Consider This

The Problem With Politics

2011-02-22T22:20:00.000-05:00

I've learned two functional definitions of politics in my lifetime, both of which I think are true. The first is that politics is the art of the possible. The second is that politics is when you say something not because it is what you truly think or believe, but based on how you think others will react. I have reflected on those definitions for the past few days thinking about three very different topics, all of which illustrate to my mind the problem with politics. The contexts range from the development of revolution throughout the Islamic world directed not against the West, but by the people against their ruling regimes to the challenges facing the school board in my community over student assignment and what kind of schools we hope to have. In between, I’ve been thinking about the flash point of conflict in Wisconsin over public sector employee unions.

I never would have predicted the unrest in Egypt, Libya, and other countries in the Africa-Mediterranean-Arab peninsula region. In some ways, that simply shows how little we here in America really know about living conditions in that part of the world for ordinary citizens. It is impossible to watch from here the protests and conflict there right now without feeling a great deal of sympathy for the people who are protesting, even as we also recognize the danger that any unruly mob can pose for people who are in it or for those who are swept up while watching and trying to cover the events unfolding. Politically, it is also impossible to ignore that the common people feel oppressed by both our official political foes as well as some of our long-time political allies. Our political foundation here is the concept that everyone should have a say in their own government. Yet pragmatically we have many times allied ourselves with strong men and dictators in various places when doing so served some other national interest. Popular democracy is a messy process, and it is often unpredictable what policies will win popular support. In the end though, I believe we have to support everyone’s basic right to have a say in how they will be governed. Add to this a young population with 30% unemployment, it’s easier to understand what is going on.

In Wisconsin, I’m not sure who ultimately wins this fight. Governor Walker is taking advantage of a budget crisis to pursue a policy initiative that isn’t really about solving the budget crisis. It’s about breaking the power of unions, particularly public sector employee unions. Unions once were a powerful political force in our country, but over time fewer and fewer workers belong to labor unions. Republicans in particular would like to see all unions “busted” once and for all. It will be interesting to see how this will all play out. The Governor may or may not win this battle, but who will win the war also remains to be seen. As a Southerner, I grew up all my life in states where the rules Governor Walker is supporting are basically the way things are and have always been, in my part of the country. People here can choose whether or not to join a labor union, and many public sector employees are not organized or lack specific collective bargaining rights. Of course, public sector employees here are also completely at the mercy of the legislature in terms of pay rates, benefits, basic working conditions, etc. too. Which ever way this conflict goes, what is clearly being lost in the confrontation is that a basic tenet of the social contract has completely unraveled in this country. For more than 20 years now, no political constituency has remained committed to the idea that we have to organize our society in a way that promotes job and wage growth for everyone. Once upon a time, that was an ideal that people did share. Not any more. Forgetting that jobs and wages and a good quality of life is important for all our citizens is something that politicians on all sides do at their peril. Witness what happened in the Middle East.

Closer to home, the Wake County Public School System remains locked in a bitter confrontation over how to organize our schools and what priorities will be followed when determining school assignments. Opposing sides champion the old approach which was basically a pro-busing, maximum diversity policy that was first developed when Raleigh City and Wake County schools were merged in the 1970s vs. an approach that focuses on parental preference, neighborhood schools and family stability. Of course, back in the 1970s Raleigh was the big dog in the county and the small towns around it had limited political clout. Over time, the balance of political power, population growth, and wealth has evened out as most of the development in the past 30 years brought new people from all over the world to the outlying communities. A compromise has been developed, which if implemented could provide a path forward, but no side has fully embraced the new choice-based plan that was proposed by an outside coalition trying to bridge the divide. It's still not clear what is really possible here, because two sides remain polarized and the environment stays toxic.

The problem with politics that all these scenarios pose, for me, is that in all these conflicts what we essentially see is people in power who are unwilling to change as the communities they ostensibly serve change. Politics is not static. Priorities change. People’s aspirations, challenges, hopes and dreams all change over time. The best politicians can read these changes and are willing to be flexible, to negotiate and compromise, and ultimately, to give power over to someone else if that is the will of the people. The worst politicians believe that power is theirs once earned, and become inflexible and focused only on staying in office or power or control. Regardless of the system, ultimately the people will have their say. The only real question is how much conflict and chaos any group of people is willing to endure, or how much abuse a group or leader in power is willing to inflict. My only hope for all these situations is that people with cooler heads will ultimately prevail.

Wow

2011-02-18T00:17:00.000-05:00

The Sea Shepherds seem to have won, this year. This is an excerpt from their news feed today; the entire story can be read by following the link below. Congratulations to Captain Watson and all the crews of the three ships. Safe journeys home to all.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

VSO Day

Victory in the Southern Ocean Day for the Whales

It’s official – the Japanese whaling fleet has called it quits in the Southern Ocean, at least for this season. And if they return next season, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society will be ready to resume their efforts to obstruct and disable illegal Japanese whaling operations.

“The Nisshin Maru made a significant course change immediately after the Japanese government made it official that the whaling fleet has been recalled,” said Captain Alex Cornelissen from the Bob Barker. “She looks like she’s going home!”

The Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker has been tailing the Japanese Nisshin Maru factory ship since February 9th making it impossible for the whalers to continue their illegal whaling operations.

“I have a crew of 88 very happy people from 23 different nations including Japan and they are absolutely thrilled that the whalers are heading home and the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary is now indeed a real sanctuary,” said Captain Paul Watson.

http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/news-110217-1.html

Follow The Water

2010-12-08T20:05:00.000-05:00

This morning I woke up and discovered a thin sheet of ice covering the sidewalk at the base of my driveway, thanks to a blast of Arctic air that wandered down from Canada to hang out in North Carolina the other day. To my Canadian friends I can only say, thanks for thinking of us, but please don’t do it too often. Homo sapiens evolved in East Africa sometime 150,000-200,000 years ago, where there was no need to be biologically prepared for Arctic air masses. I’m not a huge fan. But, I digress. This thin ice sheet for me was a minor nuisance, but it did get me started thinking about water in all its many forms.

In the search for extra-terrestrial life, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) has long had a “follow the water” approach. The basic idea is that water is an essential prerequisite for life, or at least life that would be reasonably possible and hopefully comfortable for beings like those of us who inhabit this planet. So, if we want to find life, we need to find liquid water, the conventional wisdoms holds. The logic makes sense, but recently the news reminds us that the existence of water is not all that is necessary to support life, or at least healthy life, even for us living here on planet Earth.

If you have followed the news at all, you should have noticed that the country of Haiti is gripped by an enormous and deadly epidemic of cholera right now. As of today, more than 2,000 people have died and more than 90,000 cases have been reported.

(CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm59d1208a1.htm?s_cid=mm59d1208a1_w.)

Given what I know about disease surveillance even in highly developed countries, the number of reported cases is likely to be fewer than the number of cases that have actually occurred. The same is true of deaths.

The disease Cholera is a devastating diarrheal illness caused by infection with the bacteria Vibrio cholerae serogroups O1 and O139. These bacteria enter the body primarily when people ingest drinking water contaminated with fecal matter, or eat fruits or vegetables that were irrigated with contaminated water. Occasionally eating fish or shellfish harvested from fecally contaminated water sources also transmits infection. The bacteria produce a powerful enterotoxin that triggers profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting in symptomatic patients. Dehydration can often result leading to death within just a few hours. And, it is also possible for people to be infected – and infectious—without having any symptoms.

Epidemic Cholera, and another waterborne disease, Typhoid Fever, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries killed thousands of people in cities all over the world. Today, however, most of the people in the world rarely encounter these diseases. Why? Because of improved water sources and sanitation, in the form of waste water treatment facilities and chlorinated water supplies. Today as an infectious disease epidemiologist if I receive a report of a patient with either Typhoid Fever or Cholera, my first questions relate to travel history: where in the world has this person been? Transmission of these illnesses in the United States is exceedingly rare now.

Unfortunately, infection with these diseases is not rare in countries without safe drinking water and sanitary waste water treatment facilities. Haiti was a nightmare location for this bacteria to emerge. According to water.org, before the earthquake, one half the people in Haiti did not have access to safe drinking water, and only 20% had access to sanitary toilets. (http://water.org/projects/haiti-2/). These problems are not new; when I was in Haiti in 1984-1985, non-profit organizations were working then to improve access to safe water by digging community wells and devising other projects. The needs there were massive before the earthquake, and with tent cities and the infrastructure that was destroyed recently in the January 2010 earthquake the situation was made worse.

Water is precious, and even if we in the industrialized world take our safe water supplies and sanitation systems for granted, we have good reasons to care about ensuring access to these same sources for everyone in the world. 70% of the world’s fresh water consumption is for irrigating crops. If raw sewage spills into streams, lakes and ponds, then fecally contaminated water will be used to irrigate crops. Agricultural exports are often a major source of income for developing countries.

In this season of giving I know we are all bombarded with requests for us to donate or give a gift to many worthwhile charities. I also know that diarrheal diseases seldom rank very highly as anyone’s favorite concern. Diarrheal diseases kill more children every year than AIDS, measles and malaria combined. Simple, proven technologies exist to improve water supplies and treat sewage that can often be implemented for a very modest investment. Please consider researching organizations that are addressing these problems and make a donation. After all, even NASA knows that if you want to support life, you have to follow the water.

Giving Thanks

2010-11-25T15:37:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving 2010. We have officially moved in to the late Fall/early Winter holiday season, and it is time to start wrapping this year up. It's a great time of the year, for most of us, and I hope that you and yours all get to enjoy the season together.

Traditionally this is the time when we start thinking about all that we should feel thankful or grateful for. I know that isn't the best english syntax and grammar, but you know what I mean. Of course I am thankful for my friends and my daughter. I'm thankful for the three jobs I have in this season when so many (including several people I know and care about) don't even have one. I'm thankful for my health, even as I remember some I know who don't have the health they would like to have.

I wish I had a longer list of things for which I was ready to give thanks, but this year has been tough for a lot of people. I have other lists of things I'm not so glad about. I am decidedly not thankful for the sad, sorry state of politics in the United States right now. I am not grateful for the weakness in the economy, the numbers of people who don't have jobs, or the throngs of people who lost their homes to foreclosure. I'm not happy about our wars and all the men and women we have deployed in harm's way right now. I'm not happy about the numbers of people all over the world who really hate the United States. I'm not pleased with the state of the environment, our national energy policy, Japanese whale hunting, the decline of science education in America or the disappointing sorry state of the music industry. Ditto for the silly BCS system in college football, but that is a truly minor thing in the grand scheme of things.

So, I guess the main thing I'm feeling thankful for this year right now is that 2010 is almost over. We still have a ways to go, and I don't know what 2011 will bring. It has been a tough year but we have mostly made it through. Eventually we are going to turn things around, with or without help from our politicians. I do believe that.

Being Afraid

2010-11-15T23:22:00.000-05:00

By now I would be surprised if you haven't seen the viral video of the software engineer from California who refused the advanced image technology full body scan and the "enhanced patdown" procedure, and subsequent altercation with the TSA the other day. I have thought several times that I wanted to write a blog post about these machines and the state of things we have all allowed to happen since 9/11, and until now every time I thought about doing it, I talked myself out of it. Because I was afraid. Afraid that if I did say anything about the TSA or the culture of fear we have all accepted in the past decade, with all of the corresponding erosion of privacy, dignity, human rights, or other thoughts I have about these things, I would find myself on some watch list as a trouble maker, and experience extra layers of screening or harassment when I have to fly again. In other words, because I've started to fear my own government.

Tyner, the software engineer, is becoming a folk hero for saying out loud what a lot of us have been thinking for quite some time. The TSA is out of control, and someone needs to reign them in. They are going too far, and these new screening procedures are not proven to be safe, although they are certain to be invasive. Several concerned scientists have actually written letters to the White House asking for slower deployment of this technology and against its routine use. David Brenner, the Director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University has been quoted saying "If you think of the entire population of, shall we say a billion people per year going through these scanners, it's very likely that some number of these will develop cancer from the radiation from these scanners." The largest risk would be for skin cancers first, and then increased risk of breast cancer for women who are already at increased risk. And, of course people who are frequently exposed such as pilots and flight attendants or anyone else who would be scanned daily would be at the highest level of increased risk. Other susceptible populations would include children, the elderly, and it would be reasonable to assume that pregnant women might have legitimate reason to be concerned about their unborn and developing children.

No problem, you are not required to submit to a full body scan. The alternative would be the new and improved enhanced TSA patdown. CNN recently reported the experience of one of their female employees who received this procedure. Rosemary Fitzpatrick describes it in detail in the story on their website (link below). She reports a female screener ran her hands around her breasts, over her stomach, buttocks, inner thighs and touched her crotch. "I felt helpless, I felt violated, and I felt humiliated." The experience reduced her to tears according to the CNN report.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/10/28/airline.security.pat.down/index.html?iref=allsearch

On TSAs own website, they tout several polls that they say proves the vast majority of the public supports these new machines and procedures. Of course, the polls were conducted last year and in the spring of 2010 before anyone had the actual experience. But even looking at the polling data they report, only an average of 78% of people were supportive. More than 1/5 of those surveyed were opposed, and now that the holiday travel season is upon us it would be interesting to see polls after the fact, once millions of Americans have been groped by TSA and imaged in all their natural glory for strangers to view.

TSA also defends the safety of the scanners, pointing out helpfully that FDA has assured them the machines are safe. Pardon me for pointing out that this is the same agency that approved Avandia (43% increased risk of heart attacks), Vioxx, Baycol (increased risk of complications and side effects), Rezulin (liver problems) and Meridia (increased risk of heart disease) just to name a few. In the March 27 2008 Wall Street Journal the paper pointed out that when the FDA received pressure from application expiration deadlines, they were 4 times more likely to approve risky drugs than when they were not under specific pressure to give something a green light. I cannot help but wonder how much pressure TSA officials put the FDA under to approve advanced imaging technology scanners. I have absolutely no proof, but I think the question is legitimate to ask.

Of course, all of these concerns are dismissed as irrelevant by the security officials. They have laser focus on preventing another plane bombing or terror attack using airliners and they feel justified in all their actions and decisions. These latest developments are their direct response to the attempted underwear bomber last Christmas. I know that. I know and I do appreciate their dedication and the lengths to which they are willing to go in pursuit of their mission objectives. I just feel that there is something seriously wrong when I and many others have greater anxiety and fear of our own security forces and procedures than I do about the terrorists. There is something lost when the society itself that they think they are protecting is sacrificed in the pursuit of that protection. And I for one think that line has now been crossed. I only hope that they prove me wrong now that I have said it out loud.

Remembering

2010-11-11T14:01:00.000-05:00

Webster tells us that the word “remember” means to call to mind, to hold in the memory, to recall something. All of that of course is true, but lately I’ve been remembering things from long ago that the word just doesn’t capture. Have you ever had the experience of leaving some activity or interest aside or behind, and coming back to it years later, only to re-discover it with power in the act of remembering? It’s a hard experience to exactly describe but that is what I have been feeling lately.

When I was an undergrad at Baylor University in the mid 1980s, trying to figure out what to do with my life, I remember a visiting philosophy professor who told me not to worry about it too much. He went on to explain that the average person will have at least five careers over their lifetime, and his point to me was that it really doesn’t matter all that much what you start out doing. He advised me to pick a direction and head off on that course trusting that life experiences along the way would unfold in unpredictable ways, and that the key to making sense of it all was simply to be well adjusted, well rounded and open to the possibilities that the future held.

Of course, as a college sophomore, embracing that much ambiguity with so much aplomb was no easy task. I also tended to think this fellow was off his rocker if he expected me (and everyone else) to change direction so many times as to have, on average, five different careers before calling it a day. Looking back now and recalling that conversation with 26 years of experience under my belt, his advice makes much more sense. I wonder what else I could have learned back then if I had taken the time to listen better than I did.

All of which brings me to the specific things I’ve been busy recalling lately. Although I am a public health epidemiologist now and have spent 11 years doing field epidemiology, I am actually on my 5^th career. In addition to the one I have now I have been an academician, a private sector non-profit executive running a company, a health educator, and a chaplain in my past lives. And in my first career I was a chaplain and college minister, during and just after I earned my Master of Divinity from Duke University Divinity School in December 1989.

During my brief career as a minister (1989-1991) and all during my college and Divinity School training, the main religious and theological issues I wrestled with were how to make ancient religious texts and teachings relevant to those of us living in the modern world. After two years wrestling with that angel I figured out that I wasn’t the best fit for that task and went back to grad school once again, to prepare for my public health career. I never lost interest in those questions, just patience with others who refused to acknowledge the modern world has truths that must be accepted instead of rejected. Rather than bang my head against a wall, I kept my thoughts mostly to myself and stayed out of the fray by and large since then.

Now I have a teenage daughter, and she and her friends are confronting those same issues today. Picking up the threads of discussion and debate, I can’t help but feel pleased that she and I are having very different conversations than I ever expected. What does “God” mean? Do we even need the concept of God? She is totally ok with the idea that the Bible is a collection of human texts written in sometimes archaic literary genres, and neither of us is encumbered by any pre-determined conclusions about the “right” way to read the texts. And last night we considered Socrates’ dialogue with Euthyphro from Plato, and applied the same questions to Christian religious beliefs about right and wrong and God.

In the nature vs nurture debate, in the end I guess it may not matter. She’s me, at least partly, and my tradition of thinking about these issues won’t die once I am gone as long as she is here. And that is a cool thing for me to stop and remember.

Stop Falling For It

2010-10-21T23:00:00.000-04:00

I decided it was time to write a new blog entry, and was all prepared to deal with either the baseball playoffs or George Will’s assertion that the planet doesn’t care whether you try to save it or not, but then a funny thing happened that pushed my thoughts about all that off the front page. Juan Williams got himself fired from NPR over his appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox, where he acknowledged feeling uncomfortable in the presence of people wearing Mulsim dress on an airplane. And then the feeding frenzy was on.

Deconstructing the sequence of events leading up to this moment would make for a really long blog entry, and it would bore a lot of people to tears, so I am choosing not to go down that rabbit hole all the way. I will say this, though: people on the political left need to stop falling for this easiest of right-wing tricks, and thicken their skins just a little bit.

In the culture wars, perhaps nothing the right wing think tanks have come up with in the past 30 years has been as effective as attacking politically correct speech and thought efforts by the left. Denigrating PC speech is a short-cut, a lightning rod, a twitter feed that cuts through all semblance of nuance or rational thought which instantly conjures up a vision of a weak, fearful, indecisive and overly-accommodating nerd (at best) or an all too easily dismissed activist whack job (at the worst). In other words, if you can successfully paint anyone with that brush, in this society, you have successfully rendered them politically irrelevant.

Don’t get me wrong, as someone who has been involved with language all my life and who was in graduate school at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill in the late 1980s-early 1990s, I totally understand the serious issues progressives were wrestling with that fueled the PC movement, if you can call it that. Language is powerful, and those who can control names and labels wield tremendous psychological dominance. This was the original point of being concerned about the terms and phrases that we use in thought, speech or writing. In order to be respectful toward others, the thought was, we should use the terms and names they want to have applied to themselves. Particularly when thinking or speaking or writing about people who have been marginalized economically, politically, or socially, the argument was that the rest of society should first recognize their power to name themselves.

Insofar as that goes, the intentions and logic were completely sound and morally the idea makes sense. The problem comes when people begin to evaluate everyone’s language and try to police or referee what other people say. Conservatives recognized how annoying that type of activity is, and pounced on belittling those who do it. Even worse, the practice sets the left up as a perfect target for accusations of intolerance, opposing the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. This is exactly where we find ourselves today after NPR fired Juan Williams.

Did Juan Williams do anything wrong by admitting his experience, acknowledging how he feels? I don’t think so. He wasn’t advocating that he was justified in feeling uncomfortable, or arguing that others ought to be uncomfortable. He admitted to being a human being with a bias. If we were honest, we would all have to admit that all of us are human beings with various biases. There is not one person on this planet that doesn’t have someone they would rather not be seated next to on an airplane. For some of us the person who would make us uncomfortable has a certain skin color or external trait. For others of us the person would have a political or social or religious worldview. That person might have a different dietary habit or an annoying personal quirk or a mental or physical illness. Something bothers everyone. And, it wouldn’t surprise me if Juan Williams had not done other things that bothered his employers, in ways that none of us on the outside need to know about. There is almost always more to the story than it appears.

What bothers me, is once again people on the left offered up a prime example for the right to hold up as a proof-text for their culture war position. In political baseball terms this was hanging a curve ball right over the middle of the plate just begging for it to be hit out of the park. No one should fail to notice that it happened just before an election, either. When it comes to games like these, one side consistently shows that it plays to win. And one side consistently seems to fall for it every time.

What Are They Thinking?

2010-06-22T01:27:00.000-04:00

This isn't my blog, but I totally agree with his point of view. I've had the great pleasure of seeing humpback whales off Cape Cod and in Alaska, and fin whales too. I recently spotted a small whale off the Oregon coast. The animals are too majestic to kill for no reason, and the economics of whaling are ridiculous.

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2010/06/21/no-one-eats-whales-why-does-anyone-kill-them?page=full

The Break

2010-06-19T12:42:00.002-04:00

It's been a while since my last post. I took the break because normally I only write when the mood strikes me or I have something particular on my mind. Only, for much of the past year, the things that have occupied my mind the most were not things I normally would want to be broadcasting all over the internet. I still believe that some things are private, and should remain so, if people respect each other at all.

That being said, I am getting ready to emerge out of the period of self-reflection and it seemed appropriate to at least mention where I've been and what is going on. I'm about to be divorced in the next few months after 17 years of marriage. For most of the past year, this is what I've been focused on mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.

Of course I have been aware of all the other things going on in the world. I know all about the continuing economic woes we are all experiencing. I am as frustrated as everyone else is about the continued political polarization in the land. I have my opinions about Arizona and their probably illegal law on racial profiling, driven by their own frustration with immigration policies that don't fit the reality of life in America. I watched with concern the "debate" over health care reform efforts which were anything but a debate over the real issues confronting all of us. And most recently, I am outraged and saddened by the unfolding environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Ordinarily I would have written whole blog series on all of these topics and more besides. This past year, though, as important as these things all are, I simply couldn't focus myself on any of these topics sufficiently to believe I had anything of value to contribute to our national discourse.

All of us live our lives on this planet in a series of concentric circles. We have our interior life, that goes on inside us. We have our intimate circle of immediate family and friends. We have a larger circle of extended family and people we relate with routinely. The circles keep expanding, and we all participate in all the circles to one degree or another. The good news is that the bigger the issues are and the more people they impact, the circle of people who can deal with that circle gets larger too. The downside of that of course is that the bigger the issue, the less any one of us believes we can do about it. If I have any advice to offer anyone else as I rejoin the discussion in the larger spheres of conversation, this is what I think I've learned this past year: do what you can. Don't worry about what you cannot do, what you can't control, what you cannot change. Decide what you can do, where you can make a difference, and put your energy and focus there. Trust that others who have more energy or more to offer will in fact deal with all the things you cannot deal with. Hillary Clinton once wrote a book building on the African saying, "It takes a village." The best thing about about sharing space in the circles of our communities is, we are not alone. Not really. And that is something that gives me a lot of hope.

Raw Truth

2010-01-09T16:20:00.003-05:00

It’s been a while since I last posted anything on the blog site about food safety, but two recent outbreaks I have worked on got me to thinking once again about the dilemma those of us charged with protecting both the food supply and the public’s health face every day. FDA also recently was reminded of the dilemmas as well. Since last Thanksgiving, we have seen multi-state and localized outbreaks of norovirus gastroenteritis (vomiting and diarrhea with cramps, fevers, and body aches) associated with eating raw oysters. Not all raw oysters are contaminated with viruses, of course, but some are and we have been dealing with that in several southern states these past couple of months.

Oysters and other shellfish are perfect for concentrating human pathogens in their tissues. These filter-feeding shellfish help clean water systems by pumping enormous quantities of water through their systems, filtering out nutrients as they do so. Unfortunately, they also concentrate wastes and organisms in their tissues too. If a boat dumps bilge water or a sewage spill occurs in a river, and then the sewage is washed out to sea in a heavy flood, the oysters can concentrate human viruses and environmental bacteria, as well as other pathogens, in their tissues. Later on, when these animals are consumed raw or undercooked, the pathogens may be present and active. And, sometimes people can and do get sick.

In the instance I have just worked on, a popular restaurant in North Carolina had a large number of people get sick. The pathogen is norovirus, a virus first recognized in the late 1960s which causes half of all gastrointestinal illnesses we see each year. Norovirus is unbelievably infectious and easy to transmit. It takes fewer than 10 virus particles to make someone sick once they are infected, for people who are not temporarily immune due to having recently been infected. Once infected, usually within 24 hours (although sometimes it can take as long as 3 days) the infected person experiences rapid onset with nausea, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, and potentially fevers, headaches and body aches. Symptoms last from a few hours up to several days. Usually people survive this illness, but dehydration is always a concern for frail elderly, infants, and people with compromised immune systems.

There are many ways to get infected with norovirus, but one way is to eat undercooked or raw shellfish. Adequate cooking would be lethal to the virus, making the food safe, and herein lies the dilemma. A lot of people like to eat their oysters raw or lightly steamed. If an oyster is cooked to an internal temperature of 145 degrees F, most viruses and bacteria would be killed. To a lot of people, them is fighting words. Food professionals know what could be done to reduce the risk of illness and make it less likely for people to get sick, but many people are not willing to take those measures and resent it if government agencies try to make them take those measures. It is a dilemma. Most of us would rather not spend Christmas Day coding and entering hundreds of records of complaints from restaurant patrons, doing data analysis, and preparing for the next conference call. Most people would rather not go out to eat at a popular local eatery and then spend the next 3 days in the bathroom throwing up. But we will continue doing these things until people either accept that there are risks, and deal with it stoically if they get sick, or the public lets food safety professionals require effective measures be consistently followed to reduce risk. For my part, I’ll take the Oysters Rockefeller please. I’ll let someone else eat them raw.

It's a New year

2010-01-02T11:03:00.004-05:00

Austin area singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves (pictured left) has a song I really like called "New Year's Day." I played it yesterday, of course, but most of my own New Year's Day traditions had to be adjusted this time around. I tried to think about what it means or ought to mean, this changing of the calendar. I don't think I know what significance it should have.

I know that we owe the annual change of years on January 1 to Julius Caesar and the Romans. For 2009 years now, all Western nations have paid homage to the Roman Emperor by maintaining his version of the calendar. The ancient Babylonians started their new year at the beginning of the first new moon following the Vernal Equinox, in the Spring. That is at least a logical time to observe renewal. January 1st is a bit arbitrary, but it is what we do, and I'm not complaining.

I don't know what you normally do to celebrate the changeover. I don't make New Year's resolutions, that never made a lot of sense to me. I used to watch the college football bowl games but I don't do that anymore. I prefer my sports to have a point to them, and for several years now I have thought NCAA football doesn't have one, since it doesn't have a playoff or any rational system for having a National Champion. Normally I do try to eat Black-eyed peas 0n New Year's Day (it's a southern thing), but this year I didn't do that either.

The one thing I have done unfailingly since 2001 to celebrate the change of years is listen to the annual Music Poll count down over the internet as broadcast by KGSR. The tradition was the station held an annual music poll and then on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day they played the top 107 songs of the year as voted on by the listeners. For me, it was my way to find out about songs and artists I had missed during the year, and I thought there was no better focus group than the music scene junkies in Austin to clue me in on what was good and worth checking out. Only this year, KGSR didn't do the music poll. They tell me it was due to poor timing, problems with funding the major prize that went along with it, and other changes at the station. For the various reasons the poll was dropped this year.

Maybe this break with tradition is emblematic for this New Year. 2010 may be the year that I just have to reconsider how I want to live in the world. It may symbolize that this year will be the year I ought to look at each thing I do, and decide anew whether it is what I want to be doing, and what my motivations are. I suppose that is my wish for all of you, too, that as we start this new year, we should live it intentionally. Don't just go through the motions of living, don't just do things out of habit. Choose your life this year, and live it with a purpose. That is what I think I will try to do.

Things Change

2009-12-05T08:37:00.003-05:00

Yesterday morning, as I took a day off for a variety of reasons, I decided to tune in to an old friend over internet radio. I fired up KGSR, Radio Austin through my iTunes radio menu and started streaming.

I quickly learned that while I had been going through my own changes here in North Carolina, I had missed the fact that major changes were happening "back home." KGSR has changed radio frequencies, moving down to 93.3 FM on your Austin area radio dial. The new location puts them in Cedar Park, a much better broadcasting location compared with Bastrop, where the old transmitter is. And, the signal will be more powerful. Those changes I can understand. What I also learned was that creative director Jody Denberg is leaving the station he helped create 19 years ago. That change is probably more significant.

I moved to Austin after finishing graduate school in 1993, and then KGSR was a totally fresh radio experience. The station was once described by Rolling Stone magazine as one of the 10 radio stations in America that don't suck. Denberg, Susan Castle, and the others there pioneered Adult Alternative Album formats and played local artists and bigger name artists side by side, and they threw the idea of content genres into the blender. Jazz, blues, new age, country, rock, Celtic, Reggae--it's all good. What came out of that experiment was the perfect Margarita mix of great music, and KGSR quickly became the default radio station setting for my cars and trucks as I rolled around the Austin metroplex from 1993-2000.

For me, the peak year was 1995-1996. That was a time of amazing CDs coming out left and right, the station was firmly entrenched as a cultural icon in the city, and things were really all in sync. Of course, as any musician knows, sometimes you are in the groove and sometimes things are just a bit off. Success in any business is hard to maintain. Over the years, the station changed hands. All media outlets are under intense pressure, and the listening audience is fickle. Talk radio, satellite radio, demographic changes, all sorts of pressures siphon off listeners. Ratings slipped, and continue to drop. The new changes probably reflect business decisions that most of us don't need to know the details about.

What I do know is that I look forward every year to the Austin Chronicle music poll, and the KGSR top 107 songs of the year (will the list be trimmed to 93 songs now?). I use those signals to help me figure out new music to go check out on iTunes. Because I live in the rest of America, where the radio really does suck. Austin and its music scene remain my best clue about what might be coming out that I should pay attention to. That I might want to put on my iPod, and incorporate into my life. So even though he'll probably never read this, thank you Jody Denberg for all the great years of music you have helped introduce me to. And thank you KGSR for being a beacon of good music, in a tough business. I wish the station all success, but it is hard not to feel like something good might be getting lost along the way.

Patriot Games

2009-10-09T21:58:00.004-04:00

Pa∙tri∙ot \ Middle French \ 1605 \ one who loves his country and supports its authority and interests.

Pa∙tri∙o∙tism \ 1726 \ love for or devotion to one’s country.

Both from Webster’s 9^th New Collegiate Dictionary published in 1991.

Today is an interesting day for all true American patriots. Our President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the reactions from people across the country and around the world are fascinating to observe. Much has been made on the political right in this country over whether or not the President has done anything to deserve this honor. I am not interested in that particular point so much as I am intrigued by the dilemma this drama poses, and saddened by what I think it truly means.

If we consider the meanings of the words patriotism and we value those who are true patriots, the simple truth of the matter is that we should always be glad when anyone from our country, in any field or endeavor, wins a prestigious international award like this. For any American President to be so honored, or any citizen in any field, it symbolizes American authority and it advances our national interests. All people who purport to be filled with love and devotion for the United States should by right be pleased when an American wins the Nobel Prize for anything.

Of course, many people in America, of all political persuasions, have forgotten what patriotism is, and have difficulty recognizing our patriots. The tendency on the extremes is to demonize those who sit on the opposite side of the political fence. So-called Right wing Conservatives charge so-called Left wing sympathizers with sympathy for Socialism and Communism. The so-called Left in America sees Nazi partisans across the aisle in return. The real truth is all of the people in this country, politically, are basically moderates who cluster around far more shared perspectives and values than we usually admit. We grew up saying the same Pledge of Allegiance, we like living in the suburbs, we want our 401(k) plans to earn lots of money and we all like to vacation in Orlando with the kids. Some of us may have traveled abroad but most of us would never choose to live there. We speak English mostly. We eat too much. We love sports. We are Americans, all of us, for the most part. We may think that our differences are monumental but in the grand scheme of things the American political landscape is about as flat as Kansas.

For my part, I am glad that the President won the Peace Prize but it seems to me to be far less about this President than it is about the last one. The reason the committee awarded the prize probably had much more to do with how our last President behaved and how our country has come to be perceived than it did with the man currently in office. Given the power of our nation, our position in the world, the committee seems to be saying with this selection that they value an American President who is open to talking first, and who is willing to listen to them. Surely, demonstrating that willingness advances our interests in the world. Their recognition of this renewed willingness supports our authority on the international stage. And for all of us who love this country and are devoted to it, today should be a day for both celebration and reflection about those developments.

Cycles of Life and Death

2009-07-24T23:46:00.004-04:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about cycling, life, and death recently. In the town where I live, Apex, North Carolina, we recently lost a cyclist in a motor vehicle collision. His name was Bruce Rosar, and he was a well known active leader in bicycle groups across the Research Triangle Park. He was a bike safety instructor, someone who taught cyclists the importance of riding according to the rules of the road. He was an advocate of Share the Road efforts designed to raise the level of awareness of motorists about the presence of bicyclists on the road and the need to respect their right to be there. And somehow, inexplicably, Bruce turned left in front of an oncoming vehicle and was struck, and killed. Not two miles from my house. The driver was not at fault.

I have been a cyclist since I got my first bike at age 9. Since I am 45 years old, that means I have been riding for 36 years now. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but I have logged a lot of miles on my bikes. I had a Giant Sedona hardtail mountain bike that I recently retired after 19 years of service and several thousand miles on roads and trails together. I have a road bike that has taken me from Houston, Texas to Austin, Texas in two days. They call that ride the MS 150 even though you have to ride 189 miles. Believe me, you do notice those extra 39 miles that second day as you climb the hills into Austin. I’ve ridden in Texas, North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, Missouri and Massachusetts. I’ve ridden in France. I’ve had a lot of encounters on the roads and trails with dogs, pedestrians, children, deer, squirrels, horses, and motor vehicles of all kinds.

I have been injured riding my bikes as well. There isn’t a single bike I’ve ever owned that I didn’t crash at one point or another. “Road rash” we call it, and I took my most recent spill just over a week ago riding my new bike on a dirt surface, losing the front wheel while trying to avoid hitting a little girl who was weaving all over the place while she rode her bike. I’ve jammed against boulders and flipped over 8 foot drops. I’ve had flat tires that made me lose my balance, gone into ditches being run off the road by stupid drivers. I’ve had people cuss me, throw drinks at me from their cars, and once I had a bunch of drunk red necks pull over in front of me and get out of the car wanting to start a fight. I’ve had people sic their dogs on me and tell them to chase me as I rode past their property.

I have also had amazing and wonderful experiences riding my bikes. I have watched the sun come up over the Texas Hill Country on a quiet Saturday morning and watched as a coati crossed the road furtively as I approached. I have ridden past Great Horned owls and red tailed hawks sitting on fence posts. I have ridden with comrades on the road where we found a rhythm together, encouraged one another, swapped war stories and helped each other out. I have had the thrill of riding with 10,000 other people as we charged out of down town Houston and rode past cars and trucks of people who either had MS or knew people who had MS, cheering for us like we were pro riders in the Tour de France. I have had the experience of being caught out on the road by a group of pro riders, as they flew past me on their multi-thousand dollar machines going twice as fast as I can ride on a good day. I have been eyed curiously by emus and long horned cattle as I rode by, and I have been encouraged at the summit of long climbs by total strangers impressed that I was able to make it up that hill without getting off to walk my bike. And, in France, where the people are supposed to be rude and drivers aggressive by reputation, I’ve seen truck drivers halt traffic so I could make a tricky left hand turn, and I rode across the Rhone River bridge during rush hour traffic without anyone giving me a hassle at all over the fact that I was slowing them down on their way home from work.

Of all the places I have ridden, I have to admit that I have found the drivers in North Carolina to be the least accepting and least courteous drivers I’ve encountered. North Carolina is the only place I have ever been deliberately forced off the road by motorists, and that has happened twice. Our shoulders and roads are less bike-friendly than the roads I was used to in Texas. For those reasons, I have tended to ride more now on local hike & bike trails and left my road bike in the garage.

I did not know Bruce Rosar personally, but I did see him frequently on the roads in my town. I saw him when I was riding and I saw him when I was driving. I drive past the spot where he died every day, and see the memorial shrine that has been placed there. I am truly sorry for his friends and family that he is gone. We will never know why he executed that turn right at that moment. There really isn’t an obvious lesson for any of us in what happened that day, other than that we all need to pay attention out there, whether we are riding or driving.

Life is precious. Doing what you love to do is why we live, in the first place. Here is my prayer for Bruce Rosar, and for all of us who take the risks of living in stride each day. Be at peace.

2009-06-17T12:39:00.004-04:00

Today I took a day off from work to try and get a few things done that are hard to cram into a small window of time either in the evenings or on a Saturday. It was just a normal sort of list of things, involving repairing a freezer door, dealing with a car service issue, taking the dog to the vet for his annual exam, and having a locksmith come to the house to fix a broken deadbolt lock. The idea was to take one day off and deal with everything that needed to be done.

It was all going to be smooth until the freezer door replacement part didn't show up on the truck yesterday. And the voicemail alerting us about that didn't reach me as a message until after 10:00 pm last night. And the repair guy still hasn't called me back although I paged him so we can reschedule.

It's all a small inconvenience, but it calls to mind how many things in life we makes plans about. We plan our careers. We may plan our relationships. Our retirement strategies. Whatever your thing is, I am sure that at some point you planned it out in your mind, how you wanted it to go even if the outcome was not something you could control.

I recently taught a course at UNC in Chapel Hill, or at least a portion of a course I share with some other guest lecturers. My assignment has the students write a paper explaining how they think they would respond to a given disaster scenario. The course is part of a Disaster Management Certificate program. One student wrote a paper that had the most elaborately articulated plan for organizing a response I have ever seen. It was a tour de force of confidence that any situation could be easily managed if you just had the right plan in place to handle it. I cautioned the student to remember a saying the Marines have: Don't Fall In Love With Your Plan. It often won't work out.

The poet Robert Burns had a more eloquent way of expressing the same thing, and through serendipity today I was reminded of that. I'm not saying that we shouldn't make plans, but I do think we need to hold on to a measure of humility when we do it. And, I may say, allow for the possibility that something unexpected but even better than we planned could happen too. It might not happen, but then again, who knows?

Here's the Burns poem. You'll recognize the key phrase when you read it, even if you've never read it before. Imagine a Scottish accent when you read it.

To A Mouse

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Robert Burns

Why the New Flu Matters

2009-05-17T21:11:00.003-04:00

Take a look at this image. It isn't all that much to look at, but that is what the influenza virus looks like up close and personal. This photo comes courtesy of the Public Health Image Library at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And this little bugger is what has had most of us in my profession running on high alert since the end of March.

I am a the Food Borne Disease epidemiologist for the State of North Carolina Division of Public Health. But before that, I was a general infectious disease epidemiologist with the Texas Department of Health in Austin, Texas. There I worked as much on respiratory diseases like tuberculosis, Legionnaire's disease, and influenza as I did on enteric pathogens like cryptosporidium, salmonella and E. coli. In the late 1990s I was the influenza surveillance coordinator for the State of Texas. So when this novel strain of influenza (H1N1) popped up, I was extremely interested. And, as it turned out, I was also on call that first weekend it hit in the U.S., and wound up working as part of our response team on this issue for the past several weeks.

I know that a lot of people think the hype over novel influenza this past month was overblown, and I have read the same snarky comments that everyone else has about this all being much ado about nothing really important. That could not be further from the truth. And for everyone who thinks this has all blown over, I'm sorry, but this has not even started yet for us here in the U.S.

For the past several years, we in public health have been sounding warning bells that the world is overdue for an influenza pandemic. Pandemics are world-wide epidemics of disease occurring simultaneously or in close succession, caused by the same organism. Very few pathogens are capable of causing pandemics. Influenza is one that not only can, it does. In the past century there have been three major pandemics: 1918, 1957, and 1967. Most of us don't remember them, although I was 3 years old in 1967 and lived through it. The worst one of course was 1918 when more than 40 million people died world-wide. We really don't know how many people died, because there are no accurate records from that era for places like India and China.

Pandemic influenza is caused when a novel virus emerges, usually due to reassortment of genetic pieces from a combination of influenza viruses that can infect both humans and animals. There are many different kinds of influenza viruses. When a host organism gets infected with two or more virus strains at the same time, the genes can get scrambled and a new virus emerges. That creates what is known as a shift virus, which is different from the genetic drift we see with influenza from one annual epidemic to the next one. With drifting viruses, the changes from one year to the next are subtle and can be mild. People who have been exposed to a prior version of the virus may have partial immunity, and they don't get as sick. Herd immunity from the general population keeps the numbers of newly infected people down as well.

Shift viruses are different. With shift viruses, everyone on Earth is susceptible to them. No one has the benefit of prior infection, so the numbers of new cases are likely to be higher. Sometimes the illnesses can also be much worse. The annual influenza epidemic in the U.S. infects anywhere from 5%-20% of the population. With shift viruses, we can expect the numbers to be higher--but not until next flu season, when this virus should return as the dominant strain causing illness in the U.S. Right now the new virus is a minor player. Next year, this one is likely to steal the show.

For the past several years the World Health Organization has tracked a different new influenza virus, the avian influenza H5N1 virus. That one is a bad actor, with a 60% mortality rate. But it does not transmit easily from person-to-person, and even though we have tracked it since 2003, so far it has only caused 424 confirmed human infections with 261 deaths (as of May 15, according to WHO). That is after six years. This new influenza H1N1 has caused 8,480 confirmed cases in 39 countries with 72 deaths since March 2009. (As of May 17, according to WHO). It is less than two months into this virus. It is moving much more easily, and since everyone is susceptible, it should become well established. This one is not going away and it has already taken flight.

So, yeah, we have been overdue for a pandemic for a long time. It is looking like we will soon have one on our hands, if we don't already.

Sweet

2009-03-25T20:37:00.003-04:00

Ok, so in my last post I got a few things wrong. Seven teams from the ACC and Big East made the Sweet 16, and five of them are from the Big East. The ACC flamed out below the big guns of UNC and Duke. Also, Duke advanced past the second game, which I didn't think they would do based on recent tournament appearances. And yeah, my bracket is a mess, although I've only lost one Final Four team so far.

Of the teams still playing basketball, there are many of the usual suspects still here. Most of the teams have McDonald's All Americans on them and seven of the head coaches still here have won national championships before. Gonzaga is here (again), and Kansas, Memphis, and UNC from last year. There are some surprises (Arizona? Really?) but no Cinderellas.

This next four days will give us the best basketball feast that we get all year. Lots of great teams, and some will have heart breaking losses. One thing to remember is that 49 teams went home last weekend. Twelve more will lose this weekend. After Sunday, there will only be four left. And before it is over, all but one will lose. It is the greatest two weeks in all of college athletics, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

Time to Show Up

2009-03-05T21:22:00.004-05:00

Ok, so enough of the political discussions for a while. We have come to that time of the year when it is time to put up or shut up, when we separate the contenders from the pretenders. That's right: March Madness. Tourney Time. Or, Christmas and every other important holy day for hoops fans everywhere.

The malady is especially acute in certain environs right about now: LA; Lexington; Durham; Chapel Hill; and about 60+ other communities where college ball is played and the teams have a shot at getting in the Dance.

In our neck of the woods here on Tobacco Road, Sunday will pit UNC against Duke for the ACC Regular Season title. In practical terms the outcome of this game won't matter, but who ever said anything was practical about the UNC/Duke game? The worst that UNC can do is tie with Duke for a share of first place. That's also the best that Duke can get out of it. Either way both teams already have a bye in the first round of the ACC Tournament and both of them will be in the NCAA Tournament. So this is just a matter of pride, but that is usally all it takes for these two teams anyway.

One thing that I am pretty tired of hearing this year is all the goofballs who keep saying that the Big East is a harder, tougher, better conference than the ACC. Recently on the Official Website of the Tar Heels they posted some numbers, which I'll share for your consideration:

"The ACC currently has three teams in the top seven of the RPI and five teams in the top 17. The Big East has three teams in the top 11 and five teams in the top 17. Based on those figures, the tops of the two leagues are fairly even. The bottom four in the Big East (St. John's, South Florida, Rutgers, and DePaul) have RPIs of 156, 161, 171 and 189. The ACC, meanwhile, has just one team below 100 in the RPI (Georgia Tech at 158). Some more numbers you won't often hear when some of the talking heads start touting the Big East: the ACC is 10-6 against the Big East this year, 40-33 against the Big East over the last five years, and 84-60 against the Big East over the last ten years."

So, I am pretty certain that the ACC is tough enough to win, and that when all is said and done, I like our league's chances in the Dance better than I like theirs. So, in the grand tradition of posting WAGs that are occasionally unencumbered by the thought process, here are some predictions about what I expect to see in the next few weeks. Details now will be fuzzy because we don't know about the way brackets will be set up yet, but I think a few things are more likely than others. The top 4 seeds will probably be UNC, Pitt, UConn, and Oklahoma. The ACC will get 7 teams in: UNC, Duke, Clemson, Florida State, Boston College, Wake Forest, and one more from the rest will do well enough in the ACC Tournament to get a bid. I expect 8 teams from the ACC and Big East to make it to the Sweet 16. I think only three of them will be from the Big East. I expect no more than 1 team each from the ACC and Big East to make it to the Final Four. I do not expect any teams from the SEC to make the Sweet 16. I think Duke will lose to someone in the 2nd Round. I think a team from the Big 12 will make it to the Final Four. I think Memphis won't make it back there this year. And I think this year's tournament will be awesome. I'm pulling for the Heels of course, but there are a lot of good teams and the field will be strong. Not many small conference teams have any shot this year. Davidson won't make it unless they get the automatic bid from their conference.

We'll see how it all plays out. I'll try my best not to miss any of it.

Shaped By Experiences

2009-02-20T20:05:00.002-05:00

Most of the time I write about things that are on my mind, and no one in the world even notices. My last post touched a nerve, and the comments have certainly given me a lot to think about. I promise that I will.

The recent dialogue and some of the things I have been hearing in the debate about how we should run the country have reminded me how much we are all shaped by our various experiences. There are a lot of people on the other side of our political divide who have said things that I am frankly puzzled by, asserting that the New Deal policies of FDR were wrong. And I am hearing a lot of anger from some quarters about that. It seems odd to me that this is a burning issue for anyone, but I guess that is in part due to the experiences that have shaped me.

I went to Baylor University in Waco, Texas for my undergrad. While I was there I worked a student aid job in the W. R. Poage Archives and Library, pictured here. W. R. Poage was a Democratic Congressman who was elected on FDR's coattails in the 1930s, who continued to represent central Texas in Congress until he retired in 1979. His most important piece of legislation was the Rural Electrification and Telephone Act, which brought electricity and telephone service to everyone living in rural America. The act was a stimulus package during the Great Depression, one that created jobs and also proved to be the single most important piece of public health legislation ever enacted. Bringing electricity to rural communities meant they were able to have refrigerators, reducing the risk of food borne illnesses and improving the nutrition of people throughout the country. It also meant that heating (and later cooling) homes was easier, reducing the risk of hypothermia and hyperthermia. Congressman Poage was still alive when I worked there and he had an office in the library. Some days he would wander into the stacks and ask us to shut the place down, and he would take us out to lunch. He did it mostly so he would have some company, but we were happy to go along and learn from his years of experience in politics and congress, and listen to his tales from the years he was involved in Washington.

I also remember listening as a kid to my grandfather's stories about living through the Great Depression in Georgia, in the mountains. He was a textile worker and farmer, and one thing he never failed to make clear to us was his appreciation for FDR. He told us that if it hadn't have been for FDR a lot of people would have starved to death. And, most people surely agreed with him since FDR was elected President four times.

Experiences shape us. And, how we handle the situation we are in right now will shape the generation we are raising. I just hope that when we are old enough to teach them and they are interested enough to listen, we have stories to tell them that are worth sharing.

Not the Time

2009-02-18T22:05:00.003-05:00

Last night I attended a Town Hall meeting with our Congressman, David Price of North Carolina. He is holding meetings this week in the district to talk with people about the current economic recession, to explain as best he can what is happening in Washington, and to listen to what his constituents have to say. To open his talk he showed this chart to help everyone understand just how serious the situation is right now.

The blue line in the chart represents the job losses we experienced in the 1990 recession, and the length of time it took us to get out of the slump. The red line shows the same information for the 2001 recession. The green line shows the job losses during the current recession and the slope of the decline. In 1990 the economy lost more than 1.5 million jobs. In 2001 we lost more than 2.5 million jobs. So far in the current recession we have lost 3.5 million jobs, and the trajectory and rate of job loss is clearly catastrophic. We are losing more than 10,000 jobs in the United States every day right now. North Carolina has unemployment rates of 8% right now and we are one of the 8 states with the fastest increasing unemployment rates in the country.

What do you think happened at the Town Hall meeting? The people who turned out mostly were angry Republicans and Libertarians who had come out to express ideologically driven outrage that Congress actually did something to try and slow this train wreck. They were outraged...Outraged!...that they voted to extend unemployment benefits for people losing their jobs, to expand food stamps, to help people losing their jobs pay their Cobra payments to keep their health insurance. How dare Congress shore up the safety net! What happened to self-reliance they asked? Is there no longer a role for the private sector? Accusations flew that Congress was nationalizing health care, the banks, eliminating private enterprise and taking actions no where authorized by the Constitution. There were even ridiculous claims that the FDR New Deal programs and relief efforts caused the Great Depression and prevented the economy from recovering. The Party of Just Say No was out in force.

Look at the chart. We all have our ideologies, our beliefs, our own points of view. There is a time and a place for trying to live according to deeply held convictions, for standing up for what one believes. But this is not that time. Ignoring facts and realities is not only stupid, it is dangerous. One speaker last night claimed that the entire economic meltdown was simply a result of an accounting rule (Marking to Market) which he called a "gimmick" and argued that none of this would have happened in the first place if that rule had not been there. The implication is that none of this is real, it is all just a mirage and if we do nothing people will settle down and things will start "getting back to normal" if we just let the private sector handle it. Of course, arguing on the one hand that the market is all powerful and can sort this out if left alone and in the same breath asserting that requiring assets to be valued according to their actual worth in the marketplace is a "gimmick" struck me as ironic at the time.

I know we have all gotten used to the gridlock in Washington and that the idea of Congress doing something seems novel and strange, but the reason we have them is to be there when something needs to be done that no other individual or institution can do alone. The General Welfare and Commerce clauses of the Constitution have been interpreted by the courts to provide the authority to take actions like the one they took this week. For my part, ignoring the plight of 10,000 people losing their jobs every day makes no sense. Letting the housing crisis continue to spiral out of control without trying to stabilize home values and keep people in their homes makes no sense. Sometimes staying out of the fight would be the right thing to do. But this is not that time.

So, Let Me Get This Straight...

2009-02-04T20:05:00.002-05:00

I have been thinking and paying attention to all the finger-pointing, blustering, posturing, and general angst over the current economic downturn, and there is a lot that I can't get my head around. I'm no economist, but it seems to me that anyone should be able to see that we are in a mess. Doing nothing is not an option, and doing more of what we have been doing is not going to fix it. As a friend of mine likes to say, "When you find yourself at the bottom of the hole, stop digging." And I'm no politician, but what I see right now in Washington is a lot of people who are still trying to figure out how to minimize the worst effects of this downturn on themselves and their particular interest groups instead of trying to figure out how to get everyone going in a positive direction again. Without regard for who gets the credit. So, nothing is getting done and meanwhile, in case you hadn't noticed, a lot of us are doing pretty poorly right now.

I would really like an economist to help me understand a few things. If the real root of the current crisis is the giant Ponzi scheme that was created by the exotic financial instruments that fueled the housing bubble, then it seems to me that the first step to fixing the mess is to facilitate an end to the downward spiral in housing prices, restore rationality to mortgage lending practices, and to determine how to regulate the instruments that fueled the excess so that doesn't happen again. In order to do that, it seems to me three basic things need to happen: people need to be protected against foreclosure and eviction, so they don't wind up homeless; mortgages need to be refinanced at the current value of the property; and the losses that will result from upside down mortgages need to be locked in and written off. Those could be deducted from tax obligations, providing the tax cut portion of the stimulus plan, or at least a lot of it. Everyone does not need a tax cut. But, if we cram down the mortgages we ought to let the financial firms stuck with the loss write off the loss as a deduction. And we need to cram down the upside down mortgages.

If the problem is the fact that no one feels confident enough to either borrow money or lend money, we need to address the credit crisis. People are afraid to borrow because they are afraid they will lose their jobs. Banks are afraid to lend because they are afraid people and businesses will default. I don't know how to stabilize that part of the cycle, but it seems the major thing that would help there is to end job losses. If we are going to spend money in the stimulus, we need to spend it on things that drive employment numbers up. As people regain their confidence in keeping their jobs, they will be more willing to borrow. As for lending, people need to be credit worthy to obtain financing. Due diligence should be done, and no one should lend people money they are not worthy of being lent. If that means that the credit card companies need to stop sending out 6-8 credit card offers to every living person in America, every month, then so be it. If that means that people can only borrow enough money to buy a $100,000 house, then so be it. If that means we have to drive Fords instead of BMWs, then so be it. We must restore rationality to regain stability.

So from my purely layman's point of view, those are the things that make sense to me. Find a floor, keep people from losing their homes and jobs, and this situation will at least stop getting worse. Then, we could start the harder, longer process of determining how to stop it from happening again. But if the people in Washington could do those things, there would be plenty of opportunity for members of every party and interest group to fuss over who should get the credit and the blame. But please, do something now that helps people out. Then y'all can get back to doing what you do most of the time. If you must.

A New Year

2009-01-25T16:45:00.002-05:00

Well, it's a new year. Since Christmas 2008 we have been busy preparing for and then taking our Winter vacation, which we did over the past week plus. We went to the Big Island of Hawaii, which is known as Kona in the islands. This was my second trip to Hawaii, having visited Kauai in 2000. This trip was our first to an island with active volcanoes on it. The surf was too high on the Kona coast to really do much swimming or snorkeling, but the volcanoes more than made up for any lack of enjoying the watersports.

Hawaii is wonderful to visit. We enjoyed fresh bananas and papayas grown locally on the island. We hiked through lush rain forests and lava flow deserts. We walked through a volcano crater and we watched molten lava flow into the sea. We rode horses through an ancient valley and we visited places where ancient Hawaiians carved petroglyphs into lava beds, leaving marks and messages that no one can decipher completely today. We saw pounding surf waves, drank wonderful Kona coffee, saw rainbows, snow capped volcano tops, and generally had a great time.

Traveling from North Carolina to Hawaii involves, first and foremost, 10+ hours of flying time between RDU airport and Honolulu. Then, a transfer to an inter-island flight on Hawaiian Airlines and finally you get to Kona. We tried it two ways, going American Airlines through DFW and LAX, and flying Delta through Atlanta. Of the two routes, the Delta flight from Atlanta straight to Honolulu was probably the more enjoyable way to go, even though 10 straight hours on a plane gets old.

In the next few days I'll try to think of something thought-provoking to say about the trip, but for now I'll simply say that Hawaii is great. But don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself. It's a lot more fun than reading about it.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T14:56:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas from us to you all, 2008. And for those of you who do not celebrate Christmas but do have another holiday that is important to you, we hope you enjoy your holiday season too. Here at our house people are easing into a sleepy afternoon, and in a little bit the preparations will begin in earnest for the large Christmas Supper feast.

Well, it's not too large of a feast. There will be Christmas ham, a sweet potato casserole, a spinach and cheese casserole, and some slaw with possibly some cooked apples on the side as well. And wine of course. We have my in-laws in for Christmas and it will be a fun time tonight.

Christmas of course is the celebration of the birth of Jesus for Christians. We built on pagan and pre-christian Winter Solstice celebrations for the timing of this festival, but the religious significance of the events celebrated remain the same. We celebrate the Advent of the Christ, and we observe with gratitude the simple religious truths that for me are the most significant parts of the story: Immanuel and Epiphany. Celebrating the idea that God is with us, we are not alone. And, with the coming of Epiphany on January 6th, the revelation of Jesus to all the world. But Epiphany is more than that if you follow the writings in Matthew's Gospel and think about the meaning of Epiphany.

In the Gospel of Luke Jesus is first revealed to the shepherds, the poor laborers of Palestine. In Matthew's account, Jesus is not recognized at his birth as anyone particularly special, and he also is not revealed at first to anyone living locally. It was the Magi, the Wise Men from the East, who marked his birth and life as being significant. These would have been pagan Zoroastrians or other eastern mystics, standing on their ziggurats out in the deserts of Persia or Iraq, watching the movements of stars and planets. They see this special star and are so curious about it that they load up their camels and cross the Syrian desert, wandering down into Palestine and finding Jesus and his family at Joseph's house, not in the manger. And it took them two years nearly to get there. But they did, and they brought gifts to honor the toddler, and Mary pondered these things in her heart.

So, taking all of these accounts together, the hope of Christmas to me is this: anyone who is open to finding God can do so; God is with us; and God can be found in the least likely places by the least likely people. That doesn't come across as particularly profound or even necessarily the most orthodox reading of the story but it does seem to me to be a very hope filled reading of the texts. Comforting in some ways but also unnerving in the implied humility that everyone should have when dealing with sacred truths.

What if you, and everyone around you, was looking for God, and God came, but everyone missed it? And what if the people who saw it and grasped its significance were your mortal enemies, and they grasped the revelation not by some special divine messenger but by studying nature and the natural world? What if they not only did not go to your church, but they didn't go to any church, and they still figured it out?

Here is wishing you a Merry Christmas once again, and like Mary, there are still things here that are worth pondering and keeping in your heart. May you find your own Epiphanies, and remember that they can come to you through people and in ways that you least expect.

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T17:36:00.003-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving....2008

This year it seems harder than usual to enjoy the holiday. The economic downturn, the attacks in India, the continuing wars and other news of the day have taken some of the joy and comfort out of the day, at least for me.

I don't know how you normally celebrate the day, but I'll share with you all how I've spent mine so far. Feast preparations began a couple of weeks ago when we bought 1/2 bushel of locally grown North Carolina sweet potatoes from a farmer at the Apex Farmer's Market on the final day of the season. That same day we met a local farmer who will sell us eggs through the winter when he can.

On Sunday I made biscuits and cornbread for the dressing. On Monday night I drove out to the farm and picked up 2 dozen eggs. Tuesday night I picked up the all-natural free range organic turkey we ordered from Whole Foods, along with some cranberry cheddar cheese and honey-roasted almonds. I also made the cranberry sauce on Tuesday night. Last night I baked sweet potatoes and made a southern style sweet potato casserole with brown sugar/pecan topping. This morning I glazed the turkey and roasted it, and made a spinach casserole and the dressing. After the turkey came out of the oven the dressing and spinach went in and the sweet potatoes were warmed up. While we were waiting on everything we snacked on cheese and crackers and the almonds. Lunch was served around 2:00 pm, with sparkling white grape juice for the kids and white wine for the adults. After lunch I took Austin the dog for a long walk. My wife made a home made pumpkin pie that is in the oven right now.

The preparations, menu, and themes for the day are pretty much as they always are, or often have been over the years. Of course this year I am thankful for many things. A friend of mine in Chicago has his son safely home from Iraq this year, recently promoted to Major and awarded the Bronze Star. I am pleased with the election of Obama, and I am thankful that my wife and I are both employed. I am thankful for the trip I took my father on to Washington DC in October to celebrate his 67th birthday. I'm glad my daughter is happy, healthy and smart.

While all of that is true, it would be dishonest to say that everything is good. These are stressful times for many people, and there is a palpable sense of foreboding that is impossible to ignore. I do not know how long this recession will last, and this one seems far worse that what we lived through in the 1970s. The price of gas is dropping, but it is clear that we have to move beyond fossil fuels to power our cars. I'm happy for my friend that his son made it out of Iraq again, but we all know he'll be heading for Afghanistan next year. The fighting is not over yet.

So in the end, I am thankful for what we have. I am thankful to be here. I am cautiously optimistic about our future. But when I raise my glass of wine tonight, it will be more of a toast to the perseverance of the human spirit. Maybe that goes back to my farming family background. We always celebrated the harvest. But then Grandaddy would start worrying about the weather, the price of corn, how many pigs we had, and when to plant the next crop. And say his prayers.

Real America

2008-11-05T08:56:00.003-05:00

Well, the campaign is over, and from my perspective, the country made the right decision in this election. We still don't know the outcome of the election in North Carolina or Missouri, the two states our family members have been most involved with in working in the Obama campaign. We would like to win these states too, but mostly because we worked so hard making phone calls, canvassing, and otherwise. Win or lose, however, we can enjoy the victory as much as we enjoyed working with everyone we met during this journey.

For us the last week was pretty remarkable. On Saturday, November 1, we worked walking neighborhoods and doing data entry for the campaign. We hit almost 6,000 households in our town of Apex on Saturday, finishing all of the canvassing we needed to do for the weekend in one day. On Sunday our teams helped out walking in nearby communities before being joined back at the field office for a mini-rally with North Carolina Governor Mike Easley and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sibelius. On Monday night data entry, putting together walk packets, and planning the celebration were the main activities. On Tuesday evening we joined other volunteers at a local coffee shop for our field office party before returning home to continue watching the returns. When CNN called the race officially for Obama we popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and started making phone calls to friends and relatives around the country.

I am glad that we helped make history, but we have to be realistic about what we have won for President Elect Obama. As he said last night in his speech from Grant Park, all he has really won at this point is the opportunity to get to work for all of us. There is a definite sense of the gravity of the situation he inherits from GW Bush. President Clinton handed over a country that was in great shape to President Bush; President Bush is leaving a legacy of total incompetence and widespread destruction. He really wasn't joking when he said goodbye to other world leaders as the world's greatest polluter. He was just pointing out that he's leaving behind a lot of garbage that needs to be cleaned up.

Of all the things that President Elect Obama said last night in his speech that I appreciated, the best one was his line about government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not been banished from the land. The idea of having a constitutional law professor in the Oval Office is vastly reassuring to those of us who still honor the Charters of Freedom and believe in the fundamental principles the country is built upon.

I won't say a lot about what the Republicans should take away from this election, but I do want to close with an observation. Much was said on the campaign trail about the "real America." The Republicans have formed some kind of mythology that divides the country into various parts, only some of which they consider to represent "real" American values and beliefs. That is a dangerous mythology that they do need to reconsider. The real America, the country as it actually is, made its decision loud and clear last night. By a margin of 6% the real America declared its support for Barack Obama to be the 44th President of the United States. Imagining some other world where the majority of people are white, Protestant, men living in small towns and everyone votes Republican while paying homage to the memory of Ronald Reagan might be fun in a computer game like Second Life, but here where real people live, in the pragmatically real world, Obama got a huge majority of all the votes cast during this election. That cannot be dismissed, ignored, disputed, or taken away.

I for one believe he will do a great job in his new role. As for me, and millions of other supporters, it's probably time for us to all just get some sleep.

News From the Battleground States

2008-10-30T20:45:00.003-04:00

This blog post really is just a stream-of-consciousness riff on what has been going on since my last post, and a meandering muse about where we go next from here. 2008 finds our family in an unusual position; we live in a bona fide battleground state, and so do some of our relatives. The states in question are North Carolina and Missouri, states that in most elections that I can recall were ignored by the presidential campaigns, since the outcomes of the elections were totally predictable. Not this year. This year, we can't go two days in a row without having a major event in the state from one campaign or the other, and almost all the TV ad space is devoted to political campaign commercials.

Not that I am complaining. In the past two weeks I got to attend a rally for Obama in Fayetteville, NC with 12,000 people, and one in Raleigh with Obama and 28,000 people attending. My brother and sister in law in Missouri were at the rally in St. Louis under the arch with 100,000 people. We have been working, in both states, every day for the past 6 weeks or more trying to get Obama elected. We have given our money, made hundreds and hundreds of phone calls, helped with database stuff and data entry, brought food to campaign workers, attended rallies, and voted early. We recruit other volunteers, read all the political junkie web sites, and seem to think and talk about nothing but the campaign and the election.

Now that we are within 5 days of the election, we are eager for it to be over but also stressed out, exhausted, hyped up, overly caffeinated, and driven to distraction. The radio and TV are on all the time when we aren't working and the stuff of ordinary living is shoved off until November 5. Fortunately the daughter and the dog are mostly understanding, as long as food continues to be served at reasonably predictable times.

When all of this does end, we'll either be ecstatic at the outcome and glad that our efforts and everyone else's efforts paid off, or we will enter a dark depression that will be a lot harder to get over than the post-2000 funk was. In 2000 we felt robbed, furious at Ralph Nader and the Greens, and thoroughly disillusioned with the integrity of the voting process in Florida and Ohio. Maybe that is why so many of us are working so hard for Obama this time around. After 2000 many of us were left wondering, "Did we do everything we could?" This time, win or lose, I doubt any of us supporting the Democratic nominee will have that concern.

Amazingly, though, we continue to bump into people who claim to be undecided about who they are going to vote for. This is the hardest thing for us to get. I can understand if someone is a hard-core social conservative, a died-in-the-wool Reaganite, or just someone who has admired John McCain for a long time and they plan to vote for McCain. I can understand someone being a Yellow Dog, Blue Dog, Clintonista, or any other brand of Democrat voting for Obama. I can understand independents worried about the economy, retirees freaking out about the implosion of their investment accounts, students worried about the cost of education or military families anguished about who best can help bring their loved ones safely home casting their vote. But it is beyond me to comprehend being undecided, unsure of how to vote, in this election. That is the problem with being a partisan. Partisans have an opinion and they know why they have one.

And, that is also the part of the electoral process that I find the most unpleasant, and the hardest to untangle. Candidates cannot get elected without the dedicated work of partisans. But the emotional investment it takes to be a partisan can be hard to let go of once the election is over. And, for the sake of the country, it is really important for us to figure out how to let go, stand down, stop opposing one another and pull together in a new direction. We always hope for that but it never seems to work out. I know that part of why it happens this way is the negative advertising, the hyperbolic exaggerations of candidates and their supporters, and the passion of True Believers. America seemed to work best when we were thoroughly pragmatic and mostly without ideologies. The more True Believers there are, the harder it is to be pragmatic, and the harder it is to find common ground.

Well, that is a real worry and a serious topic that deserves a lot more consideration. And I will think back on it again, sometime after next Tuesday.

Debate Matters

2008-10-05T15:17:00.002-04:00

I hope you watched the debate Thursday night between Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Delaware Senator Joe Biden. No matter which candidate you are supporting in the election, the debate itself and the demeanor of the candidates, the way they conducted themselves, was really great to observe. Both candidates delivered better than expected performances, and neither candidate embarrassed himself or herself, or most importantly, the ticket he or she represents.

There were three points in the debate that I thought were actually important, and the rest of the debate was more-or-less standard campaign fare. First, I thought it was important that for the first half hour of the debate, Sarah Palin refused to answer the questions posed to her and spoke instead about drilling for oil. In case you missed it, she’s in favor of more drilling. That is about the only answer she seems to have for most any question posed to her. She completely dodged the issue of McCain’s lifelong support for deregulation, and how we are supposed to reconcile that stance with his recent conversion experience to call for greater government oversight of the economy. It’s so much more appealing to answer those questions with “We need more oil drilling.” Never mind that we can’t drill our way out of this mess. There is a definite “Don’t confuse me with the facts” dynamic going on, which means it is useless to point out that if we tapped every single petroleum asset in all the states, territories, and off shore reserves combined that America has under its direct control, we would still have to reduce our overall oil consumption by 88% within 10 years to achieve oil independence. Ten years from now. If we had 100% of all possible reserves being drilled at full capacity, starting today. If the Democrats called for an 88% reduction in our rate of consumption and use, the Republicans would explode with rants and tirades about how that would destroy the economy and how it is completely unrealistic. Yet everyone wants to buy into their idea that more drilling will lead to energy independence. Umm…..okay, but what else have you got?

The second important point in the debate for me was when the question of climate change was asked. Biden was clear and to the point when he said that climate change is a human problem created by us, and that we cannot begin to find solutions unless we recognize what the root causes of the problem are. He was clear and concise on that point. Governor Palin’s response to the climate change question was confused, unfocused, rambling and weird. She handled most questions in the debate well enough, but on climate change…..not so much.

The third important part of the debate for me was the issue of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. This is one of the places where the two tickets are clearly different. John McCain and Sarah Palin are all about talking about the surge, but if you press them on whether the war was justified to begin with, they ask “Why are you dwelling on the past? It’s time to look forward.” Well, as Joe Biden pointed out, past is prologue. Another way of saying it is what we do as managers in interviewing job applicants. The single best indicator of how anyone will perform a job or task is how they have done before. John McCain and other Hawks in the administration and the Republican party beat the drums of war loudly in the run up to the invasion of Iraq and have defended the war ever since. It is completely legitimate for others to ask, was that sound judgment? Is that mentality the one we want to operate with in the world? John McCain has been one of the most ardent supporters of a phase in the conflict that we started unilaterally and without a good reason. Iraq did not attack us on 9/11. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as George W. Bush claimed. The basic premise for this conflict was flawed and McCain-Palin will not acknowledge that. Instead they want to focus on the recent surge.

John McCain wants to win, both the war and the election. I get that. But sometimes the best decisions are the ones you do not make. We wouldn’t be arguing about the best way to leave Iraq if we hadn’t rushed in recklessly to begin with. We would be further along in addressing climate change if we had an open and comprehensive debate about energy policy instead of secret closed-door meetings between oil executives and Vice President Cheney almost 8 years ago. But in terms of the debate itself, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I hope that all Americans look seriously and think through the issues that matter to them. We should debate these issues, because ultimately, the vote we cast is the vote that matters most of all.

The End of Reaganomics?

2008-10-02T00:48:00.002-04:00

I came of age, as far as for voting purposes and being able to participate in elections, in 1982. Ronald Reagan had defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980 and that time period represented the ascendancy of Conservative GOP rule. The formula was perfected by Reagan, and everything that has followed since grew directly out of his legacy. The major compass points for the Reagan formula were simple: free markets are a good thing, communism is a bad thing, and make sure that the wealthiest Americans are as unfettered as possible so that they have incentives to pursue personal gain. The benefits of their success, according to the Reaganomic theory, will trickle down through the society and economy to everyone’s benefit. “Big Government” was the enemy, taxes were a bad thing, heavy defense spending was a good thing, and the litmus test for whether the GOP was doing a good job was the question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

The genius of Reagan’s formula was that he was such a gifted orator that he could deliver a speech that let everyone take away from it whatever he or she wanted to hear. He was called the Tephlon President because nothing stuck to him. His advertisements were full of flags, apple pie, and patriotic sentiment. His speeches were long on platitudes interwoven with touching personal anecdotes and examples drawn from the experiences of others. He was a master at entertaining the crowd. And when it came to governance, he left all the details to a skilled team of professional geeks and wonks who did the real work. One of his leadership principles was to surround himself with smart people who knew what they were doing, and then he got out of the way.

This formula worked for Reagan so well because he never lost focus of the real issues facing the Middle Class. He helped the rich get richer, but he made sure the Middle Class believed this was the best way to help them. The downside to all of this of course was that by the end of his 8 years in the White House, he was clearly off his game. Age caught up with him and the people around him began to concoct schemes and pursue goals that even Reagan probably would not have approved of---remember Oliver North and Iran-Contra? But by 1988 the agenda for the country was firmly settled, and the GOP was driving the bus. No one doubted the main tenets of the Conservative Agenda. Many people rejected them, but most accepted them and everyone knew they were the main ideas of our time.

Recent developments suggest that this 28 year long period of dominance is ending. The current economic crisis is absolutely rooted in the philosophy that Reagan espoused. Encouraging the rich to get richer any way they can while eliminating any meaningful oversight or regulation by government led directly to the mortgage crisis that is at the core of the credit crunch and meltdown. In the defense spending area, Reagan invested heavily in military spending. But he didn’t really use the military very much. Later Republican presidents—and Bill Clinton, too---used the military much more. The current president has used it most of all. Increasing our use of military might has not really been all that effective, however, and the cost (in terms of money, lives, and America’s reputation) has proven to be unacceptable.

We are turning a corner, and in many ways, we are in the process of rejecting a 28 year long love affair with Reagan’s policies. Americans today want less war and a more active role for government in both the economy and in issues that affect normal people’s lives. The anger over the bailout proposal working its way through Congress is really anger over the idea of continuing to help the rich while ignoring everyone else. That isn’t what the bailout bill does, but that is the perception. People are tired of helping the rich get richer.

The final difference between the GOP of 28 years ago and the party that exists today is that Reagan tapped into the energy and enthusiasm of the Social Conservatives, but he made sure to ignore their core issues once he had gained power. Mainstream Republicans ruled the party in his day, and economic and security concerns were the ones that drove the agenda. That paradigm held fast from 1980-1994. But when the GOP took control of the House in the 1990s, social conservatives got their first taste of real power. By getting Sarah Palin on the ticket this year as the Vice Presidential candidate, they (hopefully) have reached the zenith of their reign. Now that we have all seen the results they achieved once they got their opportunity, the country seems poised to move in a different direction. Poll numbers consistently show a national trend away from McCain-Palin and toward greater comfort with Obama-Biden. In North Carolina, 600,000 newly registered voters have been added to the roles this year. In the youngest age brackets, the ratio of new Democrats to new Republicans is 8:1. That isn’t good news if you believe in Reaganomics.

Ok, This is Really Serious Now

2008-09-16T21:29:00.003-04:00

The Federal Government is taking over AIG. Lehman Brothers is bankrupt. Fannie and Freddie had to be saved to prevent a complete meltdown of mortgage lending in America. And the person who is more responsible than anyone for all of this is Phil Gramm, the former Senator from Texas who also happens to have been for many years John McCain's good friend and chief economic advisor. How so? Because Phil Gramm is unbelievably smart, and was a major author of many pieces of legislation that surgically relaxed, removed, and unleashed the financial sector regulations that served to protect us from these types of disasters. In the name of the free market and with absolute faith in the private sector, government oversight and regulation was nearly completely banished from Wall Street. Once he relaxed rules against predatory lending practices, he left public office and took a lucrative gig with UBS. And it was off to the races for all the big banks to blow the real estate bubble as big as it could get.

A couple of weeks ago I got a call from Countrywide trying to get me to refinance my house. Since we moved into our current house in 2002, we have received multiple "offers" from them each and every week. We get phone calls, emails and I am sure several small tropical rainforested islands have been clear cut to provide the card stock and paper for all the junk mail they send me. All of it begging me to let them re-finance my house. For most of those years they were pushing ARMs, the mortgages with ultra low initial interest rates that later blow up in your face. Lately they have been pushing fixed rate mortgages to "rescue" people from the ARMs they shoved down everyone's throats. With the last call I got, I just lost it. I tore into that poor soul who called me with all the venom I could muster, which wasn't fair but I had just had enough.

But none of that would have been possible without Phil Gramm. Phil Gramm who said Americans were a nation of whiners and that the fundamentals of the economy were strong. Phil Gramm who taught John McCain everything he knows about economics. Yesterday John McCain repeated the line about the fundamentals of the economy being strong when he gave a speech in Jacksonville, Florida. An hour later in Orlando he said the fundamentals of the economy were at risk. I guess they held a focus group on their way across the state.

Whatever you do when you decide who to elect for president this year, please think about the economy. Like Clinton said in 1992, it really is the economy, stupid. Since 1936, the economy has consistently performed better under Democrat presidents than it ever did under Republican ones (this is true; you can look it up). Democrats: FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton. The end of the Great Depression, the Go-Go Market of the 1960s, the lowest federal government deficits (under Carter and Clinton), and the longest run of prosperity ever recorded in the US (Clinton) all came when Dems were in the White House.

Republicans: Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush. Inflation, oil shortages, record deficits, record unemployment, loss of real wages, jobs outsourced, health care eliminated, predatory lending allowed, mortgage meltdown. All of it when Republicans were minding the store. It ain't about conservative social values or the culture wars. It ain't about pigs and lipstick. It's the economy, stupid. And when deregulation and unbridled greed caused the crisis, the wizard's apprentice that made it all possible cannot possibly lead us out of the mess he helped make.

Want Lies With That?

2008-09-15T21:33:00.002-04:00

I understand why some people probably can't wait for the election to be over. Most years by this point in time I am sick to death of it too. It is painful to have to watch the ridiculous ads that come across the TV, or hear them over the radio waves, because they are just so amazingly untrue much of the time. Some are worse than others, but most of them leave you feeling slimed--in a good year. But this year beats just about anything and everything I have ever seen before.

It's going to get worse, I am afraid, before it gets better. You know it is already pretty bad if Karl Rove is saying McCain has gone too far. What I don't get is how the McCain camp can have decided this is the way to go after the vicious, unfair and untrue attacks Rove and Bush unleashed on him in South Carolina in 2000. He has never been the same, politically, since then. But now we see him adopting the very same tactics that nearly destroyed his career and did destroy his spirit in his bid to win at all costs.

There is a saying in scripture that you may know. "What does it profit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?" That is a great question. Is it worth it? How badly must you want something if you throw away everything you have ever stood for in the quest to get it? I will never have to face that choice, thank God, because I am never going to be in a position to have to choose between being true to myself and gaining that kind of power. I faced my choices a few years ago and gave up money to pursue a life and job worth doing. I'm at peace with that.

I don't know what will happen next in this campaign. I can tell you some signs that I find encouraging, and some that worry me. I am encouraged to see my in-laws volunteering and helping out. I'm encouraged that one of my best friends has started donating money to Obama--a first for him. I am happy to see that Obama raised a record $66 million in August, half of it coming from small donors like us, just ordinary people. But I am worried about the negative ads, the outright lies and people who are willing to believe them. And I am worried about the persistent scourge of racism in America that is fueling a lot of the hatred.

But when I hear the stunning and obvious lies that are coming out right now, especially those fueled by the "movement conservatives" that are so exhuberant over Gov. Palin, the ones who thump their Bibles like nobody's business, it makes me wonder how they reconcile it all. I mean, there is that part in Exodus--from the Ten Commandments--that they made such a courthouse cause in Alabama and Texas--you know, the Commandment that says "Thou shalt not bear false witness." In plain English translation, Don't Lie. And having been through the Bush-Cheney-Rove slurmongering, experienced it first hand, it makes me wonder how John McCain reads the text that says "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I am pretty certain that at the end of the day the McCains are actually, deep down, ashamed of themselves for where they have let the campaign go. And the 527s are just getting started. The Swift Boat people haven't really even joined the fray in earnest yet.

Of course, the Republicans would counter that there are plenty of negative ads coming from the other side, too. I am sure they can point to claims that from their perspective are false. I'm not sure what exactly that proves, because it doesn't matter how many wrongs get committed--they'll never add up to something that is right. Or healthy. It's the season of the Chili Cheese Lies, without so much as a side order of Truthiness to go with a lot of it. But early voting starts here on October 16 and election day is 50 days from now. It's almost over, for good or ill.

Rattled?

2008-09-12T23:12:00.003-04:00

So much is going on these days it is hard to keep up with it all. First off, I want to wish all my friends in Texas to stay safe and know that our thoughts and prayers are with you as Hurricane Ike comes ashore.

On the political side, tomorrow all over the country Obama supporters will be getting together for what are being billed "Cookouts for Change," a chance for supporters and those trying to make up their minds to get together, socialize, and do the political thing. In my case I will be working most of the day with the campaign in and around Cary, NC, and then joining everyone for the cookout late in the afternoon.

I don't know how much you caught of the Sarah Palin interview, but what I heard left me certain that while the Governor is many things, one thing she is not is ready for the job she is asking us all to give her. The thing that disturbed me most was her assertion that we may have to go to war with Russia over their invasion of Georgia. It didn't take long for her to start rattling the sabres, did it?

For those of us who grew up during the cold war our entire lives, and then watched in awe as the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR broke up, her words were sobering if nothing else. Many young people today simply do not know what it was like in the 1960s-1980s, with nuclear weapons being produced on both sides in obscene numbers and our two governments never far from being hostile toward one another. The greatest achievement by the politicians and soldiers of my parents' generation was that they managed to be on the verge of war for more than 40 years without unleashing armageddon on the planet. Russia today still has a formidable nuclear arsenal, and no one should be naive or stupid enough to try and pick a fight with them.

I grew up in military towns my whole life. My dad worked in the Civil Service for both the Army and the US Air Force, and as a computer programmer for the Strategic Airlift Command one of his duties was programming Titan missile launch codes. We knew when I was in school that if a nuclear war started, we were all certainly going to be very dead very quickly. We figured we had 20 minutes to live if a nuclear war broke out. We had missile silos all around us that the Russians were targeting with their missiles just like we had their cities and installations squarely in our sites. We knew, and we understood. And we did from time to time actively worry about it.

The United States armed forces are the finest in the world, but today our men and women in uniform are stretched to the absolute limit. We must end our involvement in Iraq and focus all efforts in Afghanistan. And we absolutely must rebuild our capabilities while letting our troops, their families, and the world catch a breather. Sabre rattling is unwise, and one observer noted recently that the American position on Russia right now seems to be "speak loudly while carrying a small stick." The danger we face in recklessly resuming the game of brinkmanship with Russia is that if any real fight broke out, whichever side starting demonstrably losing would be sorely tempted to use the nuclear arsenal. To do so would be certain suicide for our whole planet. The world itself is all that would be in danger. And the fact that since the mid-late 1980s we have not been in an active cold war with the Russians means both sides are out of practice in the art of restraint while harboring hostile feelings toward one another. It would be too easy for someone to screw it up.

Am I advocating that we do nothing against Russian resurgence and potential agression? Not in the least. We may one day find ourselves in open conflict with them, although that would be a terrible tragedy given the progress that has been made. What I am saying though is that American unilateralism must stop, and the last thing the world wants or needs is a fight between us and them. Whatever strategy is developed to deal with Russia must be crafted with input from China, Japan, the European Union and our other allies and trading partners. We dare not go it alone.

If you don't get that, then you just are not ready for that job.

Seven

2008-09-10T20:31:00.002-04:00

9/11/2008 marks the 7th anniversary of the day America was attacked by terrorists in a new way, and I do think it is still important to remember that day. I have written about it before, and everything I said last year still rings true for me. If you want to read that post, you can find it at

http://apexdbs.blogspot.com/2007/09/911.html

This year of course there are new things, important things, going on. We are once again in an election cycle as we mark this day, but we have years between then and now and some possibility of putting things into another perspective.

One of the things that George Bush and many Republicans like to say about their opponents is that they have a "9/10 mentality." They mean that as a criticism. They whip it out and use it like a credit card. It is their ultimate "put down."

I am glad that John McCain and Barack Obama will be together at the site of the World Trade Center tomorrow. 9/11 is not a Republican holy day. It doesn't belong to any political party. 9/11 is a national tragedy, a terrible memory, a fact and a day filled with tales of brave courage. But above all it is a day for all of us to mark in our own way. It belongs to all of us, all Americans and also to people from all over the world who care.

Whatever 9/11 is, there is one thing it is not. It is not the "Get out of jail free" card George W. Bush has tried to make it. Whenever anyone has tried to hold him or his party accountable since 9/11 or anyone has challenged his policies, the President has pointed at 9/11 and used it as his shield, his crutch, his raison d'etre. As time goes by, and hopefully this year, that strategy will ultimately fail. It is not true that 9/11 justifies any action we want to take or absolves us for any wrong we as a nation commit. We all must come to understand that before the day can really be honored as it should. After 7 years we must stop letting this day be twisted and contorted for personal or political ends, so that we can all mourn it together and then work together to bring those to justice who really attacked us.

Democracy in Action

2008-09-08T20:42:00.002-04:00

Okay, so by now I have come clean and disclosed to the whole world, or at least the whole world with internet access who cares to find out, that I am a registered Democrat and have no plans to vote Republican any time soon. As I drove home this evening and listened to NPR about how the presidential election contest has tightened, it occurred to me that I have no idea how independent and unaffiliated voters see the election, or what they will be thinking about when they make up their minds. It also occurred to me that many Republicans and Independents really have no idea why people like me are planning to vote the way we will. There has been a general decline across the board of genuine conversation, dialogue, and attempts to understand each other in the post-Limbaugh, post-Murdoch world of Fox News and other such bombastic screed. We've lost the front porch in America, and what we have gained is frankly not worth much.

So here is my open letter to Independents and Republicans on at least part of what makes it impossible for me to consider voting for McCain-Palin. Since I have almost 60 days left, I am sure I will have other opportunities to share other reasons, but this one is most on my mind tonight. As a Democrat and an American citizen, one of the most important privileges and rights we have is the right to vote, the right to participate in a process to choose our leaders. I believe that is a nearly sacred right. The integrity of the voting process was one of the ideals I learned from my father, who thought it was absolutely essential to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My father took that privilege seriously, and he made sure I do too. It's funny how as I get older I appreciate and understand him better, and occasionally find myself agreeing with him too.

This summer the world watched in horror as Zimbabwe's corrupt leader Robert Mugabe and his political allies made a mockery of the presidential election in Zimbabwe, unleashing a terror campaign against his opposition in order to ensure his election victory. You can find numerous accounts of it on the internet, but here is one from National Public Radio.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91955609

There was national and international outrage over the "election" in Zimbabwe, but for me and many other Democrats, the news accounts were uncomfortable for what it made us think about how voter intimidation and vote suppression occurs even here in the United States. And, for many of us, we cannot understand why the same kinds of outrage should not apply here. Here is just a sample of news stories and accounts of irregularities that you can find if you look hard enough.

Voter intimidation and vote suppression efforts in the recent Virginia U.S. Senate race:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15603344/

Voter intimidation and suppression efforts targeting the college age vote at Virginia Tech:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/03/voting

And most bitter of all, the irregularities in Florida during the 2000 election. The Wikipedia account of all that is quite good, and provides many references. Or, you can search the web for other accounts if you prefer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000

The disturbing pattern in all of this is that too many times it appears that voter intimidation, vote suppression, and irregularities occur that benefit Republican candidates. It is not random and these things do happen. In 2000 and in 2004 there were reports from many states of efforts mounted to prevent people who were legally registered and had a right to vote from being allowed to exercise that right. The differences between these orchestrated efforts to interfere with elections here at home and the efforts mounted in Zimbabwe this year are differences in tactics and in scale, but the intended effect is the same. And if anyone in the United States is comfortable with that, then I truly fear for my country.

In the interest of being fair, I will admit that there are and have been irregularities in elections throughout our history benefitting all parties. Irregularities were common on all sides particularly in elections in the 1800s and up until the reform era between 1910-1950, where machine politics ruled and votes were openly bought and sold, the dead kept on voting, and poll taxes and other devices were employed to deny people their right to vote. I know. But I also hoped that we were beyond all that. I hoped that with Nixon, the era of dirty tricks politics, espionage and interference was over. Unfortunately, there is substantial evidence to the contrary. America, surely we are better than that. We can be, we should be, and we must be better than that.

The Good Old Time (Religion?)

2008-09-05T20:45:00.003-04:00

What is that worn out phrase--as American as Apple Pie? It seems like a lot of people in this country are hungry for some good old fashioned views, and as I write this it is sometimes hard to figure out whether those old-fashioned thoughts are recalling 1892, 1992 or 2004. Hurricane Sarah has arrived to reignite the culture wars, and the election has certainly taken a completely unexpected detour. She is the Belle of the Ball right now, whether you like her or not.

It will be interesting to watch what happens for the next 60 days. The Republican convention was at times surreal, and John McCain's calls last night for bipartisanship, his statements that the GOP had made mistakes and such was the weirdest of them all. The speech would have worked if Lieberman was the VP, but with the crowd all gaga over Ms. Palin and her self-described pit bull style, it seems clear that John McCain is marching to the beat of his own different drummer all alone. The crowd is with her.

It is also interesting to me that Palin helped Obama raise more than $10 million yesterday. If there was any chance the Democrats would be complacent and overconfident down the stretch, she has made certain that won't happen. In the end, though, she is simply the latest great sideshow attraction created by Rove, the Evil Genius.

She is meant to mesmerize us, fire us up or drive us mad. Because as long as we are all talking about Sarah Palin, her attempts to fire the Wasilla librarian for not banning books Sarah didn't like, the relative merits of different actors in Trooper Gate, her views on hunting wolves from airplanes (she's for it), her family life and whether it is in or out of bounds---as long as the election is about stuff like that, it won't be about stuff that matters. Real issues, like 8 straight months of job losses and an unemployment rate of more than 6% for the first time in 5 years. Real issues like mortgage meltdowns that are now rippling out of the subprime market and creating a credit crunch across the board, driving housing prices (and values) down and bankruptcy and foreclosure up. Real issues like why the Republicans did not mention the economy once during their convention even though it is the number one issue on the minds of most voters heading into November. Issues the McCain-Palin ticket cannot win on, issues they do not want to talk about.

We all have moments of nostalgia, and a longing for simpler times that we remember more fondly than the realities of life in these uncertain days. Some people find their old-time religion in the Reagan era, or the Bush-Quayle days. Others think of the peace and prosperity we all enjoyed during the Clinton-Gore years when the stock market took off, the deficit went down, and Wall Street was the envy of the world.

Me, I also have my moments of longing for the past. In my case it is a deep longing for the America I grew up being taught about. The one where we hold these truths to be self-evident, that everyone is created equal. The one where my pastor proclaimed loudly from the pulpit that the most important freedom in America was the freedom of religion, and its surest protection was the wall of separation between church and state envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. The one where we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, promote the general welfare, ensure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense promise to respect, honor and defend the Constitution. The one where we dreamed big and were asked to work together to make those dreams come true. That is the America I miss most. The one that was before the culture wars. The one the Republicans seem to have completely forgotten ever existed.

10 Reasons

2008-09-03T19:33:00.003-04:00

It is beginning to look like my main political outlet this election season, apart from giving money and driving around with stickers and car magnets on our hybrids, is going to be writing blog posts. At least until early voting opens and we can finally cast the vote that matters. I usually have avoided posting partisan political blogs, because those can be tiring to read and there is a lot more to life than politics. Also, too many people in America are prone to dismiss and vilify someone who thinks differently than they do. That is actually a huge part of the problem we have today, and I haven't wanted to contribute to that silliness. But this election is too important for me to shirk my civic responsibility to pay attention to what is going on and participate in the discourse of our society. So I'll be writing about it off and on until November.

Here are my Top Ten Reasons for not voting for John McCain/Sarah Palin, in no particular order:

1. Climate change is a real crisis (sorry Sarah)
2. We need to get out of Iraq (sorry John)
3. The whole US Constitution matters (not just the 2nd Amendment)
4. People need jobs
5. People need health care insurance
6. Torture is wrong
7. We need more friends than enemies in the world
8. Alberto Gonzales ruined the Dept. of Justice
9. Dick Cheney ruined the Vice Presidency
10. Katrina "recovery" has been a disaster

Here are my Top Ten Reasons to vote for Obama:

1. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people
2. People need jobs
3. People need health care insurance
4. The climate crisis is real
5. The Dept. of Justice must be fixed
6. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda is the real threat--Iraq never was
7. Guantanamo needs to be closed
8. The whole Constitution matters
9. Illegal wiretaps are wrong
10. The economic crisis is not a mental recession

Obama wants to work on solutions for problems that are real; McCain really isn't sure what the problem is.

Maverick No More

2008-09-02T19:27:00.004-04:00

I have been trying for several days to figure out what to say about John McCain's pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as a running mate. The more we've learned about her over the past few days, the more confused I was as to how to understand what is really going on here. I know the Republican spin machine is touting her as a fellow maverick, and playing up the idea that McCain acted on his gut instincts in true maverick fashion to make his choice. But I am not buying it, not for one minute.

The truth here is a story no one is talking about. Lost in all the hoopla over her experience (and lack thereof), her potential ethics violations in office, her family issues and all that goes with the territory, is a sad tale of what I think really happened to McCain along the way on his trail toward the White House. John McCain didn't want Sarah Palin. He didn't want Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney. John McCain wanted to do something truly independent. He wanted to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Lieberman is McCain's friend, someone whose judgment McCain trusts. And, in picking an Independent who used to be a Democrat, McCain wanted to send a signal about willingness to work with anyone who was willing to work with him on issues.
For a fall back position, McCain wanted Tom Ridge as another option on the ticket.

The social conservatives of the GOP shot those ideas down. They told McCain that if he picked either of those men as running mates that they wouldn't turn out, wouldn't support him. They told him he would surely lose the election. So, with the Republican National Convention bearing down on the campaign like a runaway freight train, in hasty fashion they picked Sarah Palin to shore up the support of the far right wing of the Grand Old Party.

Initially my take on the pick was similar to Paul Begala's opinion posted on CNN's website. I even wrote my own take, which I'll quote now, as my initial reaction: "Having spent a little time around horses in my life, I know what people like about mavericks. They are spirited, a little wild, independent. They are the stuff we dream about in our longing for the days of Manifest Destiny and the wide open West. But those horses are also unpredictable, impulsive, and sometimes they are just plum loco. " But that isn't my take on this story anymore.

What I see now in John McCain is no maverick. He once was a free spirit going where he wanted and doing as he pleased. But now he's more like a tired old trail pony hanging out by the corral in the Dude Ranch just looking for one more ride before they put him out to pasture. Dispirited, saddle broke, bridled and cross tied by his grooms and keepers. How can America trust John McCain to run the country when he can't even run his own campaign anymore? How can America believe that McCain is capable of standing up to Russia, China, and the terrorists who seek to hurt us if he can't even stand up to the social conservatives in his own party? And if he can't pick the running mate he wants, who will really be calling the shots as he puts together a cabinet or selects nominees for the Supreme Court? If John McCain is not the one calling the shots now, how can we trust him to be the one leading the country should he win? These are serious questions, and questions no one is asking. But someone surely should.

Politically Conscious

2008-08-27T19:19:00.008-04:00

Well, despite my best intentions, life and work continue to keep me too busy to post on the blog as often as I would like. This week, however, I am finding some time to think and write while I watch the Democratic National Convention. I wonder how you all are experiencing this, and I find myself thinking about my own path to political consciousness.

I never thought much about politics until the summer of 1973. I was nine years old and President Richard Nixon was being impeached and tried in Congress for numerous crimes in the scandal known as Watergate. My father, a Barry Goldwater Republican, made me watch those hearings and we had many conversations that summer and on until the President resigned in 1974. But every since that summer I have been politically aware, and followed the political process with great interest.

I think it is interesting that so many people today really don't remember all of the illegal things Richard Nixon and the Republican Party did during his presidency. When Nixon was in the White House the IRS and tax audits were used inappropriately to harass people for political reasons, there was widespread illegal wiretapping and surveillance of innocent people, campaign fraud, general abuse and illegal slush funds laundered money that funded the political espionage and sabotage. My father was shocked, ashamed and hurt. He was hurt that his political party and his candidate had done so many things that went against everything the party supposedly stood for, and that my Dad certainly believed in.

I became a Democrat that summer, although I wouldn't be able to do anything with my political consciousness until I was 18 years old in 1982. I cast my first vote for a young former law professor from the University of Arkansas who was running for Governor. His name was Bill Clinton. During those years in Arkansas he was a good governor for the state, and Hillary Clinton was a major force for improving education in our state.

I didn't stay in Arkansas. I went to college in Texas and graduate school in North Carolina. I worked in a lot of losing political campaigns for a lot of good candidates. I voted for some people even though I knew they didn't stand a chance. Because I could never forget 1973, and everything that happened. I had become a "Yellow Dog" Democrat when I was 9, and I guess I always will be.

I have enjoyed the convention this year. Ok, I didn't appreciate much about the first night except the Ted Kennedy tribute and of course Michelle Obama's speech. But last night I did enjoy the speech by the Governor of Montana, Virginia Senate Candidate Mark Warner, and the big speech by Hillary Clinton. I have to admit that I have been upset with Hillary since Obama won the primary because I thought she could do more to unite the party than she has. But last night she did a great job and gave a great speech.

Nixon made me a Democrat. As a Democrat, nothing is more important than the concept of one person-one vote. My personal political commitment is to the idea that every vote should be courted and every vote should be counted. I also look back to the election of 2000 and I still feel personal anger for the way that election ended. I and most of the other people who voted in 2000 voted for Al Gore. How different the world could be today. How different the world should be today. Warner is right. This election is not about left vs. right, conservative vs. liberal, or red vs. blue. This is the past vs. the future. We have had too much of the politics of the past. It is time for the politics of the future.

Honoring the Charters

2008-07-05T14:59:00.002-04:00

This past week I was in Washington, DC. It was my second or third time being there at or near July 4th, and after the workshop I attended was over, my wife and I decided to stick around for one more day and do some sightseeing. We had never been in the city at the same time before when it was just the two of us, so it also seemed like a fun thing to do together. Sort of like going out on a date, on the National Mall. We decided to visit the National Archives and the National Gallery of Art.

At the National Archives, we paid homage to the Charters of Freedom. There are of course thousands of documents in the National Archives, but four of them have special significance. The Charters of Freedom include the Magna Carta, first signed in 1215 by King John of England, but in 1297 reaffirmed by King Edward I and incorporated into national law in England at that time. The copy of the Magna Carta at the National Archives is in remarkable condition. But the other documents we went to see on Wednesday were the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. I absolutely had chills when I got to see them, and the presentation of the charters was wonderful to experience and see.

After our visit to the Archives, back at the home of our friends in northern Virginia, we had a great discussion about what it meant to us, and we talked about our favorite founding fathers and other key early Americans. What struck me in thinking again about the way the US was founded was the fact that the United States of America is first and foremost a nation built on ideas. We decided to become a nation. We designed our own system of government. No one made us do it, and while we certainly inherited traditions from Europe, we put them together in a way that was our own.

Read again the preamble to the Constitution: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." God did not establish it, no foreign ruler, no alien from outer space. We, the people, established this country by choice. It was an act of will, a movement of volition and determination that brought this country into being.

I was also struck by how very different the politics of the day were 232 years ago. Many of us may remember the Federalist Papers, but there were another set of documents involved in that debate in the 1780s, called the Anti-Federalist Papers. Even though the Federalists won the political argument (thank goodness), there was genuine concern to make sure this was a more perfect union, and in order to promote justice, ensure domestic tranquility, and promote the general welfare, the Constitution was immediately amended to address the concerns of the losing side. We call them the Bill of Rights. It is virtually impossible to imagine in today's political environment that any winning coalition would act with such statesmanship and honor, with dignity and grace, to include and redress the concerns of the losing political side.

My main hope for this current political cycle is that after November has come and gone, that the President we wind up with takes time to honor the Charters of Freedom. It would be good to know that the President we have is someone who believes in, follows, and upholds the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

The other thing that struck me in reflecting on the Charters is that all anyone must do to really be a loyal citizen is to accept, honor, and swear to live by these ideas. Whether people come from Punjab or Peoria, Oaxaca or Waxahachie, Beijing or Baltimore, by affirming the ideas the country was founded on, they can become as American as me. My family may have been here for almost 400 years, but I am only and truly a citizen of this country to the extent I live up to the ideas contained in those Charters.

So, Happy July 4th Weekend to everybody, and if you ever get the chance please do visit the National Archives in Washington DC and pay your own respects to these wonderful documents.
I think you will be amazed at what you find, in the room and in your self.

The Trouble with Tomatoes

2008-06-17T22:25:00.003-04:00

I love tomatoes. I especially love home-grown, honest to goodness real tomatoes that taste like the ones my grandparents grew, or the ones that will come from my own garden in the coming months. With any luck, we'll have fabulous tomatoes beginning in a couple of weeks and lasting until the frost comes in November.

But I don't buy them much from the grocery store. Not because of salmonella, but because most store bought tomatoes are bred for their tough skin, pretty color and consistent shape, instead of for their flavor characteristics. And, commercially grown tomatoes are generally picked green so they will "ripen" during transport to stores. They have no flavor.

And, right now, some of the tomatoes that are being sold or were recently being sold in large volumes in the US have been contaminated with Salmonella St Paul. Epidemiologists in multiple local, state and federal agencies have determined that there is a significant statistical association between consumption or red round and roma tomatoes and this particular strain of bacteria.

The FDA was recently raked over the coals by Congress over their inability to determine the source of the contaminated tomatoes, but I thought that was a pretty cheap shot. Don't get me wrong, I understand the frustration over this issue very well, and I won't deny that there are times it is appropriate to call the feds on the carpet over things like this. But it is a little unfair to say some of the things that were said to the agency last week. It would be just as reasonable to ask Congress why they haven't fixed the mess with Social Security, energy policy, and health care. I mean, they have had a much longer period of time to tackle those issues, with little real progress to show for it. But I digress.

It is really hard to figure out where the contaminated tomatoes came from. People who eat tomatoes tend to eat a lot of tomatoes--in salads, tacos, salsa, on sandwiches, and just plain sliced. They eat them out and they eat them at home. They probably eat them with green eggs and ham. They eat them here, they eat them there, they eat them darn near everywhere.

I am not making light of the situation. It gets harder once you start working backwards. Who supplied the tomatoes to the grocery store or restaurant? When you get that list, you have to find out all the suppliers the distributors bought from--since last April. The shipment of tomatoes you see in the display at the store is a mixed pile that came from a lot of different farms, from all over the place. Producers sell to distributors who repack and ship specific quantities to retail outlets. Traceback is hard.

What FDA has done is determine areas of the country where tomatoes were not being commercially harvested during the outbreak, and declared those areas "safe." If you live in those areas, my advice would be to buy from local producers and farmer's markets. And hope the FDA figures the next piece of the puzzle out soon.

Food Safety Nuggets

2008-06-07T20:43:00.002-04:00

Well, things have been pretty busy lately, but I wanted to throw a few nuggets out there that I have picked up from reading journal articles and participating in food safety meetings around the country over the past few weeks. I haven't been able to read many articles for a while, but when you are sitting on a plane for 3.5 hours, you get a chance to catch up a little bit.

Researchers from the University of Nebraska recently did an interesting study concerning proper food storage temperatures and practices among Meals-On-Wheels recipients. What they wanted to know was whether the program participants knew how to safely store food, and what their meal consumption behaviors were. As I read the paper I realized that the practices they found were probably common across the country, and not just in the population they studied. I also wondered how many people know what the proper temperature is that should be maintained in a home refrigerator to keep foods safe. I won't keep you waiting for the bottom line info--refrigerators should be maintained at 40 degree F. In their temperature tracking study they placed data collectors in participants' refrigerators. They found that during the week refrigerator temperatures varied on average more than 11 degrees, and one refrigerator varied by as much as 30 degrees. Factors that can cause temperature problems range from how often and how long the door of the fridge is opened, and how quickly temperatures recover after hot food is placed in the unit. Why this is important is that when refrigerator temperatures rise above 40 degrees bacteria can multiply more easily. Want to check your temps? Get a refrigerator thermometer and put it in the fridge. Just don't open the fridge too often to check the reading. You can find the study in the journal Food Protection Trends, Vol 27, No. 9, published September 2007.

A journal that I appreciate a lot is called Foodborne Pathogens and Disease. The Winter 2007 issue, Vol. 4 No. 4 had several news items and articles that interested me. Among the news items was a summary of the Peter Pan Peanut Butter outbreak and investigation, documented salmonella infections associated with pet turtles and pet rodents, and a study documenting a community wide outbreak of urinary tract infections that suggest foodborne E. coli infections contributed to the increase in cases. That is very interesting because the bacteria studied were not the pathogenic strains we normally concern ourselves with, but routine bacteria that do not cause gastroenteritis. The study showed in particular that women who ate chicken 4-6 times per week were at increased risk for the UTIs. That intrigues me, but the only hypotheses I can come up with are that either the elevated consumption rates of chicken make it more likely that eventually you will eat some that has the bacteria on it, or that a lot of chickens have the bacteria on them but with increased consumption the bacterial load eventually gets high enough to trigger infections. Either way, I might consider a more varied diet with lower consumption rates of chicken.

In the same journal issue there was a study of bacterial tests of bulk milk tanks in 220 dairies in California. Among their findings were recovery rates of 10-21% per sampling period per dairy for Salmonella and 54-77% recovery of bacteria per sampling period per dairy for E. coli. There really are very good reasons for pasteurizing milk and milk products.

I will try to post more frequently in the next few weeks, passing on tidbits like these that I think are interesting. I also hope you are having a great Spring.

Re-Entry

2008-04-26T18:32:00.002-04:00

Well, we have reached that time of year when I once again become a more-or-less normal human being. Every April, shortly after college basketball season ends, I have to take a vacation. This year we went "home" to one of our favorite places: Austin, Texas. The April vacation ritual helps me re-enter polite society, and by the end of the trip, usually I am back to normal.

It won't last, of course. From now through October, I will enjoy all the normal Spring and Summer activities. I'll cook out on the grill, do yard work, spend time outdoors, see friends and family. I'll work my job, care about public health and food safety more than ever, and I'll spend some time at the beach. I'll read up on world events, politics, maybe even soak up some of the fine arts experiences life has to offer. I won't watch the Olympics this Summer, and this year I won't be watching the Tour de France, but I will partake in most all that life has to offer.

But when October 15 rolls around, the beast inside will start stirring. Between November 1-January 1 I'll still be mostly a normal person. But January-February-March--that is all NCAA basketball. Specifically, UNC Tar Heel Basketball. For those three months, I admit that I become a bit unhinged. That is the season of the Fanatic inside of me. I live and die with the Tar Heels the first three months of the year. And when they lose for the last time, as they did this year to Kansas in the Final Four, I know a little part of me dies too. I am always devastated after those losses. Hence, the April Vacation.

Now that I am back, hopefully I will be better about writing, and I will write about a greater variety of things. Happy Spring, everyone!

Round 2

2008-03-10T19:20:00.002-04:00

Round 2 of the 2008 edition of the UNC-Duke Men's Basketball rivalry went to North Carolina on Saturday night, as you may have heard somewhere or other recently. Preparing for the game I decided to determine the win-loss record of the two teams in this rivalry during my era of fandom, which dates back to the 1986-1987 season, my first year living in Chapel Hill. Saturday night marked the 53rd time I have watched these teams play each other, and during that time, UNC has won 25 times and Duke has won 28 games.

As we were watching the pregame show on ESPN I tried to bring my daughter "up to speed" on this rivalry, but it is extremely hard to do that. How do you explain the Jerry Stackhouse Jam game, the Bloody Montross game, the 1995 102-100 UNC victory in double overtime to someone who hasn't seen them? Telling someone else about the 1991 ACC Tournament final where UNC beat Duke by 22 points does not convey how much fun it was to watch that game as a Tar Heel fan. Of course, a few weeks later Duke won the NCAA Tournament that year, which I am sure helped ease their pain that time around.

But before the game last Saturday night Duke fans and the teams and coaches involved made a wonderful gesture of support for the UNC family, and I want to commend them for what they did. During the week before the game Eve Carson, the UNC Student Body President and a Senior at Carolina, was murdered senselessly approximately 5:00 am in a neighborhood near campus. My boss lives in that neighborhood and he and his family heard the gun shots that took her life. The entire Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill community network has been shaken by this tragedy, and our thoughts and prayers go out to her friends and family.

Before the game, the Duke students arranged to give out Carolina Blue ribbons to everyone at the game, and a nationally televised moment of silence was held in her honor, and in the honor of a Duke University graduate student who was also recently murdered. I cannot quote the game announcer precisely, but the gist of what he said was that for a moment everyone was asked to demonstrate that we are not only rivals, but also one community, and the loss was a common loss that should be mourned.

There are a lot of things UNC and Duke collaborate on. I am a graduate of both universities, and I have lectured on both campuses. The two schools are located less than 10 miles apart. Students can take classes in both universities, and we see each other and live in close proximity all the time. We take the basketball rivalry very seriously, but we also know when and where the lines of rivalry and community lie. And for that night, the game was intense and hard fought, but both before and after it was over, there was no denying that community was also shown that night in Durham.

Where Credit Is Due

2008-02-20T21:57:00.003-05:00

Occasionally I have posted items about the local Wake County Public School System and the conflicts between the Board of Education and parents and communities in the county. One of the major points of contention in the fight has been the belief that many supporters of the system have that the gains in academic achievement that WCPSS has experienced since the school systems were merged, and under the policies and leadership of the staff and BOE, justify their actions. Every criticism or question raised about their actions is met with two basic charges--the system must be working because test scores are going up, and anyone who criticizes the system is obviously a racist who wants to take us back to the days of segregated schools.

This dual mantra is lobbed so frequently that it is almost as predictable as the secondary break in Carolina basketball, and so far has proven equally effective. But the other night I began wondering about the impact of demographics on academic achievement in the county, and as I delved in to the issue, I found some interesting things. Wake County has experienced massive population growth since 1980. In 1980, according to the US Census Bureau, we had just over 301,000 people. In 1990 it was 423,000+. In 2000 the population had reached almost 630,000, and today the population is estimated to be more than 786,000 people. So this county has more than doubled in population in the past 27 years.

Economically, the county has also exploded. In 1990 for instance, the median houshold income in the county was just over $36,000. Today the median houshold income in the county is almost $61,000. Even accounting for inflation it is clear that people are richer now than they used to be. The poverty rate has also dropped, from 8% in 1990 to just over 5% of the population living below poverty today.

Looking at education levels, things have improved there as well. In 1990, 85% of people in the county had completed high school. Today that number is more than 90%. In 1990, 36% of the population had completed at least a Bachelor's degree. Today 44% of the county population has graduated from college.

All of these improvements tell a consistent story: the people who have moved into Wake County over the past 17 years are richer, better educated people. With almost half the county now being college educated and the median household income level being above $60,000, that means families have better foundations for kids entering school to do well. So while it is true that test scores are rising, graduation rates are improving and the kids are doing better in school today than they were in 1973, it is also true that an awful lot of this achievement is due to demographic factors beyond the control of the school system. It would be nice to see demographers do some analysis on how much of the achievement level is being driven by the educational attainment level and income of families, and which proportion should be credited to policies of the school system. The WCPSS takes full credit for all of the gains, but an honest analysis would need to factor out the achievement levels driven purely by household and economic factors.

Round 1

2008-02-06T19:50:00.001-05:00

Tonight is the first round in the backyard brawl that is the dominant event in my part of the country: UNC vs. Duke in men's college basketball. Anywhere from 2-4 times each year between January-April, two of the greatest teams in the NCAA clash for ultimate bragging rights, and we who live in the Triangle have mid court seats. Well, figuratively speaking, anyway. I have had literal midcourt seats for this game in the Dean Dome before, but I have also watched it in a sports bar in Denver, from my living room in Austin, in sports dives on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, with friends and foes. It is for many of us a way of life. For the records, UNC leads the series 127-96 right now, and Coach Smith is still one of the few coaches to own a winning record against the legendary Coach K from Durham. Tonight will be a tough contest, because UNC's point guard Ty Lawson has an ankle sprain and will certainly not be 100% healthy, if he plays at all.

Of course, basketball is not the only game going on. Last night I watched the returns from Super Tuesday, and while that competition has been going on for a while, last night certainly concluded the first major round, if it didn't start it off. What have we learned so far? On the Republican side, I'd say that it looks almost certain that John McCain will win the nomination. After Huckabee's showing in the south, I would be surprised if we didn't wind up with a McCain-Huckabee ticket that would drive the Neocons bonkers.

For the Democrats, it is full game on. No one came out of last night with a clear advantage, and it will be fascinating to see what happens next. Obama is the smooth polished gifted orator. Hillary Clinton is tough as nails and smarter than her husband. If they played basketball, I'd say that Obama reminds me most of some of the great point guards I have seen play in the ACC--guards like Kenny Smith or Randolph Childress. Clinton is more of a power forward in the political game, who battles and bruises her way around the basket. She cleans up the glass and has a nice hook shot.

Nobody asked me, but in my opinion the question the Democrats have to answer is whether they want to win in November. The Republicans will figure out who their team is first. They already have home court advantage and a loyal fan base. Right now they may be howling to fire their current head coach, but come November they will likely pull together. And sometimes, the opponent is enough to motivate a team to overcome their chemistry problems and perform beyond their capabilities. When UNC plays Duke, it doesn't matter who's hurt, who's ranked, who has issues--seeing that other jersey is enough to turn walk ons into warriors, humans into heroes. For one night, anything can become possible. I do know that no one the Democrats could run would bring that out in the Republican fan base like Hillary Clinton. She might be able to beat them anyway, but that is not a given. The money candidate for the Democrats would be Obama. He's got the game to bring home the prize, if they are just willing to give him the ball.

What I've Been Up To Lately

2008-01-31T20:04:00.000-05:00

Well it's been a while since I posted. Along the way I managed to turn 44, and on my birthday we decided to check out the new U23D movie. In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that I am a U2 fan and I have been since I fiirst heard the "War" album as a high school senior in 1982. So yes, I am a fan, but even if I weren't, I would have been blown away by this film. The HD 3D visual effects were awesome, and the musical quality in HD audio was fantastic.

What was interesting to see was the demographic makeup of the crowd on the screen and in the audience. As we stood in line, most of the families looked like ours--adults in their 40s and their teenage/pre-teen kids. Together, all excited and enjoying the anticipation. On screen, the crowds in Argentina and other places were the usual 20-something concert crowds that most mega concerts would have.

The set list was mostly what you would expect in a greatest-hits type of set list, but the energy and intimacy of the film made even songs that were first performed live more than 20 years ago seem fresh and new. And, for kids like my daughter, that's exactly what they were. Somehow though I think the experience I have waking up every morning and hearing "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" blaring down the hall now is different from what my Dad had when he was hearing it from me 26 years ago.

It hasn't all been music and fun lately though. Last Friday the CDC published one of the outbreaks I worked on last year in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, about turtle associated salmonellosis in children. That investigation started with our discovery of a strange salmonella in two teenagers. By the end of the investigation, we had uncovered the largest reptile associated salmonella cluster ever documented in the United States. You can read all about at:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5703a3.htm

Thank Goodness That is Over

2008-01-08T20:39:00.000-05:00

Well, that's finally over. Congratulations to the LSU Tigers on beating the Ohio State University. Gee, that was a shocker. No one saw that coming, right? How on earth did that happen?

So, John Swofford, the ACC Commissioner and new head of the BCS (sorry John) is already on record stating that the conferences will seriously evaluate a "plus one" format beginning this summer. His proposal is for the top four teams to be seeded with 1 playing 4, 2 playing 3, in two of the BCS Bowls, and then the two winners playing for the championship. It is a modest proposal that doesn't go far enough. But, you have to start somewhere, I guess. I'm only 43 years old, so maybe by the time I'm 60 years old we'll have an actual 8 or 16 team playoff system and a legitimate way to sort all this stuff out.

In order for that to happen, the 11 teams in the Big 10 conference, the Rose Bowl, and the Pac 10 teams need to get out of the way. One of the principles that I do believe is that if you aren't going to be part of the solution, you need to at least stop being part of the problem. The Big 10 and the Rose Bowl are the only serious obstacles that remain to a national playoff system. Eventually the Pac 10 will join the rest of the country and want a real playoff. In 1938 maybe it made sense for the nation to care about teams from those two conferences and judge the Rose Bowl as the most important of the Bowl games. In 2008, that doesn't make sense anymore. Clearly the best football in this century right now is being played in the SEC and Big 12. After the past two years, please, let's not have another Big 10 team show up in a title game any time soon. Please. Enough already.

Not that anyone out there really cares, but I did not watch the game. I caught the highlights on Sportscenter, and that was plenty. All any of us really need to do, actually, until they finally fix this mess.

Happy 2008

2008-01-06T16:20:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year! I hope you and yours enjoyed your holidays back in December. For me, the year ended well and now we have reached one of my favorite times of any year: ACC Basketball is here. This year, the Tar Heels are enjoying their 3rd longest number of consecutive weeks ranked # 1, but it really doesn't matter now. It won't matter until April, except for helping determine the seeding for the NCAA tournament in March.

Do I like this UNC team? Absolutely. Last year with Freshmen guards, Carolina almost made the Final Four. This year Ellington and Lawson are Sophomores, and they have dramatically improved their playmaking and decisions. Lawson is scoring both inside and outside, Ellington is solid and improved defensively, and he is stronger. UNC lost a lot with Brandon Wright going to the NBA early, but Thompson and Stepheson are contributing, and Hansbrough is good enough to handle the post most of the time. Point guard depth is not a concern, because Quentin Thomas is a Senior and has played well late last year as well as so far this season.

The biggest challenge UNC will face in the ACC comes, as usual, from Duke. Duke is much improved from last season and have scoring threats all over the perimeter. It will be exciting to watch the UNC-Duke games this year, as always, but I do think the Heels still have a slight advantage there because Duke has a lot of young players, and not enough front court depth to handle the Carolina front court consistently.

NC State is playing well, but without a point guard that is proven, ACC play will be an adventure for the Wolfpack every game. Clemson is a solid team this season, and should easily make the NCAA. Virginia will eventually be good, but recently they have played inconsistently. Other than those teams, it is hard to see who will make the Dance.

As for college football, true to my convictions, I have boycotted all the bowl games. Until NCAA football adds a playoff system and a legitimate way to determine a champion, I just don't see the point of watching those games. I wish LSU well in their upcoming game, but just because the Big 10 is the biggest obstacle to a real playoff, so I always hope their teams lose. And, so far, most of them have lost their bowl games.

Baseball, Football and Wine

2007-12-17T22:39:00.000-05:00

Ok, so what do baseball, football and wine have in common? Not much, except that they have all been on my mind lately to various degrees. Last week we all got to see the Mitchell Report on steroids in baseball. I'm not sure what most people were expecting to find, but I wonder what it all will ultimately mean.

I grew up watching baseball, particularly following the Atlanta Braves. It was what you did when you were born a mere 75 miles from Atlanta in 1964, and the Braves came to town in 1966. As a little kid my first baseball hat, bat and glove all had some sort of Atlanta logo on them. When Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home run record, all I really knew was that I was glad he was on our team, and I was happy for him. The Braves were truly awful a lot of the time back in those days, but with my grandparents we all enjoyed watching them in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were not only good, but were dominant in the National League.

I really enjoyed Ken Burns' documentary series on Baseball, and was thrilled watching the home run derby year of Mark McGwire. I think that was the last year I enjoyed the game. It was great to watch him and Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey Jr. all hitting those homers. It was great to see Cal Ripken the night he broke the consecutive starts record. But shortly after all of that died down, the steroids issue came front and center. And the poster boy for all of that was certainly Barry Bonds.

Increasingly it became clear that what we all enjoyed was a game that had a drug problem. A huge addiction, and the players stopped looking like regular men, and started looking like freaks of nature. And as the money grew with new TV contracts, the pressure to keep up in the juiced up arms race became too intense. I know that baseball set new attendance records last year, but I don't get it. I went to one game all year, taking my daughter to her first game in Durham, to watch the minor league Durham Bulls. It was a lot of fun, but the magic of the game just isn't there for me any more. I did not watch even one MLB game on TV in 2007.

When I hear people talk about it, I have heard a lot of people say things like "You still have to hit the ball, and steroids can't make that easier." I also hear things like "It was a level playing field because everyone was doing it." Both of those sentiments miss the point. It wasn't a level playing field when it comes to records. Steroids don't make it easier to hit the ball, but if you can already hit the ball, on juice you can hit it farther. A lot of those home runs in the 1990s and 2000s wouldn't have left the park in previous eras in baseball. For my part, I don't favor adding an * to the era. I don't favor a lot of punishments that could be handed down. But I do believe that no one named in the Mitchell Report, or any other thorough investigations to come, should be allowed in the Hall of Fame. It just wouldn't be fair to the game or the truly great players from before. And as far as I'm concerned, Aaron is still the home run king.

Congratulations to Appalachian State University, the only legitimate national champion in NCAA football that will come out of 2007. This is their third championship in a row, capping off a season that saw them go into Ann Arbor and beat Michigan at their house. They did it on the road. They won it in a legitimate championship tournament, where good competition from all over the United States had a shot to win it all. The process and playoff system in that division is clear, the format is fair, and the "contenders" actually have to prove it on the field. The championship game wasn't created by computers and pollsters, but determined by the players themselves. The way it should be. And they did it all before New Year's Day.

Lastly, I finally broke down and tried a box wine, and found one that I actually enjoy quite a lot. I'm drinking the 2004 California Merlot from Black Box Wines. Wow--I never thought I would like something that comes in a box and sits in a polymer bag instead of a bottle with a cork. For the price, the quality can't be beat. Drink what you will at your holiday party, but I'll likely have some of the red from the box. And pass some of that fabulous brie, would you?

BCS: Bogus Championship Silliness?

2007-12-03T23:26:00.000-05:00

It was entertaining to watch NCAA football the past few weeks. For most of the season I really did not follow it much. But on Friday after Thanksgiving I had to watch the Razorbacks play LSU in what was ultimately a thrilling 3 OT finish. Run DMC would certainly get my vote for the Heisman trophy, and since I went to High School in Arkansas I was glad the pigs pulled it out.

The other reason I was glad the pigs won was the consternation that would follow with yet another loss to screw up the BCS. I never could have hoped that West Virginia and Missouri would follow through with more collapses. The only problem with all the confusion is that none of it matters to the NCAA, the moneyed interests, the BCS punks, the University Presidents. No matter how many times the on-field developments show that computers and pollsters cannot predict what will really happen, the Bogus Championship Series will not be any closer to giving way to the only legitimate way to determine a national champion.

Soccer has the World Cup. Hockey has the Stanley Cup. Baseball has the World Series. NCAA Basketball has March Madness and the Final Four. The NFL has the Superbowl. And what does NCAA Football have? The only major sport on the planet that does not even try to determine a legitimate national champion. Lots of smoke and mirrors, as long as we are all willing not to look at the monkey behind the curtain. You know, the one that's on the take.

There has never been a legitimate national champion in NCAA Division I-A Football. The best teams usually do not play each other. And any sport that says one loss destroys your team's chances is a sport that literally runs screaming from any meaningful games. Schedule like Ohio State and Kansas, hide from competition, and hope the chips fall your way. It didn't work out so well this year for Kansas, but they certainly are on the right track for how to approach the Bogus Championship Series. Teams like Virginia Tech took the risky road and got whacked by LSU. Of course, that team learned a lot, and went on to play outstanding football. LSU today is just a shell of the team that rolled Va Tech.

I don't begrudge LSU and THE OSU for getting to play each other. It's just that Oklahoma, Virginia Tech, USC, Hawaii, West Virginia, and Georgia all are just as legit. Those 8 teams--those Elite Eight teams--ought to be playing for the national championship in an NFL-style playoff system. The regular season should begin in August, with all the conference championships games being played over Thanksgiving weekend. The Elite Eight should play in 4 games on the 1st weekend in December. The Final Four should play in two games the 2nd Saturday in December. And the two that emerge victorious should play in a bowl game on New Year's Day, and that game should rotate among the Sugar, Orange, Rose, Cotton and Fiesta Bowls. All the other bowl eligible teams should feel free to accept bids to play in any bowl they like. It's a nice reward for teams and their fans.

As for the argument that in such a system the other bowl games wouldn't matter, well, that is a path you just do not want to start going down. Because today, none of the bowl games matter anyway, and they never have. And the one that matters least of all is the creation of the computers, TV networks, bowl officials and conference commissioners--the BCS "Title" game. LSU didn't play Georgia, Oklahoma, USC--and Ohio State didn't play anybody. To crown either of these teams a National Champion would just be silly. If you agree with me and would like to watch a legit sport that produces a legit champion, find a college basketball game to watch instead. Watch the NFL. Watch anything but the BCS bowl games. Because the only way anything will change is if the $$$ isn't buying eyeballs for the sponsors. Sports writers, coaches, fans, bloggers and geeks can argue and complain all they like. The only voice that will ultimately be heard is the one with all the money.

2007-11-09T12:23:00.000-05:00

From Today's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published by the CDC

Salmonella Typhimurium Infection Associated with Raw Milk and Cheese Consumption --- Pennsylvania, 2007

In February 2007, the Pennsylvania Department of Health received reports, through routine electronic laboratory disease reporting, of two persons with recent laboratory-confirmed infections with Salmonella enterica serotype Typhimurium. Both persons had reported drinking raw (unpasteurized) milk from the same York County, Pennsylvania, dairy (dairy A). S. Typhimurium isolates from these persons had pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns that were indistinguishable by use of the XbaI restriction enzyme. The same month, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) received reports of illness from raw-milk customers of dairy A. PDA obtained milk samples from the raw-milk bulk tank at dairy A, which yielded S. Typhimurium with a PFGE pattern that was identical to the pattern from patient isolates. On February 26, the Pennsylvania Department of Health and PDA launched an investigation to determine the source and scope of the outbreak. This report summarizes the findings of that investigation, which determined that 29 cases of diarrheal illness caused by S. Typhimurium were associated with consumption of raw milk or raw-milk products from dairy A. The findings underscore the need to inform policymakers and the public of the potential health risks associated with raw-milk consumption.

Epidemiologic and Laboratory Investigation

In Pennsylvania, raw-milk sales are legal at farms that hold a PDA permit, and vendors must display public notices regarding the potential hazards of consuming raw milk (1). Dairy A owned 120 cows and sold raw milk for pasteurization and by PDA permit directly to consumers. In February 2007, PDA estimated that dairy A was selling 200--300 gallons of raw milk weekly to 275 regular customers.

A case of salmonellosis was defined as a diarrheal illness with onset since February 1, 2007, in a Pennsylvania resident who provided a stool specimen that tested positive for S. Typhimurium with a PFGE pattern that matched the outbreak pattern by use of the XbaI restriction enzyme. Nationally notifiable disease reports from Pennsylvania since January 2005 were reviewed for PFGE-matched S. Typhimurium isolates to identify cases and risk factors. To locate additional cases, ill household contacts of persons with confirmed cases were asked to provide food histories and submit stool specimens for testing. Raw milk for testing was obtained from dairy A milk tanks on five dates (February 20, February 28, March 27, May 14, and July 19) and from households of two ill persons on two dates (February 28 and July 20). In addition, PDA conducted multiple dairy A inspections during February--July 2007.

Investigative Findings

A total of 29 cases were identified, with illness onset occurring in three temporal clusters during February 3--July 14, 2007 (Figure). The first cluster consisted of 15 cases with onsets of illness from February 3 to March 5. Raw-milk samples were collected February 20 from a dairy A bulk milk tank and February 28 from the home of an ill person. Both sets of samples yielded the outbreak strain of S. Typhimurium. On March 2, PDA ordered dairy A to stop raw-milk sales and advised the public not to consume raw-milk products from dairy A.

On March 19, PDA allowed dairy A to resume sales of raw milk after PDA conducted inspections and recorded two consecutive negative cultures from milk-tank samples. However, a second cluster of three cases was detected when the outbreak strain of S. Typhimurium was identified in another patient, whose diarrheal illness began on March 21 and who had consumed raw milk from dairy A after sales resumed. The two additional cases were identified in persons with onsets of illness on March 19 and March 22. The first of these occurred in one of six ill persons who primarily spoke Spanish and who told investigators they had not consumed raw milk. However, when reinterviewed in early April, three of these six persons reported consuming queso fresco (a type of soft cheese) they bought at a grocery store serving the local Hispanic community. PDA learned that the queso fresco had been made by an unlicensed producer who purchased approximately 20 gallons of raw milk weekly from dairy A. Sale of raw-milk cheeses aged <60>

On March 27, PDA again ordered dairy A to halt raw-milk sales and suspended its raw-milk permit. No additional cases were noted until June--July 2007, when a third cluster of 11 PFGE-matched S. Typhimurium cases was detected through routine electronic laboratory reporting. Of these, 10 occurred among residents of three counties near dairy A. On July 19, PDA confirmed that dairy A had been distributing raw milk to the public despite its suspended permit; the date when illegal milk distribution began could not be determined. The outbreak strain of S. Typhimurium was isolated from dairy A raw milk collected from a bulk milk tank on July 19 and from the home of an ill person on July 20. PDA ordered dairy A to halt distribution of raw milk on July 20 and subsequently revoked the raw-milk permit for this dairy.

Among the 29 persons identified with diarrheal illness and PFGE-matched S. Typhimurim, 17 (59%) were male, and the median age was 6 years (range: 5 months--76 years). Fourteen (48%) patients reported drinking raw milk from dairy A, four (14%) consumed unregulated queso fresco (three linked to dairy A raw milk and one from an unknown source), and two (7%) consumed raw milk but did not identify the source. Two (7%) other patients were unrelated infants aged 5 months and 7 months. The parents of these infants acknowledged that raw milk from dairy A was present in their households but told investigators the milk was not consumed by the infants. For seven (24%) patients who did not reside with any of the other patients, no source of exposure to S. Typhimurium could be determined. Two of the 29 patients were hospitalized; no deaths were reported.

Environmental Inspections

Eight PDA inspections of dairy A conducted during January--April 2007 revealed improper cleaning of milking equipment, insufficient supervision of workers, unspecified illness among lactating cows, and bird and rodent infestation. On at least two inspections, the required public notice regarding the potential hazards of drinking raw milk was not visible at the dairy A retail store.

S. Typhimurium matched by PFGE to the outbreak pattern was isolated from dairy A raw-milk tank samples collected on three different dates (February 20, May 14, and July 19); an S. Typhimurium isolate collected from a milk tank February 28 was unavailable for PFGE typing. In addition to Salmonella, dairy A raw-milk tank samples also yielded Listeria monocytogenes (February 28, May 14, and July 19) and Campylobacter jejuni (February 28 and May 14). Although a stool specimen from one patient with February 28 illness onset yielded both S. Typhimurium and C. jejuni, the Campylobacter isolate was unavailable for subtyping. No Listeria infections were associated with dairy A.

Reported by: L Lind, MPH, J Reeser, K Stayman, M Deasy, M Moll, MD, A Weltman, MD, V Urdaneta, MD, S Ostroff, MD, Pennsylvania Dept of Health; W Chirdon, Pennsylvania Dept of Agriculture. E Campagnolo, DVM, Div of State and Local Readiness, Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response; T Chen, MD, EIS Officer, CDC.

Editorial Note:

Raw milk is a well-documented source of infections from Salmonella, Escherichia coli O157:H7, Campylobacter, Listeria, Mycobacterium bovis, and other pathogens (2--6). In 1938, before widespread adoption of milk pasteurization in the United States, an estimated 25% of all foodborne and waterborne outbreaks of disease were associated with milk (7). By 2001, the percentage of such outbreaks associated with milk was estimated at <1%>

In the investigations described in this report, the evidence indicating raw milk from dairy A as the source of this outbreak included the 1) high percentage of ill persons who reported consuming either raw milk (48%) or queso fresco traced to raw milk (10%) from dairy A, 2) temporal associations between clusters of illnesses and starts and stops of distribution of raw milk by dairy A, and 3) repeated isolation of the outbreak strain of S. Typhimurium from dairy A raw-milk tanks. The PFGE pattern of the outbreak strain (XbaI JPXX01.0022) is rare, previously identified only 24 times in isolates from 11 states in 3 years, in a national PulseNet database of approximately 43,000 S. Typhimurium isolates.

Consumers have reported consuming raw milk for convenience, taste preference, or perceived health benefits. Although some advocates claim health benefits from raw milk compared with pasteurized milk, including decreased risks for atherosclerosis, arthritis, and lactose intolerance, such claims are not supported by scientific evidence (8). Unsubstantiated claims of health benefits of raw milk for infants and children are particularly concerning for caregivers because infants and children are dependent on their caregivers to make safe dietary decisions for them. Sixteen of the 29 ill persons in this outbreak were aged <7>

Pathogens that infect humans are shed in the feces of cows, can be present in or on the udders of cows, and can contaminate their milk. Standard hygiene practices during milking can reduce but not eliminate the risk for milk contamination. In a 2001--2002 survey of Pennsylvania dairy farms, pathogenic bacteria, including Salmonella, were isolated from 13% of samples from raw-milk bulk tanks (9). Pasteurization decreases the number of pathogenic organisms, prevents transmission of pathogens, and has been determined to improve the safety of milk more than other measures, including certification of raw milk (4,5).

Farms in Pennsylvania that hold PDA raw-milk permits undergo twice-monthly milk testing for coliforms and standard plate counts and monthly testing for growth inhibitors and somatic cell counts; annual PDA inspection and culture of raw milk for Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli O157, and L. monocytogenes; and annual herd skin testing for Mycobacterium bovis and Brucella (1). Despite these measures, consumers cannot be assured that certified raw milk is free of pathogens.

As of 2004, at least 27 states permitted some form of raw-milk sales to the public, including sales at dairies, farmers' markets, or through purchase of "cow shares." Certain states also allow public sales of raw milk but for pet food only (10). In Pennsylvania, the number of dairies with raw-milk permits increased from 42 in 2005 to 75 in 2007. During 2006--2007, three clusters of illness from Campylobacter were associated with consumption of raw milk from three different Pennsylvania dairies (Pennsylvania Department of Health, unpublished data, 2007). During the same period, PDA announced raw-milk recalls from three other dairies after finding L. monocytogenes in milk samples; no human illness was associated with these findings.
Given the continued interest in raw-milk production, policymakers, parents, and the public need to be informed regarding the potential health risks posed by raw-milk consumption. The only sure way for consumers to prevent raw-milk--associated infection from Salmonella or other pathogens is to refrain from consuming raw milk.

Acknowledgments

This report is based, in part, on data contributed by C Sandt, B Perry, Bur of Laboratories, P Feliciano, Pennsylvania Dept of Health; M Hydock, R Malik, L Sulpizio, Pennsylvania Dept of Agriculture; T Nguyen, T Ayers, G Ewald, M Lynch, Div of Foodborne, Bacterial, and Mycotic Diseases, National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne, and Enteric Diseases; A Patel, A Sheth, EIS officers, CDC.

References

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Chapter 59: Milk sanitation. Available at http://www.agriculture.state.pa.us/agriculture/lib/agriculture/legalreference/007_0059.pdf.
Gillespie IA, Adak GK, O'Brien SJ, Bolton FJ. Milkborne general outbreaks of infectious intestinal disease, England and Wales, 1992--2000. Epidemiol Infect 2003;103:461--8.

Leedom JM. Milk of nonhuman origin and infectious disease in humans. Clin Infect Dis 2006;43:610--5.

Currier RW. Raw milk and human gastrointestinal disease: problems resulting from legalized sale of "certified raw milk." J Public Health Policy 1981;2:226--34.

Potter ME, Blaser MJ, Sikes RK, Kaufmann AF, Wells JG. Human Campylobacter infection associated with certified raw milk. Am J Epidemiol 1983;117:475--83.

CDC. Human tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium bovis---New York City, 2001--2004. MMWR 2005;54:605--8.

Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. Grade "A" pasteurized milk ordinance: 2001 revision. US Department of Health and Human Services, Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition; 2002. Available at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~ear/pmo01.html.

Leonard C. On the safety of raw milk (with a word about pasteurization). Presented at the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments, Columbus, Ohio, May 12--17, 2005. Available at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~ear/milksafe/milksa1.htm.

Jayarao BM, Donaldson SC, Straley BA, Sawant AA, Hegde NV, Brown JL. A survey of foodborne pathogens in bulk tank milk and raw milk consumption among farm families in Pennsylvania. J Dairy Sci 2006;89:2451--8.

Dairy Division of National Association of State Departments of Agriculture. Raw milk survey: November 2004. Available at http://www.nasda.org/file.aspx?id=11160.

Our 3rd Hybrid Vehicle

2007-11-04T20:54:00.001-05:00

Previously I have blogged about our hybrids and how much we like them. To recap, in 2001 we bought one of the early Priuses, and in 2005 we got the Toyota Highlander Hybrid. This weekend, we got our 3rd hybrid, although this one was not planned. I guess this is our Unplanned Prius Purchase.

Last week my wife got the dreaded red exclamation point of death error message on the computer display. Our 2002 Prius actually came out and was purchased in 2001, and we have had it for a little over 6 years. By last week we had over 103,000 miles on it, and we routinely averaged about 50 mpg in the car. It was paid for and we liked it just fine.

When we took it in to find out what the error message was, we got some bad news. First, they were able to narrow it down to one of two problems--either the battery was dying and had to be replaced, or the electric motor transmission was failing and needed to be replaced. It would cost $460 to find out which repair was needed, and either repair would cost about $4,000.

Ouch. This was not what we had in mind. We discussed it for a while and ultimately decided not to fix the car. But we needed a second car, so we looked for used Priuses in our area. We narrowed it down to two vehicles, a 2005 at the Carmax in Raleigh and a 2006 at Fred Anderson, our Toyota dealership here in Raleigh. Saturday afternoon we test drove both vehicles and did the whole haggle with the dealerships over trade in values, purchase price, etc.

We actually liked the car at Carmax better, but we went with a red 2006 at Fred Anderson. It was one year newer and had 17,000 fewer miles on it, and those factors tipped the scale. This one is a lot different than our old Prius. It feels a lot more solid, and it gets better gas mileage. It has more head and leg room, and is vastly more ergonomic. Better cup holders. It has some quirky things that take some getting used to, like the electronic key, push button start, park is a button on the dash, and the gear shift is a little joystick on the dash panel. You can't really add an after-market audio system, and I can't directly connect my iPod into the system in the car. That's a bummer. The speedometer and fuel display is in a much better location. It has a lot of power and zip, much more than our old Prius.

If you live in the Raleigh-Durham area, the local Carmax has a very nice Prius on the lot. It is a 2005 with leather interior and a high level option package, and we almost bought it this weekend. And, once our 2002 gets fixed, I'm sure it will pop up on a used car lot somewhere. We treated it really well, and I hope someone gets it for $8000-10,000, and gets a lot more use out of it. Now I just need to throw some UNC gear on this red one--don't want to give folks in Raleigh the wrong impression. Especially with basketball season a few days away. Ours will be a Wolfpack red car, but it'll bleed Carolina Blue.

I'm Back

2007-10-21T15:17:00.000-04:00

Sorry it has been so long since my last post. I have been working and traveling, and I haven't quite been able to carve out the time to sit and write. I did see something today in my local newspaper, which was originally published in the Washington Post, that I wanted to comment on.

Double H Farms near Charlottesville, VA, is what most of us who favor locally grown foods would like to see succeed. It is a diversified family farm selling to local restaurants and select venues. Recently, however, Double H got in trouble because the animals it produced and sold were being slaughtered in facilities that were not inspected according to the food safety regulations. Many small and local producers around the country get into trouble because they try to operate outside the regulatory system, either as a protest, or just because they do not want to pay fees, obtain permits, file paperwork, or other reasons. You can read the story at the URL listed below.

http://www.newsobserver.com/689/story/744207.html

Saturday morning I shopped for locally produced honey, farm fresh eggs, locally grown produce, and apples at the State Farmer's Market in Raleigh. Saturday afternoon I was in Chapel Hill, visiting Three Cups coffee shop, a place where fair trade coffee, tea, wine and chocolate can be obtained. After enjoying our pecan pie and coffee, my wife and I and wandered down Franklin Street past the Lantern Restaurant, which was advertising locally raised chicken, pork, local vegetables, and fruits in various dishes. I completely support small farmers, local foods, and fair trade vendors and producers.

As a food safety professional, however, I also support the laws and regulations that we have put in place to ensure the safety of the food supply to the best of our ability to do so. Please, small farmers, slow food proponents, locavores, and other people who value family farms and local produce--find ways to comply with the laws. Form Co-ops. Work with organizations that are designed to make compliance easier and less of a burden. No one wins when a family farm or small producer gets caught operating outside the system.

My Latest Airport Nightmare...and Paying Respects

2007-09-28T23:12:00.000-04:00

This week I was traveling on business. That is not necessarily new, but I went to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which was a new place for me. I thought the people there were very friendly and the area was nice. But every single flight I was on was either delayed or canceled. It started on Tuesday, when my airplane pulled away from the gate on time, only to promptly sit on the tarmac for 45 minutes. Then we flew to Philadelphia, where we circled for 20 minutes after arriving before finally landing. My next flight was scheduled to take off in 15 minutes and the flight attendant had everyone else stay seated while I and another gentleman were quickly ushered off the plane. I ran through the airport and across two terminals to reach my next gate, rushed up to the gate attendant and explained I was on the flight to Harrisburg. The guy looked at me and asked what I was so worked up about; that flight was 20 minutes delayed and hadn't even started boarding yet.

I managed to get to Harrisburg, but I was 30 minutes late to my meeting. The next day and a half ran smoothly, until I took a taxi back to the airport. My 6:05 departure was delayed until 7:15. I was supposed to catch an 8:05 flight from Dulles in Washington back to Raleigh-Durham. The gate agent was concerned that I would miss that flight so he booked me on to a 10:05 flight as well, to make sure I had a way home. I was a confirmed passenger on both planes at that point.

Flight takes off from Harrisburg and makes it to Dulles in 35 minutes. I hit the ground and make it to my next gate to find that my 8:05 departure was scheduled to leave at 9:20 at that point. So, I hadn't missed it. By 9:10, they had further delayed the flight until 9:54 pm. I asked the agent on the C concourse whether I should go ahead and take the 10:05, and she said she recommended it. So I book over to the A concourse and ask for a seat assignment. That is where things really went wrong. The agent at that gate refused to give me a seat assignment, even though I was a confirmed passenger on that flight. Her reason was that I already had a seat assignment on the 8:05 (currently showing a 9:54 departure time), and my luggage was on that flight. TSA Regulations require that I and my luggage fly on the same plane, so she said I had to go back to my original flight. (Don't ask what I think about how safe we all are in the hands of DHS and the TSA.)

I went to the Customer Service phone and asked for help. They said they were very sorry, but they could not override the gate agent, and suggested I return to the C concourse. The 10:05 departed, and my flight was scheduled for a 10:24 departure. We boarded the plane at 10:15 and sat. Waiting. For the captain to arrive from Philadelphia. They said his plane was in the air, he'll be here in a few minutes. Thank you for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience. Around 10:45--no captain. Still. 11:00 pm--first officer comes on the speaker and announces: sorry folks, the captain has timed out and cannot fly for the next 12 hours. Our flight is canceled, please return to the C concourse and we will make arrangements to get you to Raleigh sometime tomorrow.

By the time I make it to the ticket counter, two of the absolutely least helpful gate agents I have ever seen proceeded to insult each customer and "help" us with an attitude that felt like they thought it was our fault they were still there. I was booked out on a 12:40 pm flight the next day and given a voucher for a hotel in Ashburn. By the time the airport shuttle picked me up and deposited me there, it was 1:00 am. I won't name names here, but this was all on United. Aren't they the ones with the "Fly the Friendly Skies" motto? Ironically, TSA wasn't aware of it I guess, because my luggage went on to Raleigh on the 10:05 flight, despite the gate agent's brave efforts to prevent passengers and their luggage departing on different flights.

Ok, so that is the rant. I lost another day in the office, missed breakfast with my family, and got to sleep in another strange bed in the DC area. When I arrived at the airport and made it through security, I found my gate and settled in. I went plenty early, because I wanted to be ready as best I could for the next monkey wrench. A plane arrived at the gate, and as it was coming in there were several United ground crew members and Dulles airport staff who came in and out. You could tell something was different. As people filed off of the airplane, they were very quiet. And rather than rush off to their next fight, they gathered in the gate area and looked out the window. I walked over to join them. A hearse was sitting on the tarmac, with a Marine honor guard standing at ease nearby. The honor guard assembled and marched to their positions, and a flag draped coffin was unloaded from the cargo hold. The marines slowly saluted, then took up the coffin and delivered it to the hearse. There were at least 20 people watching from inside the terminal, and most passengers were still on the plane, watching through their windows. A muscular man to my left dressed in civilian clothes stood rigidly at attention, and saluted. I don't know whether he was active duty, CIA, NSA or what, but he had a military bearing. Some of the people there were Vietnam era baby boomers, some were foreign nationals, some were college kids. Several were quietly shedding tears. An Episcopal chaplain was among us, quietly doing what chaplains do. The door closed to the hearse and the honor guard withdrew, and the hearse pulled slowly away.

I won't spin this. I don't know how anyone in that room voted, or how any of them feel about the war. I am not going to talk about how that Marine's sacrifice made it possible for us to enjoy what freedoms we still have. I'm not going to rant about the waste of human life in the war. I'm just reporting what I saw and was a part of. It was an American moment and a human moment of paying respects to this unknown (to us) soldier. I don't know how that young man or woman would feel about strangers watching this event, or how his or her family would feel to know about it. But on Thursday morning, I saw people from all walks of life stop rushing through life to honor a fallen American soldier. I hope that we did our best for him or her. I know for me, I never regained the same level of frustration that I had been feeling earlier. I got back to Raleigh around 1:30 pm, and back to my house around 2:45. I thought about that flag draped coffin all day, and I guess I am still thinking about it.

Here is my heartfelt wish for all our people in Iraq and Afghanistan: I hope you all come home, safely, and soon.

the Landis Question

2007-09-22T16:08:00.000-04:00

This is how Tom Callahan of NPR and the Associated Press covered the story about the arbitration panel's decision:

Cyclist Landis Loses Doping Appeal

Tour de France winner Floyd Landis descends on the pro mountain bike course at the Teva Mountain Games in Vail, Colo.

Cyclist Floyd Landis looked destined to be stripped of his 2006 Tour de France victory after arbitrators on Thursday upheld results of a drug test indicating he used synthetic testosterone to fuel a spectacular comeback in renowned race.

The decision means Landis — who has strenuously and repeatedly denied using performance-enhancing drugs — must forfeit his Tour de France title and endure a two-year ban on competition, retroactive to Jan. 30, 2007.

The ruling, handed down nearly four months after a bizarre and bitterly fought hearing, leaves the American with one final way to possibly salvage his title - an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

If Landis doesn't appeal, he'll be the first person in the 105-year history of the race to lose the title because of a doping offense.

The vote was 2-1 to uphold the results, with lead arbitrator Patrice Brunet and Richard McLaren in the majority and Christopher Campbell dissenting, according to The Associated Press.

"Today's ruling is a victory for all clean athletes and everyone who values fair and honest competition," U.S. Anti-Doping Agency general counsel Travis Tygart said.

It marks a devastating loss for Landis, who has said he was merely a pawn in the anti-doping system's all-consuming effort to find cheaters and keep money flowing to its labs and agencies.

In its 84-page decision, the majority found the initial screening test to measure Landis' testosterone levels – the testosterone-to-epitestosterone test - was not done according to World Anti-Doping Agency rules.

But the more precise and expensive carbon-isotope ration analysis (IRMS), performed after a positive T-E test is recorded, was accurate, the arbitrators said, meaning "an anti-doping rule violation is established."

"As has been held in several cases, even where the T-E ratio has been held to be unreliable ... the IRMS analysis may still be applied," the majority wrote. "It has also been held that the IRMS analysis may stand alone as the basis" of a positive test for steroids.

The decision comes more than a year after Landis' stunning comeback in Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour, one that many people said couldn't be done without some kind of outside help. Flying to the lead near the start of a grueling Alpine stage, Landis regained nearly eight minutes against the leader, and went on to win the three-week race.

Landis insisted on a public hearing not only to prove his innocence, but to shine a spotlight on USADA and the rules it enforces and also establish a pattern of incompetence at the French lab where his urine was tested.

Although the panel rejected Landis' argument of a "conspiracy" at the Chatenay-Malabry lab, it did find areas of concern. They dealt with control of the urine sample, the way the tests were run on the machine, the way the machine was prepared and the "forensic corrections" done on the lab paperwork.

"... the Panel finds that the practices of the Lab in training its employees appears to lack the vigor the Panel would expect in the circumstances given the enormous consequences to athletes" of an adverse analytical finding, the decision said.

The majority repeatedly wrote that any mistakes made at the lab were not enough to dismiss the positive test, but also sent a warning.

"If such practices continue, it may well be that in the future, an error like this could result in the dismissal" of a positive finding by the lab.

In Campbell's opinion, Landis' case should have been one of those cases.

"In many instances, Mr. Landis sustained his burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt," Campbell wrote. "The documents supplied by LNDD are so filled with errors that they do not support an Adverse Analytical Finding. Mr. Landis should be found innocent."

From NPR reports and The Associated Press

To me, the situation right now poses not really one question, but several. Among those are: is he guilty? Is the decision just? And where do we all go from here? As for the matter of his guilt or innocence, I am still inclined to believe that Floyd did not dope during the 2006 TDF. The levels of synthetic testosterone found in the samples are not metabollically plausible--humans do not work in the ways necessary to yield those levels in a blood test, as I understand the claims of biochemists who have reviewed the levels. Also, testosterone would be an odd choice of a drug for doping purposes during a race. Unlike EPO, or blood doping, which is designed to aid recovery, testosterone doping would be useful for building muscle mass over time, to bulk you up. Cyclists don't want or need to bulk up. It would be a weird drug to dope with in the TDF.

Is the decision just? This gets at the heart of the matter. If I think Floyd is innocent and the levels are beyond reasonable, my suspicion would be (and is) that someone added the testosterone to Floyd's sample before testing it. I do not dispute that there was testosterone found in the sample. I do think there were many opportunities and time gaps where the samples could have been tampered with, leading to the cautionary statements the panel put into the report about lab methods in France. As for the justice of the ruling, this gets at a core difference between American beliefs and European beliefs about justice. In the USA, we profess to believe in the presumption of innocent until proven guilty. In Europe, there are states that are perfectly comfortable with the notion of presuming a person guilty until proven innocent. Where you fall on what you believe about the ruling depends entirely on what you believe about justice.

Where do we go from here? Floyd has been stripped of his title, but he may appeal. I don't know what he will do. I know that there are many officials in France who are glossing over the criticisms of their lab even as I sit here and maintain it seems more likely than not to me that he is telling the truth, and did not dope. I agree testosterone was found in his sample. It makes more sense to me that the sample was tampered with than that Floyd took this drug during that race.

Random Stuff

2007-09-17T21:36:00.000-04:00

Kudos to my brother in law from St. Louis, who sent in this great picture of George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer from Sunday's finish of the inaugural Tour of Missouri. It is terriffic to see three tours in the U.S. that are drawing large crowds and giving fans a chance to see pro cycling on American soil: The Tours of California, Georgia, and now Missouri. It was great to read that the people in Missouri gave such wonderful support to the teams and riders. As much as I hate to see this fantastic team dissolve, for the riders--especially the Americans on the team--it must have been a satisfying finale to what has been a spectacular run.

On the raw milk front, new rules proposed by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture will require gray coloring to be added to unpasteurized milk sold here for pet consumption. The idea is that pets won't care what color the milk is, but since many people who purchase raw milk in this state under that provision are doing so for human consumption, the addition of gray coloring will make the product look less appealing. Labeling is proposed to also be added that would say the milk was not for human consumption. We'll see whether these measures are finally adopted or not.

It finally rained in North Carolina last Friday night. We had been without any appreciable rainfall in this part of the state since June. The drought here is extreme in most counties, and while the recent rain won't break it, rain is better than no rain. Maybe later this week I'll post a blog about an absurd landscaping committee in Wake Forest that is proceeding to enforce restrictive covenants about lawn watering and maintaining green lawns even as every municipality in our area is tightening water restrictions in this drought. People are just crazy.

Duke University's football team snapped a 22 game losing streak this past Saturday, beating Northwestern. I could understand why students from little Appalachian State tore down the goal posts when they beat Michigan earlier this year, but for Duke students to do it on Saturday for beating Northwestern was just silly.

9/11

2007-09-11T21:18:00.000-04:00

I won't put up a picture today. There are many that I could put up, and I truly wondered whether I would even say anything about the anniversary, but it just seems important to not forget about things I thought and felt when it happened. I was sitting in a meeting this morning at 9:30 am, and that was the only time all day it crossed my mind. At least, the only time it came up to the front of my mind. I think there was an undercurrent throughout my day where it was never far off screen, though.

The persistent memories I have about 9/11 are in a lot of ways minor things, but they are the ones that have stayed with me. I remember of course the impact of watching those images of airplanes plowing into the Twin Towers, and the fire, and collapse of the buildings. I remember gathering together my employees to tell them what had happened, and how the company I was working for at the time had decided to deal with the needs of staff. We told them they were free to go or stay, and to take care of themselves and their loved ones. Most stayed, but what we did was comfort each other. My wife was supposed to be on an airplane to Phoenix that morning, but she was stuck in the airport for hours, and the phone lines were jammed so she couldn't call to tell me the airplane was grounded even before it took off.

I remember going home that night, and for the next several days, driving by the silent airport. I remember how weird it was not to see any airplanes in the sky, and how different the sky looked. Researchers later showed that there was a dramatic reduction in cloud cover during those days. Airplanes contribute to cloud formation. I remember being on one of the first flights out of RDU once traffic resumed, and being on an almost empty flight to New Orleans. I remember that as we approached the city the plane got very quiet, and when we touched down the pilot came on and announced we were safely there.

I had to fly in early November 2001 to Washington, DC, and I remember leaving the airport there and driving past the Pentagon with one side caved in, and how that hit me like a punch to the stomach to see. I remember being on the National Mall and seeing the security barriers erected around the Washington Monument and other icons, and how few people were out. I remember feeling like my country was slipping away.

I don't like remembering a lot of the things I remember. But I also don't want to forget. I don't want to forget what it used to be like, before 9/11. We might not have been innocent then, but we were not afraid. We didn't live with this pervasive sense of doom then, and we didn't feel like people were out to get us. We didn't worry as much. We were more confident. Some might say we were arrogant, others might say we were ignorant. I'm not sure either of those words hits the exact tone just right. Before 9/11 we were at ease in our own skins, and we lived our lives normally. Maybe there was naivete in that, and no doubt our enemies are happy that they took that easiness away from us. When I remember 9/11. I want to focus just on that. I want to honor the dead who gave their lives, and I want to mourn the loss of 9/10 and all the days before then. Without recrimination or manipulation, without partisan spinning or foreign propaganda. I just want to remember that on 9/11 a lot of good things and people were lost. And I miss them.

Asking Big Questions

2007-09-08T17:02:00.001-04:00

Recently I had a "Parental Moment" with my 11 year old daughter. I was driving her to school and we were listening to Jimmy Buffet on the iPod. The song was "A Pirate Looks at 40". She asked me what that meant, to look at 40, and it started a conversation between us about life milestones and why people reflect on where they have been, and where they want to go.

I won't pretend that it was some breakthrough moment, or that the song is particularly significant. After we talked a few minutes she was on to other things. But after I dropped her off I kept thinking about it as I drove on to work. When I was younger I spent a lot of time thinking about the Big Questions, but over time, it seems like work and parenting and doing the chores and surfing the internet and walking the dog just sort of crowd out the time and energy that takes. I don't necessarily mean, what is the meaning of life? I guess I pretty much have come to the conclusion that there is no meaning in life, except the meaning you create for yourself. I don't know where that perspective puts me on the existential scale, but that is what I think, so I don't spend time worrying about that one anymore.

I do find myself thinking about alternative living arrangements, and the nature of a house. Shelter is one of our basic needs, but when I survey the options available for meeting that need, all of them in my area seem a little cold. You know, Little Pink Houses syndrome. Homes on fractions of acre lots crowded together in cookie cutter neighborhoods. No soul. Certainly no connection to the greater natural world.

I am beginning to think about looking for some land where we could design and build a really different kind of house. We have looked a little at the Earthships being built in New Mexico and Colorado and other places, and we want to explore other building materials. The more we think about the issues and the big questions, the more I am drawn to the idea of creating a different way of living for our family. Since this pirate has already looked at 40 and sees it in the rear view mirror, I guess it might be time to begin putting a real plan together to create that new reality now.

Why You Can't Trust Them

2007-09-01T23:14:00.000-04:00

Ken and I had a recent exchange about the pros and cons of toll roads. Every state along the Atlantic Coast has toll roads except for Connecticut and North Carolina. In 2001 the NC General Assembly passed a bill creating the NC Turnpike Authority, and authorized at that time the new authority to build up to 9 toll roads in the state.

So far, no toll roads exist. There are plans for seven projects, including two here in the area known as the Research Triangle Park. The ambivalence in the state over this new approach to roadbuilding here is evident in the fact that despite having created the authority and authorizing the projects, when the authority asked for $20 million in seed money to start building what they are calling the Western Wake Expressway, the General Assembly did not pass the legistlation. The authority is now looking at Public-Private Partnerships as a way forward, since there is no political support to give them any real money to get things started.

No community in North Carolina is clamoring for the chance to have the first toll road in the state. Nobody wants one. A large part of the ambivalence is the widespread belief that once toll booths go up, they will never come down. The distrust and skepticism of the people on that issue led to horse trading and language in the original authorizing legislation prohibiting any existing road or project from becoming a toll road. That was a promise made to the state as part of getting the idea accepted.

So of course, this year, the General Assembly changed that part of the law to create an exception. There was an existing road project here called I-540 that is a larger outer loop around Raleigh. The road is 75% complete, but the final section in Southwest Wake County has yet to be built. That segment is a little over 12 miles long. The Dept. of Transportation decided that they couldn't afford to build that final segment, so eventually the bill was submitted to change the turnpike authority law to allow the last 25% of the loop to be built as a toll road.

So the good people of Raleigh and the northern suburbs got their traditional freeway, but those of us in Western Wake County get handed the sorry bill of goods that will become one of the first toll roads in the state. That is, if they can get financial backing and the support of something called the Metropolitan Planning Organization or the Rural Planning Organization in the area where it is supposed to be built. In a major hearing on the topic in Apex a few months back people pretty much told the turnpike authority they didn't want the road, and there are a lot of hard feelings over the fact that they are now doing exactly what they said they would not do--transition an existing road project from DOT to the TurnPike Authority.

They sure know how to win the hearts and minds of the people, don't they?

Blowing Off Some Steam

2007-08-29T23:35:00.000-04:00

Recently in my neighborhood, the parents became concerned and alarmed when some guys in SUVs seemed to be taking pictures with their cell phones of kids playing. They were not from our neighborhood, and the collective radar spike assumed the very worst. Then reports started trickling in of similar occurrences in other Apex neighborhoods. When the strangers were confronted, they said they were real estate appraisers and took off.

The police were called. Registered sex offenders were accused of being in the neighborhoods. People got very upset. Then today the Raleigh newspaper ran a story about the concerns being unlikely, and that the guys in SUVs probably were real estate appraisers. It turns out that Wake County has hired appraisers and sent them to evaluate homes in Apex for tax purposes.

Ok, so here is where I blow steam. The county is wasting millions of dollars on incomprehensible school busing and student assignment plans, they converted 22 schools to year round and virtually eliminated traditional calendar schools from our community, and they have been shown to be vastly overpaying for land to build more schools. The school board had amassed more than $40 million in a "slush fund." Half the kids in Apex are not allowed to attend school in the town where they live. The school board is appealing a lawsuit verdict that they lost in spite of making prior public commitments to abide by the judge's ruling (wasting more money). And now the county wants to raise our taxes? Exactly what part of this am I supposed to be happy about?

The only community in Wake County that seems to get the shaft more often than Apex is our next door neighbor, New Hill. There are whole blogs that could be devoted just to how unfairly the people of New Hill have been treated. But Apex runs a close second. From the lack of neighborhood schools, the forced conversions to year round, the plan to build the first toll road in North Carolina here, the list just keeps getting longer. There is no way to feel like we get back anything close in services to what we are paying. But pay and pay we do. And it looks like we are about to pay even more.

Blood Sport

2007-08-23T21:52:00.001-04:00

Four miles from my house there is an old weather beaten building that looks a lot like many dilapidated barns found across the south. It is a little bit of an odd building, in that it isn't shaped quite like any tobacco barn, hay barn, smokehouse or corn crib that I have ever seen, but it clearly came from a much earlier era when such outbuildings would have been found commonly in our part of North Carolina.

A few months ago I was on an airplane sitting next to a gentleman who was almost my father's age. We were flying back from Denver, and you could just tell this guy had a lot on his mind. I won't divulge his private business, but I learned on the flight that his father owned the property that old building was on, and he grew up on the farm that contained it. It put his mind at ease to talk a while with me, and he shared a lot of stories about this area. Including the story of that old building.

It turns out that the building was once a saloon. He shared with me that he has in his possession an old handbill advertising the sorts of activities that once were provided there as amusements for the locals. Of course the saloon was a place for men to gather to drink the corn liquor that Carolinians distilled--and continue to do so--around these parts. It also was a gambling hall where card games, dice games, and horse races were wagered on. And it was a place that advertised cockfights. The handbill was dated August 1826.

Blood sports of course are a part of our past that most of us would rather not remember, and kids have been largely taught until recently that those sorts of things happened a long time ago. The fact that the University of South Carolina mascot is the Gamecocks is seen as mostly an anachronism, at best. If we are sometimes embarrassed by these sorts of things, polite southerners will simply turn the conversation to another topic. More irritated ones will complain about all the damn Yankees moving down here and get riled up. Some will just get quiet and wait for the subject to drift on to something else.

The Michael Vick situation has thrown the entire issue of blood sport back on the table in an undeniable way. Vick was born in a part of Virginia not too far from where I live, and a part of Virginia my ancestors came to from England almost 400 years ago. There are places in the woods and swamps of the Southern Atlantic coast where you can imagine some attitudes and practices surviving that go back that far. The ones we are proud of get displayed for tourists, or celebrated in our cuisine. Others we are less open about.

I don't know if you have ever killed a living thing, but when you grow up on a farm like I did once, there are times when that part of the cycle of life and death become part of your experience. One thing I learned as a child is that when the time comes to kill a living thing, for instance a yearling pig or a steer, or a chicken that will become supper, there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. The right way always had to do with humanely and quickly dispatching the matter at hand. And to do it for a good reason. I can tell you from personal experience, it is not a simple thing to take the life of a living animal.

Michael Vick is about to plead guilty to some federal charges associated with the blood sport of dogfighting. I watched earlier this week on ESPN as some athletes and personalities tried to rally around Vick, and other commentators engaged in our modern version of blood sport, called public humiliation by 24 hour media scrutiny. But one thing that really caught my attention was an unspoken undertone suggesting that Vick was being treated unfairly in all of this, pointing out that he didn't kill any people, downplaying the cruelty involved, and subtly laying the race card out there. Not overtly, but in a way that is still real.

I don't know what sentence will be handed down by the court system, but I do know that dogfighting involves gambling. And gambling is something that professional sports across the board sit up and notice. And it makes me remember the particular case of Art Schlichter. A lot of people may not remember Schlichter, but he wore the number 10 and played for the Ohio State Buckeyes back in the day. He was the last quarterback to play for Woody Hayes, and was drafted fourth in the NFL in the same quarterback class as Jim Kelly and John Elway, by the Indianapolis Colts. Schlichter was, on the football field, one of the great college football quarterbacks of all time. A lot of people believed that he was the best of the quarterbacks to come out in that fabled quarterback class. But Schlichter had a gambling problem. Ultimately, he was sent to prison, and his life was ruined. Not to mention his football career.

I don't know what will happen to Vick, but no one should assume that whatever happens has anything to do with race. In life, there are consequences for certain behaviors. Even quarterbacks who can do amazing things on the football field can cross the line. And when it comes to blood sports like dogfighting and cockfighting, there is no way to be involved in those behaviors today that our society will accept. If careers can be lost over gambling, I see no reason they can't be lost over senseless cruelty.

Abundant Miracles

2007-08-19T21:14:00.000-04:00

Every day in the United States, 299,398,484 Americans eat an average of three meals per day. That is, assuming the U.S. Census Bureau estimate of the population of the country is reasonably accurate. Multiply that out and we can imagine that 898,195,452 meals are consumed most days in the U.S. Of course, there are some people who don't get to eat three meals a day, but that population estimate is also from the year 2000, so between the variances and allowances for error in estimation, the 898 million number is probably pretty close.

That is a lot of food. I thought about that today as I fought the drought to keep my tomato plants alive, and thought about the work that went into growing the food we ate for dinner. Our trip on Saturday to visit the Farmer's Markets was productive, but the Apex market (being new) didn't have too much to offer yet. We bought some Mango-peach butter from an interesting vendor, even though that particular item violated the point of trying to buy local goods. We grow a lot of things in NC, but Mangoes are not among them. Then headed over to Carrboro to hit that well-established market.

There we bought new potatoes, shelled purple hull peas, locally produced pork chops, a few slicing tomatoes, a watermelon and a mess of green beans. Of course we had to stop at the lemonade stand, visit the potters, and generally browse around too. We paid $4.00 for a pint of shelled fresh purple hull peas from a woman who had brought 120 pints to market. That is a tremendous amount of labor; purple hull peas are not very large, and the number of pea pods someone would have to shell to make 120 pints is hard to fathom. And for her efforts, she took home less than $500. We also paid about $4.00 for the potatoes we bought. The potato growing season in North Carolina lasts about 90-110 days. A single plant will produce maybe 8-15 potatoes. These have to be dug up out of the ground, which without mechanical assistance, means back-breaking work.

There are several miracles in all of this for me. First, the amazing fact that we are able to produce or import and then deliver 898 million meals in the U.S. every day, given how really hard it is to grow the food, and the small number of people actually involved in food production. The second miracle to me is that we can get that food shipped where it needs to go, most of the time, safely and in time for it to be enjoyed. My tomato plants with enough water can make a lot of tomatoes all at once, and without enough water, can leave me with days between good ripe tomatoes to eat. Of course, with a large enough garden I could always find something ripe to eat, but crops can come in all at once with lean patches between. But every time you go to the store, you can find almost whatever you want to find. The delivery system we have developed is nothing short of amazing.

The final miracle to me is that food in the United States is, actually, amazingly cheap given what it actually took to make that food and get it to the consumer for those 898 million meals enjoyed here today. If you doubt that, try contemplating two ideas: being responsible for growing or producing your own food, and going without. For most of us, both of those alternatives would be unacceptable. And the vast majority of the population wouldn't have a clue about how to start growing and producing their own food if they absolutely had to do it.

So, the next time you meet a farmer, I'd challenge you to say a word of thanks. I don't know how he or she will take it, but lord knows, we owe them one.

The Real Question

2007-08-17T21:55:00.001-04:00

The life cycle analysis that the economists in New Zealand did was useful and cautionary, and from a certain point of view it was a really important set of questions to ask. For those not following the most recent discussion, read previous posts and comments to catch up. But the research question may well have been the wrong question, from a global warming concerns perspective. Their analysis looked at the total carbon footprint of a meal of lamb imported into the United Kingdom from New Zealand vs. eating a locally produced English lamb. That might be very defensible from a research design perspective--comparing a total life cycle for two highly similar if not identical products. The problem may be, however, that both meals have too much of an impact.

What if the real question isn't which of these two lambs has the lower carbon footprint, but is actually a different question? What if the question is, what is the best constellation of food choices I can make to have the least negative impact on the planet? For consumers in the UK, the answer might be grass fed beef, free range chickens, and vegetables from France, for instance. I don't know if that is what the answer would be, but I do think that is a better way to frame the issue. It would be pretty difficult to build a website that lets people put in their location, answer a few questions, and then get recommendations on how to structure your food choices so that they were as least harmful as possible. But it should be relatively easy to calculate an average carbon footprint for categories of foods, that people can refer to. Someone may have even done it.

Of course, eating is also about a lot of things, and calculating the carbon footprint of your meal on top of the fat content, calories, Weight Watchers points, and such, just kind of ruins the fun of it all. Tomorrow morning I'm planning on checking out the new Farmer's Market, and just savoring it without too much angst.

Wishing It Were Simple

2007-08-16T20:46:00.000-04:00

Richard raised a really good question in response to my last post, and drew my attention to the Lincoln University analysis of the concept of "food miles." If you want to dig into the issue for yourself, look at his comment in the previous post and follow the URLs. It is important to note that the study was done by economists in New Zealand who were motivated, in part, to defend Kiwi (as in from New Zealand) producers whose primary markets are in Europe--not exactly local, in other words. But the question is valid, and just because something is locally produced does not automatically mean it has a lower carbon footprint. And of course, how you count carbon footprints and food miles depends entirely on which factors are included--and excluded-- from the analysis. I've never met anyone as clever at manipulating variables in a computer model as an economist, and you really do have to look hard at the assumptions being used.

There are other reasons to buy local, however, besides simply wanting to fight global warming and lower the carbon footprint of your meal. Today I attended a summit on agriculture and food safety from the farm to the fork sponsored by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. I learned something there today that I frankly was stunned to find out, until I reflected on it further. We are, as a country, now importing more food than we are exporting. The last time food imports merely equalled our exports was 2003. And the trend is rapidly heading toward a day when the United States will be as dependent on foreign countries to produce our basic food stuffs as we are on foreign oil producers. That is staggering to me. And the single largest exporter of food products into the U.S. today is China.

It would be easy to go all xenophobic right at this point, but it truly is sobering to consider what that means. Today only 3% of the U.S. workforce is engaged in food and fiber production, and the average age of farmers in the U.S. is something like 60 years old. We are losing the producers, and that may actually be something we want to think about as a matter of national security. In the past year we have seen melamine added to food additives, antifreeze added to cough syrup and toothpaste, and lead-based paint on toys coming out of China. Less than 1% of imported products are inspected at the border, and less than 1/2% of products are analytically tested for chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics. Whatever you may think about modern industrial agriculture production practices, it is fair to say that foods produced locally in the United States have a better chance of being safer than many of the products coming in from countries that put less of an emphasis on food safety and product integrity than our producers do.

And, if you buy local produce from conscientious (perhaps also organic) farm producers, you may very well buy food with a lower total carbon footprint. That is not necessarily guaranteed, but it is certainly possible. It will also likely be a lot fresher. Something that was still on the vine this morning and bought this afternoon at the Farmer's Market is bound to be fresher than something packed, trucked, flown and moved about all over the globe before you took it home from the grocery store.

Before you decide I'm a raving anti-globalization lunatic, I have to admit that nothing about our modern food chain is simple, and I also worry about foreign producers. Last year I was in Guatemala, and I was really surprised to find out how hard it is to get a decent cup of coffee there. I was expecting (naively) that if you travel to the source, you will find amazing blends you can't get in the U.S. What I learned was that their best coffee was grown purely for export to Europe and the U.S. The locals are even having to mount a cultural campaign to teach Guatemalans about coffee and how to brew a good cup of coffee. When I saw the poverty and other social conditions there, of course my desire was to see their producers be able to grow a product and earn a living from it. As long as it is done fairly and safely, I do believe part of what America has to do to be good world citizens is to buy goods from overseas producers. I am just worried that we must do more to support our own producers, for lots of reasons, than we are doing today. And I do count my food miles a lot more straightforwardly than some economists might.

Local Feast

2007-08-13T21:53:00.000-04:00

I mentioned recently that we had watched the DVD of "An Inconvenient Truth." We also learned recently that in the United States, the average meal travels 1,200 miles from where it starts to wind up on your plate. Do that 3 times a day for 365 days per year, and multiply by the population of the United States, and you realize that the simple act of eating contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

So, we decided to see how much we could do to buy local food, to reduce the carbon footprint of our meals. On Sunday evening we had an entirely local food feast, using ingredients either grown in our back yard or purchased at the Carrboro Farmer's Market. We grilled bratwursts, red onions and green and red bell peppers, made a homemade slaw, ate some homegrown tomatoes from our garden, and I baked bread. Okay, I will admit that the flour and yeast used to make the bread dough were not locally produced, but the finished product came out of our oven and to the table. Tonight we did not do quite as well, but still ate chef's salads made with locally grown lettuce, homegrown tomatoes, and topped with locally produced boiled eggs and grilled chicken strips using chickens raised here in North Carolina, and a salad dressing made in our kitchen. Of course, the blood orange and dried cranberries in the salad, and the feta cheese, were not local products, but most of the meal didn't travel all that far to become our dinner.

When it comes to local Farmer's Markets, our routine has been to visit the big farmer's market in Raleigh or the one we like best in Carrboro (near Chapel Hill). But each one of those trips is about a twenty to thirty minute drive from Apex. Next Saturday, we are pleased that Apex will be opening a Farmer's Market. I'll probably take my digital camera down and shoot some pictures of it for the blog next week. We are trying to moderate our expectations given that this will be the first weekend for this market, but we are hoping people turn out to support the farmers and producers who choose to set up stands in Apex. We are hoping to limit our trips to the other markets to once a month each, and make a regular habit of hitting the new one here in town. I'll let you know how it goes.

A Sad Day

2007-08-10T20:14:00.000-04:00

Discovery team to cease operations at season's end
Associated Press
Updated: August 10, 2007, 6:37 PM ET

AUSTIN, Texas -- The Lance Armstrong era in cycling is over.
Citing fractious leadership in the sport, constant doping allegations and the struggles of finding a new sponsor, Armstrong and the owners of his former Discovery Channel team said Friday the squad will disband after this season.

Armstrong said it was the perfect time to go out on top: Discovery's Alberto Contador of Spain won the team's eighth Tour de France title in nine years last month. "It's a sad day for cycling. Certainly a sad day for American cycling," Armstrong said. "We're proud of our record."

The decision shuts down the sport's only elite professional team based in the United States. Armstrong retired from riding in 2005 but remained a visible co-owner of the team operated by Tailwind Sports.

Discovery announced in February it would not sponsor the team beyond this year. Team General Manager Bill Stapleton acknowledged difficulty securing new sponsorship with the sport under the constant pressure of doping allegations.

"It's not an environment right now that's conducive to a lot of investment," Stapleton said, adding the team was in talks with several potential sponsors. "This was a difficult decision, not made any easier by our recent Tour de France success."

Armstrong said he believes a sponsor could have been found, but the ownership group decided now was the time to quit. Armstrong can turn his attention to his cancer foundation and politics -- he is hosting a cancer forum with presidential candidates later this month and is a key player behind a $3 billion research initiative in Texas -- and team director Johan Bruyneel is retiring.
"This is not about the lack of a sponsor," Armstrong said. "Right now is a good time to step aside."

The team was a dominant force in cycling for nearly a decade. Armstrong won the first of his record seven consecutive Tour de France titles in 1999 racing under the U.S. Postal Service banner. The team built cycling's top lineup as Armstrong and his lieutenants powered their way through France and maintained that dominance when Contador won the Tour and American teammate Levi Leipheimer finished third.

Discovery will still ride in this year's Tour of Spain and the Tour of Missouri, but the shutdown means Contador, Leipheimer and the 25 other riders must find new teams for 2008.
"They leave with the Discovery stamp," Bruyneel said. "I'm sure they will be very wanted."
Contador has been dogged by recent doping allegations, and on Friday denied again taking performance-enhancing drugs and any involvement in the Operation Puerto investigation.
"I've never committed a doping offense. I've never been involved in any act of doping," Contador said. "My promise against doping is absolute."

Although he never failed a drug test, Armstrong has been forced several times in recent years to deny repeated allegations that he use banned substances during his career. Discovery also signed top Italian rider Ivan Basso in 2006 but was later forced to drop him when he was caught up in the Spanish blood-doping investigation. "We had our share of controversies," Armstrong said before ticking off a list of team victories over the years. "And not one positive [drug] test."

Bruyneel oversaw each of the team's eight Tour victories. "I'm going to miss the staff, riders and the excitement of the races, but not all the infighting between the teams. This team has become my family and it is very sad to think that we will not be together next season," he said.

Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press

Random Thoughts from Last Week

2007-08-05T20:59:00.000-04:00

This week I'm just going to write in a stream of consciousness way about some random thoughts that are rolling around in my head, based on things I saw or learned last week. I finally watched Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" this weekend. My wife and I had been meaning to watch it for months, but somehow never got around to it. Now we watched it (the whole family), plus the special features, and we were really impressed. It is a haunting film in many ways, and I find myself thinking about different elements of the film and the issues it raises, now two days after we watched it. I'm certainly concerned about the effects of carbon emissions on the global environment, and I would ask anyone who hasn't seen the film yet to do so. It was extremely well done.

On Saturday I had to get the Highlander inspected, and I had another amusing encounter with a mechanic who is still new to dealing with hybrid vehicles. I left the keys in the ignition, and the vehicle registration on the dash, and went to wait in the lobby while the mechanic headed out to take the SUV into the bay for inspection. A couple of minutes later he was honking the horn for me to come out. He was overturning the ignition trying to get it to crank, which of course in a hybrid initially is silent. I explained to him about the gas and electric motors, assured him it was actually running, and he could move it once he put it into drive. He cautiously reached for the gear shift lever, looking all the world like he thought it might blow up or electrocute him at any moment. Halfway through the inspection he came into the lobby and asked "What kind of mileage are you getting with this thing?" Later, he mostly wanted to know whether I thought it could pull a boat. I told him it should be able to with the towing package, depending on the size of the boat, since it gives V-8 power. He was still scratching his head when I drove off, but seemed genuinely interested.

On the food front, I read an interesting study this week in the Journal of Food Protection about the natural antimicrobial action of various liquids. It was a study conducted in Spain, where identical volumes of several liquids were inoculated with identical amounts of several known pathogenic bacteria, and sampled several times to see whether the liquids were sustaining growth or killing the bacteria. The liquids tested included several fruit juices, milk, Coca-cola, olive oil, vinegar, beer (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic), and red and white wines. In there experiments, none of the fruit juices, milk, yogurt, or coca-cola inhibited bacterial growth significantly. Vinegar killed the pathogens, but so did olive oil and the wines. Beer did not have a noticeable antimicrobial effect. But it made me wonder if the noted health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet could be, in part, due to the antimicrobial action of wine and olive oil against bacteria like salmonella, shigella, campylobacter, listeria, and E. coli. Interesting to ponder, anyway.

Finally, I noticed that North Carolina Senate Bill 948 failed to win approval in the North Carolina legislature before the legislative session ended. So, for now, it remains illegal in North Carolina to sell raw milk for human consumption.

Congratulations Team Discovery Channel

2007-07-29T20:25:00.000-04:00

Today was a great day in cycling. Looking at the podium in Paris, we see the future of the sport. Four young riders that represent the next generation of superstar cyclists. Boonen in the Green Jersey is the old man of the lot, at 26 years old. Alberto Contador was the revelation and surprise winner of the tour. The young Spaniard came out of the gate early this season with great races in the spring classics, and the buzz on him was that he was a terrific climber. But no one really expected him to challenge for the Yellow Jersey. His goal was to finish the race, help the team, and contend for the White Jersey, as the best young rider.

Of course he did all of those things, and more. He won the race. He also helped Team Discovery Channel win the overall team competition, something they never did when supporting Lance Armstrong win his seven Tours de France. Watching the crowds that turned out on the Col d' Abisque, to watch yesterday's time trial, and today on the route to the Champs Elysees, you would never know the race was marred by any doping scandals. That is what made today also special to me.

Tour organizers expelled riders and teams from the Tour this year. They drew a hard line against doping and they weren't afraid to live by their principles. Whatever I may think about the French testing lab and the procedures anti-doping authorities follow, I have to respect them for booting even Vinokourov, and the man wearing the Yellow Jersey at the time, Michael Rasmussen.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this issue. At the end of the day, my take is that I would rather follow a sport that does test and try to weed out cheaters, regardless of who they are, than one that turns a blind eye to dopers as long as fans are turning out and buying tickets. Most American professional sports associations desperately seem to want to avoid the issue any way they can. At least in cycling, they are trying.

I guess I have to admit that I see things a little differently this year, because the digging is not directed disproportionately against Americans. Rasmussen is from Denmark and Vinokourov from Kazakstan. With Landis, Hamilton, and the constant allegations against Lance that were never proven, there was a sense that it was more about being angry at American cyclists ruining the European expectations than anything else. This year, it has seemed to me to be more about cleaning up the sport. Am I biased? Yeah, probably. We all are, in some ways.

Did Contador deserve to win? Absolutely. His riding in the mountains was outstanding. In the time trials, he battled against better men in that discipline and rode well enough to hold his own. He is a worthy champion. He honored the jersey and he deserves the win.

I have to say I have gained a tremendous amount of respect for Levi Leipheimer, the Californian who started the tour as Discovery's team leader, but this week had to work for the new kid on the block and help him win the race. Hinault wouldn't do it. I don't know about other past champions, but human nature goes against actions like his this week. It is a testament to the team leadership that they weathered the potential distractions and put the good of the team above any personal ambitions. Bravo, Discovery, and well done, Levi Leipheimer.

We wait now for news about who will pick up sponsorship of the team we have known as U.S. Postal and Team Discovery Channel. After this showing in the Tour de France, Johann will undoubtedly find a sponsor. Will the new sponsor be another American company? It is not clear. A lot of American companies could afford the $15 million price tag, but who will pony up? The other big question will be, can they keep Contador? His salary expectations just shot through the roof. If anyone can navigate these difficult waters, it would be the leadership of Discovery Channel. Johann Bruyneel may be the greatest Director in the sport. 8 Tour wins in 9 years, with two different champions, should be confirmation enough.

A Rogues Gallery?

2007-07-26T23:11:00.000-04:00

Wow. It seems these days you can't log on to the Internet, listen to the radio, read a newspaper, take a vacation or walk the dog without another major sports scandal hitting the press. And it is almost August, the time of year when traditionally news slows down and nothing too big happens. Right now, a lot of big--and bad--things seem to be going down.

The Tour de France is a mess. Rasmussen and Rabobank are gone, Vinokourov and Astana are gone, and even bit players like Christian Moreni are testing positive (seemingly) for banned substances. The fact that the French lab in question with some of the results being reported out is the same lab that was shown to have sloppy and questionable procedures in the Floyd Landis trial notwithstanding, it looks bad for the Tour and for cycling in general. And the evidence is damning, even if Rasmussen was innocent, because he certainly lied about his activities and whereabouts in May and June.

So, are cyclists the worst of the bad apples in sports? Unfortunately, I think not. We still have here at home the Barry Bonds and Michael Vick situations unfolding. And both of those guys make a ton more money than all the pro cyclists combined pull down. With Bonds, it seems like Major League Baseball is as powerless as Congress at getting to the bottom of what is really going on, and Karl Rove is more likely than Bonds is to come clean about all he has been up to.

With Vick, the most troubling stories are circulating. If he is guilty of being involved with dogfighting, I guess that has to be the lowest of the low. At the Tour de France, the doping that is going on is about trying to recover faster and ride stronger, to win the race. That doesn't make it right, but at least the goal is understandable. With Bonds, the Giants are not contending for a title, he's just chasing an individual record. The team only benefits economically, by getting people to come spend money at the ball park.

Vick is the worst story. His issues aren't about winning, or setting records. If he is guilty, it means he allows and condones cruelty to other creatures, for no reason, not even bad ones. It is the ultimate in selfishness. Bonds has never been accused of being a great team guy, but if Vick has done what he has been charged with, he let down his league, his owners, his teammates, and an entire city that wants him to be their hero.

Meanwhile Mike Nifong appeared today in court, where he apologized to the Duke lacrosse players whose lives he ruined by his unscrupulous actions. That story is the only one that keeps me from deciding exactly what I think is happening in France, San Francisco, Atlanta and Virginia. That was another scandal that wasn't everything it looked like initially.

>We are drawn to these men because of the magic they seemed to be able to perform. On the field, Vick can be mesmerizing. What Bonds does well is hard to do. And the Tour de France is grand spectacle. But the illusions of their greatness seem to be falling apart before our very eyes. The reality may be much uglier than we want to admit. I guess if real heroes and magical performances are what we crave, we need to be asking J.K. Rowling to give us more of Harry Potter.

Showdown at Albi

2007-07-20T14:43:00.000-04:00

Michael Rasmussen has held on to the Yellow Jersey now for as long as the contenders will allow, I am afraid. Tomorrow there is a very technical time trial run in and around the town of Albi, and tomorrow night the true contenders for the overall victory in this year's Tour de France should emerge.

Tom Boonen of Quickstep, and the entire Quickstep team, are having a terrific race this year. Quickstep has had multiple stage wins, and Boonen looks to be a lock for the Green Jersey this year, barring some unforeseen mishap. Alberto Contador looks very secure in the White Jersey, but time will tell. Contador may be the best rider on the Discover team, and he has already had a great season up to this point. Many in Spain believe he can win this race, but I think it is unlikely that he will. This is just his first Tour, and there are still many stages to go.

Team Astana is certainly the strongest and most determined team in the event this year. They will absolutely continue to attack as the race enters the Pyrenees. The South African team Barloworld is the biggest revelation as a squad, coming literally from nowhere to capture two stage victories this year. They are getting the most of their involvement for sure.

As for the Yellow Jersey, Rasmussen is not a time trial specialist at all. In the Prologue in London he gave almost 2 minutes to Fabian Cancellara in less than 8 kilometers and finished 166th of 189 riders. There are 110 kilometers of time trial to cover tomorrow and next Saturday, so by rights Rasmussen should lose at least 10 minutes to the other contenders this week. I don't believe he can gain that much time back in the mountains. As for the eventual winner, I think 6 riders have the best chance. Discovery and Astana are best placed, with Vinokourov, Kloden, Leipheimer and Contador in good positions. The other two riders well poised to win it are Valverde and Iban Mayo. I think one of those six men will win, and some combination of them will have podium finishes in Paris.

Can Rasmussen Hold On?

2007-07-16T11:09:00.000-04:00

Michael Rasmussen of Team Rabobank had a phenomenal solo ride to the finish yesterday in Tignes, demonstrating his particular skill as a climber on the first day in the French Alps to secure a stage win and become the overall leader in the Tour de France. Rasmussen also took top honors in the King of the Mountains competition, a race within the race that he has won before.

The question now is whether Rasmussen, and more importantly his Rabobank squad, will be able to keep him in the yellow jersey all the way to Paris. While I am no expert on all the riders or the sport overall, based on the years I have spent reading about this event and watching it on TV, I doubt personally that he will remain the tour leader all the way. I do think he will be able to defend the yellow jersey for a few days, but before he gets to the Pyrenees, where the most difficult part of the race is this year, he will have to cross the southern portion of France in dry hot conditions, which are not ideal for the climber. To compound that, strong teams like Astana, CSC, Discovery Channel, and T-Mobile will be launching attack after attack to unseat him. I think the Rabobank domestiques will be exhausted before they get to Spain, and if Rasmussen makes it to the Pyrenees in yellow, he will have to ride the mountains virtually alone. Meanwhile, the Spanish climbers will be eager to demonstrate their skills on home turf, and elite level riders that are still within striking distance will try to crack him.

A lot of us wondered yesterday why the main chase group that included Iban Mayo and Christophe Moreau did not work together better to distance themselves from the Astana attack of Vinokourov. I thought a lot about that, and my take is that while the individual riders in that group could have gained time over Kloden, Vinokourov and the others behind, they would also have been helping Mayo and Moreau at the expense of their own team captains. This they could not do, so they allowed Rasmussen to achieve the win while limiting the losses of their team captains to Mayo and Moreau. That is what I think was going on there.

Today, a rest day. Tomorrow, another great day of racing in the Alps. Au revoir!

The First Few Days

2007-07-11T11:27:00.000-04:00

Well, I haven't been posting much because I have been on vacation and in the middle of a job switch. But I have been following the Tour de France, and the man of the hour is certainly the Swiss rider Fabian Cancellara. Cancellara is the reigning World Champion in the Time Trial specialty, and he proved in the Prologue and again yesterday that on flat roads he can ride faster than anyone else in the Peloton.

The biggest surprise to me in these first days has been the inability of the big-name sprinters to take advantage of the conditions before them. The Australian McEwen certainly won a stage, but Cancellara yesterday and the Quick-Step lead out man Steegmans both won stages so far that by rights should have gone to the sprinters.

We have yet to see who will emerge as the top contenders for the overall competition, and as usual, the race will be decided in the Alps and Pyrenees most likely. I do like the way Tom Boonen, Andreas Kloden, George Hincapie, and Alexander Vinokourov are riding right now, but the race remains totally wide open. I hope you are following it, it is a wonderful event.

Celebrating the Day

2007-07-04T21:58:00.000-04:00

Do you have heroes? Probably you do, but few of us find it easy to talk about our heroes, the people we genuinely admire and look up to. Maybe it is a sign of the jaded age we live in, but it seems these days we all take our celebrities with a box of salt, and just wait for the clay feet to show. Kids aren't taught to think of people as heroes much anymore, but when I was growing up, that kind of talk was not too unusual. I'm not saying that was a good thing or a bad thing, it's just true.

If I have a hero that I find it easy to admit to, it would have to be Thomas Jefferson. And today is as good a day as any to think about him, and about the era that spawned our nation. 231 years ago, the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson wrote, and the idea of the country that would become the United States of America was born.

Of course, that is way too simple a way to describe that time and those events. And signing the Declaration was not easy, but it was certainly easier than the years of war that would follow, and the many difficult tasks that had to be accomplished to turn the idea of our nation into a reality. George Washington deserves to be known as the father of our country, for many reasons, but if he is the father, Jefferson is certainly the uncle. Jefferson was the idea guy, the one who could explain what we were doing and why. Washington was a man of action. He inspired others to follow his lead. But Jefferson and his words have shown that they can inspire generations to love our country and the ideas and ideals we hold most dearly.

Today I celebrated the Fourth of July by participating in a neighborhood community parade in Durham, NC, that has been going on for 56 years. I was there at the invitation of some friends who live in that community. Half the neighborhood marches, about that many line the streets, and then everyone gathers in the local park for a party. There were flags from many states and countries on display. Our Congressman, David Price, led the throng in saying the Pledge of Allegiance. A community chorus sang several patriotic songs. People handed out lemonade and cupcakes, and raffled off a high-quality American flag. Kids rode bikes, scooters, tricycles, skateboards and even a riding lawnmower in the parade. People wore red, white and blue. And a rainbow of other colors too. Dogs turned out wearing their best stars & stripes regalia. Two policemen on motorcycles led us through the neighborhood, along with a firetruck. After it was over the firemen sprayed kids who wanted to get wet with the hose.

It may have lacked glitz, there were no TV reporters there, no fireworks performances, no superstars. The parade lasted maybe 20 minutes, and the party in the park lasted maybe another hour or so. But looking around, you just knew that everyone there really was grateful and proud to be an American. Everyone there was pleased to be able to call this place our home, and these people our neighbors. And everyone there, regardless of race, creed, national origin, sexual orientation, age, gender, political party, or any other way you care to put people into boxes, agreed with Thomas Jefferson.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united
States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
There is more. If you've never read it all, check it out. You can find it at http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm. And however you chose to mark the day, I do hope you celebrated it. It's important to do so. And, for my part, if you want to understand what the United States of America stands for and means, if you want to comprehend why this country came into being in the first place, then I suggest reading up on Thomas Jefferson. I don't think anyone has ever said it better than he
did.

Francophilia

2007-06-28T21:07:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's post, and the time of year, mean that my mind is definitely wandering in the direction of two of my favorite things: cycling and France. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law are heading over to London for the start of Le Tour next week, and they will also be catching some of it live in the French Alps. I'm thrilled for them--a little jealous, but totally thrilled.

Along the sidebar to my blog you'll notice a link to Backroads. I have to give a shout out to Backroads, because last fall I got to go on a cycling trip with them in Provence. Of course we flew in and out of Paris, which is everything you ever heard it was, and then took the train to Avignon. I spent five days cycling around Mt. Ventoux (no, I did not climb it), St. Remy, Avignon, Pont-du-Gard, and lots of wonderful small villages. Backroads did it up right, the bikes were set up perfectly, the guides were great, the routes spectacular, the food was wonderful. If you love bikes, go. If you love France, you'll love it even more on a bike.

Forget everything you ever heard about the French not being friendly to Americans. If you are on a bike in France, truck drivers will hold up traffic to let you make a left turn on a busy road. At 5:00 pm I had to cross the Rhone River in Avignon on a narrow and busy bridge, but no one hassled me about the fact I was slowing down the traffic. And that is a long bridge. I can give many other examples, but cyclists in France hold a seemingly special place in the pecking order of the road.

I love the country, I love the people, and I love their grand Tour. I'm not crazy about their seeming anti-American feelings in the ranks of the Tour organizers, some of their press, and such, but I do love the event. I hope that the UCI and Tour officials can work through their posturing, and I wish all the riders and teams well. The event threatens to be a debacle this year, and it looks like many great riders won't be there.

Backroads offers many different cycling trips in France. If you have any desire at all to experience the greatest rides you will ever do, call them up. And no, I'm not paid to say that.

When the World Goes Mad

2007-06-27T21:22:00.000-04:00

If you read my post on Floyd Landis, you know by now that I am a cyclist and I enjoy following the sport. Each July I look forward to watching the Tour de France, but I also follow the sport on line through various websites all season long. I was excited earlier this year when Team Discovery Channel got off to a great start with some early wins in the spring classics, and with a great showing at the Tour of Georgia here in the U.S.

But my sport is in a lot of trouble right now, and it is frustrating to us who love the sport in many ways. Cycling is first and foremost a blue collar sport. This is about gritty guys (and women) who are willing to punish their bodies in ways that are hard for most of us to imagine, and who ride amazingly well. But it takes a huge toll on the body to pedal a bike at high speeds (think, averaging more than 30 MPH) for anywhere from 65-120 miles every day during stage races. Plus all the training rides. It is not easy to do what these guys do. I got to ride once with pro riders in Austin, Texas in April of 2000, when I rode my first Ride for the Roses event to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

I took off that morning with about 8,000 other cyclists. I was training for the MS 150, and the Ride for the Roses fell at a good time for me to go out for a 50 mile training ride. The pro riders got to start us off, and they went on a century ride (100 miles) that day. The route went east of Austin, and then south, and looped back to finish at a county fair location. There was a huge hill to climb to get back up to the start/finish line. As I was climbing that hill, I heard a lot of noise behind me and a guy with an Irish accent yelled for me to hold my line. That's cycling talk for "ride straight". The peloton of pro riders caught me in the last mile and totally blew past me up the hill I was climbing. They rode 100 miles in the time it took me to go 50. And I was in great shape at that time, at least so I thought.

The riders on this page, Matthias Kessler, Iban Mayo, Sirhiy Honchar, Alessandro Petacchi and Ivan Basso are some of the great riders of today. All of them are in trouble right now for failing doping tests. For Mayo and Petacchi, it is because their blood levels had too high concentrations of substances that are actually allowed (like asthma medication) within certain limits, but there is something a little off in their recent test results at the Giro d'Italia.

For other riders, it is more serious. Basso was handed a two year ban recently, and Kessler was fired yesterday from his team in Europe. The UCI (cycling's pro tour organization) has asked riders to sign an anti-doping charter before the Tour de France, and Le Tour is saying they intend not to allow anyone to ride who has not signed the document.

Cycling's zero-tolerance approach may at this point have reached the level of ridiculousness. Their testing program is completely messed up right now, and you are presumed guilty with virtually no way to clear your name if one of the WADA labs says you tested positive for something.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., we have baseball dancing around steroid abuse while high profile players attempt to break records that are, for baseball fans, sacred icons. The approach in that sport is broken too, but badly in the other direction. And a "pro wrestler" in Georgia may have been driven mad by his steroids. We may never know what role the drugs played, but a whole family has been killed in an episode that makes no sense, and "pro wrestling" isn't even a legitimate sport.

I don't know where this all leads, but it seems to me at times the world is just mad, and I'm not talking about useful anger here.

Freedom to Choose

2007-06-26T22:11:00.000-04:00

John Stuart Mill, (1806-1873)

“That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right...The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

From John Stuart Mill, On Liberty Ch. 1

This is going to be my last post on the issue of raw milk, at least for a while. I want to thank the many people who have been reading the website this week, and I invite any of you to check in as often as you like.

The most difficult argument to address in the whole issue of SB 948, before the legislature now in North Carolina, is the argument put forward by raw milk proponents that this is a matter of free choice. They ask, reasonably enough, “Why should this be illegal?” Why indeed? What social benefit is so great that it would require that society would prevent the free choice of these individuals to drink raw milk and eat raw milk based products?

There is almost no way to wrestle with or think through these issues without looking back to John Stuart Mill’s classic work on this subject, On Liberty. No matter what you or I may think about utilitarianism, of which Mill was a proponent, his writings on liberty are still among the best ever put forward. Mill argues convincingly that the only legitimate reason to limit another person’s liberty is when that liberty causes harm to another group or individual.

On its face, it would seem that I and everyone in the public health sphere would have to restrain ourselves in this matter, since it does me no harm if you choose to own a cow or a share of a cow, and even if I think you are taking an unnecessary risk, you drink that milk directly as you please. I admit that at first glance this seems the only logical conclusion. But unless several principles are agreed to on all sides, it is not true that your actions in this matter only affect you. There are at least two groups that are directly or indirectly impacted by your decisions, and only if there are strict limitations put in place can we agree that your actions only impact you as free individuals.

First, and Mill concurs on this point, children cannot be judged to have the capacity to freely choose. It is incumbent on society to limit the free choices of children because they are not able to make for themselves an informed choice. From a public health perspective, we would also be concerned on legitimate biological grounds that children should not be exposed to any products that pose unnecessary risks for them. The children are the future of society. The social benefit of extending life for as long as possible is best accomplished by keeping children alive until they become adults. Due to their small size, they are particularly vulnerable to dehydration from diarrhea, and should be protected to the best of our ability from pathogens that cause that set of symptoms.

Second, people in North Carolina (and elsewhere) who make their living from selling milk and other dairy products must not be harmed by someone’s choice to consume raw milk products from North Carolina. The potential risk here is that if a future outbreak occurs involving raw milk or milk products from North Carolina, all consumers may boycott all North Carolina dairy products, harming other producers. This is something we observed with the spinach outbreak last year. Thousands of dollars worth of spinach all over the country was plowed under because there was no market for spinach due to the contamination on one farm in California. Producers in the mainline dairy markets need to be protected from harm in order for raw milk consumers to exercise their free choice.

So, I would be forced to admit the legitimacy of your freedom if you were willing to commit to limiting the consumption of raw milk only to adults capable of making an informed choice, and you were willing to let the state set up regulatory mechanisms to test the product routinely, and establish other protections for the commercial dairy producers that the state Department of Agriculture deems appropriate. If the proponents of raw milk consumption agreed to these conditions, it would seem unreasonable to oppose them further.

That’s all I have to say on raw milk for now. It has been fun for me to think through my positions on this issue, and I appreciate Mr. Senkpiel and others for pushing me on it in the comment boxes. I only wrote anything about this because I felt my profession was maligned and unfairly represented in Ms. Nelson’s article, and because I thought the health claims being put forward were potentially dangerous. I hope I have at least helped you understand public health’s perspective better, even if in the end we cannot agree.

I wish you all health.

Why We Do What We Do

2007-06-25T21:59:00.000-04:00

Did you ever wonder why the U.S. has a Surgeon General? Or why he or she wears a naval uniform? Because the first public health service in the United States were the navy doctors who took care of sick and injured seamen, and later inherited duties associated with quarantine stations established to keep out foreign diseases.

On each Wednesday, all over the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention campus, you will see men and women wearing naval uniforms. At the National Institutes of Health and in some state health departments you see the same thing. These are the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, and they carry naval military rank. They have to meet annual physical requirements and wear their uniforms at least once per week.

The public health services of the United States were extremely limited for the first 150 years or so of our country's history. There wasn't even a list of nationally reportable diseases until Congress passed the first disease reporting law in 1878, which made Yellow Fever reportable. In subsequent years more diseases were made reportable, notably malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis, and others. But many of the diseases we track today were not reportable until after the CDC was officially created in 1948, growing out of the Malaria Control Office Congress had previously established in Atlanta, Georgia.

What you may notice is that the list of diseases that were first made reportable are largely diseases that are under control today. But it was not always so. From the National Center for Health Statistics, we have records documenting life expectancy at birth dating back to 1850. In 1850, the average U.S. life expectancy at birth was only 39 years. By 1890, the average life expectancy at birth had risen to 43 years. In 1911, that number was still between 43-44 years. But today life expectancy at birth in the U.S. is 78 years. How did we add more than 30 years to average life expectancy at birth in less than 100 years time?

In 1900, the three leading causes of death in the United States were pneumonia & influenza (they were combined for reporting purposes back then), tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Today, our top three causes of mortality are heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. Researchers attribute 5 years of the added life expectancy since 1911 to advances in medicine. The remaining 25+ years of additional life expectancy that have been achieved are attributed to key public health interventions in three areas.

The majority of life expectancy added since 1911 in the U.S. is attributed to measures designed to prevent diarrheal diseases, particularly cholera and foodborne diseases; vaccination for childhood viral illnesses; and additives mandated to the U.S. food and water supply, notably fluoride in water, niacin in flour, and iodine to salt. Among the antidiarrheal interventions, the most important developments were sewage treatment plants, chlorination and chloramination of drinking water, and pasteurization of dairy products. These measures taken together were responsible for adding 25+ years to the average U.S. life expectancy at birth. This was accomplished by keeping children alive past age 5 years old, largely by preventing severe dehydration from diarrhea, and then to adulthood through vaccination.

The key to the most effective public health interventions devised to date is that they are designed to operate universally. The interventions are designed to affect everyone, and in so doing, improve the health of the entire population. And these interventions have proven wildly successful. The reason public health professionals worry about letting people opt out of the interventions is we risk returning to higher rates of disease in the very young, with increased mortality that we have learned how to prevent. None of us want to see the life expectancy gains we have worked so hard to achieve eroded.

In today's Independent, in the comments section many of you have read, I was amused to learn that we epidemiologists are being bought and paid for by agribusiness corporations, and we're only pawns in the game of denying people their freedoms and oppressing small farm producers. If that's true, I wonder why I get so much hate mail from oystermen, cattlemen, poultry producers, restaurant owners, and food distributors. And I wonder where my cash is stashed. The truth is, we make the policy recommendations we do to to keep people alive longer. It is the purpose of my profession. It has been our purpose for over 100 years. We may not have won many friends along the way, but we have been very successful in the past at correctly identifying interventions that work. If we weren't doing that, the 30 years of life expectancy that were added wouldn't be there. The numbers just don't lie.

Burden of Proof

2007-06-24T21:54:00.000-04:00

Robert Koch (1843-1910), German physician and one of the first microbiologists

Last time I said I would attempt to lay out the difference between believing something was true, and being able to prove it. There is a huge difference. A useful framework for understanding that difference can be explored by looking at Koch's Postulates. Robert Koch was a German physician and one of the men who established the germ theory of disease in the 1800s-1900s as the preeminent explanation for many diseases. He also discovered Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that causes anthrax, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes TB, and other nasty pathogens.

Koch was working at a time when many people did not believe in germs, bacteria, viruses, etc., and when many early laboratorians were beginning to grow all kinds of bacterial cultures, but they did not know what they were growing, or which bacteria did what types of things. Koch put forward four classic postulates that could prove a connection between a particular disease and a particular bacterial pathogen. Since he was writing in German, the English translation of his postulate has been stated in various ways, but essentially these are what they say:

1 - The microorganism must be found in all organisms suffering from the disease, but not in healthy organisms.
2 - The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture
3 - The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.
4 - The microorganism must be re isolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent.

Ok, so what do they mean in plain English? First, you have to always find the same organism in an animal or person suffering from the disease. You have to grow a pure culture (not mixed with other bacteria). Then, in experiments, inoculating a healthy test subject (usually an animal) with bacteria from the pure culture should reproduce the disease. And finally, you should be able to re-isolate the same bacteria from the diseased test subject. If a scientist could repeatedly do all of these things, he or she could claim to have established the linkage between the disease and the pathogen.

I bring this up to illustrate that there is in science a high burden of proof. In epidemiology there is also a high burden of proof. One of the accusations in the raw milk article that, frankly, set me off was the accusation that epidemiologists just jumped to the conclusion that raw milk caused disease and ignored other explanations. That isn't how we do our work. But what we do is not well known by many people, so I'd like to open the curtain to our methods, and our burden of proof. Forgive me if this turns into a long post.

There are many types of studies and different proof tests, so I will confine my remarks to outbreak epidemiology. This is the most relevant to the topic anyway, and it is the type of field epidemiology I do, so it is what I know the most about. When we are confronted with an outbreak of unknown etiology (an outbreak we recognize but do not know how it is spreading), we first want to interview the first reported cases to understand their recent exposures, and we want to determine what laboratory evidence there is, to help us focus on a cause. We test for bacteria, viruses, parasites, chemical exposures, toxins, nutrient imbalances, or other things depending on the symptoms the patients have. Once we know the pathogen we re-interview the cases to hone in on the exposures during known incubation periods. For example, salmonella has a usual 1-3 day incubation period, staph intoxications just 2-4 hours, norovirus 24-48 hours, E. coli 2-10 days, etc. So depending on the pathogen, we look at longer or shorter exposure periods.

If we determine that several cases share an exposure, for instance, eating Peter Pan peanut butter, then we have a hypothesis to test. We design a case-control study where we develop a systematic questionnaire asking about exposures, and make sure that the particular food item we are interested in is on the questionnaire, along with every other exposure we can identify that could explain the disease. In the case of salmonella, we would make sure that eating raw eggs, mayonnaise or ice cream made at home, raw milk, pet turtles, pet snakes, pet lizards, bird exposures, all kinds of things would be in the questionnaire that other people in previous outbreaks had implicated. We would also ask about restaurants, brand names of food items, grocery store chains they buy food at, etc. on the interview. Every investigation includes hundreds of potential exposures in the study design.

We would administer this lengthy questionnaire to all the case patients we knew about, plus another group of healthy people who were otherwise the same as our ill patients. We may choose the healthy controls in a variety of ways, but usually they are matched on key demographic and geographic variables to the ill persons, and we interview both the ill people and the control group systematically. Then we enter all of their responses into computers and run statistical tests on all the variables.

What we are calculating with these tests are called Odds Ratios. We want to see if there is any exposure in the study that ill people share overwhelmingly, but controls do not. Then we apply other statistical tests to our odds ratios to determine the probability that any association we derive could occur by random chance, and whether the association is toward causing disease, or protecting someone from getting the disease.

Once we have an exposure that is statistically associated with disease, we will try to, in the case of bacteria, culture the bacteria from some of the product we are implicating statistically. This is sometimes impossible, if all the food or beverage item has been consumed. But many times we can locate food samples to test. The goal is to grow the bacteria from both the patient and the implicated food item, if possible.

If we do implicate a food item, before we can publish that finding we typically have to satisfy at least two or three other groups of epidemiologists that our findings are valid. We would have to present our evidence to our peers and superiors inside our agency, and then usually to a similar group in another agency (like the CDC, FDA, Food Safety Inspection Service, USDA, or state health departments). Only if the evidence was found sufficiently strong by several different groups in diverse agencies would we be able to publish findings, initiate product testing, recalls, and trace back activities.

What I am saying here is that I do not believe the accusation by proponents of raw milk that epidemiologists implicating raw milk in particular outbreaks did so recklessly, or that they ignored other explanations. We face a high burden of proof, and there are many internal and external checks and balances in the system.

Similarly, proponents of raw milk are asserting that it has many health benefits over pasteurized milk. I think there is a high burden of proof they should meet before making those claims as a justification for relaxing the laws and regulations to open greater access to raw milk. To get there, we would need to agree on exactly what is the specific health benefit, and then we would need to design a study or studies to meet the burden of proof. At a minimum, proponents of raw milk would need to put forward a health benefit that all people would get from the product; it would need to be measurable; it would need to be reproducible; and benefit would have to be shown not to be caused by something else. Right now proponents of raw milk are asserting benefits that are vague or not measurable, are subjective, and diverse. They also seem to be challenging those of us who do this type of research to disprove their health claims or to verify them. But when someone is advancing a new claim or idea, it is on the claiming party to fund the studies, produce the research, publish the findings, and face peer review. That is how science is done.

The Foundational Science of Public Health

2007-06-22T21:44:00.000-04:00

I am by profession and career an epidemiologist. Epidemiology is considered the foundational science of public health, because epidemiologists seek to understand the determinants and distribution of disease in human populations. In plain English, our main reason for existence is to figure out what causes disease and how disease patterns change over time, and in different populations or under different conditions.

Public health as a set of disciplines is relatively young. Sure, Greeks like Hippocrates had ideas about medicine, ancient Egyptians explored surgery, Chinese medicine practitioners devised frameworks for describing health and disease, and every culture had shamans, wise women and other healers who devoted their time and energies to promoting health. Their focus, however, was on the health of individuals.

Public health is different. Public health is concerned with the health of groups, of populations. Thinking about health in this way did not even start until the early 1800s, and the first people to think in these terms were brilliant physicians and theorists in Germany, France, and England.

One of the first to think about disease in terms of populations was a French physician named Louis Rene Villerme (1782-1863). In 1826 Villerme conducted a study that showed, conclusively and for the first time, that disease and death occurred at different rates and in different neighborhood and community patterns. Disease was neither random nor uniformly distributed. In fact, Villerme was the first to show that poor people suffered more disease and earlier deaths than the wealthy did.

Observing differences in disease patterns was a major breakthrough, but it did not explain why these patterns existed. In the 1800s, theories of disease causation included: miasma; contagion; personal behavior; and the supernatural. Miasma theory had strong political backing, driven by social reformers who advocated improved sanitation. Contagionists were not new, they had existed for a long time, but they did not know about germs. Contagionists were politically associated with the military and other authorities, who wanted to quarantine infected ships and goods. Capitalists felt threatened by contagion theories of disease -- they interfered with commerce. Personal behavior and the supernatural were closely intertwined. Moralists were inclined to think of disease in terms of divine punishment for misdeeds, and health as a sign of divine approval.

Arguably the most famous epidemiologist, ever, was a British physician in the 1850s named John Snow. John Snow was a London physician concerned with cholera epidemics in London in the 1850s. There were many theories trying to explain the cause of cholera at that time. Two of the most important were the miasma theory and the contagion theory. The miasma theory argued that noxious vapors or fumes existed in unsanitary areas, and these fumes were the cause of cholera. The contagion theory argued that there was some contagion, something that was passed directly to the individuals who contracted cholera. This debate was all occurring before the germ theory of disease had been developed.

Snow opposed the miasma theory of the spread of cholera. He believed that there was some sort of contagion involved. He documented a major rise in the epidemic of cholera in London's Broad St. area. He learned through extensive interviews that the people who were getting cholera were drinking water from the Broad St. pump. He also identified two anomalous groups who were very near the pump who suffered no effects of cholera: inmates at a prison; and workers at a brewery. The prison had its own well, and of course the inmates had no access to the public pump. The men at the brewery were not thought to drink water at all.

Snow also documented incidences of cholera in districts served by two competing water companies in London. Both companies used water from the River Thames, but one had a local water intake and the other had an intake upstream of London, away from the city's raw sewage. The Lambeth company, whose intake was upstream, suffered no incidences of cholera in areas it served. All the cholera occurred in households served by the company with the local water intake.

Snow's work was scientific. Many people before him had opinions about what caused disease. Snow designed experiments to try and prove what factors were and were not associated with disease. In his case, the disease of interest was cholera. The methods that Snow and Villerme demonstrated slowly began to permeate the thinking of physicians and influential policymakers, and the idea of a set of disciplines devoted to systematically improving the health of human populations was born.

The 1988 Institute of Medicine report defines public health as "what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy." This endeavor involves [1] - assessment; what exactly is the state of health in the society? [2] - policy development; once the situation is understood and needs are identified, policies designed to address the problem areas need to be developed and implemented; and, [3] - assurance: the goal is that 1 & 2 will result in assuring the promotion and preservation of health in the society. Before policies can be developed and enforced, however, the determinants and distribution of disease must be understood. That is why epidemiology is the foundational science of public health.

The thing that triggered my alarm in the article promoting raw milk consumption as a positive health benefit is that in no way was it scientifically examined. The entire article quoted people's opinions and anecdotal descriptions. There was nothing rigorous in the thought process, although there were plenty of accusations, assumptions, and claims being thrown around as if they were facts. Next time I will attempt to describe the difference between believing something is so, and proving it.

The Assault on Science

2007-06-21T22:05:00.000-04:00

"Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence."

Louis PasteurFrench biologist & bacteriologist (1822 - 1895)

I am about to start writing a series that may become boring to some of you, but is vitally important to me. In my blog caption, I said I would write about "everything that matters." Well, today my local Independent newspaper published a cover story on the raw milk movement, and there is a bill before the N.C. General Assembly to allow cow shares and human consumption of raw milk within certain limits.

In the story, pasteurization and homogenization are attacked in no uncertain terms as production steps that are alleged to destroy all that is good and true in milk, and raw milk is heralded as a panacea cure for everything from milk allergies to cancer. As an epidemiologist, thinking like that which produced this story leaves me feeling sad, concerned, and alarmed. Add to it a recent lawsuit against North Carolina alleging vaccines causing autism, along with the general degradation of science during the Bush administration and it is hard to remain optimistic about the future.

In the series I am about to write, I will focus only on the science of public health. There are too many things that I could write about. I will be trying to build the case that anti-science thinking and a basic failure to comprehend the history of disease control efforts in the United States are coalescing to support a radical fringe movement that threatens to undermine public health improvements that have taken 60 years to achieve. This case will take time to build, and I want to proceed in a way that illuminates the topic. If this is not your cup of tea, I can only beg your patience.

For the record, to tie this new series in with the one I did on food and food safety earlier, a few disclaimers. My grandparents had milking cows, and every morning and every evening my grandfather milked the cows. He brought fresh raw milk to the house and poured it through cheesecloth into milk cans, which he sold to a local dairy. But he also kept two gallons at the house each week, usually, one of fresh whole milk and one of fresh buttermilk. As a child I helped churn butter and I ate that butter. I was fed raw milk on my cereal. My grandmother cooked with raw milk. And I didn't die. None of that means it was safe. One of the points the author of the piece I read today made was basically built on interviews with people who drink raw milk, and say things like "And I'm fine. It's never made me sick."

The best analogy I can think of to respond to those points is that as a child in the 1960s I can remember my mom driving around Georgia at frightening speeds, with me, a small child sitting in the front seat, never wearing a seat belt. Meanwhile, everyone was driving 80 MPH (the then posted speed limit), no car had airbags, and most sign posts on the side of the road were solid bars that if hit could cut a car in half. And I didn't die. But that does not mean any of us were safe.

Louis Pasteur was a great man, a great scientist, and a true humanitarian. Pasteurization was one of the two or three major process inventions in the history of human kind. Along with vaccination, and a couple of food additive efforts, pasteurization has done more than almost anything else to add 30 years to the average life expectancy of most Americans. People who idolize a past before pasteurization and vaccination forget to mention that in that world, the average life expectancy in the U.S. was in the 50s, that thousands of children died from disease and want each year, and no one understood anything about the way diseases spread or how best to control them.

Judge me as you will, but let me make my case. For my part, I am grateful for the work Louis Pasteur and others have done before us.

Summer's Here

2007-06-20T21:56:00.000-04:00

We have reached a transition of the seasons. The solstice occurs at 2:06 p.m. EDT. This is when the Sun is farthest north for the year in Earth's sky and begins its six-month return southward. Summer begins in the Northern Hemisphere, winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

Of course, that is just the dry scientific fact of what we are experiencing. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, tomorrow is officially the longest day of the year. Ancient Europeans marked this day with bonfire celebrations, and Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" was inspired in part by the idea that solstice causes unusual behaviors in humans.

What does solstice mean to us today? In agrarian societies, this transition in the Northern hemisphere would signal the ripening of the crops, the fullness of the year, heading toward the bounty at harvest. Here on the Atlantic coast of the United States, summer solstice means we are heading into the teeth of hurricane season. From now until October, we will watch the tropics for signs of storms developing.

But for most people these days, I imagine that solstice will come and go with little thought or recognition. The weather anchors will inform us that it is now officially summer, but people have already been experiencing and acting like it was summer for several weeks.

I don't have any particular solstice memories or experiences to share, but I mark it every year, mentally. Along with the equinoxes it forms a mental signpost for me. 2007 is halfway done. We enter now the downhill slide of the year. Have you accomplished half of what you had hoped to this year? Does it matter to you? Well, remember that in six months we will be full in the clutches of our Winter solstice, and all the holiday season experiences.

Maybe that is why, figuratively, we get such a long day tomorrow. Time is about to start running out.

Hybridize

2007-06-19T22:44:00.001-04:00

We are a Toyota family, and we are a Hybrid family. My wife primarily drives a 2002 Prius, and I usually drive a 2006 Highlander Hybrid. Today I found a nail embedded in one of the tires and took the SUV in to get the tire fixed. When the technician went to back out of the service bay, he at first wasn't sure that it was turned on. When he got out he looked at me with amazement and said "Wow, this thing sure is quiet!" He then went on to ask me how I liked it, and whether I had any issues with it.

Issues? What kind of issues could I have? It's an SUV that gives V-8 power from a V-6 engine, and gets 30 MPG. The Prius gets 50 MPG routinely. We are cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions, stretching our fuel budget, and we sacrifice nothing in terms of creature comforts to do it. We love our hybrids.

I know that car manufacturers are fighting Congress on new CAFE standards (the fuel efficiency requirements they have to meet to be able to sell cars) right now, and state governments are complaining that fuel efficiency is curtailing their tax revenues. It is a nasty secret that our own governments are in cahoots with the auto industry and big oil to keep fuel consumption up, so everyone makes money. Everyone but us consumers, that is. We get to pay and pay. And the environment is worse for it.

I just don't see why every car, truck, van and SUV in America can't average 30 MPG or better. There is absolutely no technological reason why any passenger vehicle on the road gets less than that on average. Toyota has shown that it can be done.

The only limiting factors, really, are backbone and imagination. Unfortunately, those seem to be two natural resources that are in critically short supply right now. I hope that someone finds a new set of reserves of them, and soon. For all our sakes.

Wonderful World of Wine

2007-06-18T16:56:00.000-04:00

I have always been fascinated by wine. There is something magic and wonderful that can happen when grapes are fermented into wine by a master of the craft. I say something magic can happen, but it doesn’t always. Some bottles of wine I have drunk were truly awful, and some were sublime.

The wonderful and frustrating part of it all is that you cannot tell when you buy a bottle of wine whether it is worth the price, or even what you will think of it when you pull the cork. Some vineyards do have a greater likelihood of achieving consistency than others, but even among those, certain vintages rise above the rest as superb expressions of the soil, the climate, the grapes, and the skill of the winemaker.

While I love wine, and visiting vineyards, I find I do not love wine snobs. Once I was at dinner with a group of people and a wine was ordered. When the glasses and bottle were put together, this guy erupted in anger that the glasses were all wrong, and demanded to see the manager. The manager and the Maitre’ D came to our table to discuss the situation, and the chap went on and on about how we were about to drink a Bordeaux, and the glasses were for some other type of wine, and how it would be a disaster. To be honest, I found the whole thing embarrassing. The staff explained they were out of the other kind of glasses at the moment; this was all they had enough of to set our large table, etc. etc. He was having none of it, and all of the rest of us were left uncomfortably sitting there while the tempest raged on. And on.

When I read wine tasting notes, or look at the point values assigned to a wine by Wine Spectator or some other reviewer, I sometimes feel confused. Should I be able to discern the differences between currants, cherries, and plums in three different glasses? What about other tastes, like tobacco, tar, or one I read recently, oil? What on earth would I want to drink that for? Still, there are times when I do catch a sniff of apricot, or grass, or some other flavor, and understand what the reviewer was writing.

In the end, I find that I simply “know” what I like and what I don’t. Once I taste it. But it is still ephemeral. I remember in Texas buying a certain vintage of a rather cheap French table wine, and being completely blown away by it. I went back and bought a case of it. We drank it for several weeks, thoroughly enjoying each bottle. A couple of years later I saw the exact same vintage for sale in another store, and I eagerly bought a couple of bottles. When I poured it, it was past its prime and not very enjoyable at all. Some wines get better with age, others decline.

Sometimes, of course, it is also fun to play around with wine. This past weekend I made Sangria, and it was wonderful in every way. Here is the recipe I used; if you have others to suggest, I’d love to hear them.

I started with a bottle of Penfold’s Merlot, which cost me about $7.00 at the grocery store. I added to that ½ cup of sugar, ½ cup of cognac, ¼ cup Triple Sec, 1/8 cup of orange juice, and 1 lemon and 1 orange sliced thin. I stirred all of that together until the sugar was dissolved and chilled it for about 7 hours. Then I added 1 cup of orange flavored seltzer water and served it over ice. Everyone loved it.

If you have drunk something particularly fun, or memorable, please let the rest of us know.

More Tips from the Kitchen

2007-06-16T16:08:00.000-04:00

Quick--you just find out that your kids have been invited to an impromptu sleepover, and you and your significant other suddenly have a date night you didn't know was coming. What are you going to do to make dinner special?

This was my meal dilemma last night, but stopping off at the local Whole Foods and walking through, I came up with a menu that turned out to be really good, and surprisingly easy. First, since I knew it would take a little while to fix the primary side dish, I grabbed some goat cheese spread and a loaf of sourdough rosemary bread. The goat cheese spread had garlic and basil in it, and with the bread made a wonderful snack to hold us over while I fixed the rest.

In the produce section I picked up some small sweet potatoes and heirloom tomatoes. I boiled the sweet potatoes whole for about 20-30 minutes or until soft. While that was going on, I diced up the heirloom tomatoes into two salad bowls, dusted them with an Herbs de Provence herb mix we picked up last fall in France, drizzled them with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and tossed them to coat the tomatoes and moisten the herbs. Then I sprinkled crumbled feta cheese over the tomatoes to make a Mediterranean-inspired tomato and cheese salad. You could use any herbs you like, but thyme, basil, oregano, etc. would all work well.

As the potatoes neared being done, I fired up the grill. When the potatoes were soft, I drained them, removed the skins, and mashed them with 3 tablespoons of butter, some salt, ground ginger and cinnamon. Then I placed them in an oven on low heat to stay warm.

At Whole Foods in the seafood section I had picked up a skewer of peeled and deveined shrimp and some sea scallops wrapped in smoked salmon. I grilled these items for 3-5 minutes each side, seasoning them first with lemon and dill.

So, from start to finish, it took me a little over 40 minutes to make a fabulous meal. Salmon wrapped scallops and shrimp, grilled, with mashed ginger sweet potatoes and a tomato/feta side salad. We drank red wine with it, but a nice white wine would have worked equally well. The feta was a needed counterpoint to the sweet potatoes, but the grilled seafood had a smoky-lemony savor that was awesome. We chased all of this later in the evening with a turtle cheesecake dessert we split.

Not bad, for short notice, to make a special meal with limited clean up, little effort, and wonderful tastes. Try this menu sometime for someone you want to surprise, and let me know how you like it.