this week i

published on out of pocket spending among americans on medicare.

consider friendship, at its core, an unspoken agreement that you enjoy watching one another live your lives.

drove the robert c. byrd appalachian highway system.

rented a blackwater falls cabin.

passed the ranger, parked with low beams, to the 24h gas station.  "could i buy beer or is it too late?"  "sorry, it's 2:05, sales stop at two" i rustled around in front of the more bespoke snacks, these organic gummy bears look healthy.  "actually the time just changed, it's 1:05"  miller light, please

hope i'm aiming for peace rather than victory.

ate a cheesesteak burrito and other mountain statements.

read..

(1) adaptation

walk in, take off mask, order coffee.  put mask back on, walk out

from here on it's triage

we have built our megacities - 13 of the largest twenty are ports - in sinking river deltas

'even if germany's future temperature range becomes like that of italy today, italian crops are not guaranteed to grow in german fields.  soil and pests will remain different, and so too will the length of the days

(2) drug movement

the organization owned more planes than aeromexico

during prohibition, border patrol agents would rock cars back and forth to listen for sloshing liquor

narco-juniors tend to flaunt their wealth on social media with photos of pet panthers and stacks of cash

(3) slithering audibly in the north korean garden

the argument of western governments is that, far from protecting him, nuclear weapons put kim in greater danger of being attacked, and that if he obediently gives over his deterrent he will enjoy a rich bounty.  recent examples of those who were persuaded to reverse nuclear course provide strong reasons to doubt this.  the most prominent among them, gaddafi, was lynched in 2011, shortly after being sodomised with a bayonet, in a libyan uprising backed up by american bombardment.  the more recent nuclear deal with iran is in jeopardy after the present us government abandoned the agreement painstakingly reached by its predecessor.  you don't have to approve morally of anything about the kim regime to conclude that, for a dictator in such circumstances, to give away nuclear weapons, rather than hold on to them, would be the behavior of a madman

the days when dictators could scarper safely off into exile, like ferdinand marcos, the shah of iran or syngman rhee, have long gone.  kim knows that in attempting to do a gorbachev, or even a deng xiaoping, he would be more likely to end up as a gaddafi or a ceausescu

11/7

this week i

published on risk adjustment in the private medicare market.

parked on the potomac in paw paw.

listened to episode 124.

now you may be wondering why this tax is known as a poll tax.  well the word poll appears to be an early loanword from dutch, and it meant head.  so a poll tax was literally a head tax, because it was a tax on every head, or every person.  the word poll soon came to refer to the process of counting every head or every vote, and that produced the modern sense of the word as a poll to determine public opinion.  but that original sense of the word as head also survives in another interesting word.  the word tadpole.  a tadpole is a very young toad or frog that's left its egg and still resembles a small fish.  it hasn't developed any legs yet, so people once thought of it as nothing more than a frog's head with a tail.  thus it was called a tadpole.  tad is an early form of toad, and pole meant head.  so a tadpole is literally a toad head.  so if anyone asks you what the connection is between frogs and voting, now you know

5/16

this week i

drew the sample for our 2012 employer health benefits survey.

drove to the west virginia mountains with my father.

unpacked the car.  and look at that, you read my mind.

rented a cabin.

sat on the porch.

didn't anticipate the altitude weather difference.

communed with nature.

found an arcade room in the lodge..

..with other relics too.

now know what the locals do for fun.

watched waterfalls.

enjoyed scenic overlooks.

visited the self-proclaimed highest incorporated town in the state.

ate american breakfasts..

..and desserts.

headed out..

..to luray caverns.

walked the tour..

which included a stalactite organ

..and yes, they do weddings.

wonder what percent goes to coinstar.

always discover something new at the natural history museum..

..and apparently am not the only one.

attended the smithsonian's feature on bioluminescence..

complete with deep sea mimicry goggles

draw-your-own ocean monsters

..and wicked witch of the west impersonation opportunities.

am still of the age where everything feels good.  even hurt, it all feels good.  pray that never changes.

reminded myself what a.m. and p.m. stand for: ante meridiem and post meridiem, latin for before and after mid-day.

kicked around the feasibility of some sort of nafta-expansion that would give all united states, canadian, and mexican citizens the right to live, work, and travel freely in each others' countries.  with the current state of the euro, it's hard to imagine currency unification makes any sense and this idea doesn't necessitate open borders, either - everyone still has to pass through inspection, so other non-citizens legally in one of these three countries couldn't simply hop into another.  why are we constricting ourselves?

downloaded colonization ©1994.  slower than i remember.  this, civilization, and starcraft - my three favorite games.

walked to the new mlk memorial with emma.  prime real estate.

read a bit..

(1) manhattan's park in the sky

historic preservation, adaptive reuse of obsolete infrastructure, green urbanism, and private-sector funding and stewardship of civic amenities

(2) the case for transparency in war powers

(3) american post-secondary education

no one knows how long families will be able and willing to pay for four years of largely symbolic training that steadily becomes more expensive and loses impact

americans..now owe almost a trillion dollars in student loans, more than they owe in credit card debt

(4) russian propaganda

'life in russia,' the journalist told me in the democratic bar, 'has got better but leaves a shitty aftertaste.'

(5) the arizona crossing

arizona, he said, 'has to come back into civilization'

for every illegal migrant apprehended, border patrol estimates that three get across

water stations in dozens of locations in the middle of nowhere

arizona is for immigration what mississippi was for civil rights

(6) in the protests

that goldman sachs built its new headquarters without putting the words 'goldman' or 'sachs' on the exterior of 200 west street is, at least, a little telling.

(7) the electorate

johnson in 1964 was the last democrat to win a majority of the white vote.

women vote ever more clearly on class lines; men don't.

like tightrope walking in the dark with a gorilla on one's back.

(8) somalia now

fragments of a pulled tooth still wedged deep in the bleeding gum

'where is the un, where's the money, where are all those experts?  there are all sitting in nairobi, spending the aid money on supporting their own lives.  they should be here, working.'

he tried to insert the tube for a drip into a child's skull.  i asked him: why not his hand?  he looked at me, lifted the child's tiny hand and said: 'find me a vein here and you can have my lunch today.'

back in the hospital a man sat on a piece of soiled cardboard, holding his son's head high, a tube inserted into the child's nose.  a visiting delegation from an arab charity passed by.  they went up to the father and his child, and a man in a white jacket with the charity's logo kneeled next to the child.  the father looked at him respectfully while he held the child's head and turned to face one of his colleagues, who was holding a camera.  the man grinned, and the other man took his picture.  'ok, muhammad, it's your turn,' the kneeling man said, and they switched places.

(9) ows

"mike check!" one of the women cried, and with a unison roar the crowd repeated her words.  this was "the people's mike," used in lieu of bullhorns, megaphones, or other amplification devices that were prohibited because the protesters had no permit..the crowd has to repeat every word

mohamed bouazizis of the united states

(10) banking: the prosecution rests

not a single criminal charge has been filed against anyone at a major bank

the failure to bring strong criminal cases also makes it difficult for most americans to understand how these crises occurred.

12/8

this week i

tried my hand at r graphics.

received my 7", $126 netbook. purchased after reading this ft review. the $100 laptop dream has become reality.

whitewater rafted in west virginia. (videos of other people)

rented a cabin..

..with six dudes and a toilet seat that wouldn't stay upright.

ate bonfire corn on the cob.

stared, decorated, stared some more.


felt superior.

experienced wildlife.

took in the state..

seinfeldian restaurant names

highway karting

emissions-standards loopholes

all-around bad-asses

wrapped up the amazing maps of meaning lecture series.

"what human beings like more than anything else is to be right."

"satan can step out of hell in one moment. he can admit that he was wrong."

"it was group guilt, class guilt that mattered to stalin. if your parents were rich, bourgeois, what was the probability that you were going to be a useful part of the workers' collective. it'd be easier to get rid of you."

"ptsd: if you relive it over and over and over again in your imagination, in as much detail as possible, you will get better faster and stay better longer."

"you can't tell the meaning of someone's life until the very end. that's why catholics believe salvation can always be attained."

"the real problem of life isn't so much what do you do when you're around things that you understand. the real problem of life is what do you do when you encounter something you can't conceptualize. and i think a good recent example of that is the bombing of the world trade towers, which people were compelled to watch that over and over and over and over. and if you ask someone 'well what is it that you're watching?' they would say, 'well i'm watching the world trade towers fall down', but then you might say, 'but why are you watching it over and over?' and they would say something like, 'i can't believe it. i can't believe it's happening.' and what does that mean? it means something like: whatever it is that's happening here - whatever's being blown apart - exceeds my ability to model. and as a consequence i have to expose myself to it again and again and again and again to try to understand what's falling, what's falling exactly. is it just the towers, is it twenty thousand people, is it the financial system of the us, is it the stability of the western world, is it the beginning of world war three? what is it exactly that you're looking at when something happens that you don't understand?"

"this is more true among elderly people. if their spouse dies, the probability that they'll die in the next year, say from a heart attack or something like that, increases substantially. why is that? it's because their conceptual framework was so dependent on the existence of their spouse - say someone they'd lived with for twenty five years - that the anxiety and uncertainty caused by their anomalous disappearance - their death - is so extreme that it sends their body into a physiological state that's basically unbearable and that does them in."

"when you start to understand what having your preconceptions rattled really means, then you also start to understand why people are so motivated to protect their ideological territory."

genius.

8/27/09