The columbian exchange

This was fairly interesting:
This portrait shows, right to left:

• Louis the Petit Dauphin, died of measles in 1712 along with his wife and eldest son
• Louis XIV, who had smallpox in 1647 and survived to die in 1715
• Louis the Grand Dauphin, died of smallpox in 1711
• The future Louis XV, who only survived the measles epidemic that killed his parents and elder brother because
• the woman on the left of the picture, his governess Madame de Ventadour, locked the royal doctors out of the room

It also had this bit which puzzled me:

The question, "Were New World populations significantly reduced by Old World diseases introduced after 1492?" is currently considered settled by historians, and the answer is "Yes". If this startles you, it *is* a paradigm shift from what you probably grew up learning

Really? What on earth are/were they teaching their kids in the USA about this? I would have regarded it as totally anodyne and accepted wisdom. Though the extent of it did surprise me a bit:

Ninety percent of the population of civilized Mesoamerica and Andean America perished by 1568. Civilized highlanders constituted the vast majority of America's precontact population. Consequently, their sixteenth century epidemiology determined the magnitude of "the worst demographic disaster ... in the history of the world." (emphasis mine)

 Ninety percent? Makes poor old pasteurella pestis look like a piker

Edited to add a link to this hysterical parody site! Completely OT for this post, but .... Go read it
(courtesy of the wonderful Debra Dickerson)

America

Bottom Line: If Jesus loved you as much as He loves Donald Trump, you’d be as rich and deserving as Donald Trump.  If Jesus just barely tolerates you, then suck it…

Civil Rights? You must be thinking of some other country

Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.
In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry.

And it pretty much deteriorates from there:

“We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” David said. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”

from The Agitator, courtesy of LGM

Paying your way

courtesy Kevin Drum:

Not so much regulatory capture as regulatory rape

From the FT

 Mr Dimon’s comments come as Wall Street executives and Republican members of Congress are starting to attack regulation as anger at the financial industry subsides.[...]

Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House financial services committee, has said that regulators are there to “serve” the banks and warned 
the Treasury not to hurt Goldman Sachs’ shareholders when it writes new rules implementing Dodd-Frank

Jesus, poor deluded me, I thought the regulators were there to serve US and protect us from the rapacity of banks. So much for that.

Torture and irredeemable evil

From this long article on solitary imprisonment:

Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande#ixzz18IzC8GKT

Also this:

The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago.

It's becoming more and more difficult to avoid seeing US society as predicated on evil - inflicting savage and unpredictable punishments more or less at random, reliant on duplicity and fraud to sustain its businesses, penalising the poor and incapable and inflicting the same conditions on their children where possible, and trying its best to deny the capable avenues to improve their condition: plus showering rewards on the children of the ruling classes in abundance, as if to taunt those denied it.

Time, and past time, to move - but that will take a couple of years I fear. We just have to hold onto our self-respect and wash our hands frequently in the meantime.

Elections.

Feh, talk about overanalysed.

This election cycle is simply down to 2 factors:
(1) The economy sucks, and the party in power gets blamed for this
(2) Only 40% of the eligible voting population came out to vote, so old white voters are massively more significant as a proportion of votes cast.

All the rest is handwaving, special pleading, and irrelevancies.

Really not funny

One of the things that makes me most nervous about this country is the truly catastrophic consequences of serious illness here - getting cancer, or anything that requires serious expensive treatment, is often a quick route to bankruptcy, and frequently a guarantee of an unnecessary death once your resources do run out.

The idea of relying on private enterprise to 'insure' your health care always struck me as pretty dubious, and after encountering it at close range, and hearing a few of the many many many horror stories about how this has resulted in its victims being purged from the books once they start costing money, rather than just coughing up their cash, this has just been reinforced for me, over and over and over.

I mean, the NHS in England was pretty shoddy and embarassing at times, by NZ public health standards, but that was more or less in keeping with the English attitude to service, labour, and ... well everything to be honest. At least it was cheap, tho - something like 5% of GDP, compared to the 14% of GDP that the American system swallows (although to be fair I think that should be noted as 10% of GDP spent of health care and another 4% spent on health care insurance companies).

However, the occasional callousness and dirtyness of the NHS is as nothing compared to the utter barbarity of things like this:

One after another, shortly after a diagnosis of breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. First there was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. Later, Robin Beaton, a registered nurse from Texas. And then, most recently, there was Patricia Relling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky.
None of the women knew about the others. But besides their similar narratives, they had something else in common: Their health insurance carriers were subsidiaries of WellPoint, which has 33.7 million policyholders -- more than any other health insurance company in the United States.
The women all paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, none had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.
They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.
Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. WellPoint declined to comment on the women's specific cases without a signed waiver from them, citing privacy laws.
That tens of thousands of Americans lost their health insurance shortly after being diagnosed with life-threatening, expensive medical conditions has been well documented by law enforcement agencies, state regulators and a congressional committee. Insurance companies have used the practice, known as "rescission," for years. And a congressional committee last year said WellPoint was one of the worst offenders.
But WellPoint also has specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies, federal investigators told Reuters. The revelation is especially striking for a company whose CEO and president, Angela Braly, has earned plaudits for how her company improved the medical care and treatment of other policyholders with breast cancer.

Free markets are, by definition, more efficient than government programs which leads to better outcomes for everybody, across the board as incentives always line up in a seamless conjunction:

The cancellation of her health insurance in June 2008 forced Robin Beaton to delay cancer surgery by five months. In that time, the tumor in her breast grew from 2 centimeters to 7 centimeters.
Two months before Beaton's policy was dropped, Patricia Relling also was diagnosed with breast cancer. Anthem Blue Cross of Kentucky, a WellPoint subsidiary, paid the bills for a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
But the following January, after Relling suffered a life-threatening staph infection requiring two emergency surgeries in three days, Anthem balked and refused to pay more. They soon canceled her insurance entirely.
Unable to afford additional necessary surgeries for nearly 16 months, Relling ended up severely disabled and largely confined to her home. As a result of her crushing medical bills, the once well-to-do businesswoman is now dependent on food stamps.

I suppose one could blame these women for not realizing that all they needed to do was bring a few chickens to their respective oncologists/surgeons in order to get the care they needed, but that wouldn't be nice.

Snark aside, kudos to Murray Waas for covering these stories (see, also, Waas' coverage of a similar scandal involving Assurant and its systematic rescission of HIV-positive customers).

The reference to bringing chickens needs a little explaining - one of the Republican candidates for the US Senate seat in Nevada has publicly recommended reverting to barter (specifically, bringing a chicken in payment) with doctors in order to reduce medical costs. Seriously. When twice offered an opportunity to modify or retract this, she has reiterated and reinforced it. And yes, this happened in 2010, not 1810 (even the Victorians would be ashamed of such naked nuttiness).

Let's see, it cost about $1k for my cardio scan last year: frozen chickens sell for about $5 each, so that would be about 200 chickens - I hope they have some fairly substantial freezers at the hospital. Or I suppose I could bring live ones, which would be less valuable (all that effort slaughtering and plucking), so say 240-300 live chooks? Well I suppose they could use the carparks to pen them up, after all noone will be able to afford an automobile with this system.

Not Funny?

From the Washington Monthly:

Last week, the Georgia House Judiciary Committee held a hearing to consider a Republican proposal to "prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips in human beings." I'm not entirely sure what the point is -- it's not as if there's been an outbreak of involuntary microchip implantation -- but GOP officials nationwide have a tendency to worry about imaginary threats, so I suppose this shouldn't be too surprising.
The legislative hearing led to remarks from a local woman, who claimed to have personal experience on the matter.

"I'm also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip," the woman said. Slowly, she began to lead the assembled lawmakers down a path they didn't want to take. [...]
She spoke of the "right to work without being tortured by co-workers who are activating these microchips by using their cell phones and other electronic devices."
She continued. "Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission," she said.
It was not funny, and no one laughed.

I'm sorry, I may be calloused and cynical, but I found it laugh-out-loud hilarious, not least that the elected politicians took this seriously.

What century is it, again?

I read this Washington Post article a couple of days ago, and I still haven't managed to really grasp that this is an article from 2010, not 1970:

Tuesday, April 13, 2010; 2:58 PM

A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county's only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.

And just to add to it, there have been letters to the editor and a spattering of web posts and comments defending this as 'part of our local culture', and 'making more sense for the local residents' ... the white ones of course, because they are the ones that matter, I assume.

I mean, seriously, these people still don't get how wrong this is? I should go and see how far away this county is, from the Mississippi county that cancelled their prom/dance rather than letting a lesbian couple attend it (and then snuck around the federal judge's order and their own promises on the dance), as the attitudes obviously dovetail comfortably. (See this article for details)

Edit: the answer would seem to be, the other end of the state, so I guess it's a statewide thing. Ha! if only that were all).

I suppose on the bright side, just when I think Arkansas is irremediable, Mississippi again overtakes it in the race for the bottom.

Its Not OK To Kill Civilians

Like Slacktivist says (please read the link)



The Video is of a small and very ugly massacre in Iraq a couple of years ago, by a pair of US attack helicopters on a small group (including 2 Reuters journalists) wandering through a neighbourhood. During the approach and attack, the soldiers several times claim (to their superiors) to see people with weapons, and to be shot at, in order to receive permission to shoot these people, but after going over it several times, I can't see -any- sign of any of the victims shooting, and the only weapon I can see is actually a camera being hoisted by one of the journalists.

I really hope this will prove to be a fake, a mock-up photoshopped into something it isn't, but that seems unlikely (edit: apparently a senior US military official has confirmed that the video is genuine, so much for that hope).

This just makes me sick. This is just pure murder. It's almost unbearable to watch the thing, especially when they circle around again in order to kill the wounded man trying to find succor, and to massacre the van-full of people who drove up to help him and look after the dead.

I appreciate that civilians often get killed by accident in warfare.

This isn't accidental.

This isn't a WAR!

The Americans are a hostile occupying force seven years after a war was concluded.

Morality aside (and that's a mighty big aside), this is just indelibly stupid. The briefest look at any classic suppressive effort against partisans, (guerillas, what have you) will amply demonstrate that massacres and brutality breed resistance and aid enemy recruiting.

I should fulminate further, but what's the point? Those who know it is wrong will be horrified, and those who don't are out of reach of logic, reason, or any trace of common humanity it would seem.

As soon as your born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,

There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working class hero is something to be.

Thank you, John

Third World Plumbing in a First World country

Cat actually asked me to write this one, as she's fairly terminally disgusted with the plumbing here, and I can see her point.

Of course, it's not Third World, we aren't talking holes in the ground, it's just kinda ... Second World, well intentioned, badly designed, appallingly constructed, which is how Russia has been described to me (often).

What really appalled her, in our last place, was having the toilets back up into the shower stall, while she was trying to have a shower. The underlying cause of that one was tree roots gradually crushing/lifting the combined outlet pipe, but she - well both of us really - were appalled that the toilet outlet pipe and the shower drain would be combined, rather than separately piped into the sewer mains.

Quite a bit of the plumbing, electrical and other basic infrastructure seems to be like that: just not well-thought-out, and often poorly implemented. For instance, some dimwit in the 60s thought it would be a good idea to wire houses with aluminium (sorry, aluminum haha) wire, which was cheaper, but has caused endless problems.

Another, and this still appalls me, is that the electrical plugs are largely just 2-prong, i.e. there is no earth! This is gradually being phased out (bad pun) but this stuff is still being sold and still installed in houses, despite the minimal savings and the truly lamentable lack of safety. Aside of anything else, it also means any appliances you have which have 3-prong power points, requires a converter plug in order to even fit (the plugs & sockets are also disastrously designed so that plugs are forever falling out of the wall - I have had it seriously recommended to me by electricians that you need to bend the prongs in order to alleviate this!)

Part of this is, I'm sure, because there are few or no regulations compared to NZ, England, or ... well, the civilised world*: and of course that varies state by state, as there are essentially NO federal regulations on anything like this. Part of it - and I'm sure a lot of Americans would say all of it - is that we're in Arkansas, which is regarded as relatively backward & third-worldish by most of the USA**. But a lot of it is just the cut-the-corners, minimise-everything attitude that has become more and more prevalent with the last 5 decades or so.

Bah, youngsters today! Standards are falling! Everything is worse!!

But seriously, I've had people I work with, supposedly educated and intelligent, tell me that many houses*** are, and should be, built to only last 30 years because they'll get pulled down and replaced after that anyway. Which (a) I doubt, and (b) results in insta-slums, because they look like crap after one year, and start literally falling apart after 2. Cost-efficient for the builder, I'm sure, not so much for the owner.

That, again, is a kind of tangent though, because the plumbing, electrical & stuff I am ranting about is in middle-class housing - pretty much all the houses we looked at buying, and at least the next tranche above, i.e. the ones we looked at but couldnt have afforded, all had these afflictions. I am assuming that the really affluent houses don't ... but when I stop to think about it, I'm probably wrong about that too: this is more a disease of the spirit than an absence of wealth: the shonky fly-by-night attitude of casual disregard.

Enough grumpy old rants for one day :)


*yes that's a bit harsh, I agree.
**except for Mississippi and Alabama which in the same boat
*** Many = poor peoples, i.e. black people and po' white trash

OMG you're going to put THAT in your mouth?

I found this hilarious - a plaintive complaint from Sarah, a Kiwi girl who lived in Chicago for 10 years and has just gone back home to live. I can well imagine after getting acclimated to US food, adjusting back to rill-kiwi-fuud will be a struggle: it sure is, going the other way.

Not that the food here is bad, per se - unlike England, it is much more palatable. It's just so incredibly processed, usually sweetened, and .... odd. Grits, something I was curious about, turn out to just be porridge, or a minor variant on it.

On the other hand, we had Carol & BJ (sisters) over for a cooked lunch a while ago, and did a roast of pork & roast veges - potatoes, sweet potato (no kumara duh!), roast carrot & parsnip & pumpkin, and it was like a revelation to them: apparently roasting has just disappeared from the american concepts of how to cook.

Ah, and ambushed again - more P1 tickets at work. I'll try to come back & edit this later to add to it.

UPDATE:
well, more of an addenda really :)

Eh, and Fridays used to be so peaceful - with half the client staff working flexi-fortnights and taking Fridays off, there wasn't a large volume of calls. Something however seems to have changed, and we are getting a steady stream of emergency-fix calls (rated Priority 1) on Fridays, to deploy changes to the application software. I suspect this may revolve around the turnover in developers, plus Thursday being the day for standard fix deployment, i.e. we're getting an upsurge in standard fixes that arent doing what they are meant to do, and noone wants to admit this and just roll back the fix ..... which is what they're meant to do of course, but that would blot their copybooks & make them look bad.

I sometimes think the role of perverse incentives in our management organisations is underestimated.

Advertising

It's funny about advertising - here in the US, most advertising seems to be

• cars, and how sexy/powerful they make you
• prescription medicines that you should badger your doctor into prescribing
• and cleaning products that cause women to have orgasms

In the UK, it seemed to be much more

• Supermarkets, and how shopping at OUR one will show your superior social status
• OTC medicines, usually to fix things wrong with your arse
• and cleaning products to eradicate all those nasty nasty gerrrmmmmsssss!!!

(I'd include a NZ comparison, but it's too long since I've seen kiwitv, and anyway our ads are pretty much dictated by the US/UK/Aussie markets).

I find it amusing, the different national obsessions (and particularly funny that the English are so obsessed with germs, when their approach to cleanliness is so casual much of the time). The different approaches to what presumably works to sell products is also interesting: the American approach is -much- more hardnosed and direct, and less about social pressures and (by and large) less about conformism, than the English approach.

Which is surprising, as America is far far more conformist than England ever was. I guess that is down to how they perceive themselves, as rugged and independant & all that pseudo-frontier nonsense, but it still astonishes me how little liberty there is in the 'land of the free', and how little that is perceived.

It's hard to put into definite terms, but so many of the simple things you'd take for granted in NZ are just, well, not here or not simple. I'd try to put in some concrete examples, but I've just had 3 more P1 tickets land on my desk, so any ponderous pontification will have to wait for tomorrow.

TV and information

I've been watching the soi-disant news shows here, and getting more and more dissatisfied with them (as I suppose is obvious from other rants I've made). It occurred to me quite recently that one reason is the quality and type of guest that is always getting interviewed.

I should explain, first - there are 4 free to air channels here, which frankly are all pretty much rubbish: tons of "reality TV" with programmed reactions but nice cheap non-actors, a few game shows still survive, and some very formulaic and guarenteed non-offensive sitcoms and cop shows of various ilks. Then there is 'cable' (although I actually get this via satellite) which is divided into 'basic cable' and 'premium', based essentially on price - which in this case tends to actually relate to the quality of programs, as premium channels to tend to have the few really good and occasionally innovative programs.

The news shows are all on basic cable, or some variation thereof, and there are several channels of them, plus specialised business news and so forth. They all run 24 hours a day, which means they all have 24 hours of broadcast to fill with something, anything. The approach to this varies between channels, but it basically comprises some mix of massive repetition, pointless interviews, and endless editorialising by journalists, generally about subjects they exhibit a stunning ignorance of, or about their own idiot prejudices. Some of that can be amusing of course, especially if they either share my prejudices, or if I'm in the mood to be loudly and rudely mocking at the TV.

Anyway, one of the things I noticed is an awful lot of the people getting interviewed on these shows are other journalists. Now that might be fine in the case of, say, a financial analyst being interviewed about things economic, or a political analyst being interviewed about politics, or even say a political reporter being interviewed about what he's observed. However, an awful lot of it seems to be just reporters being interviewed for their completely uninformed opinions on, say, what the public thinks about X or Y, or what effect a government decree will have on Z, without any training or specialised knowledge at all: essentially just banging on about their own prejudices again, but palmed off as actual news.

Then in addition, you get the people who started as specialists on one subject, but obviously the news director liked them, so they start getting interviewed about broader and broader subjects, until it's completely removed from any knowledge or specialisation they might have. Which I suppose can be entertaining if they are someone who speaks vivaciously and has a fund of stories and metaphors to colour the interview, but in terms of disseminating actual information and real analysis and dissection, it just seems that anything useful gets inundated in a tidal wave of twaddle, misinformation (and of course outright lies and delusions).

This of course is not really different from what I do here, but then I don't ask for money or pretend to some greater significance. Hmm, perhaps I should consider a new career as a talking head? :)

The end result, however, seems to be an enormous echo chamber that outshouts any serious information, reinforces existing prejudice however crazy*, and lacks any real positive attributes at all. I don't have a solution for this**, but it looks like it will not get addressed - in fact it's very hard to see anyone who could address it - and will only continue its' ever-growing din.




*thus the nonsense about Obama being a foreign citizen, born of insane racism and amplified and repeated endlessly
** well none that is either politically or ethically acceptable. Shooting them all probably wouldn't work anyway

Omg jfk wtf and all that slang

Welcome to Arkansas - this is so appalling I couldn't believe it, but apparently it's true:

When the fire chief of Jericho, Arkansas, finally got fed up and went to court a few days ago to challenge his second traffic ticket in as many days, the town's entire 7-man police force showed up for the hearing. And then shot him.

Seriously. Apparently a scuffle broke out and one of the cops pulled out his gun and shot the guy in open court. He's OK, but the police department, which was already in deep trouble for its habit of ticketing everything on wheels that rolled through Jericho, has been disbanded and all outstanding tickets have been voided. The town's part-time judge has quit too. And nobody knows what's happened to all the ticket revenue.

Apparently the (county-based) Sheriff's department is now investigating the disappearance of all the ($150) fines levied by the police department: and the Police apparently had also been abusing their power by issuing tickets on the nearby interstate (motorway) which is outside their jurisdiction.

After the shooting, Martin said police chief Willie Frazier told the sheriff's department he was disbanding the police force "until things calm down." The sheriff's department has been patrolling the town in the meantime.

I just love the 'until things calm down' bit ... so as soon as the press have packed up and gone away, these vile execrable excuses for human beings will be back, abusing their power and gouging any passers-by of spare cash on any excuse, no doubt.

Mayor Helen Adams declined to speak about the shooting when approached outside her home, saying she had just returned from a doctor's appointment and couldn't talk.

"We'll get with you after all this comes through," Adams said Tuesday before shutting the door.

A white Ford Crown Victoria sat in her driveway with "public property" license plates. A sales brochure advertising police equipment sat in the back seat of the car.

Of course, as of Saturday she still hasn't made any public comment.

Welcome to Arkansas, monkeys, and nuts, to misquote Shakespeare

Egalitarianism

There was one incident that occurred during our house-hunt, that struck both Cat and I as a bit odd. We were in a car with a real-estate agent, Mike, who was driving, and Cat said she needed some more cigarettes & bottled water, so he stopped at a supermarket enroute our destination. Cat hopped out when he stopped, and went off to get what she needed, without a second thought - and Mike was flabbergasted. He had naturally assumed that, as clients, we would expect him to do the fetch & carry - and I suspect also to pay for it out of his pocket, tho I didnt ask.

It rather made me think about the whole way deferrence and superiority are treated here. In the UK, social deferrence was definitely structured around both class, rank and money, but primarily around class. I think Cat experienced this much more, and worse, than I did, as floristry is regarded there as a working-class profession, so all florists get treated as such (with perhaps a tiny minority of floral boutique designers who get treated as 'artistes'). Of course, shop-owners are pretty much the definition of bourgeousie, so are middle-class, and get to treat the serfs like scum if they so desire - and quite a few DO so desire, in fact for some I would have observed it is their primary cause for emerging from the cave they're pleased to call a bed, every morning.

As a result, Cat - who noone could ever accuse of lacking backbone or spirit - had an endless headache with employment, and got fired or encouraged to move on, many times: a total lack of respect for the despicable, plus the common Kiwi attitude of brutal egalitarianism, guaranteed that this would be a frequent outcome. Funnily enough, the two bosses (both women) who treated her well, she is still on close terms with, and did freelance work for even after moving on to other positions.

Which is not to say she had no fault in the matter, having her own authority-figure issues, but these were - to my eyes - enormously multiplied by the strict class/hierarchic (and patriarchal) attitudes that seemed to be universal.

I'd have to add, I had my own problems with these attitudes. Of course, being an IT worker and therefore something approaching a professional (now there's a subject to get me foaming and gibbering, but another day, another day), I was slotted into the comfy middle-class cardigan, but still supposed to show proper deference to those above - and to treat those below me with the appropriate panache and disdain. After all, how else do you know where you are, if you can't rain your contempt downwards?

Funnily enough, none of the janitors, secretaries or food-workers objected to being treated as just people - and til I gave up smoking, they were the bulk of the people I knew at that worksite (after that, working life got a lot lonelier). However, I know I made enemies through most of our company's hierarchy because - when they made their annual trip down to see us and assure us we'd get treated as 'part of the company' from now on - I would always ask pointed comments about contracts, performance of sales staff, the necessity of so many layers of management, and (especially) about the financial figures in the finance reports they presented so proudly.

Of course, they couldn't answer these - some because there was no acceptable answer, but in the case of finances, usually because they didnt actually understand the figures or what they actually showed. Often enough, neither did I, I know - but that's why I was asking: and sometimes the figures were such an obvious flimflam, I was trying to pry out some reason for why they were lying so badly.

I managed to mostly avoid the customers' management hierarchy, which is probably a good thing, but I am told I did create some annoyance, simply by not observing the proper protocol towards the CFO and CEO while in an elevator - what I did wrong, lord only knows, and could I care? Doubtless I just failed to kowtow to the right degree, or spoke to them offhandedly: as I couldn't pick either out of a police line-up anyway, I can't really say.

Aaaanyway, having wandered off on a massive tangent, what I started off on was, here in the USA I had thought they would be much more egalitarian (well, the whole race mess aside), and they are ... sort of. What gets deferrence here seems to be wealth and custom, that is, if you're paying someone it seems that you're meant to treat them as inferiors. I suppose this is the flipside of the supposed great service that is available in the US (and often, it really is).

Naturally, as good honest kiwis, we still tend to (or try to) treat everyone as our equals. I think we (all us kiwis) have tended to expect the same treatment back, and if that means the waitress doesn't jump when we snap our fingers, or the server looks us in the eye and calls us mate, or the food is a bit slower than we might want, well, that's just part of our culture.

It seems to cause real shock and surprise here, tho - for instance, both the estate agents we dealt with commented on how easy we were to work with, and what a pleasure it was: and at our favoured diners, we are now instantly recognised & treated as warmly as friends.

Up til now, it hasn't caused either of us problems at work - Cat hasn't been working, and as I'm working essentially as a team of one, there's noone much to offend except my site manager, and she was a gem. How this turns out now, as Cat is gearing up to start, and I've got a new site manager who is vastly more bureaucratic, and seems to lack even the simplest understanding of what the job is, well, I guess we'll just have to suck it and see.

It's still a badge I wear with pride, though, and I think it is something, paradoxically, that makes kiwis a touch better than other people :)

How unreasonable can it get?

The guy in the next cubicle to me, Mark, is a very engaging, friendly guy. We have hardly anything in common, despite being about the same age, not even background or history really - he is an orthodox traditionalist christian (although brought up as an evangelical), hard-right Republican (& always has been), who more or less avoided popular music, drugs, & the university lifestyle when younger, and has 5 kids.

Despite that, or because of it, we have long, extended conversations, comparing and contrasting experiences, arguing fairly intently on a range of political subjects, and occasionally even finding common ground - for instance, we both agree on the recent ouster of the President of Honduras:

(Massive tangent here) Despite being popularly elected originally, we both think that he has both extensively violated their constitution, and was the one to originate the violations - with his opposition doing only a minimum of violence to the rule of law, necessary to actually protect the rule of law. After all, when your opponent is expressly ignoring the laws, and the rulings of your Supreme court, and is arming and recruiting mobs threatening violence, to wait for the next congressional meeting to pass a motion of impeachment (which he can equally ignore), is to invite your opponent to complete the violent overthrow of the constitution and claim perpetual power under the guise of 'popular action' a la Venezuela.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Chavez stole his initial election there (the subsequent ones, yes, the first one was honest) - but he has comprehensively ignored the laws and the constitution at his own whim, and even if he has retained popular support (a debatable proposition), to destroy the rule of law is to destroy all legitimacy: without it, all you have is the whim of the tyrant, whether his power arises from the army, the divine right of kings, or 'popular majority'.

But, to get back to my original point at last! We were wrangling over the Health Care reforms being proposed, and I was flabbergasted when he said his opposition is based, not on anything in the bills being submitted, but because they contain the seed of something that may be carried much further as a precedent, which he would oppose, such as the supposed 'death panels' that are causing such hysteria here.

God spare me!

On that basis you should oppose any and all laws - I can certainly find in the roots of any bill that is passed, something that could be egregiously exagerrated into a total abuse of power. How can you even argue with someone who won't argue the law being offered, only possible extensions of it and hypothetical actions of future politicians? The time to argue against the things you actually resist is when they are proposed, not at some earlier irrelevant juncture, surely.

I've listened to these slippery slope arguments for 40 years now** - ever since Vietnam - and they have never borne fruit, not once. I'm just utterly exasperated at this point. Worse than that, Mark and his family would be amongst the beneficiaries of these reforms (whereas I doubt if it will benefit me, short of losing my job), yet he has this apparently totally irrational opposition to these very moderate and mild reforms, because 'they could lead us to having a Canadian style health system'.

I won't even bother with the argument that the Canadian system actually delivers much better average outcomes than the US one does, at 2/3 the price - it doesn't matter, the Canadian system has been so systematically vilified as terrible, with horrible rationing of care, that no argument based on facts could actually penetrate. Of course the US system also has horrible rationing - done by insurance company functionaries operating out of a profit-first motive, so even more callous than any government bureaucrat - but that also doesn't matter, apparently.

The fact is, the current proposals dont resemble in any fashion the Canadian system, and noone is suggesting that it should, or that it would be a good idea: and what truly seems to horrify people here about the Canadian system is that they forbid you to go outside the government system if you're rich enough to pay for private health care.

Of course, the Canadians can afford to do this because they know anyone rich enough to seek private health care (and thus skip over the dreaded queueing), will simply drive across the border and get it in the USA, where, after all, the best health care in the world is available, if you're rich enough. Besides which, if any politician ever made such an egregiously egalitarian proposal here in the Land of the Free, they would be immediately and permanently jerked out of office, and laughed to scorn, with popularity ratings as low as the despicable Cheney.

Anyway, with even the reasonable wing of the opposition being apparently totally unreasonable (and I would talk about how chickenhearted the uncrazy Republican politicians are about this subject, but I appear to have exhausted my store of invective for the moment): all we can do is hope the Democrats find some backbone and cohesion, and ram this through. There is no possibility of getting bipartisan agreement on the bill(s), and the opposition have made that painfully clear: but, the Democrats actually do not need this, and can & should ram it through on their own, as soon as possible. Once it's done, the storms of opposition will move on to some other subject, and health care will be forgotten, and eventually (like Medicare and Social Security) be seen as part of the American heritage, and a great thing. Eventually.


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Update: and apparently it was going on a long time before I started listening (from Political Animal):

Though no one was talking about "death panels" back then, opponents claimed that Social Security would result in massive government control. A Republican congressman from New York, for example, charged: "The lash of the dictator will be felt, and 25 million free American citizens will for the first time submit themselves to a fingerprint test."

Another New York congressman put it this way: "The bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants." A Republican senator from Delaware claimed that Social Security would "end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European."

Today, opponents of a public health insurance option claim that it would drive private health insurance out of business and put a bureaucrat between doctors and patients. Back then, opponents of Social Security warned that it would "establish a bureaucracy in the field of insurance in competition with private business" that would "destroy" private pensions.

Then as now, opponents played the socialism card.

It wasn't just Social Security. When FDR tackled health care reform, the right condemned "the socialization of medicine," and the AMA said Roosevelt's plans were "un-American."

America

This is an excerpt from the blog of a friend of mine, Sarah in Chicago, who is about to return to NZ after a long period living in the USA - it sums up so much of what I feel about the place, I thought I'd grab part of it and republish (I wish I could have summed it up so pithily):

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I am completely expecting this to be a very large part of my homecoming soon. Particularly so given that I'm going to be moving into policy and political work as a career back in NZ, as while I definitely participated in politics before moving here, I really cut my teeth, as it were, in the cauldron that is American, and Chicago, political theatre. There are attributes of a vicious, vivacious, incredibly fast-moving, animal when it comes to US politics that really exists no where else in the world. The political world here is constantly changing, constantly moving, always shifting from one thing to the next, as issues of huge ramifications are debated, lost and won. Knives are being moved from one back to the next, just as acts of incredible self-less charity are given. There is passion and anger, joyfulness and celebration, utter sadness and dejection, love and sacrifice, here.

New Zealand politics are, as any kiwi will tell you, quite different. For a start, despite setting the course of a nation, they're simply not taken as seriously, In fact, culturally kiwis take nothing incredibly seriously. Not that we don't care, or that we make fun of such, but rather, the all-consuming nature of the way Americans approach most things is just something your average New Zealander would cock their eyebrow at and ask "Wot are ya, mate?". Our laid-back nature as a culture just doesn't allow us to care, or at least be seen caring, about anything the way Americans do about seemingly most things (except, naturally, about such things as beer, rugby, and having a fair-go). This cultural passion and approach to things is something I have certainly internalised.

And I have to say, I have moved to the Right on some political issues. The US centre politically is ridiculously to the Right ... almost to the point of caricature. What is considered reasonable right-leaning political positions are positions that anywhere else in the developed world, the Western world, would be rightly laughed out loud at. Don't get me wrong, I haven't gone insane and turned into a libertarian or any such nonsense. But I have repositioned myself to the pragmatic need for a strong military, for instance, and do tend to give police and such forces the benefit of the doubt. While as a sociologist I certainly come down on the side of the structural forces in society being the dominant cause of individual behaviour, I have definitely taken-on individual responsibility attitudes that I hadn't had previously. Don't get me wrong, even back in NZ I'm still going to be a left-winger, but I am a far more centrist one than I was before I left.

Then, of course, is the way Americans approach work. To an American, what you do for your career encapsulates in large part, if not in majority, who/what you are as a person. This is in part pragmatic, because so much of the American life is accessed via one's employment, from health-care to consumerism, to grilling and neighbourhood, credit and psyche. This is both in terms of the amount of one's income, but also where one's status is viewed to be located. Furthermore, it's also about how much Americans work. There is an absolute good seen in working as many hours as possible in the day, week, or whatever. Rooted in Calvinism, the US culture sees fundamentally how much time you spend working as a sign of effort and commitment, of how good you are as a person. This is something present across all of Western society, but only in the US has it taken on absolutist principals ... working oneself to death is not a euphemism here. You'll often over-hear on the subway professionals boasting of, as part of their everyday conversations, how many hours they've been putting in ... being 'busy' is taken to be the regular state of affairs.

And I will admit, I've totally bought into such. I find a lot of pleasure and worth in sitting in a cafe late at night, working ... in getting up with the dawn, grabbing my espresso, knowing that I'm getting into the office before most, owning a part of the day most people don't see ... in getting home in time to just grab some food before bed, just as I know I'll be getting up early to repeat the day over-again. One of the things I am really looking forward to once I am back is working after-hours in cafes around Wellington. I expect I'm going to be putting in more hours than your average kiwi ... and I'm going to love it.

There are, however, things I haven't taken on, that I remain most emphatically a kiwi, as well as Dutch, over. The consumerism of the US society, where everything requires money and/or an assessment of your ability to pay, where any misstep can doom you for life, at the same time as making self-worth require getting as close to that misstep as possible. Not to mention the related insane individualism of the culture, where a society's responsibility, or the need to relinquish one's rights to the benefit of society as a while, are seen as evil and hideous concepts (as evidenced by the treatment of Sonia Sotomayor currently). The US really needs to get beyond this if it is to mature as a nation, right past wrongs, and gain respect. The same for the high focus on competitiveness, where one needs to the best in everything, or one is nothing. Where everything (and I do mean everything) is hierarchically organised and ranked ... a mentality that leads to ignoring any and all weakness or fault, an absolutism that can produce nothing but disaster, depression, and American exceptionalism as absolute good, as difference is not prised for its diversity, but rather questioned as to level of worth. Then there is the pervasive displays of religion everywhere, in everything, something that for New Zealanders is highly offensive, where religion, and any reference to such, is considered a personal, and highly private, thing.

But, that all said, there is a beauty and wonderfulness about America that I have experienced nowhere else. While the American Dream is precisely that, a dream and a myth, the ideal that if one just works hard enough one can fix any problem, solve any issue, and go places no-one has gone before, means that as a country America will try things and do things that no other nation will. It believes in itself in ways that no other nation does. Sure, this gets it into trouble quite often, as it will meddle where it has no invite nor experience, not listening to the advice and knowledge of other more mature societies. Or it will over-simplify like a teenager, earnestly thinking that no one else has come up with a particular idea ever before in history, ideas that will solve everything.

But occasionally, just occasionally, it can live up to that ideal, and in doing so, like no other nation on earth, it is glorious and wonderful. It will trip over its huge gawky feet regularly, but those feet will carry it to places from time to time, that no one else really has never been before. This is a country that birthed the civil-rights movement, the feminist movement, the LGBT movement, etc ... movements that, while here still have a long way to go, had ramifications throughout the world, reverberating through time and space. America embodies the best and worst of humanity ... it is the excesses and extremes of our species and societies, the incredible highs to which it can succeed, and the depths that it can descend to. It is risk personified as a nation, that which holds not just our darkest fears, but also most cherished dreams as a world.

And it this hope, this positivity, that I have really garnered living here ... Americans believe, fervently, in their core, that things can, and will, get better, if only one believes that they can. I love this country for that. When I speak to my students about issues in America, I want them to reclaim this country, as I have investment in it, as I see its worth and possibilities as my own. As annoyingly grating as every other culture in the world finds America's insane optimism as a nation, something I will say I too wince at often, there remains the fact that to an American, the phrase "that's just the way things are" is not an explanation, but rather a call to change.

So, as teenager-ish as this country is, for all it's faults and for all it's beauty and wonder, just as I call myself Dutch, and a New Zealander, I can call myself an American.

I have become an American.
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Unlike Satah, I have not yet become an American, and I'm not sure I ever will, being a lot older and crustier by the time I got here (I certainly didnt become English even with 7 years there)... but it is quite an insidiously inviting place, and I probably will slide into Americanity, at least in some parts (and of course there are some bits where I was already there, like being assertive with restaurant service). Mind you, when someone tells me of all the extra hours they work here, my reaction is still, You can't be very good at your job if you need to work extra hours! and somehow I doubt that will ever change.

Update: I forgot to say, I have some amazing bruises today, & spent the weekend very sedately.