Christmas Money – fiat vs. real value

I had mentioned in a comment on DADvocate’s holiday post that I’ve simplified my Christmas gift giving considerably – cards for adults and something interesting – educational even – for the kids.

Raising Zombies From the Dead or Twice Killed Pork

Katie Drummond at Danger Room reports that DARPA, the research arm of the military, is trying to create zombies . Then, reanimate them. Lucky for us, they are starting with pigs first.

Around half of U.S. troop fatalities are caused by blood loss from battlefield injuries. Now, with another 30,000 troops deploying to Afghanistan, the Pentagon is pushing for medical advances that can save more lives during combat. The Defense Department’s latest research idea: Stop bleeding injuries by turning pigs into the semi-undead. If it works out, we humans could be the next ones to be zombified.

Military’s mad-science arm Darpa has awarded $9.9 million to the Texas A&M Institute for Preclinical Studies (TIPS), to develop treatments that can extend a “golden period” when injured war fighters have the best chance of coming back from massive blood loss. Odds of survival plummet after an hour — during combat, that kind of quick evacuation, triage and treatment is often impossible.

The institute’s research will be based on previous Darpa-funded efforts. One project, at Stanford University, hypothesized that humans could one day mimic the hibernation abilities of squirrels — who emerge from winter months no worse for wear — using a pancreatic enzyme we have in common with the critters. The other, led by Dr. Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, used nematode worms and rats to test how hydrogen sulfide could block the body’s ability to use oxygen — creating a kind of “suspended animation” where hearts stop beating and wounds don’t bleed. After removing 60 percent of the rat’s blood, Dr. Roth managed to keep the critters alive for 10 hours using his hydrogen sulfide cocktail.

We already raise people from the dead

A warm welcome to our readers and their friends

As venues you have previously frequented change in ways that no longer suit you or fade away entirely, consider Alexandria as a place to visit more often, if not ultimately come to inhabit.

As our Guidelines for Authors and Guidelines for Commenters make clear, the paramount value in Alexandria is full freedom of conversation on issues of any type, large and small. Naturally, by their having assumed greater responsibilities, our Authors have earned rights to publish beyond those enjoyed by commenters.

If you have not yet found what you are looking for here, perhaps it is because you or someone you know has not yet offered it. Consider doing so, and consider inviting someone to do it with you.

In time you may come to find something interesting, something those who have been here awhile already know whether they articulate it or not, that in Alexandria it is not, in the end, about the issues, the invigorating sparkle of their interest, the thrill of mental and rhetorical contest, the warmth of agreement, the quiet chagrin of realizing the greatest fool has just been revealed by you to be—you.

In Alexandria, in the end, it is about what remains when all else fades away.

Consider joining us today, or, if you know someone more suited than yourself, recommend us to them. If you somehow cannot find the Contact Form on our About Page, consider doing something else instead with our warmest blessing.

H. M. Stuart
Alexandria

95% surveyed admitted to it (and the other 5% were lying), and, So sleazy the cavemen did it, and, Today’s Tom saw you

All men watch porn, scientists find [tip: Robert F., email "Dog Bites Man"]
Scientists at the University of Montreal launched a search for men who had never looked at pornography – but couldn’t find any.

Daily Telegraph: Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users.

But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it.

“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn’t find any.”

Although hampered in its original aim, the study did examined the habits of those young men who used pornography – which would appear to be all of them. [More]

Like porn itself landing just-like-that on one’s computer (so we hear) like a Willie Mays say-hey-what’s-this-in-my-glove vest-pocket catch, Friends just happened to be on ‘TBS earlier and we were too preoccupied online to grab the remote (more the Seinfeld type, we):

["The One With the Free Porn"]

(Joey switches channels with the remote and porn appears on the TV)

Chandler: Hey!

Joey: Whoa, is this porn? What did I do, I must’ve hit something on the remote!

Chandler: Do we pay for this?

Joey: No, we didn’t pay our cable bill. Maybe this is how they punish us.

[later] Chandler: The weirdest thing happened to me today. I went to the bank, there was a lady teller, and she didn’t ask me to do it with her in the vault!

Joey: Same sort of thing happened to me. Female pizza delivery guy comes over, drops off the pizza, takes the money, and leaves!

Chandler: What? No “nice place; I bet the bedrooms are huge”?

Joey: No!

Chandler: You know what? I think we need to turn off the porn.

Cf. also, from The Colbert Report, “Caveman Porn Stash: German archaeologists discover a caveman’s porn sculpture 35,000 years after he dies”, and from “Elephants on acid – the 10 wackiest experiments of all time“, THE TIMES, October 31, 2007:

7) Turkey turn-ons

Martin Schein and Edgar Hale, of Pennsylvania State University, devoted themselves to studying the sexual behaviour of turkeys in the 1960s, and discovered that the birds are not choosy. Taking a model of a female turkey, they progressively removed body parts until the males lost interest.

Even when all that remained was a head on a stick, the male turkeys remained turned on.

Why We Liked Ike

Via Exum, a link to Eisenhower’s Project Solarium. in short, when Ike was elected, he needed to develop a policy on how to deal with the USSR. Then, as now, there was a g to war faction. There was also a group which proposed containment. Eisenhower selected three teams to debate the pros and cons of different approaches. After the debate, he chose the containment approach. Most interesting though are the rules he set for the debate.

1) I will not accept any strategy which undermines the economic foundation of this country.

2) I will not accept any strategy which assumes we will emerge from a war better off than when we entered.

3) I will not accept any strategy which must go forward without the consent and support of our key allies.

Holiday Madness Advice Madness

Serving on the wellness committee make up one of my extra-curricular activities at work. Recently, we’ve been focusing on stress management and accident prevention. Part of our efforts includes posting informational sheets on the subjects. The sheets posted earlier this week cover managing holiday madness. I’m given two copies to post strategically in the men’s restroom. As usual, I posted without them without reviewing the tips.

Soon, my boss exited out of the restroom laughing. After asking me if I’d read the “Tips for Managing Holiday Madness” and I said, “No,” he exclaimed that the tips sounded more as if a person was “mad,” as in crazy. Reading the tips, I easily saw why he laughed at the list.

Most of the tips are sound advice but a few left me scratching my head.

Buy everyone gifts from the same store (e.g., bath and body lotions, candles, books), shop on the Web from one mall site, or buy everyone magazine subscriptions. And, hope no one judges you lazy, uncreative, or whatever for putting no thought into their gift.

Break projects into small steps so you won’t feel like a failure if you don’t get the whole project done. It’s easier to berate yourself for one small failure. – We certainly want to make it as easy as possible to berate ourselves.

Have pot luck meals so you don’t have to do all the cooking. You can always dine out every day and worry about credit card debt next year. – Nothing like running up your personal debt to help deal with stress and madness.

Then focus on making that happen for yourself. When you find yourself comparing yourself to others, remind yourself that they may look perfect but they’re all probably miserable inside. – Thinking others are miserable inside always makes you feel better, doesn’t it?

Besides, when you begin to feel good about being alone, everyone will call and e-mail you to make demands on your time. – Huh? How do they know when I’ve began to feel good about being alone?

By not spending money on other people you’ll have more for yourself. The holiday season comes every year. It’s fine to miss this year. – Greed as a coping mechanism. Next year you’ll have no friends on whom to spend money.

Personally, I recommend switching religions as the various holidays come up. Always be a religion other than the religion of the holiday being celebrated and you have a built in excuse not to participate. If people accuse you of being crazy sue them for violating your religious rights or violating the American Disabilities Act.

African ingenuity blogwatch: Coconut handbags, open source science archives, and more

Discussion of African branding practices.

Nigerian farmers take Shell to court.

Chris Blattman on How to Bump Your GDP.

South Africa has found an interesting way to bolster its gross domestic product: include illegal activities.

Nigeria: Central Banker Calls For Capital Market Reform.

Kenya: What We Search for on Google.

Ethiopia: Nation, Norway Sign Agreement On Hydropower Development, Academic Cooperation.

Ghana: Continent Urged to Engage in Partnership Without Borders.

Tanzania is sending one of the largest teams to the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Promoting a Reading Culture in Schools.

Open Source Science Archives-Scientific African.

Coconut + Zippers = Handbags.

Zuku Slashes Kenya Internet Prices.

Gettin’ By- Fish Marketer.

M-banking: Going where no bank has gone before.

Namibia: The role of new media in 2009 elections.

Illustrated version of the harmonized draft constitution in Kenya.

African Mobile Market, Q2 2009 Numbers.

Announcing the TED Senior Fellowships.

Djorwe Temoa-Software Developer.

Afri-Pads.

Health Care Costs: Insurance vs Providers

Lots of the people talking about health care reform are very smart. Many of them are well informed, but usually in just a few areas. Few of the people involved seem to have ever negotiated fees. This is important when reading Ezra Klein yesterday. He is well informed, coming from a left of center point of view. Even the right wing pundits go to his site for information. Yesterday he posted a piece on why we cannot control costs. Key quotes…..

The base insight is that providers — doctors and hospitals, mainly — have most of the leverage in the battle with insurers. If there’s one hospital in town, then either your insurer cuts a deal with them, or you get another insurer. What you don’t do is get another hospital.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the insurer doesn’t really care to negotiate lower prices. They tried that in the late ’90s, and everyone hated them for it. It turns out that workers don’t feel the cost of their health care because they think employers pay it, and employers don’t care that much about cost increases because they take it out of wages. Neither group likes premium increases, but they don’t really care. But everyone screams if you tighten networks and review care. As such, providers have pretty free rein. That’s part of why we pay so much more than any other country per unit of care.

Additionally, health-care reform is going to great lengths to avoid touching providers. Hospitals and doctors are simply too powerful to seriously anger. Insurers aren’t. That’s why the original public option was so important. Armed with — and adding to — Medicare’s bargaining power, it was a policy that you could justify because insurers were evil, but that was actually directed at providers. When it lost its attachment to Medicare, it still had good arguments for its existence, but its potential as a gamechanger ended.

My somewhat pessimistic view is that the politics of this aren’t likely to change until workers are closer to their health-care spending. You’ll get public will to rein in provider spending when the public realizes how much it’s actually paying for health-care coverage. As it is, employers pay more than 70 percent of the average worker’s cost, and Medicare and Medicaid are no better, so there’s no support for solutions proportionate to the problem because the overwhelming majority of the country is insulated from the full pain of the problem.

His points here have a lot of merit, especially some of his conclusions. However, on the setting of fees, he is only half correct.

something keeps bugging me

Today was “one of those days” which I don’t really have very many of, because my job is really great. But today was filled with people who I think of as incurables.  They don’t have any particular disease, but what they have is problems which nobody can fix for them and for which any of my advice is unwelcome. They usually want from me something that will definitely NOT help them such as more opiate pain killers or the newest bestest fancy drug or test.

My morning seemed to be unusually full of people who were not helpable.

The last one was a young woman who really wanted opiate pain killers. She had back pain which was going to continue to be bad as long as she stayed in the dead end convenience store job she had, and she didn’t want to go ahead with further evaluation because she would soon be off of her parents’ insurance and unable to buy her own. And I know her well enough to know that she really could go to college. I suggested that if she did, jobs with better salaries would be open to her and she could get something in the government even, with good health benefits. And then she just opened up and began to vent about how terrible the government was now that the man who she hadn’t voted for was president, so she wasn’t going to vote anymore, and she wouldn’t work for the government.  She said that she thought it was terrible that Obama would tax people making over a quarter of a million dollars a year to help pay for insurance for people like her, since after all they had worked hard to be that wealthy.  She knew about this because she heard it on Fox news.  Other than that she wasn’t quite sure why she hated him, but she knew that making health insurance available to the working poor wouldn’t help her, the working poor, to be able to afford health care.  Her passion about the subject was impressive, and still has me shaken up.

With people like her passionately hating the president for attempting to give her exactly what she needs, I wonder how there will be any consensus between people who label themselves republican and those who label themselves democrat.

Knowing History: Afghanistan

Ever read something about a period of history that made you wonder how you could have forgotten it? This Tapper piece, via Sullivan, reminds us about an important time in the history of Afghanistan. Key quotes……

This meme, in the hands of others in the Obama administration, has been in some ways a pushback against former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticisms of President Obama and his handling of foreign policy.

Not only is the current mess in Afghanistan due to the fact that the Bush-Cheney administration under-resourced the Afghanistan war, the argument goes, when Cheney was Defense Secretary for President George HW Bush from 1989 until 1993, the inaction of the Bush-Quayle administration helped open the door for the Taliban.

Tuesday night, President Obama referred to the Taliban as “a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war, and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere.”

And earlier that day, National Security Council chief of staff Denis McDonough said “if you go back to…the early 1990s when then Vice President Cheney was the Secretary of Defense, we made a very grave mistake when we walked away from Afghanistan and Pakistan.”…..

But for Secretary Gates, the mistake is a little more personal.

“I feel a certain sense of personal responsibility,” he testified before the House Armed Services Committee in December 2007.

“I was deputy director of CIA and then deputy national security advisor during the period when the Soviets did withdraw from Afghanistan, and the United States essentially turned its back on Afghanistan,” Gates said. “And five years later came the first attack on the World Trade Center. And so, you know, one of the lessons that I think we have is that if we abandon these countries, once we are in there and engaged, there is a very real possibility that we will pay a higher price in the end.”

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell says that Gates at the time was focused on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Warsaw Pact……

As George Crile, author of Charlie Wilson’s War, wrote, by 1990 “the Afghan freedom fighters had suddenly and frighteningly gone back to form, re-emerging as nothing more than feuding warlords obsessed with settling generations-old scores. The difference was that they were now armed with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons and explosives of every conceivable type….What now seems clear is that, under the umbrella of the CIA’s program, Afghanistan had become a gathering place for militant Muslims from around the world.”

Crile wrote that the presumption at the CIA “had been that when the United States packed its bags and cut off the Afghans, the jihad would simply burn itself out. If the Afghans insisted on killing one another, it would be a shame but not America’s problem. Perhaps that policy would have worked out had it been only weapons that we left behind. But the more dangerous legacy of the Afghan war is found in the minds and convictions of Muslims around the world. To them the miracle victory over the Soviets was all the work of Allah not the billions of dollars that America and Saudi Arabia poured into the battle, not the 10-year commitment of the CIA that turned an army of primitive tribesmen into technoholy warriors. The consequence for America of having waged a secret war and never acknowledging or advertising its role was that it set in motion the spirit of jihad and the belief in surrogate soldiers that, having brought down one superpower, they could just as easily take on another.”

This all paved the way for 9/11, Crile wrote.

“By the end of 1993, in Afghanistan itself there were no roads, no schools, just a destroyed country — and the United States was washing its hands of any responsibility,” wrote Crile. “It was in this vacuum that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden would emerge as the dominant players. It is ironic that a man who had almost nothing to do with the victory over the Red Army, Osama bin Laden, would come to personify the power of the jihad.”

Gates was publicly quiet during the debates about Afghanistan.

Press-Pool Britannia

A wounded British officer reading The Times’s report of the end of the Crimean war, in John Everett Millais‘ painting Peace Concluded. (Wikipedia)

Whether your chosen loci classici in the history of British journalism centre round the vast and stately, sand-grained graphics-free dispatches from the Crimea of Russell of THE TIMES, the more recent archetype from Private Eye of the raffish London journo as “Lunchtime O’Booze” (rum having long since joined cut-throat barbers among the set-piece Demons of Fleet Street), or Rupert Murdoch’s omelet-breaking of the Jurassic print unions at Wapping in 1986, you lack not for archival fodder after your taste in the digital age. From the postwar decades, two such items make today’s Media column from the London bureau of the Alexandria Blog Post:

Nicholas Lemann, Columbia J-school dean formerly of The Atlantic and Charlie Peters’ early Washington Monthly hothouse, reviews My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times by the mid-Atlantic editorial doyen Harold Evans, aka Mr. Tina “Mistress of Buzz” Brown, in The New Yorker this week:

At thirty-six, he was summoned to London and offered the job of managing editor of the Sunday Times. Not long afterward, the editor left and Evans got the job. Suddenly, he was being driven to work by a chauffeur (and also riding around London on a motorcycle), working in an office that looked “like an elegant drawing room,” and supervising a staff that was substantially made up of Oxford and Cambridge men, whose upper-class credentials and accents he describes almost obsessively, all these years later.

This was the great glorious time in Evans’s career, and the most glorious aspect of it was the work done by the paper’s “Insight” team: it included journalistic espionage (often directed at government spy agencies), quick-cycle history, scientific research (on topics like airline and drug safety), and the sort of campaigning that Evans had perfected in Darlington. The team memorably took on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the birth defects caused by Thalidomide and the lack of justice for its victims, the infestation of the British intelligence service by upper-crust spies, and wars and human-rights abuses around the world—all in the face of government restrictions on the press that were much more severe than in the United States, or in the United Kingdom today. The Sunday Times’ proprietor during most of this period, Roy Thomson, was, in Evans’s account, peculiar and inaccessible but also wholly supportive. Thalidomide was manufactured by a liquor company that was the Sunday Times’ largest advertiser. “You happy in your own mind, Harold?” was all Thomson said when Evans wanted to publish the diaries of a Cabinet minister despite government warnings that doing so might violate the Official Secrets Act.

All this was happening at roughly the same time as Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the early glories of magazine “new journalism” in the United States. Evans and the people he worked with were major contributors to a supercharged new conception of what journalism could be:

With a Link-All Help From Our ‘Little Friends’

Items from the last week shot into our firearms male-pouch, aka Gunny Sack,  by the “Lodge brothers” forming our long-running private email group of lawyers, writers, journalists, historians, musicians, booksellers, music-sellers, humorists and gun dealers (all of whom wear more than one [off-]white hat therein), whose fraternal briefs, of perpetually expanded waistband, center round firearms and the law, civil liberties, the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment, police and prosecutorial incompetence/misconduct, and the growth of the surveillance state:

Concealed-carry quietly in effect

Family Suing After Phoenix Cop Shoots Homeowner Instead of Intruder
Tony Arambula Was Shot Six Times After Calling 911 For Help

Gun ruling reversal tests domestic violence law

Martin Armstong – Forced to Move to a High Security Prison to Silence Him?

Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public

Goldman Staff Packing Pistols to Defend Against Peasants

Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times
A blogger has released audio of Sprint’s Electronic Surveillance Manager describing the carrier’s cooperation with law enforcement. Among the revelations are that Sprint has so far filled over 8 million requests from LEOs for customer GPS data.

Deputies to hold Phoenix ‘vigil’ for jailed officer

Free Market Increasing Health Care Costs

I believe that some degree of competition and transparency will help to bring down health care costs. However, if everyone in the health care field works to maximize profits, without some kinds of government oversight, costs are unlikely to decrease. It is too easy in medicine to artificially increase demand. It is also too easy to manipulate drug prices.…. Via Sullivan, Zachary Roth at TPM reports……..

Over the last few years, drug-makers have embraced a startlingly simple tactic for fending off competition from generic brands: paying them off. In a nutshell, the company that holds the patent on a profitable drug strikes a deal with the maker of the cheaper generic brand: you hold off on marketing your generic for several years, and in return, we’ll give you a share of our profits on the drug.

The vehicle for these deals is patent litigation. When a generic drug is approved to come to market, the maker of the more expensive name-brand drug sues the generic for patent infringement. But instead of a conventional settlement, in which the generic pays the patent-holder to settle the claim that it infringed the patent, the payment goes the other way: the patent-holder pays the maker of the generic, in exchange for a pledge to delay bringing the generic to market. That suggests the patent-holder fears its patent wouldn’t hold up in court, as many don’t. And it runs counter to the intent of the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984, which sought to speed the path of generics to market, and to provide a legal framework for these cases.

So common have these deals become lately that they’ve been given a name: pay-for-delay. The approach — a textbook anti-competitive tactic — is worth billions to drug-makers, because it essentially allows them to buy more protection than their patent confers.

That was made more or less explicit by Frank Baldino, the CEO of Cephalon, which makes the sleep-disorder drug Provigil. In a 2006 interview, Baldino trumpeted recent deals with four generic drug-makers that kept generic versions of Provigil off the market until 2012, declaring: “We were able to get six more years of patent protection. That’s $4 billion in sales that no one expected.

But pay-for-delay doesn’t work out nearly so well for consumers. Generics are sometimes priced as much as 80 or 90 percent cheaper than the name brands. For instance, the cholesterol drug Zocor costs $164 a month, while a generic version costs just $12 a month.

Let us say

Health care production & delivery vs. food production & delivery

Both have their roots in providence and become increasingly politically-economic from there.

Compare, contrast, discuss rights, responsibilities and realities as you are of a mind to.

Those without bread may enjoy cake in our Taberna.

H. M. Stuart

Alexandria

All Your Base Are Belong to ____

Rare photo of H.M. Stuart and DSL., c. 1975

As the Ted Baxter of Alexandria, and thus your QUIZZmaster (“Ted’s Moment of Glory“, Mary Tyler Moore), “we” ask with “our” accustomed self-inflation via l’editorial oui today’s Question of the Host with the Post, a heady foam-flecked draught pulled by your blogger with the lager…

Q. Name the one entity of of any status, private, public or nonprofit, serving via one-on-one paid business and/or consumer transactions a broader section of those presumed physically resident within the US and its territories (in explicitly inscribed enacted practice, not just in theoretical inclusion), citizen to alien to traveler, fetus to long-deceased, than any other.

After you work through such wannabe universalists as Wal-Mart, McDonalds, AT&T, TimeWarner, Subway, and the Social Security Administration, whose population-Hoovering requirements for service do indeed seldom exceed the possession and sporting of pants and feet soled extra-humanly, and after you realize all your rejected candidates, unlike the One True US Universalist, have each their tens of millions of abstaining rejectionists, your final words as you discover with forehead-slapping foam hand the correct answer may be, “But of course – it could not be otherwise.”

The commenter with the first correct answer may receive a(nother) lame joke themed after that answer, and our undying admiration.

Hint: the organization has both its walk-in and “drive-thru” aspects, under which latter it enacts its populational ubiquity most definitively.

A Green Economy?

Well, business and government leaders are milling around DC for the employment summit, posturing for the cameras and attempting to draft some missive from on high that will wave the magic wand and create jobs. Of course, it would help if they dirtied their Gucci loafers and actually circulated in the real economy to get a handle on how bad things really are, but that’s far too pragmatic for those whose thinking follows a priori mode: Create plans based on theoretical deductions, rather than empirical evidence, now and say “D’oh!” later.

The summit calls to mind Obama repeatedly talking up the formation of a green economy as the way to create jobs for the future. It sounds ideal, with job growth fueled by technologies that will lead us out of foreign-energy and fossil-fuel dependence. And Obama is still beating that drum.

But there’s one problem: Why does the Obama administration believe this research or manufacturing will be the sole province of the U.S.? Simply because some of the technologies may be developed here? What is stopping such jobs from migrating oversees once production is underway, like much of our manufacturing capacity? Or why is it assumed the U.S. is the only country capable of the research necessary to advance such technologies? Our meager levels of research and development spending is hardly an encouraging sign.

This New York Times report solidifies the above contentions: Taiwan Semiconductor will pursue the manufacture of solar panels. Another report states the Chinese are well on their way to surpassing U.S. solar panel production, forging ahead so hard they have succeeded in pushing the price of panels down by half.

What will likely unfold in terms of a green economy? A “green economy” will only become a partial realization in the U.S., just as the “service economy” and “technology economy” became partial realizations. The latest buzz words for a utopian economy may change, but their inability to address real problems remain intact. What is called for is thinking based on reality.

What is called for are leaders who own a pair of chore boots, not Gucci loafers.

Immaculate Conception

My mother-in-law has about fifteen Madonnas. My mother has little patience for the cult of Mary. While growing up Episcopalian and marrying into a Catholic family is in some ways like encountering a near twin of the faith I grew up in (especially if I look at the more liberal sides of each church), I’ve found Mariology a big difference.

Greetings to the Alexandria Community!

Greetings to the Alexandria community! And my thanks to H.M. for inviting me. I have been blogging about a variety of subjects for years — medical issues, politics, horses, music, personal ideas — but until a few days ago I was down to just one blog, on my business website, entitled AFMarCom: Watch me build this site! Now that I’ve joined Alexandria, I will repost some of those articles here, but I’ll write about other things as well.

H.M. just sent me a note encouraging me to submit my first post. He said, (I paraphrase,) Write about anything! Afghanistan! Social networking! Your adorable cat!

I don’t have an adorable cat, but I do have this:

Hippie-Cow

(Did I mention that I love photo blogging?)

Okay, you probably want to read something more useful than that, at least on a weekday, so below I am reposting my most popular AFMarCom blog to date. It’s a Thanksgiving vacation Twitter challenge for social networking newbies, but you can take the challenge even though Thanksgiving is past. Just call it the “first December weekend challenge.”

I look forward to reading my fellow authors and readers on Alexandria!

Angelique

——————————————-

Twitter Newbies: The Thanksgiving Vacation Challenge

At Thursday’s massive Networking Phoenix event I met dozens of people who have opened Twitter accounts but are not sure what to do with them. Some of these accounts lie dormant; some are only used for occasional press-release-type blurbs. In all cases the users are not getting any benefit from Twitter.

Are you one of these people? At least a few of you are, because you promised to follow me, and you did, and you have followed the link to this blog post. Now I will tell you how to use Twitter to learn lots of interesting things. These suggestions are easy and fun, so you should do them all next week and weekend.

“But Angelique!” you are saying, “Shouldn’t I be promoting my business using a magic Twitter application that will get me a thousand followers in seven days?” Trust me — everyone will be busy planning, creating, traveling to, eating and recovering from Thanksgiving dinner, after which they will be shopping, watching football, or complaining about shopping and football (gender depending) so you will not be missing any great “business opportunities.” What you have instead is Educational Opportunities, which are much better and will serve you well in the years to come.

(As for the magic Ronco Follower-o-Matic, the only person whose pockets it fills is the guy who wrote the app. The only thing it will do for you is magically turn you into That Guy — even if you’re a girl. Trust me — again: You do not want to be That Guy.)

Concept One: People in your industry or field are writing interesting and useful things about your industry or field. This especially true if you are a programmer, designer, photographer, writer, marketer or promoter. Use Twitter to find these people.

Step-by-Step How To:

1. In the right column of your Twitter profile, under the search box, there is a choice called “Lists.” Create a list with the name of your industry.

2. Go to the search box and type in the name of your industry or a buzzword associated with it, preceded by the “#” sign. On Twitter, this sign is called a “hashtag.” Examples: #opensource #design #photoshop #nanowrimo #ecommerce #marketing #b2b

3. The resulting list of tweets will offer you two things: Links to articles and links to the profiles of the people who have written or retweeted the articles. when you find someone whose articles you enjoy reading, or who passes on good information, or who just writes informative, funny or interesting tweets, follow that person and add that person to your new list.

4. Take your time and spend days doing this. There is no need to rush; none of these people are going anywhere.

5. Remember to share information you think is good. It doesn’t matter if you only have a few followers; it’s good practice, the people whose info you are sharing may decide to follow you back, and you may get into a conversation with them. How to share? Here’s an example: “RT @afmarcom From my blog:

Concept Two: You can learn a lot about social networking, blogging and image-making from the zillions of “experts” on Twitter. Caveat: There’s a reason I put “experts” in quotation marks.

Step-by-Step How To:

1. Make a list called something like “Social Networking.”

2. Follow these people: @unmarketing, @chrisguillebeau, @gwenbell, @ryanrancatore, @johnfmoore, @bradrourke and @snipeyhead. Oh, and @afmarcom.

Note: @Snipeyhead is foul-mouthed and rude. She is also your best guide to avoid turning into That Guy.

3. Use the #socialmedia, #smm, #personalbranding, #marketing, #twitterhelp and #newbie hashtags to start your own search.

Have fun, and Happy Thanksgiving!

[shortlink: http://wp.me/paweu-419]

Larry and Sergey’s Big Ad Venture

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
Sergey Brin, left, and Larry Page at Google Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. in Sept. 2008

Nicholson Baker in the NYTBR on Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta:

One unnamed “prominent media executive” leaned toward Auletta at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist Conference and whispered a rhetorical question in his ear: What real value, he wanted to know, was Google producing for society?

Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google’s movie showtimes, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google Translate? Have you not made interesting recherché 19th-century discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of awed delight the first time you saw the planet begin to turn and loom closer in Google Earth? Are you not signed up for automatic Google News alerts on several topics? I would be very surprised if you are not signed up for a Google alert or two.

Surely no other software company has built a cluster of products that are anywhere near as cleverly engineered, as quick-loading and as fun to fiddle with, as Google has, all for free. Have you not searched?

Because, let me tell you, I remember the old days, the antegoogluvian era. It was O.K. — it wasn’t horrible by any means. There were cordless telephones, and people wore comfortable sweaters. There was AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves, and HotBot, and Excite, and Infoseek, and Northern Light — with its deep results and its elegant floating schooner logo — and if you wanted to drag through several oceans at once, there was MetaCrawler. But the haul was haphazard, and it came in slow. You chewed your peanut-butter cracker, waiting for the screen to fill.

Then Google arrived in 1998,

‘Afghanistan: The Betrayal’

US soldiers at the Camp Phoenix base observing a moment of silence during Barack Obama’s inauguration, Kabul, January 20, 2009 (Musadeq Sadeq/AP Images)

I did not think he would lose me so soon—sooner than Bill Clinton did. Like many people, I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president. I had written op-ed pieces and articles to support him in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. My wife and I had maxed out in donations for him. Our children had been ardent for his cause…

…I cannot vote for any Republican. But Obama will not get another penny from me, or another word of praise, after this betrayal. And in all this I know that my disappointment does not matter. What really matters are the lives of the young men and women he is sending off to senseless deaths. – Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books blog.

(h/t: The American Conservative)

Strange Drops Keep Falling Off My Bread, or, Smörgåswhord

Much like the laughing Butch Cassidy reminded Sundance that the latter’s absent prowess in swimming was as nothing compared to the force of their imminent vertiginous plunge into the river, Jacob Sullum reminds us, in “Orgies for the Masses” in reason, that since it’s not the sex that’ll kill you, it’s the food, always practice safe snacks and use a condiment – otherwise you’re eating every other tomato your meat’s ever been with in a swing-club sandwich:

Early in American Swing, a 2008 documentary about the Manhattan sex club Plato’s Retreat, screenwriter and actor Buck Henry recalls the “free, third-rate buffet, which I always considered tempting but dangerous.”

Medical Insurance: Shop For, Not Shop-Floor

tip: The American Conservative – “Neither side in the current healthcare debate is tackling the inefficiency of employer-based insurance coverage. Jacob Sullum argues that replacing benefits with cash pay would be a major cost-saving incentive.”

The Consumer Is Not the Customer
Both parties promise to preserve one of the central problems of the health care system

Jacob Sullum from the December 2009 issue of reason

The other day, I was trying to figure out why the paycheck deduction for my health insurance was higher than I had expected. When I called my insurer to ask what the total premium was, the customer service representative said it was none of my business.

Three-fifths of Americans, the share with employer-provided health insurance, are in the same situation. Since someone else buys insurance for them, using money they would otherwise receive as wages, they are in no position to shop around and typically do not know the true cost of their coverage. This disconnect between payment and consumption is one of the central problems with the health care system, contributing to insecurity, rapidly escalating costs, and the general lack of choice and competition. Yet both Democrats and Republicans insist on preserving it.

Outlining his reforms in September, President Obama reassured the public that “nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage…you have.” In fact, he said employers should be forced to provide health insurance (or contribute to a fund that subsidizes premiums). Obama presented himself as the protector of job-based medical coverage against those “on the right” who “argue that we should end employer-based systems and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.” That approach, he warned, represents “a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have.”

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Paying Down Our Debt

Jeff Frankel has written down his ideas on starting us down the path toward retiring our debt. They sound doable and mostly make sense. We are going to have to make trade-offs and no one will be entirely happy, but we have to start somewhere.

Support President Obama and Our Troops

There was probably no way that President Obama could have simply pulled out of Afghanistan. It’s not just that he’s been saying for a couple of years that Afghanistan is where we should have been fighting, as opposed to Iraq, where we should not have been. He said during the campaign last year that it was important to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. The same is true of Afghanistan, only it is an even more tangled tale.

We went into Afghanistan in pursuit of a rather small outfit that had actually caused us some damage: around 3000 people killed on one day, four planes hijacked, two or three buildings destroyed, all planned and financed from outside of the United States. It was a quick and smooth invasion, and most of the Americans cheering didn’t notice why. We didn’t have to send many troops in, at first. On the northern fringe of Afghanistan was a battle-tested army of 30-year combat veterans, avowed enemies of the Taliban who ruled the rest of the country. They knew the terrain, they knew the culture. All they needed was a nice superpower to give them a supply of ammunition, some tactical air cover, and a little bit of on-the-ground operational support.

Once the operation was underway, they knew how this game plays out in Afghanistan. When the in group appears to be losing, and an out group appears to be winning, all the little feudal lords and tribal leaders flip over to he winning side, the momentum builds, and its all over. Our sudden allies of convenience knew how to flip. Locally, a lot of the same people remained in charge. Now if we had a smart president with a smart cabinet and a smart secretary of defense, the United States would have done the maximum damage to al Qaeda, then told our friends, “Thanks guys, glad we could help each other out,” and left the country. It would have been a good opportunity to declare “Mission Accomplished.”

But that’s not what the USA did, and a new president has to work with what did happen, not with what should have happened. There is no way to go back and replay it. First we played with installing a democratic government, in a land where if voting occurs at all, each tribal chief tells their people how to vote, and they do so. Let’s face it, elections are a show put on to keep the American money flowing. Somehow, the military force that did most of our fighting on the ground for us disintegrated, in favor of a corrupt “democratic” government that didn’t have much of an army of its own. We inspired a “police force” in a country that never had one, which was paid so little that of course the officers all turned to graft. The government we are there to sustain made the usual deals, made the usual enemies, and disillusioned the usual number of civilians. Afghans don’t have a government that would inspire much of anyone to risk their life or die for it. That’s why “the Afghan army” is never ready to take over from the Americans.

But a few good things happened. People genuinely disliked the style of Taliban rule. Being able to play music and send girls to school and shave off their beards was a relief. On the other hand, the Taliban were popular when they first came to power, because they suppressed a bunch of warlords who were looting and raping at will. So, the warlords are back, and the Taliban are starting to look good. But, people don’t really want them back in power. But they don’t like the government. So, if we pull out, the Taliban will be back, the women will be locked up in the house, and people will feel that the Americans got their hopes up, then abandoned them.

Besides, there is always the possibility of al Qaeda getting its hands on a few of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. We can’t really expect Pakistan to fight the Taliban, who are now on both sides of the border, if the Americans don’t keep their soldiers on the ground. So we are kind of stuck with the situation, at least for now. George W. Bush was right that we can’t do nation-building, but he tried it anyway, and its not working. We can’t leave a free and democratic Afghanistan, no matter what we do. In fact, we might have been better off leaving it under the semi-communist government it had thirty years ago. George Bush’s terrorist was Ronald Reagan’s freedom fighter. But that is all water under the bridge too.

Even though we can’t do nation building, we can’t fight the Taliban without building some real support in the civilian population, if only to deny them to the Taliban as a base. If General McChrystal has a half-way decent plan, we will be more popular in a lot of local communities than the government in Kabul. Hopefully, we won’t worry much about the government in Kabul. We aren’t there to sustain it, we are there to dismantle as much of al Qaeda as we can, and as much of the Taliban as we can, keep Pakistan out of the hands of both, and pull out without really hard feelings if we can help it.

The best thing the United States did in Iraq was to form alliances with Sunni tribes who were sick of al Qaeda, even though they don’t trust, and are not trusted by, the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. We may end up in Afghanistan strengthening a network of local tribes and communities that like us better than the government in Kabul, but can outfight the Taliban when we leave. We’re going to have to leave. Nobody in America has the stomach to keep armies in Afghanistan indefinitely. The Taliban and al Qaeda know that, and they are banking on it. That might be OK, as long as they aren’t in a position to do real damage to us once we’re gone. We’re not going to leave behind a liberal democracy. If we’re lucky, we’ll leave a stable balance of forces that isn’t going to be upset too quickly once we’re gone.

Towed to Surfdom by F., a Kayak

Julia Cumes for The New York Times
Dave Lamoureux fishes for bluefin tuna from his kayak in Massachusetts.

Sports

Catching Tuna and Hanging On for the Ride

By CHARLES McGRATH

Dave Lamoureux is part of a small subset of kayak fishermen, and his most recent catch, a 157-pound bluefin tuna, is one of the sport’s greatest recorded feats.

YARMOUTH, Mass. — Dave Lamoureux’s kayak, named Fortitude, must be the only one in Massachusetts registered as a motor vessel. That’s because a powerboat registration is required to get a permit to fish for tuna here.

Apparently, it never occurred to the authorities that someone might be crazy enough to want to catch a bluefin while sitting in what amounts to a floating plastic chair and enjoying what Melville called a “Nantucket sleigh ride.”

Since the end of July, Lamoureux has caught three bluefins this way, paddling a couple of miles off Race Point, at the tip of Provincetown, hooking a tuna and holding on, the rod clipped to a harness on his chest, while being towed at speeds up to 15 miles an hour before the fish exhausts itself.

His most recent catch, on Nov. 5, was a 157-pound bluefin, a record tuna for an unassisted kayak fisherman, and a near record over all, topped only by a 183-pound halibut caught by Howard McKim, an Alaskan, in 2004. Reeling in a halibut, though, has been likened to hauling in a load of plywood, and some of Lamoureux’s admirers consider landing a bluefin, known for its power and ferocity, the greater feat. He is a hero at bait shops up and down Cape Cod. On fishing blogs, a few grumblers call him a dangerous idiot.

Until about 10 years ago most kayak fishermen knew each other by name. Lately the sport has enjoyed a growth spurt, but it is still not recognized by the International Game Fish Association, the official record keeper for saltwater anglers. So kayakers keep their records informally and on Internet forums. There is an honor system. Some kayakers allow themselves to be towed out and back by a mother ship.

Lamoureux’s record required paddling alone and bringing the fish into shore.

Lamoureux is 42 and friendly, with a big smile and a ready laugh, and lives most of the year in Chicago, where he is a futures and options trader. He also has a place in Boston and access to his parents’ summer home here.

“My personality — I trend toward risk and danger,” he said last week, explaining that he used to rock climb and do extreme skiing.

But kayak fishing entailed “measured risk, not being-crazy risk,” he added, and compared it to trading. “Being a trader, you like risk. You’re comfortable with it. You have to weigh the reward versus the other side, which in this case is your life.”

Lamoureux’s 12-foot Heritage FeatherLite isn’t even a fishing kayak.

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