I’m going to start lightly, but I end up talking about kids playing Russian roulette.

Me and High Blood Pressure

I don’t manage risk well.  If you give me a bunch of facts and stats and ask me to change my behavior, good luck.  For the past couple years of been treating my high blood pressure by inconsistent attempts at diet, sleeping better, and getting some exercise.  Anything but medication.  It’s a bad decision, and I know it pretty well because my job is health information outreach.  I’ve optimized articles on hypertension for the Web.

What did it take to get me back on medication?  I think my cardiologist actually threatened me.  Also, he woudn’t sign off on something else I needed, (ADD medication).  My sister had a similar experience.  She’s taking her high blood pressure meds because, as she says “I think the doctor said he was actually going to give me a stroke if I didn’t.”

Arguably, since I am only managing my own risk, I’m morally superior to the parents who won’t get their kids vaccinated.  But the moral element isn’t what I’m after today, it’s the thought process and how it might be changed.  My daytime job is basically health outreach.  Getting good information about health into the hands of people that need it.  Often I think we’re too timid.  We don’t want to offend anyone.  This keeps us from telling stories in a way that works.

Kids Dying in Swimming Pools

But first, let’s back up.  Swimming pools kill people.  So do guns.  If you let your kids play at a house a swimming pool you increase their risk.  If you let your kids play at a house where there are guns, you  also increase risk for your child.  Stasticaly, the swimming pool is FAR more dangerous.  But we feel more outraged by the guns.  Why?  We’ve accepted drownings as part of life.  Unfortunate accidents.  We think of them as something that happens passively.  An accidental shooting is active.  Someone DID something.  There is more guilt, some of which will always splash back on the parents.

Just imagine two headlines, without any other facts:

Child Dies in Swimming Pool (add sub-head about tragic unfortunate accident)

Child Killed While Playing With Gun (add sub-head about “could have been prevented” or “poor supervision” maybe “charges pending”)

Both could actually be prevented with about the same level of safeguards and attention, but one we process as passive and one as active.

Now to the vaccines.  Injecting a child with something is active.  Infectious diseases are, like swimming pools, a passive threat.  They are an unfortunate reality.  Tragic, but it happens.  Dying from a vaccination is an active event.  No matter how “correct” the decision may have seemed, that death will feel like the fault of the parent.

But passive and active are constructive, like foreground and background.  It all depends on how the story is told.  Instead of timid recitations of facts, here is how I would do a campaign to encourage parents to vaccinate their children:

Parents Letting Kids Die

Two kids, sitting across the table from each other.  Between them, a gun.  Yes, they are playing Russian Roulette, and Yes, we do show them taking turns and putting the gun to their head, while the parents watch.  Finally, the gun goes off and the kid collapses with the symptoms of swine flu.

Final message? “Take the gun away, get your children vaccinated.”  See? We’ve now converted swine flu into an active risk, and responsibility splashes back on the parents.

If anyone steals this idea, I hope they put it to good use.

I think people (by which I mean the press) underestimate the importance of writing a new story in Afghanistan.  Instead of business as usual, Karzai is acknowledging voter fraud and entering a run-off election.  Obama gets a lot of the credit for this.  While this may not seem like a big deal here, America’s reputation in the Middle East has two large stains.  The first, as everyone knows, is our uncritical support for Isreal.  This perception will probably persist even if we do pressure significant concessions out of Isreal, it’s ingrained in the Palestinian story.  But the other stain is that America supports repressive Arab and middle-eastern regimes, prizing stability and oil over the rights of the local people.  By pressuring Karzai, who we clearly want to stay in charge, into participating in the full democratic process, we are signalling that things really are different.  And, we stand favorably against the story of Iran.

Once again, a beauty pageant model is brought to task for “bad behavior” and nude photos.  This time, the woman is Carrie Prejean, a Miss California, and target of Perez Hilton.  The photos exist, but we’ll probably never see them, because she was 17 when they were taken.  Big deal.  I’m going back and forth on who I don’t like and who I just don’t care about:

1) Perez Hilton is an annoying idiot who suddenly claims some kind of political relevancy?

2) Some 21 year old bimbo can’t walk a political tight-rope?

3) Beauty contest are basically displaying and rating female flesh, with a patina of respectability, and yet trashing the ones who’ve shown a millimeter more flesh?

I want to say, lay off the girl.  And I would, if she had gone back home, quietly stating that she didn’t think her beliefs should matter in a beauty contest.  But she didn’t, she signed on with “National Organization for Marraige”.  National Organization for Marraige is the worst kind of hate group, it goes all emo over people disagreeing with it.  Hating minorities and disempowered groups is a long-standing tradition in this country.  Probably in any country.  Our high schools are still permeated with it.  But the bullies used to at least have the guts to be consistent.  NOM is part of a new movement among conservatives.  They spew hate.  When they get a negative reaction, they act injured.  Victimized.  It’s pathetic.

So at least I have one bad guy in the mix.  I hate NOM.  Not for being bullies, not for perverting religion to their own hate, but for being all emo.  And I can give up my sympathy for Carrie Prejean because she signed on with them.  But still, digging up nude pictures from when she was seventeen?  Sure, it proves she isn’t absolutely morally pure, but that has never been the position the evangelicals take.  They all flirt with with sin, and if they get caught over the line, they repent.  It’s practically required.

I started out being mad at Perez Hilton.  That’s easy, because I’ve never liked him.  He can be funny, but mostly he’s cruel in a kind of “I can say whatever I want and then act harmless” way.  And, what kind of person tries to trip up beauty queens with complex moral questions?  That’s like Kramer beating up the third-grade Karate class.  But then I asked myself: Who picked him as a judge?  The same person who thought Roseanne Barr should sing the National Anthem?  What, exactly, did they expect?

I guess what I really hate is the politico-entertainment-industrial-complex.  It’s this machine that delivers something like Carrie Prejean through talk shows, commentators, entertainment shows, and the internet as if she can really be the focus of an important national debate.  These are the people who filled our living room with Joe the Plumber.  And the problem is, they guys on my side are as in on it, as guilty as the guys on the other side.  Bill O’Rielly, Keith Olberman, both eat this stuff up.  Each from his own moral high ground, but they both let a 21-year-old bimbo become the focus of their respective wrath/understanding.

Condorcet came up with a theorem about juries and how, if a group of people share their knowledge on a topic, they will come to a better decision than the average of the decisions each would make as an individual.  Of course as soon as this sounds great, they start coming out with limitations:  group-think can reduce the value of decision-making.  If, like the Republicans insist on doing, one large sub-group all decides to think the same, then the overall decision loses power.  There are other problems, groups may tend to make correct choices if there is an objectively correct choice, and if the group has some level of knowledge, and if all members of the group participate, but otherwise it’s likely that the group will not only make a wrong choice, they are more likely to stick to it.

But the real problem is that some powerful alien force can introduce robots.  This article explains how scientists model Condorcet’s theorem among animal communities. But they don’t just watch the animals, they create convincing robots which infiltrate the bug communities and convince them to do something self-destructive:

José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels used robotic cockroaches to subvert the behaviour of living cockroaches and control their decision-making process. In his experiment, reported in an earlier issue of Science, the artificial bugs were introduced to the real ones and soon became sufficiently socially integrated that they were perceived as equals. By manipulating the robots, which were in the minority, he was able to persuade the cockroaches to choose an inappropriate shelter—even one which they had rejected before being infiltrated by machines.

Just imagine if some other power tried to do the same thing with us?  They could send robots into our world, disguised as humans, and convince us to make self-destructive choices, such as ignoring global warming, invading Iraq, and giving away our civil rights.  That would make a good story, wouldn’t it?

During the movie Taken, one of my friends had a strong negative reaction to the torture sequence. Not because it was graphic, or even disturbing. He had a political reaction. Afterwards he said he nearly walked out because “torture never works”. My other friends thought it odd that he picked out that element. After all, hiding behind a couch to avoid bullets never works, either. Other things that never work:

• Driving through a hail of bullets hoping the thin metal of your car will protect you.
• Finding conveniently placed explosive barrels to help cover your escape.
• Taking on a guy with a handgun using your super-duper fire extinguisher.
• Recognizing a voice you heard over an international line, based on two words.
• Shooting a middle-aged woman in the arm and saying “it’s just a flesh wound”.  Could be, could hit an artery.

But none of these things upset my friend.  He’s against the torture.  I went back and forth.  I’m also against torture, and also believe that it rarely gives reliable intelligence.  In fact, I don’t like the show, 24, in part because they constantly use torture to advance the plot in a way that seems to validate it as an intelligence gathering tool.

On the other hand, it’s just a movie.  We allow ourselves to enjoy movie protagonists who commit every kind of heinous act.  Torture doesn’t stand out over, say, murder, genocide, drug-dealing, or vampirism.  I thought people who got upset about the “torture quests” in WOTLK were idiots.  Still do.  So why shouldn’t this be the same?  I think that, had they really established the character they were shooting for, the father so blinded by rage and love for his daughter that he considers nothing else, it might have worked.  But in this case, Liam Neeson’s character never rises above a sort of everyman with talents.  So we don’t really separate his morals from our own.  So his choices are those of someone who we consider “moral”.

I do think my friend was being ridiculous, but I get just as ridiculous over other things, especially the off-screen hiding spot.  The hero walks into a room, looks around, and is suddenly jumped by a bad buy who was hiding off-camera.  It’s a good hiding place, because WE CAN’T SEE THEM.  The hero, though, shouldn’t be limited by the camera frame.  Liam Neeson does this once, walking out into a hall, apparently without noticing the bad guys, who then knock him out.  So they can hang him from a pipe.  This trope drives me crazy.  I haven’t walked out, yet, but then I’d have to explain and people would probably say “it’s just a movie.”

I live in Washington DC.  Once in awhile, things happen here that don’t happen anywhere else, like terrorist attacks on the pentagon and the inauguration of Barack Obama.  For both events, I was here, in DC.  If I ever had grandchildren, or even children, I’d probably have to tell them I wasn’t actually down on the mall.  It was damn cold, and you had to get there really early.  Instead, I watched everything on my HDTV, in my warm apartment, while tweeting and facebooking about the event to friends all over the country.  I saw a lot more than I would have seen down on the mall.

I did go down to Chinatown, made it as far as the security gates keeping people out of the parade route.  I took pictures, which are posted here.  I talked to vendors, and bought two Obama hats and a bottle of Obama hot sauce.  The hats will go to my sister, who wanted something that was there, at the inauguration.  The hats count.  Even though you could buy the same things from other places, on other days, she’s getting hats that have that ineffable been-there-ness.  Had I bought the same hats a day later, though, even though they might have been sitting there for the inauguration, they would not have that magic quality.

On 9/11, I was walking around Dupont Circle, talking to my sister on a cell-phone.  I assured her that nobody would attack Starbucks.  One plane hit the Pentagon, the other may have been coming for the Whitehouse or Congress.  I had friends who were closer, but that day was in the air everywhere.  We didn’t know what would happen next, there were rumors of car-bombs, and I didn’t dare get on the Metro.  So I was “there.”

I was reading a Peter King (Sportswriter and Bret Favre spokesperson) column where he complained that the TSA didn’t do the same thing every time at every airport.  He wanted the comfort of either being told to always take off his shoes, or never take off his shoes.  I think he speaks for most people.  If there are security precautions, they should be the same, everywhere.

In fact, if the security was the issue, the rules would change constantly.  Any static set of precautions can be planned around or bypassed.  But planning around rules that don’t stay the same is far more difficult.  But I suspect that even if we explained this to people over and over, most would still rather have predictable rules.  They would feel comforted.  Obviously, the true goal of the TSA is comforting our fears.

Long lines at airports, to get through security, tell us something.  They tell us that our government is doing something about terrorism.  In fact, the government is mostly crowding travelers into large packs, in the midst of which large carts full of luggage are dragged along.  It makes a pretty good target, but nobody says anything.  Any joke or comment about safety wins you a quick trip to a private room and rubber gloves.

There are other rules, practices, rituals that make us feel safe.   Once we go through those security gates.  The assumption is that terrorist will only target us on the other side.  With hummus.  We take off our shoes, take out our laptops.  No pen-knives, no liquids.  And, it turns out, no hummus, no cottage cheese, no yogurt.  The TSA doesn’t seriously think you could design a bomb that looks like an unopened thing of hummus, does it?  Anybody who could do that could make a meatball sub into something even more dangerous.  And how did they decide what amount was too much?

It’s a safety ritual.  It has to do with making us feel safe and protected.  It’s a bit of theater, really.  When they took my hummus, the TSA guy looked deep into my eyes, with the trained softness of a hostage negotiator or grief counselor.  “I understand,” he said, “I’m a hummus eater too.”  I offered him mine.

Before 9/11, we had a false sense of security.  After 9/11 we had a false sense of danger.  It happened, so we believe it could happen again, anytime, anywhere.  In fact 9/11 took years of planning and organization.   But we need something to tell us that it’s okay to fly.  Ritual security measures are probably more effective than real security, which necessarily takes place out of our view.

The War Prayer

by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!*

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory –

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of — except he pause and think.

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory–*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Turkeys get slaughtered all the time.  Come Thanksgiving, it’s going to be Turkey Genocide.  We’re okay with that, because we like food, we like getting together with family, and watching football or something.  Still, every year, we have our leaders pardon a turkey or two:

But Sarah Palin pardons her turkey while behind her, on camera, a bunch more get slaughtered.  It’s bad theater.