for a conservative - that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word - that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot - that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn't the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

Powerful stuff, and I feel for the guy. It is not easy to admit that you were wrong and question yourself after so many years of believing you were right.

The Mahablog, picking up on the theme, muses:

The problem is, as it is with so many of his fellow travelers, that his understanding of politics remained childish. He seems to have retained a child’s simple faith that Democrats (and liberals) are “bad” and Republicans (and conservatives) are “good,” so one does not have to think real hard to know who’s right or wrong.

Something made me wonder about the implied one-sidedness of her analyisis. I am the same age as Dreher. However, my earliest political memories are not of the 1979 hostage crisis, but rather of Watergate and Vietnam. If a 13-year-old can be imprinted by the vision of Ronald Reagan triumphing over Iran and Jimmy Carter, how much more imprinting must it be for an 8-year-old to be told that the President was a crook and that Daddy was helping to organize a rally againt Vietnam?

It's easy to score points off the opposition by accusing them of being immature, but frankly, I don't think this particular line of argument is a particularly solid one. Being politically liberal does not grant you immunity from the influences of your childhood.

A quiet night in chilly California.

Two happy kitties hanging out on the office couch. Even though Bear is no longer a kitten, Gimi is almost always very gentle with him.

Life is slowly getting back to normal chez lux, but I've managed to fall out of the blogging habit in the interim. I feel some lingering guilt for not posting daily, but I also don't feel that I have much to say right now.

If past experience is a reliable guide, my blogging frequency tends to go up almost immediately after I make a post like this. We'll see what happens.

Over at No More Mister Nice Blog this week, Steve's been giving full coverage to recent nasty rumors about Barak Obama that have been circulating through the Internet and various right-wing news outlets. Based on information about where Obama went to school when he was 6 years old, the intent is to plant the seeds of fear in people and thereby scuttle his potential presidential run in 2008. To borrow a techie phrase, it's classic FUD.

I find the whole thing despicable, not least because the real fear-mongering part of this crap is based on the concept that all Muslims are somehow part of a vast, evil, and powerful worldwide conspiracy. Replace the word "Jew" for "Muslim" and this is the exact same horrible lie that's been lobbed against the Jews for centuries.

The sad part is, it was a highly effective lie. People still believe it today. And at least some of them will believe this too.

Well, neither of the teams I was rooting for won their respective playoff matches today, so it looks like I'll be watching the Super Bowl for the commericals this year.

To console any other depressed Patriots and Saints fans, here's a cute video of a kitten and a Mac:

As Deborah said, it's really simple.

It's my body.

I get to decide what happens to it.

End of story.

Click through to Flickr for the full-sized screenshot.

I was poking through my Sitemeter results tonight and came across yet another person who found my blog via a Google keyword search that included the words "evil" and "Jews". As I've mentioned before, this happens with depressing frequency; several times a week is the normal rate.

What was a little unusual tonight is that the person who did the search was doing it from the domain allentowndiocese.org, which just happens to belong to the Catholic diocese of Allentown, PA.

Nice.

Three lazy kitties, all in a row....

That's either insane ... or brilliant.

That cup of coffee just not getting it done anymore? How about a Buzz Donut or a Buzzed Bagel? That's what Doctor Robert Bohannon, a Durham, North Carolina, molecular scientist, has come up with. Bohannon says he's developed a way to add caffeine to baked goods, without the bitter taste of caffeine. Each piece of pastry is the equivalent of about two cups of coffee.

Thinking about it, I'm leaning towards insane. But I've been wrong before.

I ran across the "Ask a Ninja" podcasts on iTunes sometime this past fall and thought it was a hoot. In fact, I showed one of the videos to my teammates in my Strategic Management class, and it was such a hit we took 'Ninja' as our theme for the final paper and presentation for the class. I an not sure our instructor liked it as much as we did, but at least we had fun putting the thing together.

If you're curious, this was the �NINJA� strategy we developed:

Narrative � Is our strategy compelling and easy to communicate? If not, something is wrong.
Innovative � How will we keep being better than our competition?
Nimble � Anticipate and embrace change. Be where the competition is not.
Journey � The journey will not be the same at each point along the way.
Assess � Always be asking: How does this help reach our strategic objectives?

At any rate, it was nice to see that the AaN team is getting a nice payday for their efforts:

The folks at Ask a Ninja are pretty excited. I spoke with Kent Nichols today and he says that he and Douglas Sarine, the other madmen behind the year-old video blog, just signed a deal with blog network Federated Media that guarantees them a contract for sales in the low seven figures this year.

Basically, the two have agreed to work together in wooing advertisers. In exchange for the right to sell ads for Ask a Ninja, FM promised the video blog it would bring in a certain amount of revenue. Whatever FM sells, the two split, with Ask a Ninja taking the majority, Kent says. And if FM doesn't sell that much? Well, Ask a Ninja then simply can walk out of the contract.

My favorite is still the "Pop!Tech" episode.

The 'silly season,' as Atrios likes to call it, has begun in earnest. One of my favorite bloggers, Shakespeare's Sister, has been hired by the John Edwards campaign, and she's not the only one. Undoubtedly other campaigns will start lining up to recruit other bloggers in the near future.

Although I'm pleased that Shakes got the gig, my happiness is not unalloyed with a little sadness. Although things are very nice and collegial around the left blogosphere so far, a day will inevitably come when the picture won't be so pretty.

My crystal ball is too cloudy for me to see who will be involved or exactly what will cause it, but the time will come when loud accusations of backstabbing, lying, and bad faith will start to fly. People will choose sides, write long, passionate denouncements, pick fights in comment threads, bring out the sock puppets, and rearrange their blogrolls, all because they're backing different candidates.

It will happen, and it will suck. Mark my words. I hope I'm proved wrong, but somehow, I doubt I will be.

As for me, it is way, way too early in the race for me to pick a horse. For one thing, so far, there doesn't seem to be any significant difference between the various Democratic candidates in the field. Six months from now, maybe, the distinctions will be more obvious and I will be ready to make a choice.