Lyme's funding via the NIH and the CDC is about 9 million dollars per annum. About 1% of the population has it. It's rarely fatal, and yet it slows one down quite a bit. A friend of mine who got it (a doctor from a big NYC hospital who got it hiking) reported to me that he felt like he had had the flu for fifteen years. He said he had good days when he was up for four hours before he had to lie down again.
The government is willing to spend 9 million for Lyme's (funding has nearly doubled over the last few years). West Nile disease has about 30 million dollars appropriated for funding research and prevention.
By contrast, AIDS funding is about 20 billion dollars.
AIDS is more often fatal than either West Nile or Lyme's, but there is the question of etiology. AIDS is almost always gotten via sexual contact. That is, you have to choose to perform an activity to get it. It's a disease of adults, who make poor choices. (Monogamous couples can't get it.) The other source of contact is intravenous drug use, in which a shared needle is the source of the infection.
I personally would never perform anal sex. I wouldn't do it, because I think it would hurt the other person. It just doesn't seem like the two things (penis and anus) would fit. One's bigger than the other, and the one is not designed to receive the other. So there is blood, and blood and feces then mix. Obviously, this is a lifestyle for some. Perhaps even the very thing that many people live for. Maybe even die for. Fine, but it still doesn't make any sense to me. It's as if someone was to live for jumping off an apartment on to their head, I still wouldn't think it was sensible, even if the vast majority started to do it, and even voted in a president who thought it was the best idea around. It's no more sensible than to decide to screw someone in their ear. Why should the people have to pay for the brain damage that would result if a whole sector of society decided to screw each other in the ear? There would be hearing damage. That would have to be repaired, as well as the brain damage. Should the population have to pay for self-inflicted damage?
Well, the counterargument runs: we already have to pay for fatsos who eat so much they develop heart disease. This runs to the tune of a half a trillion dollars. Who's to say that people can't eat what they want, and screw what they want.
This is a good point!
But I would also never inject an unknown substance into my veins! What kind of a lunatic would do such a thing? Still, people do it. It's a whole lifestyle for many people. Many people, called heroin addicts, actually live for the next injection! And/or die!
I don't know what to say except that that is a self-inflicted injury, too.
So let's think about outlawing self-inflicted injuries. It is already against the law to commit suicide. Why then should we allow people to get fat? I think there should be a law against being fat. I think there should be whole prisons set aside for weight-watching. It should be against the law to eat or sell a Snicker's Bar. I mean this. I am not snickering! People should be imprisoned for getting over the BMI recommendations as posted by the Federal government. If government gets into health care, they also have to have health care police. And they should slap lard sandwiches out of the hands of perps and force them on to the ground for 50 push-ups!
On the other hand, children who play outside are likely to get Lyme's Disease through no fault of their own and aren't committing any health crime. In fact, health recommendations suggest that we turn OFF the TV and have children play outdoors. Fine, but then they get Lyme's, and the government turns its back. The disease has a bizarre cycle in which it lives inside a mouse for two years and then inside a deer for a year, and then hops on the skin of a tot, and within 24 hours, the damage has been done. The disease is exploding, especially in coastal areas. It's a disease that has gotten ten times more victims this year than ten years ago, and is likely to go up that number again in ten more years. Because Lyme's disease victims don't have a lifestyle in common, they don't have a lobby.
Therefore, no funding. Well, very little funding.
Most of the people who get Lyme's live in the country, and have fewer contacts in the mainstream media, and are children, so they don't vote. The people who get sexier diseases often live in the cities, and either are journalists, or are friends with journalists, and they do vote.
Because you need to put pressure on elected representatives in order to secure funding, you need journalists, you need a voice. Funding goes through an appropriations committee. The last cycle had a Representative from Virginia named Frank Wolf who suggested we double the funding for Lyme's. So it's up to nine million measley dollars.
That's about three dollars for every American who has the disease. That's less than a Happy Meal. If 1% of Americans now have the disease, then that would mean that about 3 million Americans are suffering from Lyme's, each receiving a Happy Meal's worth of care.
Many of Lyme's victims report that their childhoods are lost, and that they cannot pursue a career. It's true that fatality from the disease is lower than that of AIDS, but the CWL is all but dead.
And now many people are living longer with AIDS and can return to their former lifestyles of rampant sex and intravenous drug use.
What about the children of Lyme's, who can't get back to playing outdoors?
Once the Happy Meal is over, their vision is often so impaired and the headaches so intense they can't even enjoy Sesame Street.
If we cannot secure research funding for CWL because of better organized lobbies that now hog well more than half the CDC's annual budget for AIDS and other STD research and prevention, is there anything else that can be done to snap the cycle on West Nile and Lyme's, which disproportionately affect children?
For West Nile, there is mosquito spray, and you can drain abandoned pools of water. And yet still last year there were about 4000 cases of West Nile from coast to coast. But with only 8 fatalities, mostly in the elderly population, it's hard to get more than a p. 13 story with two paragraphs at most.
For Lyme's, which has a much larger population of victims, and yet no fatalities, perhaps the disease is too non-dramatic to invoke journalistic empathy, especially from the government currently in position and its backs. I have a dramatic suggestion. You can't kill mice. You can't kill the ticks. They're too small. What then, about killing all American deer in order to save our little dears? What about sending up helicopter gunships and destroying every last deer population in North America? In about a week, this could be accomplished. The deer wouldn't know what hit them. And who would miss the deer? Would the drivers who hit them? Perhaps the hunters would miss them, but they already do miss them, a lot. Because deer are very tricky, and hard to hit! But not from helicopter gunships with trained military personnel aboard! Let them go after the deer, and save our children from Lyme's!
The deer would be shooting ducks! It would be a turkey shoot!
And then we could give that nine million dollars presently allotted by the CDC toward funding the diseases of the city dwellers and their STDs.
Does that sound like a win-win?
103 comments:
*facepalm*
epic troll thread is epic.
seriously, Kirby -- why you hate us fatties?
Mmm, A bit too obvious this time. Not your best.
I didn't think anyone would notice. I started off seriously, and then couldn't quite hold all the threads together. All my fatuous concerns put into one blog post tended to smash into one another, like bumpercars, sending the whole thing into a farcical direction. But I still believe that there might be some valid points in here, somewhere.
The funding issues really are disproportionate, for instance, aren't they?
Why should the CWL take a backseat to the PWA for instance?
Especially at such an enormous difference, percentage-wise?
9 million compared to 20 billion?
What percentage of 20 billion is 9 million?
Even though the PWL now outnumbers the PWA, they apparently don't have nearly the same political clout, and are thus effectively ignored by the Appropriations Committee in charge of healthcare research funding.
It's a true catastrophe for the PWLs!
I even kind of meant it about the deer, but couldn't help putting Bambi at the top. I just wanted to show how vast the problems are, and how finite any possible mind is in terms of dealing with it all.
But I do think that most parents would gladly shoot all the deer in the land to save their little dears a single day with Lyme's, let alone a lifetime!
I also think it's unfair that adult PWAs outrank the child PWL in terms of funding, simply on the basis of not forming a powerful voting block.
PWLs should form a voting block, along with their parents and relatives. Victims now number 1%. In the coastal areas that new voting block might equal something like 15% of the total vote!
That's a number to conjure with!
The helicopter gunship issue might not get traction anytime soon, though. Especially if Bambi is the poster child. Probably need a mean and ugly deer with big teeth to mobilize non-empathy.
I like that you advocate for Lyme's disease. It is always sad when people lose the ability to enjoy life as they once had.
I know I've put it on here before, but I think Lupus is another such disease which doesn't get as much attention (and research funding) as it deserves.
SLE (systemic lupus erythematosis) is really quite nasty, and it has been on my mind recently because both of my grandmothers had it, and I'm in need of testing for it which is kinda scary for me.
Anyway, through my research I was able to find a few statistics: the Lupus Foundation of America estimated that 2 million (vastly female) Americans have the most virulent form of Lupus which can be life-threatening. Lupus is an auto-immune disease (like AIDS) but unlike AIDS it is not transmitted by sexual contact or dirty needles. It is also more common in women of color.
Pretty much, your immune system goes haywire and starts attacking your organs, connective tissues, cartilage, bones and joints.
Federal funding of Lupus research is practically nil. Since 2004, only 5 million dollars have been allocated to Lupus research.
That makes me sad. Does anyone know anyone who's had Lupus? What was the testing like?
Thanks!
Emmy, I had heard of this disease but didn't know what it was. Lupus sounds like the Latin word for wolf. Now your husband will probably howl like one, which would be nice.
I always loved the music of Howling Wolf.
Can you name some famous people who have Lupus?
Did Howling Wolf have it?
I wonder how many other very big diseases are being pushed aside in favor of STD research which now takes up more than half of the CDC's budget.
I think it takes up such a big chunk of the budget because of political reasons. There are enormous lobbies for the PWAs. CWL have no lobby, and no votes.
I'd suspect that Lupus has a similarly low political profile. Maybe the people who have it are too screwed up to testify, or to become testy in the halls of Congress.
It seems you have to package a grievance, and dress it up with empathy-gaining memes, and then dance the thing through the Funding Appropriation members' minds.
Representative Wolf (real name) is the one that single-handledly doubled Lyme funding.
You need to find out who is on the committee, and then selectively bomb their office with information, and point out that a huge chunk of their voters in their precise district are affected by a given disease.
This takes a lot of hard work and a lot of strategizing.
You would need to have literary critics who specialized in the way the disease is dealt with in literature, but even before that you would need movies and books that were based on people who had the disease, and the tragedies thereof.
Tom Hanks as the Philadelphia lawyer did that for the PWA people. He was handsome, and likable.
We need something like that for a Lyme disease patient. Preferably a cute and bubbly individual who's already a giant star like Hanks. Who goes from being bubbly to virtually inert, yanking the empathy out of the voting population.
It's a long hard thing to build such a pipeline and you have to hand it to the gay community for having done that so effectively for PWA.
IT's turned on an enormous spigot of funding, while the dribble that Lyme gets is unlikely to get more unless a similar pipeline is built.
Lupus, too, must have a pipeline.
There are some famous writers with Lyme. Amy Tan has it.
But she doesn't politicize much in her writings, insofar as I know.
We need a novel out of her that dramatizes her disease!
Perhaps for special effects it could end with an Apocalypse Now vision of the helicopter gunships taking off to eliminate Bambi. but the problem is that Bambi itself was meant to mobilize the country against shooting deer, and against hunting, and clinging to guns, mobilizing the love of children for their mothers and fathers in order to quell hunting across the country.
And now we have all these deer carrying Lyme's, as a result.
Perhaps we'd do better to go after the mice, but the recent film Ratatouille will be a problem to overcome.
Maybe the ticks are even more likable than the CWL!
But that's the thing: it's a war of images.
I think to attack the gay lobby is going to be fatal to any movement that tries it, but attacking intravenous drug users soaking up the money from the CDC would be easier.
I don't know. It's going to be hard to go against AIDS activists, and probably not even possible. They mobilize enormous parades.
As far as I know there are no similar parades for the users of shared needles, and their pride in their activities. But they share a disease with a more popular group.
Maybe not to attack another funding pipeline, but just to seemingly trot out our own issues for the CWL is the best that can be done. But we need writers, and directors, and talent, and editors, and to develop an enormous audience, through college classes, and so on.
How is it possible to help the Children with Lyme without all that, and how do you start? It's such an enormous undertaking.
But as Mao said, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single misstep.
Faggot
Kirby,
Treating Aids is a big biz for the pharmaceutical companies; I have to think that the % of Americans with HIV must be larger? I think we should shut down the Iraq adventure and put all of the money into Lyme's disease. Imagine saving 3 million people instead flushing billions away in Iraq which has brought us nothing.
Why then should we allow people to get fat? I think there should be a law against being fat. I think there should be whole prisons set aside for weight-watching.
Now now who would implement and execute this law against fat people? The big government that you are so distrustful of that won't let them provide you with healthcare? I thought the market takes care of everything? Not that I'm calling you fat, but you seem to be on a campaign to convince us of this.
--Tom
Kirby—
Regarding allocations for Lyme, etc.
A sensible solution might be to set up a blue-ribbon panel of doctors, epidemiologists, medical economists, and other specialists, to propose how best to divide a given allocation of funds to medical research, so as to meet some well thought-out criterion, like "minimizing human suffering," or "minimizing the economic impact of disease, subject to respecting and preserving the dignity of human life." The members of such a panel might be appointed by the director of the National Institute of Health. These allocations might become part of omnibus bills on "scientifically managed" parts of the federal budget.
But back here in the real world, such a solution would be immediately characterized as "socialist" in some quarters, or "elitist" in others, especially after various lobbyists have had the opportunity to educate members of Congress as to where their interest actually lies. Other members will immediate attack the allocations to diseases in which the risk correlates with "lifestyle choices." For example, the AIDS risk, as Kirby points out, can be greatly reduced by avoiding certain dangerous sexual practices (e.g., unprotected anal sex) or sharing drug paraphernalia.
And of course, some will point out that Lyme risk can be reduced by simply staying indoors, watching TV, and eating doritos with dip. Of course, such behaviors would increase obesity, which Kirby wants to criminalize, but this is all good from the point of view of the private fat-prison industry, which runs open-air exercise and living facilities in the Adirondack's, right next to the Lyme disease research center. The resultant exposure of the fat-criminals (and their fat-criminal overlords!!) would be an an unfortunate consequence of their lifestyle choices. If only they'd exercised!
Anyway, I've known a couple of doctors who do research on AIDS. They're both pediatricians, and their patients acquired the disease in utero. But Kirby must not be denied, it was their choice to have mothers who were drug addicts, or didn't know that their partners were bisexual. If only they'd have chosen better, there would be more federal funding for the truly important things, like better weapons for the War Against Deer.
Well, I'm not really against helping innocent children of every stripe, whether their moms are drug users or avid hikers, but I do think the lion's share of the CDC money should go to help children, rather than adults whose ranks happen to be filled with creative people: esp. journalists and film makers, who can put the best spin on the diseases that are most likely to affect the creative classes.
Grandmothers with LUPUS, or GWLs, or unlikely to have access to the media, in the same way that the PWA crowd does. Ditto for Lyme.
And scientists will not be neutral either. They will have their own diseases, probably things like eye diseases from reading too much, or looking through microscopes too much.
Not sure if there can be any ideal fairness. But I do know that if Children With Lyme's want a fair shake, they'd better be media savvy, and get their parents and families to vote for the candidates who address their issues.
Connecticut might itself be won right now by a Lyme candidate, that is, a candidate with no other agenda than to increase the funding into research for Lyme's.
At nearby West Point, they might like to get the signal to send out the gunships.
Flannery O'Connor died of lupus. She was in her early 40s.
Did O'Connor write about it? She could be revived, to act out the death throes, I should think.
But how well-known is she? I'll bet her share of the national audience is to Michael Jackson's what Lyme's funding is to Aids.
Tom, I don't really want whole prisons set aside. I'm warning where this is leading.
Here's one - church-led republicans tend to get heart attacks from too many barbeques and spending half their life in cars, while consuming one third of the worlds resources, tend to drop dead of heart attacks. I say we put 'em in jail or leave them to die for eating so much rainforest-munching meat.
Funny that those who demand that that governments retract from helping the poor or providing health care are oh-so-keen on bigger government when it comes to shooting deer, bombing brown people or incarcerating negroes. Whining for more jails and wars while they bitch over taxes.
I'm sure anal sex wouldn't be a problem for yourself as you're such a huge asshole already that you wouldn't feel a thing!
Anonymous—
The first two paragraphs were pretty effective. Too bad about the third, which rendered your otherwise incisive commentary moot.
I mean this in all sincerity.
I forgot to add that you're probably too small to make much impact on anyone else's asshole either.
EB -- my wife's aunt has a slew of auto-immune diseases -- fibro/lupus/cfs/etc. She's tired and in pain most of the time.
Endometriosis is another disease that affects quality of life but doesn't get much press or research.
But hey, bugger someone and catch VD and all of a sudden you're Important.
VD used to be shameful.
'course, so did buggery.
Just read the first seven chapters of Pioneers online. Wouldn't you know it, the first thing they do is shoot a deer, and they weren't concerned about Lyme disease at all. The rich fat guy from New Jersey who owned the lake at the portage between Cooperstown and Fort Plain shot first, trying to impress his teenage daughter who was on her first trip to the wilderness. He used a shotgun and put a big hole in a tree, but he also hit the Indian kid behind the tree. Instead of shooting back at the rich fat guy, the Indian kid saw that the deer was bounding off into the woods and killed it with one shot. Then Natty Bumpo stepped out from behind another tree and explained to the rich fat guy's daughter that the Indian kid was willing to trade the deer for health insurance.
Kirby - could it also be that the unbalanced interest in STDs is due, in part, to conservatives hyping up AIDS as God's punishment for the unholy...
They did, at the least, play a huge role in making such things more well-known, and for creating an identity group to be chastised and hated, and therefore leading to that identity group coming together to gain rights, and on and on and on.
maybe Lyme's disease doesn't get any play because no one is out there saying that it's punishment from the G-man for ones sins.
...
On another note, you also have to take into account the fact that Because AIDS is so preventable, more money is put into education and awareness...
...
None of the above is to suggest that the imbalance is just or right...only to suggest that there are more facets to it than the standard Kirb-line.
And yes, fat people should be put in prisons. But this kinda already happens, because poor people are both disproportionally fat AND disproportionally criminal. There Must be a link.
really, though...
It's weird to understand the psychology of it. It's unhealthy to be fat, and fatness is Almost (but not quite) always a result of personal choices (like AIDS), so the culture Should have somewhere in its worldview fat=notwhatyouwannabe.
At the same time, if you tell people this, then they tend to be all silly and get all worked up about things and either starve themselves to be thin or get unhappy and therefore eat too much...(a la Mike Myers' Fat Bastard).
Obesity's like abortion - unfortunate, and we should have an approach that decrease its numbers as much as possible, but one must still be free to be so.
G.M. - VDs aren't exactly badges of pride these days.
Per usual, peeps on this board are a matter of decades behind (usually people here think it's the seventies...right now, we're back to the early nineties).
That being said, people with AIDs shouldn't be shunned like lepers. Pretty sure Jesus was all up on this sort of 'accepting people, not judging them' thing.
And so you had people out there who were idiots and didn't know anything about AIDS so they wouldn't let their kids go to school with other kids who had AIDS, and people didn't want to share toilets with them, and all sorts of other idiotic, scientifically dumbassish ways of shunning a group of people idiotically.
'Don't do the things that increase your chances of getting AIDS' is a fine message that the uber-liberal school system and media have been pounding away at for years...
It's just also true that the rest of us should be told 'don't treat someone as unhuman because they have a certain disease.'
wanka wanka
OMG! ROFLMAO!!!
Kirby, you are too funny. Are you sure you weren't an original member of Flying Circus???
WW
Actually it wasn't an Indian kid who got shot. It was Oliver Edwards, Natty Bumpo's homosexual sidekick who likes to wear Indian clothes. Uncas doesn't turn up until later in the book, but Chingachgook gets to the trading post just in time to demonstrate traditional medicine for the butcher working on Oliver's wounded arm.
am so delighted that kirby has finally arrived at a worthwhile social justice issue
with serious christian resonance no less
i guess the remaining questions would have to do with things like
taxidermy
i mean would we want to be reminded by the means of a musieum or soemthing of the various species of deer in our land the cute littel tic attractors which used to roam so free and peacefully before the
fire storm of bullettes descended on theys sweet littol heads
i think you should take a side glance into the theology of st francis assissi kirby he was really good to animals and never harbored drastice and violent thoughts like the one you propose here
at any rate
thanks for the chuckle
bringing things around to
cognitive mayhem
kirby olson for sec of the interior
j
did howlin wolf have lupus
you should show a little shame
j
stu:
Now that you've joined this blogsite (and believe me, you are a most welcome addition!), I think you are beginning to see how discussions on this blogsite go awry or quickly degenerate into political donnybrooks, once Tom and brett weigh in with their adolescent pc Political Theory of Everything and with its corollary that "conservative" must ever be understood as a term connoting something on a scale from not generally desirable to patently despicable and worthy only of scorn, contempt, and derision. This attitude is quite common in academia, where Trotskyites are indulged (as I myself would have it), but the mere existence of a mainstream Republican is treated as an intolerable personal affront and where whole bogus departments (like ethnic and "gender" (for me a grammatical term) "studies" (excursus: I fully expect someday yet another new department to be consecrated to investigate the process of educational remediation--euphemised as "basic" education and which for most undergrads is what they are relegated to--called "Study Studies"), which are but thinly-disguised social and political advocacy clubs that require pc "perinde ac cadaver" ("just as a corpse" or by extension "corpse-like obedience") assent to a radically antinomian agenda. So I've made a virtue of necessity by trying to hone my agonistic rhetorical skills by winding up the likes of leftist dullards like Tom and brett, knowing that Kirby's committment to free speech (unlike most institutions of higher learning, where unconstitutional speech codes, "diversity" training, and "multicultural" propagandizing are rife). I'm proud to say that I've been banned by about a dozen (and all academic) blogsites by intolerant, faineant bigots who simply can't take the heat of opposition (stu: one example is at your own university from an sway-dough academic fraud, terrorist, and traitor [who willingly allows postings of personally abusive messages--which mine were not--just to show how much a political martyr he feigns to be--while censoring reasoned but incisively oppositional posts] by the name of [surprise, surprise] Bill Ayers).
In a way, I think (and I think Kirby would agree) my and to some extent Emmy's and GM's expressed right-wing views (and believe me they're not affected in my case, though in my scholarly writings and teaching I'm careful not to allow them to affect my judgement as much as possible) allow Kirby the precious asset of appearing more moderate, as is suitable to both his own views and to his nature.
So I serve somewhat like Huxley to Darwin, as Kirby's "bulldog" whose lead he must on occasion tug back on when he believes I'm overly savaging an opponent. As Kirby's said, I'm a semi-retired humanities academic who's no stranger to the culture-war battlefield, and I've sacrificed both for my traditionalist approach to liberal arts scholarship and teaching as well as for my political views that are supposedly unimportant in the process of awarding preferments in scholarship or teaching. But everyone knows they ARE important, and certainly more in the humanities than anywhere else. I did traditional scholarship with the hope (esperance!) that I'd be given my due for it, and while the more traditionalist (in the early 90s at least) U of British Columbia awarded me a fellowhip (and I was a finalist in the Killam competition for another fellowship at Dalhousie U in Halifax) I wasn't even considered worthy of a teaching assistantship or adjunct position at the U of Washington (where I adamantly refused to kiss Marxist and feminist fannies to get them). Bitter? Of course not, for my experience only confirmed my views about the precipitate decline of liberal education since the awful 60s (hear that, brett?), and who wouldn't want his or her views so clearly proven true?
Fenimore Cooper went to school at Yale for awhile, but they tossed him out. Don't think he got any honorary degrees, even after Last of the Mohicans became the most popular novel of the 19th century.
Apparently he had a predilection for incendiary devices.
'Don't do the things that increase your chances of getting AIDS' is a fine message that the uber-liberal school system and media have been pounding away at for years...
Um, no. They haven't.
If anyone says "don't have sex unless you're totally monogamous" or "don't use IV drugs" they are automatically labeled a conservative.
Liberals say things like "have safer sex" and "don't share needles."
Jacques—
one example is at your own university ... by the name of [surprise, surprise] Bill Ayers
You are incorrect. Mr. Ayers teaches Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a campus of the public University of Illinois. I'm at the University of Chicago, a private University that no long has an Education department to which Mr. Ayers might belong.
Very likely the source of your confusion relates to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and the notorious fact that Mr. Obama (from UC) and Mr. Ayers (from UIC) were both involved. Certainly, you've made a great deal of this relationship in various posts.
Here are a few items of note in this context. Walter Annenberg was a well known conservative, and indeed served as ambassador to the UK under Mr. Nixon. He was very wealthy, and very involved in philanthropy. The Annenberg foundation is a partial expression of this, with a particular focus on education.
Mr. Ayers was one of three co-authors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge proposal, which was awarded $49.2M. An independent board of directors was picked by Adele Smith Simons, President of the John T. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Mr. Obama was part of this group, and indeed was selected as its chairman. I will note that the award was made during Mr. Annenberg's life, and he was a vigorous defender of it. Certainly Mr. Annenberg was aware of Mr. Ayers' role and history, and did not find it prejudicial at the time.
Curiously, although I don't know Mr. Obama (or Mr. Ayers, for that matter) I do know one of people who served as a director with him. A leader of a major Chicago cultural institution, a life-long Republican, and a really intelligent, reflective, and generous person, for whom involvement in a school reform project was undoubtedly a natural expression of his commitment to service and the greater public good. The repeated efforts to tar Mr. Obama by association with Mr. Ayers also involves any number of people whom you would find not only perfectly respectable, but even worthy of considerable admiration. I know that you're just parroting the talking points of the last Presidential campaign, mixed with a bit of bonus invective that comes from your own perspective, but if you'd take a less superficial, and less politically framed view of the CAC, and the roles of the various participants, I believe you'd conclude that honesty requires that you find a different line of attack.
I think it is fairly clear that our educational system is in tatters and shambles. We lavish money on the uneducable (but trainable) while short-changing those who are most capable of most benefiting from education (the intelligent and gifted), all in the name of "feeling bad" for those dumb kids.
Nice, but stupid.
Now, for fat folks. Jesus, Kirby and Brett -- I'm really not sure what's wrong with the two of you.
I think that you fundamentally don't understand that there are people with different metabolisms. One of my very close friends and his wife are both near the bottom of the BMI charts -- and they eat constantly and TRY to gain weight.
I, on the other hand, can only lose weight in one of two ways: either I eliminate non-fibrous carbs from my diet (note -- I have tried other calorie reducing diets -- they don't work for me -- my metabolism just slows down) or I spend two or more hours exercising a day.
Let's see how that would work. I have two young children and a wife, none of whom would benefit from an Adkins-style diet (believe me, all salads and chicken breasts all the time is my perfect diet, I lose weight like Obama loses popularity). Indeed, when I tried it (before our first daughter was born), Heather couldn't even stick to it for two weeks because she felt so terrible.
So we would have to make totally separate meals, meaning more cost for us, more time in cooking meals, less money I could pay bills with, spend on my daughters, etc.
Or I could exercise two or so hours a day. Let's see. I get up at 5-5:30 so I can leave for work by 6. I guess I could start getting up at 4, but since it's hard enough to wake up by 5:30, I don't see it happening (also note, I have tried). I get home about 3:30. My daughters go to bed at 7:30.
I suppose I could take out, oh, half the time I could spend with them with to exercise, but that doesn't seem very fair to me.
After the girls are in bed (by 8:30 or so), I suppose Heather and I could spend the rest of our time together exercising. But she and I both frequently have work to do (she generally has about 50 email and phone inquiries she answers in a day and, well, I've got to write poetry some time), so I suppose we could exercise until 10:30 and then stay up until 1 am or so getting our work done.
But then I have to get up at 5. Oh and I teach in the public schools, so it's not like I can take a break at work and go to the gym or anything.
However, my blood work is great (I am sure I have the best cholesterol count of anyone on this blog) and my family (many, many of whom are overweight -- and have been, even decades before it became some societal "problem") consistently lives in good mental health and with great mobility into their eighties.
So, Brett and Kirby, unless you're able to either invent a couple extra hours in my day or come cook for me, please shut up about how evil and sad and terrible fat people are.
I've sacrificed both for my traditionalist approach to liberal arts scholarship and teaching as well as for my political views that are supposedly unimportant in the process of awarding preferments in scholarship or teaching. But everyone knows they ARE important, and certainly more in the humanities than anywhere else.
Right. So explain Allan Bloom and his disciples. On second thought, don't bother. I served on a committee John Mearscheimer, and he's a great guy, and someone I like and respect. Liberal political views?! It's time to lay off the 'shrooms. And I haven't even gotten to our Econ department. Or how about Mr. Obama's former colleague, Richard Epstein? And he's hardly an outlier.
I don't have much use for the political correctness of the left or the right. As usual, the charges that the right makes of the left involve considerable projection. And I've never had the experience that political opinions are relevant in appointment/promotion/tenure. I don't doubt that your experience was different. What I do doubt is the validity of generalizing from one's personal experiences to a global condemnation of higher education.
It's easy to believe that political considerations are going to be involved in any of the departments of victim and/or opinion studies. But most of academia falls outside of this circle.
On blogsite censorship of me, I should have mentioned the single exception of the funny-man-who-isn't-funny, Garrison Keillor, like that grinnin' hick half-wit, David Leatherhead, a sway-dough snide but deeply cretinous antiwar (I say, I say) foghorn.
Just heard the idiot-girl mayor of Cambridge the Lesser slobber out some sort sop to that struttin' trash-mouth bum Gates and his equally buffoonish shill, Prez O-bozo. What a hoot! Or as brett, in his rare but eloquently lucid moments has it: Whee!
GM, I I didn't know you were fat. When I'm thinking about fat people, I don't think about individuals who are obese. I can't understand how people get to be SO fat that they can't put one leg in front of the other unless they are just mashing Twinkies down 24/7. At Wal-Mart now when we go they have a whole squadron of electrical wheelchairs -- probably about 30 of them -- to help the obese do their shopping. From time to time, I play detective and tail one, and observe their shopping, just to be sure I'm not being prejudicial. And it appears to me that they are getting loads of Twinkies and basically mauling the candy section. But there may also be anomalies like you and Emmy, and for that, I should be a tad more careful.
They say that getting enough sleep is positively correlated with losing weight. If you get 8-9 hours of sleep you feel better, so you may not need to eat as much food? I don't know. I personally struggle with weight, being at the top of the BMI's suggested index for 5'10". I weigh 173 pounds.
The bottom of the index (still normal) goes down to 133! That means I could weigh 40 pounds less, and still be within the norm.
Sure, at Auschwitz.
I could probably go down to 110 or so and still be alive.
You have to bore your appetite. I think that's crucial. I eat oatmeal with a bland yogurt in the morning, with a glass of iced tea (very bland), then have a simple sandwich in the afternoon. In the evening, I have a microwaved box. I know that's not the healthiest, but I can count the exact number of calories.
It's always important to count the calories.
If you get me going on cookies, I can easily eat a hundred of them in ten minutes, so I don't even have one! Same thing with ice cream. If I were to eat a bite of it, I would easily clean out five gallons.
I also do a solid half hour of fitness videos every day, and often play baseball or something with the kids for another hour.
And even then I am only at the very top of the BMI. Two more pounds and I'm in the overweight category.
I have to watch it since the men in my family tend to croak from heart attacks in their fifties. It's quite common. So the only way to get a little extra mileage is to step very lightly through these last couple of decades.
But at any rate good sleep seems to be crucial to losing weight, so don't cut back on sleep.
Take care, GM.
Have you seen a doctor about your weight? I go to see mine, but he's a bit fat. It's rather comical that he tells me to watch my weight.
I have pretty good blood counts, too. Cholesterol is decent, and all the other counts are decent.
Take care.
GM—
I think it is fairly clear that our educational system is in tatters and shambles. We lavish money on the uneducable (but trainable) while short-changing those who are most capable of most benefiting from education (the intelligent and gifted), all in the name of "feeling bad" for those dumb kids.
I guess I see it differently. At my wife's school (she teaches 4th grade at a suburban public, mostly to Irish Catholics), they spend about as much time and energy on gifted as remedial. Indeed, they have a full-time gifted coordinator.
At the University level, I'll admit to having a privileged point of reference, but I see very talented undergraduates, with excellent backgrounds from high school, getting a very rigorous liberal arts education, and going on to top graduate programs.
At the public level, pre-collegiate education was a long-standing American success story, and a remarkable piece of social engineering which for the most part has served us well.
I would, however, point to a few challenges that public education has come to face. A primary issue has been the lifting of the glass ceiling for highly qualified and intelligent women. Back in the bad old days that many here remember with fondness, women had few professional opportunities outside of education. This lack of open competition for the talents of these women amounted to a subsidy of public and private education. Funding for education has not kept pace with changes in economic opportunities for women since the 60's. One still finds highly talents women (and men) in education, but there are strains. Likewise, education (particularly secondary and college) have gone from being exceptional qualifications (and therefore essentially guarantors of economic success) to minimum qualification (and therefore a much larger number of people are remaining in school longer). Combine increased demand, concentrated at the bottom, and decreased supply, and there's going to be dilution.
My opinion is that we should make an appropriate societal decision as to what education is worth, and therefore what we ought to be paying for, and stick to it.
Jacques that was one of your more pathetic posts in the few years you have been on this blog. Really, another page long rant against the leftist boogeyman which takes the form of myself and Brett in this instance? When you’re done nuzzling your nose into Stu's anus, please tell me how this fits into the discussion of disease or the political implications of its treatment? It's the same crap from your mouth over and over. You have nothing to say! You offer another long list of gripes as to why you are ignored by the academic community. It's not my fault that you are irrelevant! I think you were banned from blogs for another reason Jacques. It once again involves an anus.
Kirby,
In Auschwitz, inmates received about 800 calories per day. We are supposed to consume about 2000 calories per day. 20 piece chick mcnuggets is about 1000 calories. If people avoid processed foods and fast food, then they can cut calorie consumption remarkable. Also, many foods are derived from broken down industrial grade corn, which spikes your glycemic level.
--Tom
stu:
Sorry I got your university wrong; I'm glad you're at the U of Chicago--it's a fine institution and I very much respect the heritage of Robert Hutchins, who, I hope, ended the corrupt cesspools that are big-time college athletics at Chicago forever and Mortimer Adler, whose Great Books programme was a grand and generous intellectual experiment. I'm also pleased that Chicago has no education department; would that every other college and university follow suit and end these pseudo-professional schools that remain one of the main obstacles to educational reform and progress in this country.
I'm glad to hear John Mearsheimer is a great guy, though I've little respect for his and Stephen Walt's polemical "Israel Lobby" production.
Allan Bloom is dead and gone (though his fine books will live on), so who are his disciples at Chicago? I'd like to sample their works.
To suggest my generalisations are based solely on personal experience is to give me little credit for observing and hearing the stories of scores of others--whether colleagues, conference acquaintances, published accounts in books and articles (the National Association of Scholars, of which I have been a member for some years [and which, BTW, is comprised of 35% self-professed liberals, 45% conservatives, and 30% moderates or undecided according to a recent poll--but that a plurality of members be conservative is enough for it to be labelled a "conservative" organisation and to be a source of much irritation and occasional intimidation--ditto for FIRE, whose president Greg Lukianoff--an acquaintance and self-professed Democrat), regularly publishes accounts of academic favouritism due to political bias.
One would have to be blind not to see that the whole diversity/multiculti/affirmative action as well as the ethnic, gender, and "queer" studies departmental establishments are in good part left political enterprises dedicated to the exclusion of Caucasian and Asian males from academic positions. Read also the case of the brilliant polymath philosopher Roger Scruton who was told outright that he was the most qualified candidate but was excluded from consideration due to his right-wing politics. Read classicists Heath and Hanson in "Who Killed Homer?" and "Bonfire of the Humanities" (and BTW, Kirby, it's Victor Davis Hanson, a life-long conservative Democrat known to me, and now at one of the VERY few academic institutions that have a predominance of conservatives, the Hoover Institution at Stanford) on political revenge against them practiced by a feminist hyena at the U of Maryland (she tried to implicate them in the FBI search for the "Unibomber" out of petty political spite. And Martha Nussbaum of your own university has been outed as a cheat, liar, and falsifier of documents (not to mention a deliberate distorter of classical texts) all to serve a left political agenda in hearings on a gay and lesbian affirmative action referendum in Colorado. Und so weiter . . . I'm pleased that in your own department these sorts of considerations seem rare, but in the humanities not so.
I'm also pleased that Chicago has no education department; would that every other college and university follow suit and end these pseudo-professional schools that remain one of the main obstacles to educational reform and progress in this country.
I have a different take on this, naturally. First off, let me mention that my wife received an education degree (Master of Science in Teaching) from UC, back when they still had an education department. And she received a fine education here, and has gone on to earn master teacher certification, etc. It was a fine department, but one that had lost its research focus, and with that, the ability to replenish itself in the highly competitive appointment environment at here.
As it is, a variety of highly influential and invariably demanding curricula came out of that department. Their swan song was the "Everyday Math" curricula, which my wife's thesis advisor was heavily involved in. This is a major force in pre-collegiate education, although it's difficult precisely because it makes heavy demands on its teachers as well as its students. It's a curriculum that you just can't "fake."
I think that what is killing education these days is an over emphasis on testing and standards. It is not that I don't want high standards, I do. But what I'm seeing (especially in pre-collegiate education) is an education that is driven by curriculum, standards, and standardized testing. My opinion is that the facts you learn in school are entirely secondary to what you learn about learning, and the attitude you have towards reading and lifelong education. In the old days, it was possible for a 5th grade social studies teacher to have "her" unit on the civil war. It might not have been in the curriculum, but it was her passion, and she could communicate that passion to the students. These days, not so much so. Instead, every day aligns with the standards, and teachers know that they have to "teach to the test." It is a shame.
And this is why education education feels so sterile today. It's all about standards and alignment and curriculum, with little opportunity for a teacher to learn how to teach what they love. And so students have little opportunity to observe adults who are excited about education, and therefore fail to learn what might be the most crucial lesson of all.
My mother had a master's degree in education, and taught reading in first grade for twenty plus years. One year the administration banned phonetics and they had to teach whole word.
My mother left the building along with many others.
Centralized planning is usually a problem, at least from my viewpoint.
I'd like there to be more room for individual thought rather than someone in the center deciding what's to be thought, and everyone on the periphery having to jump to the tune.
I recognize there would be a lot of fun in being a Kim Jong-Il type, and deciding everything for everybody, but I still think it's bad for everybody else.
And a bad system, in general.
One of Victor Davis Hanson's insights into the reason the west has always won its wars since the Greeks is that western armies have always allowed a lot of leeway for the individual insights of soldiers, while the Persian armies did everything by centralized command.
Which got them slaughtered at Thermopylae.
It took a Greek to show them the back road up around.
Persians thought -- and fought -- like ants.
Ants are pretty easy to kill.
Hanson makes the same case against the Japanese in WWII. They fought like ants, waiting for orders from Tokyo before they could turn a boat around. By that time, they were decimated.
It's one of the problems of authoritarian regimes.
It's why the Brits slaughtered the Spanish Armada.
and it's why freedom for individual teachers works better.
While I'm at it, it's also why the Protestants have done better than the Catholics: we haven't got a Pope deciding everything. Most Protestant denominations leave the individual conscience to think things over with God. This might mean we get things wrong (as the Catholics aver), but if the Pope gets something wrong in Catholicism, the whole faith is wrong. Whereas with the individual conscience, the betting is more evenly distributed: the probability of somebody getting it right is higher.
With the Buddhists, who put their very minds into the hands of a guru -- oh my goodness. The guru is likely to just give them AIDS, and then tell them to go away and do meditation until they're dead.
Never ever put all your eggs into one basket. Whoever came up with that saying must have been a Protestant.
I distrust all centralized committees and centralized planners, especially when they are answerable to no one else.
Kirby, whover:
Henh, henh, you see by the obscenity of Tommie-boy's response that he's been wound up again, LOL--well, you jes' made my day, Tommie-boy!!
Here's an academic manque who even with the debased standards extant nowdays, jes' couldn't finish it, could he now?--just like those other losers at the U of Washington who were lavished with bennies and still even then couldn't cut it! And this reptile fancies he's an intellectual for having read a few foreign novels!? What struttin' insolence!
Mon plus cher "Tommie," mon vieux: Meme mon chat, qui n'a qu'une cervelle tout petit, bien sur, a plus d'intelligence que toi, foutu pedale! Bouge-toi et vas t'en, vas t'en, et n'oublie pas d'aller de faire foutre, asticot miserable! He! He!
Allan Bloom is dead and gone (though his fine books will live on), so who are his disciples at Chicago?
The truth is, I don't bother to keep track. I've heard Richard Strier so called, but I lack personal knowledge. I'm pretty sure that all of the right allusions are in Ravelstein, but it's been quite a few years.
I have broad contacts across the University. Pretty much the only time I run into these guys, though, is on the council of the senate, and I've been off it for a few years.
Truth be told, I find them to be difficult to work with, pretty much for the same reason that we've had difficulties. They have these huge interpretative frameworks that they're totally invested in, and which both depend on and reinforce their understanding of hundreds of books. And they understand everything in the world through these monolithic frameworks, and cannot justify any judgement without reference to their system in its entirety.
For someone brought up on a mathematician's aesthetic of parsimony, it is just incomprehensible. They are simply constitutionally incapable of making a simple argument, and indeed, are completely mystified by an intellectual aesthetic that can embraces complex arguments, but which always prefers a simple argument to a complex one.
Yawn.
--Tom
Hanson makes the same case against the Japanese in WWII. They fought like ants, waiting for orders from Tokyo before they could turn a boat around. By that time, they were decimated.
Here is a huge oversimplification. I think it is fair to say that military forces are shaped by culture, training, and the nature of their opposition.
The Imperial Japanese Navy (here I'm talking about gunnery and carrier arms) was well trained and equipped, having improved upon the equipment and training of the British who trained and formed them. They had leaders of great creativity and intelligence, but had the ground cut out from underneath them by cryptographic failures and by an inadequate industrial base. The IJN submarine force, in contrast, was well known for brutality, and was extremely poorly deployed and managed.
The Imperial Japanese Army was a more complex story. The IJA was shaped in large part by battles in China. The Chinese Armies were conscript armies, with poor command and control. The Japanese Armies, on the other hand, were known for their fanatical soldiers. Simple frontal assaults by dedicated fighters against ill-disciplined, poorly controlled troops without automatic weapons or artillery support are very effective. But the tactics that worked against Chiang Kai-Shek's armies didn't work so well at Guadalcanal, so they adapted. There were not bonzai charges at Peleliu, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa. Instead, you see an Army that has learned from its opponents, and has became quite formidable. I'd have much rather been a marine on the Teneru or Edison's ridge than a rifleman in Sledge's K/3/5 on Okinawa. The former had merely to turn around a history of defeat, but had superior arms and tactics (if somewhat shakier logistics). The later had the force of history behind them, but an extremely capable and well-supplied enemy who went into the battle with no thought other than to sell their lives dearly.
This, by the way, is part of why I like the Graves' book. It's quite clear that the British in WW I knew that both the French, and especially the Germans, knew more about trench warfare than they did. So they learned from their allies and enemies how to fight that kind of fight, and improved on what they learned. You don't get that sense from most other books.
I found Stu's description of the college senate fabulous.
I'm on something called the Curriculum Committee in which the people of various disciplines meet. We get along well, though I think I am often irrelevant to the discussion in my remarks, which people regard as humorous but only tangential, I think.
The more business types, and the electrical engineering types try to tease me by saying, there is a public sector for us with real jobs. If you go out of work, what is to become of YOU?
I answer them that they and their disciplines may be USEFUL, but when you are picking friends, do you just want someone who is USEFUL, or do you want someone who is DELIGHTFUL?
The humanities used to be about the delightful (before they became an attempt to be useful to the left).
I think they should still be about being delightful. Shakespeare is delightful.
When you have a free moment on the weekend, you want to go to see a movie or a play which is DELIGHTFUL, don't you?
and the more complicated the delight, the better!
Kirby—
So now the light comes on. Two cultures, once again.
For science/engineering types, the council of the senate is a necessary evil. It takes us away from our books/students/labs, but it is an essential aspect of faculty governance. So we go, hoping to slog our way through the agenda, dealing in deliberate fashion with each agenda item. And hoping, even praying, with touching naivity, that if we can dispense with all of these stuff expeditiously, maybe we can get back to what gives us life.
Whereas, for people from the other side of the divide, it's just another arena to show off their erudition, polish their pride, and vex their opponents. Therefore, there will never be time left over, for what is that time but a stage upon which they can perform? And what are we, but an audience, duly assembled, for their benefit?
Jacques also believes that the phrase "basically devastated" is Valley-Girl-ish. I won't get into a style war with Jacques. The man can't write a single sentence without some pointless aside or tedious reference. "Basically devastated" was meant to sound silly -- sort of a bathetic or oxymoronic construction, like "mildly annihilated." Jacques would like to be the Diction Police (sort of like the neo-classical Unities Police who hated Shakespeare so much). And yet Jacques, when he's wearing his masculine Halloween costume, claims to be a fan of Hunter Thompson. Thompson shifted diction registers faster than Jacques can change the subject (from intentionality to diction). I'll take Lester Bangs over Dr. Thompson, but in any case, code shifting is my style of choice, J-Dogg.
Jacques, in my meetings I am the only one from the Humanities, and it's a smaller committee of only about a dozen. We get along well, and I think we all keep our talk to a minimum, but we say something now and then to pretend we're still alive. And to be friendly to the people coming in to introduce their classes that they are offering to put on the curriculum.
senate at an enormous institution like yours is I am sure a bother, and the twits from the humanities at those institutions are just as awful as they are everywhere.
read Zizek or Baudrillard and you'll find out how tiresome they are. All show, and no substance.
And those guys are the stars of that kind of political posturing. I can't believe how tiresome it must be to listen to people of that ilk who lack the razzle dazzle and moonwalks of their supposed best.
They are an unnecessary evil, but I do agree that evil is the right term. they have turned from the good, and most probably don't even believe it still exists.
Like good/bad Nietzscheans, they are beyond good and evil, in the endlessly indeterminate, and virtually insensate, pouring out books every year like the periodic geysers at yellowstone only without the beauty or drama.
Oops, my message was meant for Stu.
Kirby, Kirby:
A casual glance at Garrett Mattingly's "The Armada" shows the poverty of your partisan speculations about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The English (not the anachronistic "British") simply showed themselves superior in tacics and gunnery on that day, though there were other factors such as familiarity of the English with their own terrain and the weather. Drake, the hero of the day, subsequently suffered a number of humiliating defeats at the Spaniards' hands in Spanish America and died of dysentery in defeat in 1596.
Then this:
"Most Protestant denominations leave the individual conscience to think things over with God. This might mean we get things wrong (as the Catholics aver), but if the Pope gets something wrong in Catholicism, the whole faith is wrong."
Kirby, if you are referring to the doctrine of papal infallibility, this is the sort of errant nonsense that's really unworthy of a man of your learning and intelligence. Since 1870, the pope (Pius XII in 1950) has spoken ex cathedra only once, and that concerning the Bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary.
Both Elizabeth I and Philip II were great monarchs in an age where divine-right monarchy was the rule in both England and Spain). Please, Kirby, show some subtlety of analysis when you touch on historical topics. It doesn't work to transpose the Persian vs Greek thesis of Hanson et alii (that very well may have validity) onto the Spanish-English wars in Shakespeare's time two millennia later.
Oh, on Tommie-boy's post, "toute petite" (agreement).
Stu --
there's one gifted co-ordinator, correct?
How many ESE teachers are there? Just as many as gifted teachers?
Half as many?
senate at an enormous institution like yours is I am sure a bother, and the twits from the humanities at those institutions are just as awful as they are everywhere.
Oh, they're not all twits. Many are truly delightful, with rapier wit and the ability to call upon just the right anecdote. But there are a few which I describe as "self-caricaturing." Sadly, it just takes one such to eat up the meeting.
The senate is 51 members by statute, elected for three year terms in groups of 17, by the Hare system for proportional representation. I find that this system does an outstanding job of guaranteeing that there will always be at one such in each cadre of 17.
Jacques, the standard analysis of Drake's defeat of the armada is that the smaller ships and easier maneuverability of same belonged to the Brits, who succeeded because of these. I confess I haven't looked at the newer arguments for why Drake's seadogs won, but bought this from a Shakespeare class taken as an undergraduate.
But I still think we are looking for evidence of a general principle that individualism in combat will triumph over centralized planning.
Even if the Pope has only spoken once EX CATHEDRA since 1888, the very fact that he has the RIGHT to do it, is damning.
But even if he doesn't speak EX CATHEDRA, he does still determine policy church-wide.
In the Lutheran body, it is more or less a democracy. This might be horrifying to centralized planners, and naturally they do come up with some bad ideas, but I still prefer it.
If their ideas are bad enough, everybody will just leave, as they are, at present, from the Episcopalian church, and to a lesser extent, from the ELCA.
If their ideas are bad enough, everybody will just leave, as they are, at present, from the Episcopalian church, and to a lesser extent, from the ELCA.
The flows go both ways, Kirby. Yes, we've lost folk like you (and I'm genuinely sorry for that, but I hope you're happy in the LCMS), and we gain folk who want a community that is more inclusive, or has a greater outward focus.
The Episcopalian Church is facing some interesting times. I think it is reasonably likely that they will divide, roughly along the ELCA/LCMS axis, which is unfortunate, but that both will remain within the greater Anglican movement.
How many ESE teachers are there?
ESE — Exceptional Student Education, seems to me to be Floridian for a what are a couple of separate categories in Illinois. We have special education, i.e., for students with diagnosed learning disabilities, and ELL, "English Language Learners" for students whose primary language is not English. My impression is that special ed is more-or-less in one-one correspondence with gifted at my wife's school. There is ELL, but it's not a big deal for her district. I wouldn't be surprised if there's just one.
Obviously, if you're looking at Chicago Public Schools, ELL is a big deal, and unfortunately, there's a tendency there as elsewhere to dump students with behavioral issues into special education, which works out pretty badly for all concerned. So far as I know, there is no generally recognized specialty for teaching students with behavioral/social issues [I can almost hear you guys saying, "Yes there is—law enforcement," but that isn't working so well either.]
stu:
Investigations by Dr Stanley Kurtz (PhD, Harvard, Social Anthropology; taught at Harvard in the "Great Books" programme; delivered The Dewey Prize Lectures at your U, stu; did field research in India on child-rearing; staff writer for "National Review," etc.; relation?) seem to conclude that the Annenberg project of Obama and Ayres was both driven by leftist ideology and a failure--nevertheless, it seemed to provide our future prez with a meal ticket for a while? Perhaps Walter Annenberg approved, at least of the initial proposal, but it's been documented that the MacArthur Foundation has been co-opted by lib-left partisans. That's not parroting ("parroting!? cries Bertie), is it?
Regarding the Armada, I recently saw an article—it might have been in the Smithsonian, which attributed much to the English system of outfitting a ship with a large number of essentially identical guns. This simplified magazine management, and it also meant that there was a common optimal engagement range, and the advantages of directed battery fire.
In the Spanish ships, the canons were a mixed bag of examples, with intrinsically different rates of fire, range, and penetration characteristics.
In effect, the English could trade off effectiveness at very short and very long ranges for much greater effectiveness at medium ranges, and their advantages in speed, maneuverability, and seamanship were such as to give them every change to maintain optimum range.
Jacques—
Regarding CAC, I think there have been a variety of analyses of it. Some decry the lack of "signature" accomplishments. Others note that it took a ~$50M initial grant, leveraged it into something like $600M in funding, which provided for systematic investments in infrastructure and training that wouldn't have otherwise occurred.
As for the "meal ticket," this seems a bit off. I believe that during the time Mr. Obama was chair of the board of CAC, his "day job" was as a Law School Prof at UC. I have no idea whether or not being on the board of CAC was a compensated position. My guess is costs plus an annual kicker, but nothing like a full salary.
I have no idea of the "lean" of the MacArthur foundation, I just know that the CAC Board contained responsible D's and R's drawn from the general population of "Chicago Civic Leaders," and this makes the notion that there was a strong ideological lean less than plausible, at least within the constraint of a grant that focussed on public education. Mr. Annenberg's efforts were often criticized by conservatives who though his money would have been better spend on private education. Indeed, these critics already viewed the grant, because it was public, as having a leftward lean, and I suspect your Dr. Kurtz (no relation, AFAIK) to be of their number.
Undoubtedly a good part of the reason that Mr. Obama believes that he can work together with R's comes from his stint with the CAC. But the R's here were primarily interested in the effective stewardship of a sizable resource, as was he, so there was something of a common perspective. Unfortunately, while it seems clear to me that Mr. Obama continues to approach the problem of governance in terms of the effective stewardship of the common purse, it is far from clear to me that this is true of the current DC R's, so his Chicago experience may have been misleadingly benign.
G.M. - I'm sorry that you're genetically inclined to fatness. That's too bad. Still seems that if you use more calories than you consume, then you should be losing weight, unless you've a thyroid disease.
We actually burn calories in our sleep, Kirby - that's part of why if you sleep longer, you're thinner...
Though of course, if you're asleep you're not late night snacking, and you're well-rested, so you're also not trying to get more energy by consuming when really you need sleep.
I think we tend to be out of touch with our bodies - we eat when we're thirsty, we eat when we're sleepy, we drink when we're hungry.
And GM, I do think that fatness is an epidemic in America, and is part of our lifestyle.
I don't have kids, so I can't empathize with how that fits into the scenario, but I would suggest, if possible, changing your lifestyle so that you're not inclined to be fat.
I think the best thing about the green movement is that the lifestyle it proposes is simply healthier.. whether or not it helps lower the sea levels is beside the point...bike, garden, go for lots of hikes, walk more, eat less-processed foods, play ultimate frisbee, etc.
Which might mean a change of priorities, or something.
Do Yoga instead of reading... Both Ron Silliman and Jacques read too much, and look where it's brought Them!!!
People in Nederland Colorado simply aren't fat. Boulder, with all its hypocrisy, wealth, and douchebaggery, is mostly fat-free.
There are places where people, because of the way they live, aren't fat - I think we should, for the most part, live like those people, instead of like the people from the fat places...
Some people might have to work harder. So be it. Redheads need to wear more sunscreen. But we shouldn't be all pansy bout it and say that they can't Help getting skin cancer because of the way they were born. wear a hat! Put on SPF 50! Wear long sleeves!
Let's be compassionate, but also put it out there: Being significantly overweight is, by definition, unhealthy, and a state to be avoided.
-Brett
brett: As usual playin' th' naggin' pc nanny--lib authoritarians all--even nagged WW 'bout not litterin" Mt Everest on what was to be her weddin' daY--SHEESH!
Seems the CAC faced not a small amount of opposition from the teachers' unions--curious. . . . I think you're incorrect about Obama being a "Law School Prof": actually he seems to have been a part-time lecturer mostly on "Race and Law." I can't imagine a prestigious school like UC even considering him for THAT position (without a single refereed article or book on law and for 12 yrs yet!) without heavy deferences to so-called "affirmative action" (in most cases, AKA "race quotas").
In my application history the most feckless school I'd have to call moneybags Yale, for they're the only school of hundreds that actually sent a POSTCARD with a rejection box checked! What jerks!
I want to return to the original idea of the post having to do with funding percentages. If the percentage of Lyme's to AIDS is a mere fraction (.0005) and yet the risk to future generations posed by AIDS is greater (or is Lyme's passed now to the unborn like heroin addiction and AIDS?), then that might play a part in the equation. Also, in Africa at least (Bush sent a lot of money to Africa to help fight AIDS but which was probably soaked up by local warlords to spend on guns), AIDS is often transmitted by nonmonogamous heterosexual populations, not the usual transferral we have here.
Therefore, perhaps some other larger markers (care for the unborn?) shoiuld come into play.
It's interesting to think about how other criteria can come into play that are presently unthought (at least by me). What other criteria might we advance in order to help the CWL?
I still don't quite know the American % of Lyme's versus AIDS victims, nor do I quite know how to calibrate the seriousness of the diseases. Lyme's is debilitating and does deteriorate the quality of life. But do you say something like, your life has been hinkmeistered by 60%, compared to death, which would be 100%?
My friends with Lyme's (FWL), tell me that they have good days, and even good months, before it deteriorates again.
Also, I think the drugs we now have in America will keep PWAs alive longer but are they now living 10% of the quality of life they formerly led, or is it 90%?
Which one is more systemically frightening?
AIDS transfers within the human populations more effectively, whereas with Lyme's it jumps only from ticks. I don't think you can get Lyme from kissing someone with Lyme's, but I could be wrong.
Somehow all these other vectors have to be calculated!
But still I think that Lyme should go up a bit past the .0005 amount of the funding that AIDS gets.
But to what percentage?
What is FAIR and BALANCED in this?
Oh, the cannons all being the same would make perfect sense in terms of the Armada! My understanding was that the ships of the Armada were large and difficult to turn around, and there wasn't much wind in the battle on the Thames. The seadogs under Drake had much more maneuverable craft.
This whole questions deserves considerably more scrutiny, as does the principle of maneuverability versus uniform calibration generally. All the guns of a ship would be effective if they were all calibrated to fire at the same range, meaning they would all hit.
Apparently, the Spanish ships being bigger also helped the smaller ships of the Brits since they presented a larger target, whereas the tinier ships were tough to hit by dint of their size.
Plus, never forget home court advantage! The Brits knew how the water went down the Thames, and where there were rocks and shoals, and they could count on the locals if their ships went down, whereas the Spanish would get massacred if they swam to an English shore.
Lots of variables! And of course the role of the Protestant Reformation in allowing the Brits to think for themselves, as opposed to waiting for the Pope to say, Open Fire! Would be incalculable. But would have to be on the order of at least ten percent advantage.
There should be a Parker Brothers Game!
SINK THE ARMADA! Soon to be in Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, and other leading stores of the Protestant Revolution.
When and why did the Spanish fold? I think the Spanish hit England about 1590, and after that they were basically irrelevant in terms of global conquest but got to keep what they had already captured in the New World. Why?
Why did their regimes last so long such that everything south of the border still can't function under the weight of the Counter Reformation?
Why did the Brits take it all down there, and change all those regimes? All they got was Belize, and a few islands.
All those peoples would be so much more prosperous if they were speaking English. All over the world those who are speaking English are doing better than the Spanish, and the French-speakers doing better than the Spanish-speakers.
Is it a question of vocabulary to some extent?
Philosophy?
Not sure.
(When I get a few knuckleheads on here, I love to get the pepper going, because then they get going, and it drives up my numbers like a madness! Sometimes I hit two or three hundred comments. The quality goes WAY down, but there is SOMETHING to be said for QUANTITY, too.)
Sheer numbers often brings in enormous new pools of readers, and out of these great numbers, sometimes I get someone with an actual brain, who will stay.
What has happened to George Grady?
The new anonymous has only form of argument -- name-calling.
It's amusing to notice the dearth of resources.
I like Stu and other leftists and centrists who actually bother to launch claims, followed by evidence.
But that's why he wants to use his own first name, I guess.
If my only intellectual resource was to call someone a name, I would wonder why I was ever allowed into kindergarten.
El Stupido.
I have to admit, it is kind of fun. But I don't think anybody can actually learn anything, so the fun is short-lived.
I think you're incorrect about Obama being a "Law School Prof": actually he seems to have been a part-time lecturer mostly on "Race and Law." I can't imagine a prestigious school like UC even considering him for THAT position (without a single refereed article or book on law and for 12 yrs yet!) without heavy deferences to so-called "affirmative action" (in most cases, AKA "race quotas").
Actually, there's a celebrated story about when Saul Levmore (UC Law School Dean, I know him slightly) had a heart-to-heart with Mr. Obama when he was getting ready to run for the Illinois Senate, telling him that he should instead commit to being a regular Professor (in the full sense of being a legal scholar, with publications, etc.) and drop his political ambitions.
Formally, his title was Senior Lecturer, which means that he was accorded all of the rights and responsibilities of a Professor in the classroom (including title), but that he was understood to be a practicing professional rather than a scholar. And his specialty as Senior Lecturer was constitutional law, not "race and law." This is well documented, and should not be a matter of dispute.
The notion that he was some sort of affirmative action appointment is absurd. The UC Law School doesn't work that way. I invite you to take a look at the current list of Senior Lecturers in the Law School: Ken Dam, former Provost of the University, former Deputy Secretary of State (Reagan, under Schultz), President of United Way (after the big scandal); Dennis Hutchinson (a UC fixture: Harper Professor, Master of the New Collegiate Division, Associate Dean of the College); Andrew Rosenfield, managing partner of Guggenheim LLC, trustee of the University; Frank Easterbrook, judge US Court of Appeals 7th Circuit; Richard Posner, presiding judge US Court of Appeals 7th Circuit; Diane Wood, judge US Court of Appeals 7th Circuit. That is a complete list. Any of the last three is a credible pick for SCOTUS, rumor was that Wood was on the short list. That's the equivalence class that the UC Law School felt Mr. Obama belonged to, before he declared his political ambitions. It would not surprise me, if, after his terms as President are complete, that a successor would nominate him to SCOTUS.
Jacques—
I'd like to follow up a bit on my own remarks. You said,
I can't imagine a prestigious school like UC even considering him for THAT position (without a single refereed article or book on law and for 12 yrs yet!)
You underestimate the arrogance of my beloved institution. Intellectual firepower can be demonstrated by refereed articles and other tokens of accomplishment granted by outsiders. But this can only prove what we knew before the articles were published. A fine publication record is neither necessary nor sufficient to be appointed as Professor at Chicago. What is necessary and sufficient? You have to convince us. It is a much more demanding test.
Regarding armada cannon.
It wasn't Smithsonian, it was Slashdot, referring to the following BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7899831.stm
It's not exactly as I remembered—they count fewer, bigger guns, and faster projectile speed, as being as important as a uniform caliber.
stu:
I still suspect you're covering for President Obama's scholarly lethargy or inability. I certainly know Judge Posner's work; can you assure me that others have NO publications like Obama? And for how many years did he teach "full- time" at your law school? And how many other courses other than "Race and Law" did he teach?
stu, PS:
What is the percentage of African-Americans teaching in your law school? How many tenured professors at UC have NO scholarly publications to their credit?
Aside from that, you know no Catholic could in good conscience support a supporter of infanticide and, apparently, euthenasia. I think this president's arrogance combined with incompetence will sink him eventually. His most recent mistake in the Gates affair is only one more bit of evidence in this pattern that recalls Shakespeare's tragic figure of Richard II.
I still suspect you're covering for President Obama's scholarly lethargy or inability. I certainly know Judge Posner's work; can you assure me that others have NO publications like Obama? And for how many years did he teach "full- time" at your law school? And how many other courses other than "Race and Law" did he teach?
I've got nothing to cover for, since I'm not a member of the Law School faculty. I have no idea about the publication records of other senior lecturers. The Law School's web site only lists the last three quarters worth of courses, so this is not a trivial question to answer.
But let me point you to the following article on the Annenberg FactCheck.org website --
http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/was_barack_obama_really_a_constitutional_law.html
-- and suggest that the burden of proof in this matter belongs entirely with you. You're the one suggesting that things are not as they appear to be, and the one calling into question the integrity of the UC law school, on no basis other than that you don't like our current President, who had an affiliation with it.
What is the percentage of African-Americans teaching in your law school?
I don't know, I suspect it is not high. But let me suggest that if there was a quota system in place, it should be no great problem for you to discover Obama's replacement in this slot. And again, that is where the burden of proof lies. There is a public web site—I'm under no obligation to be your research assistant.
How many tenured professors at UC have NO scholarly publications to their credit?
I doubt many, but this is the wrong question. The right question is, how many had no publications at the time they were appointed. Again, I don't know. I don't expect the number is large. But, knowing my institution as I do, I'd be stunned if the number is zero.
I think this president's arrogance combined with incompetence will sink him eventually. His most recent mistake in the Gates affair is only one more bit of evidence in this pattern that recalls Shakespeare's tragic figure of Richard II.
Actually, a characteristic of Shakespearean tragedy was that the tragic figure was unable to recognize or recover from their tragic flaw. Mr. Obama's handling of the Gates-Crowley affair has shown evidence of grace and reflection.
It seems to me that if you want to look to an example of a President with a tragic arrogance—the kind that isn't capable of acknowledging (even to himself) error, and adjusting—you have to go back one.
Stu - are you crazy? Or a catholic?
Don't you know that my thinking proves decisively that no black man in this country gets anywhere without being mollycoddled by some socialist baby-murdering aids-advocate pulling the strings? Back in the Hawaiian jungle Obama wouldn't have stood a chance to get where he is today. Especially with that feminist single mother!
It's pretty clear that Venezuelan communists had something to do with it. Look at pictures of him as a child! Do you really believe that Hawaiian tribes can afford sneakers like that?
All the groundwork was laid years ago for this coup d'etat. The communists knew their days were up, so they started grooming 'fellow travellers' in remote third world counties like Hawaai so they could get revenge on us Christians for winning the cold war.
Anyone who actually voted for him was just duped by the communist media that tell everyone what to think. I know this happned because Bill O'Reilly was talking about it last week.
Your list of Obama's colleagues as senior lecturers is unconvincing. We are discussing Obama, not the justly recognized Judge Posnre. So what was Obama's "professional" career except as aq practically non-practicing lawyer or community organizer (or agitator) with most unsavoury connexions? Certainly not in the stamp of Judge Posner--Federal judge, legal scholar, and writer of distinction ("Public Intellectuals"; though I'm sure Obama would never consider him for SCOTUS). Further, the purpose of refereed publications is to contribute to one's field in general and to allow other institution's scholars to judge the work of a candidate for tenure as well. That you say,
"You underestimate the arrogance of my beloved institution. Intellectual firepower can be demonstrated by refereed articles and other tokens of accomplishment granted by outsiders. But this can only prove what we knew before the articles were published. A fine publication record is neither necessary nor sufficient to be appointed as Professor at Chicago. What is necessary and sufficient? You have to convince us."
Arrogance, indeed, but what special qualities could he have demonstrated? Hidden, like most of his academic records. Perhaps he's just a sphinx without a riddle!
Jacques—
What's going on with the Jacquesw nom de plume? I didn't think that Kirby had banned you already, so it's a bit early to be coming in under an alias.
Love your last two posts!
Stu -
I had to write my name as it's pornounced - 'shee-ack-wah' (like 'Aquaman'). When i hear your voice in my head your saying it all wrong! I don't want to be reminded of those gay atheists who hounded me out of academia for being right about everything. When I heard their communist voices in my head in the middle of the night they kept saying:
"Please leave JACK. We hate working with you JACK. We don't want to be reminded every morning of how we're going to hell because we vote Democrat JACK."
How annoying that got! Luckily, I had the book of Job to guide me out of that situation and it got be back on the true path.
When i hear your voice in my head your saying it all wrong!
I am sorry. I've been pronouncing it "zhaq," like les strap, but with a softer attack, yet vocalized, unlike Mr. O'Neil's first name. I'll make sure to add the "wah." No disrespect intended.
I think that the Book of Job should be mandatory reading for any academic. I really think that Job was a chairman. It explains so much.
Hey, Stu,
Jacques wasn't even in the house at 10:53 when the post which begins:
"I had to write my name as it's pornounced - 'shee-ack-wah' (like 'Aquaman'). When i hear your voice in my head your saying it all wrong!"
was posted on Kirby's site.
I think we have an impostor, Stu. I'll have to have Jacques look at a few of the posts put up under his name when he gets back.
Seriously. Shame on whoever's doing this. Your style isn't even remotely convincing as an imitation.
stu, kirby, all (save one):
The deranged troll is at it again in the last post (obviously not mine--Emmy caught it while I was at the store). I think we can get him if we co-operate. . . .
I also knew it was an Impostor because Jacques actually turned to the Book of Numbers to get his soul on track.
And his colleagues didn't communicate their dislike for him via telepathy - they told him right up to his face! Not like the hateful cowardly impostor posting in his name.
Emmy Bea—
Jacques wasn't even in the house at 10:53 when the post which begins:
Please do. I had my suspicions, which is why I asked about the nom de plume. I'm also dubious of the 10:16 message, although the earlier ones seem plausible enough. There is also a post similar to the 10:53 post in the comments to "Just War."
Comment #82.
Are you shooting for 100 comments again? Who'd a thunk it would be on a post about Lyme's disease?
WW
OK - I've rounded up the Minutemen and now we're coming round to your home to get you, troll scum!
Listen out for horses and keep your eyes open for the burning cross!
83 comments, but evidently no one has mentioned that it's Lyme Disease, not Lyme's. It wasn't named for a doctor (Dr. Lehman Lyme?) who clarified its nature, but for Lyme, CT, where there was an outbreak.
83 comments, but evidently no one has mentioned that it's Lyme Disease, not Lyme's. It wasn't named for a doctor (Dr. Lehman Lyme?) who clarified its nature, but for Lyme, CT, where there was an outbreak.
83 comments, but evidently no one has mentioned that it's Lyme Disease, not Lyme's. It wasn't named for a doctor (Dr. Lehman Lyme?) who clarified its nature, but for Lyme, CT, where there was an outbreak.
The 11:13 comment is not from me, either. My husband and I were having a very late Greek dinner. So someone has also taken my name which is really sort of disappointing because I'm a fit mouthpiece for no one, really.
Whoever you are, I wish you'd stop. This is proving nothing and its really rather childish. Please show everyone here some respect, and a bit of self-respect as well and either come out under your own name or just go. You're contributing nothing but malice.
I hate to see grown men act this way, I really do. Assuming you are a grown man, and not a little girl.
My Filipina travel agent's name is Jacque, but she pronounces it more like J'que, with all the emphasis on the last syllable.
Oh and my posts referred to Lyme disease, not Lyme's.
Still posting obnoxious gibberish under others' names, eh, coward?
Come il tuo italiano, cretino ebete e sottohumano? N'importa, idiota sbavato, non puoi scapparci per sempre, mascalzone e codardo abietto! Vattene, feccia!
Burning crosses aren't allowed here in the Philippines, but don't look at me. I didn't post anything using your name.
They do still allow horse taxis here, but only if the taxi was in use in the Spanish era and was passed down to you from your grandfather, quite literally a grandfather clause.
KKK in the Philippines refers to a part of the Propaganda Movement organized to overthrow Spanish rule. It's a chain of restaurants now that serves Filipino food the way it was prepared during the Spanish era.
That comment by me about me not being by me wasn't by me either. Seriously, you better stop playing these cowardly games.
Don't encourage her Emmy, you're only encouraging her typical feminist mind games. Rest assured Our Personal Lord and Saviour will have a special judgement for her when she dies of AIDS.
I'm not the name stealer, but I was at UW during the '80s and I can certainly commiserate. The program admitted people simply to bring in revenue and social support was nearly negligible. What positions one could hope to earn through merit had been ear-marked in advance to students from outside the region who had no connection to Seattle or the State of Washington beyond having studied with a professor who had referred them to a colleague in that department. My wife's experience in grad school at the same university was totally different. She was on lower campus and everyone admitted to her program had so many job offers they could barely afford to waste time attending classes.
Well this is certainly easy.
I think JA/JDL and Emmy Bee that it might be in your best interest (since you obvs have some internet stalker) to make a google account (even a dummy one) to comment from -- that way it will be hyperlinked & unique.
Boy that sucks.
GMP (this is really me, Kirb can check his IP address)
Well this is certainly easy.
Indeed.
I see a few options.
1. Kirby could use a more selective setting for comments, e.g., "registered users," which would block both Anonymous and Name/URL. The problem here, oddly enough, is coming from people misusing the Name/URL choice, *not* the Anonymous choice, but there's no setting that turns off one and not the other.
2. Jacques and other regulars can establish Google id's just for commenting, and use public profiles.
Now, spoofing is still possible with either, although it should be possible to build a tool that somehow marks comments that come from "trusted" id's, which would enable relatively easy identification of spoofed messages.
3. We could go to a digital signature scheme for comments. This would be a bit of a pain in the rear, but would be the gold-standard in terms of identity verification.
My suggestion -- turn off anonymous commenting for a while, let the problem settle down, and turn it back on later. This has a bit of the feeling of whack-a-mole, but that's the internet for you.
Ok, I'll try to work on a verification system for the blog comments. This might mean that all previous comments are lost when I transfer to the new system. I did it once about two years ago, and all comments were wiped out.
The problem is that when you have colleges and universities around the country that have in effect become madrassas, you get hateful people who will do anything to harass and interrupt any thought that doesn't accord with their own. Terror itself is the weapon of choice.
And yet the people who are doing this generally act in a cowardly manner hiding behind anonymity, and then they start to take other people's names who are already embedded within the thread.
I'll try to sort this out and apologize for the disruption.
This, by the way, is the original reason I left the left. I got tired of the intolerance, and the bizarre and disgusting characterizations of any viewpoint not their own as racist or classist or sexist, with that generally being the end of the discussion.
I did want to open this as a space that would allow for deeper and more various reflections, not excluding humorous divagation, and irrelevant black humor and other modes not currently recognized within the pious world of the madrassas who seek only to stoke hate, and promote unity through terror.
I apologize again for the disruption, and will seek to explore another avenue that will allow for freedom of expression with a minimum of responsibility governing threats, and taking over another's identity, and libeling them by making abusive comments in their name.
All of these are known tactics on left blogs.
However, I want to avoid all that.
Suggestions welcomed.
Kirby—
I'd just try eliminating anonymous comments for a bit, and see if that does it. It's easy to do, and I'm a fan of trying easy fixes first.
Just hit "customize" when you're logged in, and at your Blog's front page. Go to Settings > Comments, and change the "Who can comment?" radio button from "Anyone" to "Registered Users."
This will force Jacques and Emmy Bee's hand in terms of having to have an OpenID compatible identity to comment from. It's no guarantee against spoofing, but it makes it more time consuming.
Well, I was just going to go to the first but will go to the second tomorrow, depending on today's behavior. Thanks for this suggestion. I would like everybody to behave well here. I am tired of the death threats, and threats of punching noses, and bizarre sexual fantasies attributed to other users (this is usually a sign of someone who is seriously disturbed).
Deborah Frisch's profile fits the profile unfortunately of my new stalker. I'm not sure how many of these are out there, but fear that the number is legion.
Thanks, Stu. Will do.
Stephen Baraban is correct to note that the correct term is "LYME DISEASE" because the disease was originally discovered in Lyme, CT. However, when you are denoting something of or having to do with the disease, it is correct to write "Lyme's" funding.
But the term has also morphed, and you now see online usages such as Lime and even, Lime's.
The statistics at present are that about 3 million Americans have Lyme disease.
By contrast, about a half million Americans are suffering from AIDS.
Six times more Americans are suffering from LYME. And yet, the funding is a mere fraction. .0005 of AIDS funding is granted through the CDC to LYME DISEASE.
One of the only major authors to have the disease (of which I am aware) is Amy Tan. Her recent novel SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING, is about Myanmar, and the Karen people's suffering under the Buddhist government there.
Among other atrocities, Karen children were forced to walk on mines, to test the efficacy of the mines. Limbs and scarred faces are the result.
Amy Tan apparently finished her novel SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING while suffering from LYME DISEASE.
Tan has to inject heavy antibiotic dosages every week in order to remain relatively free of infection, and to continue her fine work.
I suppose if going outside were an activity frowned upon by most of civilization for most of its existence, we would have silly folks fighting for the right to go outside and fighting for funding to ward off, treat, and/or cure diseases that could simply be avoided by staying indoors.
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