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Today I reach the age of Jesus.
By then, he'd already walked on water and cured lepers. For most of us, that would have made for a pretty stellar C.V. ... but he was just getting warmed up.
Me? Not only have I not matched him, but I've yet to pull off either trick.
Lots of catching up to do. In the meantime, maybe I should stop having my portraits painted to include halos and a heavenly light emanating from my person. At least for a little while.
It Kind Of Makes Me Hate Baseball
One of the few players willing to speak honestly about his cheating. (image via deadspin)
C and I have a running dialogue regarding the terrible behavior of everyone involved in MLB's steroids scandal -- owners, players, press, agents (I know, redundant) -- everyone.
These guys are liars and cheats. They've made millions while ticket prices have skyrocketed and municipalities have raised taxes to pay for new ballparks, and even though they've been caught red-handed, all but a couple have refused to admit any wrongdoing. Who'd have thought that only Jose Canseco would be honest and forthright with the public? Disgusting.
Yet it's not a problem that is limited to baseball. Just look at the real estate industry over the last decade. Or at Wall Street. Or at how W and company sold the invasion of Iraq and then defended his decision. Or at how Republicans in Congress spent money they didn't have while they were in power, but now that they're out of power claim that spending is always morally wrong and bad for America. Changing the story, being disingenuous, refusing to take the blame -- all persist and are symptoms of a deeper social problem, a disease that is causing our society to rot from leaf to root.
I guess baseball truly is America's sport.
As always, The Sports Guy kills it in his most recent mailbag...
We always talk about the tangible effects of the Steroids Era (it screwed up the numbers historically, compromised the competitiveness of the games and tainted some of the nicer memories we had as fans from 1990 to 2007), but the underrated effect was the realization that some of our greatest players were scumbags. Should we have realized this after the Pete Rose scandal? Yeah, probably. But look at some of the greats from the past 50 years. Rose lives in Vegas and spends his days betting on horse racing. Barry Bonds seemed like a truly awful person even before he let his buddy rot in jail for him. Clemens was willing to sell everyone out, even his wife and friends, to try to keep his name clean. Mark McGwire doesn't have the decency to admit that he cheated. Neither does Sammy Sosa or Raffy Palmeiro. A-Rod lied in 2008 on national TV, then lied about the lie. There are 103 names from that 2003 random drug-test list still out there, only none have the balls to come out and say, "You know what? I'm probably on there and I'm ashamed of what I did." And when you think about how many All-Stars cheated over the past two decades -- is the number 70 percent? 75 percent? 80 percent? -- the unwillingness of the commissioner's office and the player's union to apologize publicly or admit any culpability whatsoever is really staggering. Why is Bud Selig still the commissioner? THIS HAPPENED ON HIS WATCH! Why is Gene Orza still running the players' union? THIS HAPPENED ON HIS WATCH! Everyone's collective "apology" this winter seemed to be, "Let's move on, it's spring training, the World Baseball Classic will be fun, fantasy baseball is starting up ... no use crying over spilled milk."
Ask yourself this: Do you feel like the players, union leaders, owners and executives even feel bad about what happened? Because I don't feel like they do. And it makes me kind of hate baseball. I will still follow it, and I will still love the Red Sox, and I will still do the League of Dorks ... but at the same time, when the sport flounders because of the economy this summer, part of me will be thinking, "What goes around comes around."
Mindful Meditation
Entrance Walkway, Koto-in Zen Temple, Kyoto.
I'm not a Buddhist. I don't believe in the religion's teachings, requirements or stories. That said, I agree with many of the central precepts of Buddhism; my experience sees truth in some of the teaching, and I find the practice of Buddhism to be quite useful as I work to develop as an individual.
My first interaction with the religion came, as I'd guess is true for many Westerners, when my friend Matt suggested I read Siddartha by Herman Hesse. A freshman in college, I was supposed to be studying chemistry. Instead, I repeatedly hit Matt up for book suggestions.
Matt, a math genius who, despite taking near-graduate level mathematics courses as a freshman, instead chose to be an English Lit major, offered winner after winner: Brave New World, 1984, A Confederacy of Dunces, Slaughterhouse Five, and a full slate of books that I'd skipped or skimmed when they'd been assigned in high school. So Siddartha was Matt's doing. And I'm forever grateful.
What struck me most about Siddartha was how well it explained aspects of my own personality that I'd always felt made me different, made me foreign from other people. Siddartha's openness, his willingness to see the world from other points of view, his objective detachment from others and his refusal to make quick or permanent judgments reminded me of myself. Naturally I, the confused, ungrounded, more than a little narcissistic 18 year-old quickly focused my attention.
Today daily, directed meditation is being found to have numerous positive benefits, including improved memory and recall, reduced pain levels, extreme body control and treatment for depression:
Last week, psychologists from the University of Exeter published a study into "mindfulness-based cognitive therapy" (MBCT), finding it to be better than drugs or counselling for depression. Four months after starting, three quarters of the patients felt well enough to stop taking antidepressants.
MBCT marries Eastern meditation with Western cognitive therapy. Patients are taught the simple technique over eight sessions and then practise it at home for 30 minutes a day. Professor Willem Kuyken, whose team at the Mood Disorders Centre of the University of Exeter carried out the research, says: "Anti-depressants are widely used by people who suffer from depression and that's because they tend to work. While they're very effective in helping reduce the symptoms of depression, when people come off them they are particularly vulnerable to relapse. For many people, MBCT seems to prevent that relapse. It could be an alternative to long-term antidepressant medication."
But back in 1998, all of these potential benefits were unknown to me. Even had I known about them, the book's repeated focus on humility, personal experience, experimentation and mindfulness would have been the primary draw, even though such focus pointed out just how much work lay ahead.
Despite Siddartha's profound impact, I didn't think much about Buddhism until after college, when I stumbled across a copy of Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.
Wow. What a read. Techniques described and explanations given allowing for productive meditation, all succinct and clear. Philosophy and worldview shared without the use of spiritual tales or any need for preaching. Every sentence emenating calm and wisdom. Less than 200 pages, but so powerful.
I began to practice sitting meditation and active zen awareness. Quickly, I found that I stunk (yes, all practice is good practice, but still...) and was reminded that I had a lot to learn. So challenging was the exercise that I usually gave up in a matter of minutes. I lacked patience.
That was eight years ago, and between then and now I've gone through periods where I've mediatated often, and periods, usually several months, without any practice. The lessons taught by Shunryu Suzuki, however, have kept me calm and allowed me to work through extreme, difficult personal challenges. And while I should practice more at home on my own, I now accept my own limits and supplement my lack of discipline with occassional trips to meditate with others.
So thanks to Matt and Herman Hesse and Shunryu Suzuki. My life, and hopefully the lives of those around me, are better because you took the time to share what you'd learned. Time for me to sit and to breathe.
[Image by One Man's Perspective, used under a Creative Commons license.]
Krugman Wins The Nobel Prize For Economics
Professor Krugman (photo via the NY Times)
One of our great economists won the Nobel Prize today. He won for his work...
[O]n international trade and economic geography. In particular, the prize committee lauded his work for "having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity."
He has developed models that explain observed patterns of trade between countries, as well as what goods are produced where and why. Traditional trade theory assumes that countries are different and will exchange different kinds of goods; Mr. Krugman’s theories have explained why worldwide trade is dominated by a few countries that are similar to each other, and why some countries might import the same kinds of goods that it exports.
I began reading Krugman's op-eds in the NY Times in 2001, and have found great relief in his clear, focused, in-depth analysis of the Bush tax cuts, the costs of Bush's proposed social security privatization, the effects of different proposed national health care plans and the debunking of the Bush administration's national economic health numbers, doctored and manipulated to make everything seem rosy.
The one topic Krugman nailed before I heard it mentioned anywhere else, (much to his own dismay, I'm sure), is the economic crisis currently rippling across the globe. Krugman criticized Greenspan early and often for his complicity in the Bush tax cuts, and then again in his decision to keep interest rates too low for too long. He understood that the housing bubble was real, and that most of the value inflating the economy was junk. Professor Krugman saw this coming and shouted that the heavens were falling, but no one listened.
Many of his detractors use words like shrill, pessimist, anti-American when they describe Krugman and his writing. Yet he has been such a beacon of hope in the darkness for so many of us over the last eight years that, after receiving a number of requests to do so, Krugman also started writing political opinion pieces in the Times. He also started a blog to discuss timely matters or those not worthy of an entire column. (How he has the time to do all of this writing on top of his teaching is a mystery.)
Still, I always prefer when the Professor sticks to economics. He has a gift for cutting to the core of economic issues and for explaining what is really going on, pointing to the crucial indicators and showing his readers what to look for and what to expect in the future.
As we've seen from the repeated disasters of the Bush administration, one of the most important factors a citizen should consider when casting their vote is to look at who that candidate would appoint to key positions in the executive branch. I expect that if Obama is elected President next month, Krugman will be named as one of his economic advisors, and today's award suggests that the world would welcome this nomination. Well done Professor! Thank you, and keep up the great work.
(Also see: The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive)
Obama Will Lower Taxes; $250K = Rich
Tax plans drawn to scale.
I've gotten into a few debates recently with friends who oppose Obama's tax plan for two main reasons: (1) they feel that raising the capital gains tax will hurt the national economy by discouraging investment and removing liquidity from the market; and (2) taxes are going up for those households making over $250,000 per year. That's not much money, they argue -- a good chunk of my friends have advanced degrees (with associated debt) and live in S.F. and NYC. If they want to even dream of owning their own apartment in a decent neighborhood, making that kind of money is a necessity.
If you agree with point number two, first take a look at the chart above, which shows how the tax plans of McCain and Obama will directly impact different segments of the population.*
Clear? Good. Welcome back. Next, Daniel Gross takes apart the second argument in his Slate article "The deluded Obama critics who think $250,000 is a middle-class salary."
Barack Obama's tax plan, . . . promises to improve the nation's fiscal standing by scaling back tax cuts for people making more than $250,000. Since then, the business pundit class has been griping that people who make $250,000 a year aren't really wealthy, especially if they live in and around New York; San Francisco; or Washington, D.C. . . . On Wednesday afternoon, CNBC's unscientific online poll found that (surprise!) only 35 percent of respondents believed an income of $250,000 qualified a household for elite rich status.
I have two pieces of bad news for the over-$250,000 crowd. First, the reversal of some of the temporary Bush tax cuts is probably inevitable, given the Republican fiscal clown show of the past eight years. Second, I regret to inform you that you are indeed rich. . . . [I]ncome data can surely tell us something. And they tell us that $250,000 puts you in pretty fancy company. The Census Bureau earlier this week reported that the median household income was $50,223 in 2007—up slightly from the last year but still below the 1999 peak. So a household that earned $250,000 made five times the median. In fact, as this chart shows, only 2.245 million U.S. households, the top 1.9 percent, had income greater than $250,000 in 2007. (About 20 percent of households make more than $100,000.)
In dealing with aggregate nationwide numbers, we should of course take account of the significant differences in the cost of living from state to state. . . . But even in wealthy states, $250,000 ain't bad—it's nearly four times the median income in wealthy states like Maryland and Connecticut. And even if you look at the wealthiest metropolitan areas—Washington, D.C. ($83,200); San Francisco ($73,851); Boston ($68,142); and New York ($61,554)—$250,000 a year dwarfs the median income.
Still feel that $250,000 isn't much money? Let me know why -- I'd love to discuss.
[Update -- According to this 1997 paper put out by the Fed [pdf], 1% of the population owns 82% of the stock market.]
* Looking at tax policy alone can be misleading, especially because of the radical differences in proposed health care plans.
Trio of health care articles
(1) Hospitals Look to Nuclear Tool to Fight Cancer
There is a new nuclear arms race under way — in hospitals. In Loma Linda Medical Center's fixed beam treatment room, where brain and eye tumors are treated, a machine is readied for a patient. The patient's head will be immobilized by the mask at left.Medical centers are rushing to turn nuclear particle accelerators, formerly used only for exotic physics research, into the latest weapons against cancer.Some experts say the push reflects the best and worst of the nation’s market-based health care system, which tends to pursue the latest, most expensive treatments — without much evidence of improved health — even as soaring costs add to the nation’s economic burden.
(2) Finding Alzheimer’s Before a Mind Fails
Ms. Kerley is part of an ambitious new scientific effort to find ways to detect Alzheimer’s disease at the earliest possible moment. Although the disease may seem like a calamity that strikes suddenly in old age, scientists now think it begins long before the mind fails. “Alzheimer’s disease may be a chronic condition in which changes begin in midlife or even earlier,” said Dr. John C. Morris, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, where Ms. Kerley volunteers for studies.But currently, the diagnosis is not made until symptoms develop, and by then it may already be too late to rescue the brain. Drugs now in use temporarily ease symptoms for some, but cannot halt the underlying disease.Many scientists believe the best hope of progress, maybe the only hope, lies in detecting the disease early and devising treatments to stop it before brain damage becomes extensive. Better still, they would like to intervene even sooner, by identifying risk factors and treating people preventively — the same strategy that has markedly lowered death rates from heart disease, stroke and some cancers.So far, Alzheimer’s has been unyielding. But research now under way may start answering major questions about when the disease begins and how best to fight it.
(3) Medicare Private Plan Abuses
Heavily subsidized private Medicare plans are continuing to prey on elderly Americans despite state, federal and industry efforts to stop them. It is yet another reason to rein in these operations by eliminating their unjustified subsidies. These plans are a financial drag on Medicare as the government pays them about 12 percent more, on average, than the same services would cost in the traditional Medicare program. All too often, the private plans are an ethical horror as well. . . .[U]nscrupulous insurance agents have tricked people into dropping traditional Medicare coverage and enrolling instead in private plans that do not meet their needs. Agents typically receive $350 to $600 for each patient they enroll in a private plan. Some try to boost sales by pretending to be Medicare officials, forging signatures or hiding the fact that a patient’s doctor will not be part of the private plan. Others barge into homes and use high-pressure tactics to push poor, semiliterate people into a private plan.
Minor cut-up
Had surgery on my left knee yesterday. A scope and cleanup - I think it went pretty well. Some observations...
- The procedure was done at the Presidio Surgical Center (PSC). Despite the name, it isn't located in the Presidio. It's also nowhere near the hospital where my doctor's office is located. Tricky, no?
- The PSC has a funny setup to minimize liability. They only provide equipment, space and support - all of the doctors are independent contractors otherwise unaffiliated with the Center. Because of this formal separation, even though it feels like a standard hospital to the patient, if something goes wrong during surgery, the patient will have no claim against the PSC (which has a lot of assets) and will only be able to sue the doctor. This is true even though the doctors can be part owners of the PSC... very sneaky.
- The ceiling panels at the PSC are the modular type, common in hospitals. After every five or so panels, however, the standard grey panel is replaced by a backlit photo of a blue sky with white, fluffy clouds. Amazing what a difference a small change like this can make. These few panels made the otherwise standard hospital space feel much more open and relaxed. Imagine what will happen when thin LCDs get so cheap that they can be used instead - the Hogwart's dining room roof will be a reality!
- Didn't need much Vicodin - the good doctor did an excellent job - which is a good thing. Turns out that Vicodin knocks me the hell out. Instantly. An off switch in pill form. Good to know.
- I had to initial a form stating that if my insurance company didn't cover the cost of crutches I would be responsible for payment. For $30 crutches after a $4,000 procedure. Some insurance policies will cover the surgery but not the crutches. Yeah. Our health care system is in great shape.
- My knee wrap looks like something Barry Bonds would wear if he were a mummy. Much better than a cast though, so no complaints from me.