Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

But There's No Racism in the Tea Party

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

Lost in the whole Shirley Sherrod debacle was the impetus for Breitbart’s smear — the NAACP’s decision to call out the teabaggers for their unwillingness to disavow racism. The Sharrod smear was a desperate attempt to prove members of the NAACP were the real racists, that the tea party was free of racism, despite the strong evidence that Mark Williams had presented to the contrary.

Well, in further proof that the tea party is free of racism, let me introduce you to Tea Party Comix,whose imagery really speaks for itself.

Yes, the image of a horrible caricature of a black judge (meant to be Obama, natch) threatening Batman with a trial before a jury of twelve “angry black commies” is pretty much racism defined — so much so that the Tea Party’s response to the comics was to declare that they just had to be a liberal plot, because, uh…look over there!

Well, it turns out that the artist behind Tea Party Comix has come forward. He’s a real member of the tea party movement. He really hates Obama. And he admits he’s a racist.

Kidding! Well, not about the tea party and the hating Obama:

The creator of the now-infamous “Tea Party Comix” has spoken. The response, sent to Comics With Problems’ Ethan Persoff last week, ends speculation by some that the black-and-white comics featuring a racist caricature of President Obama might be a liberal parody gone wrong (or just misunderstood). In the rambling email sent early Thursday morning, the unnamed creator of the comics (the name was withheld by Persoff) suggests that they were created out of anger at Obama, but — according to the creator — not out of any intention to make a racial statement.

“I do not understand the connection with ‘big ears’ and ‘racism’, and I do not understand how a ‘dark face’ implies racism,” the creator of the comics wrote to Persoff. “The accusation of ‘Hate’ is true, but it is the hate of an IDEOLGY [sic], not a of race of people….. I understand that the ideology has captured 80 or 90% of the race(s) in question, but it is STILL a AN IDEOLOGY and NOT a “race” that this comic book attacks.”

You know, I think I liked the racists better when they’d just admit to being racist. I mean, at least then you could argue against them. But nobody’s racist anymore. Whether they’re running a Klan-themed bar that suggests Obama’s plan for health care is to “N—-r rig it,” or making an image of Obama as a witch doctor, or suggesting that “coloreds” want slavery to be reestablished, the racists are never, never racist anymore. They believe that all people are equal. It’s just that black people happen to be savage, lazy, dice-throwing, jive-dancing, welfare-cheating scum. But they don’t hate black people. No no no! Indeed, it’s you who are the real racists for suggesting such a thing.

The problem is that the racism is getting more and more overt, to the point where it’s not so much a dog whistle as a foghorn. An organization with decency would recognize this obvious fact, would strongly disavow racism, would work against it. The tea party will not. But don’t call them racist. You’re the racist, for thinking that that racists are racist.

Posted in Race, racism and related issues | 3 Comments

Convenient Double Standard on Drug Use

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Guest Writer

(This post by Kevin Keith is crossposted, with Kevin’s kind permission, from Sufficient Scruples.)

USAToday reports a study of the high rate of suicide and drug-related deaths in the military. The report concludes that such deaths have increased because soldiers, particularly during wartime, are “inclined toward risky personal behavior”.

After nine years of war, the Army attracts recruits ready for combat but inclined toward risky personal behavior — a volatile mix that led to more deaths from suicide, drug overdoses and drinking and driving than from warfare, an Army review concludes. “Simply stated, we are often more dangerous to ourselves than the enemy,” says the 15-month study, released Thursday.

Commanders have failed to identify and monitor soldiers prone to risk-taking behavior, the report says. As a result, suicides among soldiers have soared. . . .

Many recruits join the Army knowing they will be sent to combat, so they may “even be more comfortable accepting high levels of risk and uncertainty in their lives,” the report says. . . .

Chiarelli commissioned the review 15 months ago as the Army suicide rate exceeded that for civilians. The study says poor command decisions helped contribute to a record 160 suicides by active-duty soldiers last year and an additional 146 deaths resulted from risky behavior such as drug or prescription medication abuse. Seventy-four of those deaths were overdoses.

Randall McElroy III, at The Distributed Republic, has a useful comment:

Internal investigations by government agencies always seem to turn out this way. It’s not the multiple deployments, the stress of fighting in a conflict where you can’t tell who wants to kill you until they’re doing it, the moral burden of shooting at innocent people, the vagueness of the goals of the conflict, or any of that. In other words, it’s not the essential part of what soldiers do these days.

It’s that, for some reason, without any causes, soldiers are engaging in risky behavior, and their commanders are just too darn earnest about prosecuting the war to notice.

However, I wanted to note the way drug- and alcohol-related deaths are handled in this story.

Half of all such deaths in this study, and a quarter of all “risky behavior” deaths for last year, were caused by drug overdoses. Soldiers are taking illegal drugs and dying from them, at higher rates than among civilians. Had these been civilian deaths, the narrative would have been simple: junkies OD and die. Surely far more than 74 civilians fatally ODed last year (though the per-capita rate is still lower); you don’t see many stories about this growing menace. What you certainly don’t see are civilian drug users characterized as “risk takers” or “comfortable accepting high levels of risk and uncertainty in their lives”. Convulsing to death with a crack pipe in your hand, if you’re a soldier, however, is apparently something like fastroping into a hot LZ or charging a machine-gun with a bayonet – the sort of thing those gung-ho heroes do because, you know, they just can’t help being so macho.

I wouldn’t mind this so much, if it were in any way honest. Identifying psychological factors that contribute to drug-taking, in fact, is a welcome step forward (even if slightly implausible in this case; chalking drug use up to simply being “prone to risk-taking behavior” is not only vague and one-dimensional, but even in some way circular). If the government were to take its own treatment of this issue seriously, and begin to sincerely probe the psychological and circumstantial factors that lead some people to drugs, we might be able to approach the issue of drug use in a more rational and realistic way. But of course that’s not what is being done here.

Characterizing drug-using soldiers as “risk-takers” is simply assigning a convenient euphemism to behavior, and its tragic consequences, that are relentlessly condemned in other circumstances. This is convenient in several ways: as McElroy notes, it lets the military off the hook for putting these soldiers under the stresses that, indirectly, killed them; it also preserves the unchallengeably heroic facade that the military is allowed to hide behind in all circumstances; and it gives these soldiers a pass on the judgmentalism that otherwise greets mental illness or drug use. Even outright suicide is treated as “risk-taking” – an absurd circumlocution that neatly obviates the inquiries into soldiers’ mental states, and the effect that military service has on them, that would otherwise be inevitable. In this way, behavior that would certainly be categorized as pathological, illegal, and disreputable in anyone else is folded into the military’s self-assumed and deliberately promoted ethos of heroism and rugged virtue.

Nobody is going to go on from here and say “Hey, you know, civilians also experience stress, self-medicate to deal with it, and exhibit a range of coping mechanisms influenced by their own psychology and their propensity for risk-taking. Maybe we should lighten up on the moralistic rhetoric about drugs and start recognizing the real-world factors that influence behavior, so we can respond more sympathetically and effectively. Maybe some proactive interventions with people at risk would help them out. Maybe our leaders have a responsibility to create better living conditions and offer better interventions to people at risk to help prevent self-destructive behaviors ahead of time, rather than sending millions of people to jail for being heroic, macho, rugged risk-takers.” Because the people who are painting military junkies and suicide cases as heroic, combat-ready risk-takers don’t really believe that and don’t really give a shit about people’s problems, in or especially out of the military. They certainly have no investment in being accurate, honest, realistic, or sympathetic about stress, pathology, and self-destructive behavior. Sugar-coating America’s Heroes to sweep a military-related drug problem under the rug avoids dealing with drugs realistically in any venue – which is the one thing any of our drug programs can never do.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, In the news | Comments Off

xkcd: Athiests

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Ampersand

From xkcd; via Blag Hag.

Transcript:
Man: “Personally, I find atheists just as annoying as fundamentalist Christians.”
Woman: “Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.”

Posted in Anti-atheism, Atheism, Cartooning & comics, crossposted on TADA | 3 Comments

No, Ms Magazine Never “Hired” Mary Koss

Posted on July 31, 2010 by Ampersand

(This post is available on both “Alas” and “TADA.” No anti-feminists ((Including MRAs and including the folks from the “feminist critics” blog. )) in the comments on “Alas,” please.)

On Yahoo Answers, I stumbled across this, which was part of a lengthy anti-feminist rant:

As most of us on here already know, the famous “1 in 4 women will be raped” claim is false. This comes from a study conducted by Ms. Magazine. They hired psychologist Mary Koss to direct the study. No scientific or scholarly organization was associated with the study.

I wrote a response, but before I could post it, the question I was responding to was deleted — presumably because it wasn’t really a question so much as an editorial.

But since it’s frustrating to write a response and then not be able to post it… well, what else is a blog for?

1. Koss’ study found that 1 in 4 college women surveyed have experienced rape and/or attempted rape at some point in their life. Not that “1 in 4 women will be raped.”

2. Koss designed her survey independently of Ms Magazine, and published a non-national version of the study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1982. (( “Sexual experiences survey: A research instrument investigating sexual aggression and victimization.” The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology v.50, p. 455-457. 1982. )) This was three years before Ms. Magazine became involved. Ms. Magazine first became associated with the study in 1985, when they published an article about Koss’ work.

In 1986, Ms. Magazine donated office support to help make a national version of Koss’ already-existing methodology possible. In 1988, Ms published a book, I Never Called It Rape, reporting on Koss’ findings. And that is the extent of Ms’ involvement. Ms Magazine never “hired” Mary Koss. Koss was neither employed nor paid by Ms Magazine at any point.

3. Koss’ work was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)., not by Ms. Magazine. The NIMH approved of the entire design of the study, including Ms Magazine’s participation (which was strictly limited to office support). The study was then put through the peer-review process before being published in a scientific journal (The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology v 55 (2) p. 162-170, 1987). So your claim that “No scientific or scholarly organization was associated with the study” is inaccurate.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Mary Koss controversy | 5 Comments

A Meta-Fictional Diptych Relating to the Stories “Appoggiatura” and “Fixing Hanover”

Posted on July 31, 2010 by Mandolin

Last month, Matt Cheney emailed me to let me know that he was putting together a celebration of Jeff VanderMeer’s new collection, Third Bear. He asked a number of writers and critics if we would each write about two stories from Jeff’s collection sometime in July. You can visit this site to see the rest of the carnival.

“Sure,” I said, “but my July is busy. It might be late in July.” Matt assured me that was okay, and here I am, as promised, at the very last minute.

Matt told us we could write however we wished about Jeff’s stories. In this case, I felt fan fiction would be the sincerest form of flattery.*

A Meta-Fictional Diptych Relating to the Stories “Appoggiatura” and “Fixing Hanover”

by Rachel Swirsky

I. Rebecca

Rebecca Salt, age fourteen, daughter of divorced middle class Jews from Long Island, was tired of being a Speller. She could still remember how things had felt before she got competitive, when Spelling was still a pleasure, when she had a sort of palpable sense of the l-u-x-u-r-i-a-n-c-e** of words and letters. She’d heard the symmetry between alphabet and language as a kind of ringing d-u-l-c-i-m-e-r, intricate and melodious. Sometimes the joy she took in words felt a-u-t-o-c-h-t-h-o-n-o-u-s, seeming to rise up in her from some ineffable, otherworldly source.

Six years into the rote of shuffling flash cards in every free moment, gasping out words as she ran out the door to school, eschewing the playground to snatch more time at recess and lunch, her evenings collapsing into a formless mass of homework seeping into study… well, six years into it she found herself waxing e-l-e-g-i-a-c about the days when words had seemed to sing and spin. It seemed almost s-a-c-r-i-l-e-g-i-o-u-s to admit it, but she regretted the k-n-a-c-k for words that had bound her to this labor.

Until she discovered s-m-a-r-a-g-d-i-n-e.
Continue reading →

Posted in Mandolin's fiction & poems | 3 Comments

Upgrading "Alas"

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Ampersand

I’ve decided to upgrade “Alas” to the current version of WordPress. (Much more secure that way).

Unfortunately, doing so has inevitably broken lots of stuff and it’ll take me a while to fix said stuff. Like, er, the recent comments thingy in the sidebar. Thanks in advance for being patient while I figure this stuff out.

UPDATE: Yeah, the whole blog looks like crap. It’ll get better, right? Of course right. Now go have some cookies and milk and go to bed.

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff | 29 Comments

"Men's Books" Don't Sell

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Working on the “Fragments of Evolving Manhood” series has pretty much convinced me that I want to give the book on manhood and masculinity that I started writing in the 1980s another try. It will be, obviously, a very different book than the one I was working on back then, if only because I am twenty years older and so my view of the overall subject and of the material I already have written will be correspondingly different; but the idea of the book itself, a series of personal, literary essays that explore, from a feminist perspective, in intimate detail, a man’s experience of manhood, remains compelling to me. As far as I know, there was no book like it on the market twenty years ago; and, as far as I know, there is no book like it on the market now; and I think we need such a book. (Whether or not the book I want to write will ultimately prove to be that book is a question that is not for me to answer; I just know that I want to try.)

I have also decided that, just like I did the first time around, I want to try to find an agent to help me sell the book. In preparation for going through that process again, I recently read through all the correspondence I have saved from the agents and editors who read my proposal during the six years that I or my agent–because I did have one for a brief time–were trying to sell the manuscript. It’s been an instructive experience, both encouraging, because of all the seriously supportive things people had to say about my work, and discouraging, because with very rare exceptions everyone’s bottom line response expressed, more or less, the same sentiment expressed in the title of this post.

I don’t remember what I felt receiving these responses back then, but reading them now, it’s hard for me not to feel that all the people who wrote to me or my agent had gone to the same committee meeting, where they’d all been given the same instructions for how to respond to proposals like mine. My point is not that any of these agents or editors were being dishonest or insincere. Rather, the consistency of their responses suggests to me that the state of the market was indeed as they described it, though I did find one agent who was willing take a chance on me. Hers was the second response I received in 1994, when I first started sending the proposal out. The first one, though, turned out to be the prophetic one:

This is a good piece of work you’ve sent me and one that well deserves to find its way into publication. But unfortunately I am already involved with one men’s issues book which I will admit to having trouble with so rather than take on something else which is a bit competitive I think I’d best concentrate my efforts and wish you the best of luck in your pursuits.

I don’t have anymore the acceptance letter I received from the woman who became my agent, but I do have some of the responses she received from editors. The first was from Pocket Books:

It’s a powerful, unrestrained, philosophically intriguing and potentially controversial examination of the issues of male socialization and sexuality. As intriguing as it is, however, it doesn’t quite have the huge commercial potential that would make it right for Pocket Hardcover.

The second response was from Putnam. “The book is strong stuff. Ether you like it or you don’t, and although I am interested in the ideas, there is no chance that this would succeed at Putnam.” The letter did not say specifically why, but in context, it was clear that the reason was the editor’s lack of confidence in the book’s commercial potential. Basic Books had a similar response, “I read portions of the material with great interest. Newman is a good writer and this is an interesting subject. However, I am skeptical about the commercial prospects of such a work.” Finally, after a year without success, without even so much as a nibble, my agent gave up. She, after all, had a business to run. This is what she wrote me:

The men’s books I’ve worked on this year have been met with nothing but resistance and “there is not market” and “all the men’s books, even Bly [Iron John] and Keane [Fire in the Belly] did not do well.” I think it is therefore wise for me to stick with what publishers know me for, that is books about and for and by women.

To hear over and over again how compelling the sample chapters were and how timely the topic was only to be told, Sorry, no. We just don’t think the book will sell, was not only frustrating; it was also confusing. I was perfectly willing, within limits, to revise the book to make it more commercially viable, but no one seemed interested in even asking me to try. So, to give myself some distance and the opportunity to look at it again with fresh eyes, I put the proposal away for about six months and devoted my time to working on other projects. Then I revised it, developed a new list of agents and editors to try and started sending the proposal out again. The answers I received were tellingly similar to those I’d received during the previous year.

One agent who responded positively asked me to make some changes, which I did, but even after revising the sample chapter in the way I was asked to, this is the response I received:

Reading over the revised proposal that was sent to our office, which was careful and respectful of our comments, I was quite impressed. However, upon a second reading, it became clearer to me that we are not the right agency to represent a book like yours. One of the aspects of your chapters that I admire the most, the intelligent linking of pivotal autobiographical moments to major currents of thought and important thinkers, is what makes them inaccessible to the kind of audience that publishers we normally work with cater to.

I appreciated this agent’s honesty, of course, and I appreciated as well the way in which the changes he asked for improved the proposal overall, but I still did not have a publisher and his comments about audience depressed me, since I began to wonder if all of the publishers the proposal had been sent to catered to the same kind of audience. Another agent confirmed this for me when she wrote, “It is a rich blend of personal, philosophical, and political elements, but I ultimately came away from it deciding it didn’t work for me. As others have told you…the blend of elements I’ve just mentioned also makes it more analytical and academic than what most larger publishers are looking for.” She then went on to suggest that I try smaller presses or university presses, where I could submit an unagented manuscript without a problem.

I had decided after my agent dropped me that I would be perfectly happy to publish with such a press, and I had a list of potential publishers ready to go. So, in 1998, I gave up searching for an agent and started sending the proposal to small and university presses. The first response I received was from Indiana University Press. “Although the project looks very interesting and exciting, I do not feel that your…book fits in with our current list. You might want to try a commercial publisher.”

The small presses to which I sent the proposal were either otherwise committed or not interested in the book because they didn’t think it fit their list. Then, with a referral by someone with some influence, I submitted the proposal to Temple University Press, and the editor liked the proposal enough that he sent it out for anonymous review. This is how university presses vet the projects that are sent to them. Academics in the field read the proposal and make recommendations to the press about whether they think the manuscript ought to be published. There were either two or three reviews of my proposal, I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember that, in addition to the very positive one of which I still have a copy, there was a completely negative one that I wish I had saved.

The man who wrote the negative review rejected completely the entire premise of the project, since I was not calling for the end of manhood, the end of gender. The man who wrote the positive review, on the other hand, not only had some wonderful critiques and suggestions for how to make the manuscript better; he also completely got what I was trying to do:

This is an attempt to harness the current memoir craze to politically correct effect–that is to write the memoirs of a profeminist man. To my knowledge this is a first. I think that the market is ready for a male confessional that specifies the ways in which “typical” male socialization involves coercion, brutality, and a significant amount of pain–without ever losing sight of the larger issues of privilege and patriarchy.

Unfortunately, because the reviews of my project were so mixed, Temple’s editor did not feel he would be able to persuade his board to publish the book and that, near the end of 1999, turned out to be the last straw. I just did not have the strength to go back into the material one more time to figure out how to revise the sample chapter and the proposal, and so I decided the market was simply closed against me. I put everything into a folder and turned my attention to writing poetry, where, as it turned out, I had a good deal more luck getting published. The Silence of Men, which deals in verse with a lot of the same ideas I was writing about in Evolving Manhood, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2004, and I became as well a translator of classical Persian poetry. So far, I have published two books of my own and one as a co-translator.

It has been more than ten years since I set Evolving Manhood aside, and, as I said above, I am ready to try again to publish it. My own sense is that the book will sell, but that it is more likely to sell by word of mouth than anything else, which would seem to make it a perfect fit for a small press, and I will try small presses again. I want first, however, to try one more time to find an agent. Obviously, there are advantages to me as a writer, financial and otherwise, if I do and he or she can sell the book; but I also like the way the process of finding an agent forces me to be at the top of my game in terms of the sample chapter(s) I submit and in the way I articulate what I have to say in the book proposal. It is a lot of work, and, frankly, the possibility for a greater financial return that exists with an agent helps to make all that work worthwhile, even if, in the end, I don’t get an agent and the press that publishes the book is too small to be worth an agent’s while.

Wish me luck!

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected

Posted in literature | 33 Comments

What Is Good Health Care When We're Dying?

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Ampersand

(Crossposted on “Alas” and on “TADA.”)

In The New Yorker, Atul Gawande has an excellent article on how the American health care system treats dying patients.

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

Gawande ends up strongly favoring hospice care.

The difference between standard medical care and hospice is not the difference between treating and doing nothing, she explained. The difference was in your priorities. In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We’ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now—by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care—for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now. That means focussing on objectives like freedom from pain and discomfort, or maintaining mental awareness for as long as possible, or getting out with family once in a while. Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren’t much concerned about whether that makes people’s lives longer or shorter.

Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Curiously, hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months.

In our current system, patients typically have to choose between attempting to cure their problems, or explicitly admitting that they’re going to die and choosing hospice care. Interestingly, giving patients the option of doing both — that is, both having home hospice care and allowing patients to pursue all the curative treatment they want — saved money.

So Aetna decided to let a group of policyholders with a life expectancy of less than a year receive hospice services without forgoing other treatments. A patient like Sara Monopoli could continue to try chemotherapy and radiation, and go to the hospital when she wished—but also have a hospice team at home focussing on what she needed for the best possible life now and for that morning when she might wake up unable to breathe. A two-year study of this “concurrent care” program found that enrolled patients were much more likely to use hospice: the figure leaped from twenty-six per cent to seventy per cent. That was no surprise, since they weren’t forced to give up anything. The surprising result was that they did give up things. They visited the emergency room almost half as often as the control patients did. Their use of hospitals and I.C.U.s dropped by more than two-thirds. Over-all costs fell by almost a quarter.

The point isn’t that saving money is all that matters. The point is that these patients got more choices, better care, and better quality of life, and it didn’t cost the system — or the patients — anything extra. Why isn’t that exciting news? Why aren’t insurance companies, and legislators, running to make this the standard treatment?

According to Gawande, a lot of the problem with our system is that many or most patients die without ever having an explicit, in-depth conversation with their doctors about the possibility of dying, and how they’d prefer to die. Just talking, Gawande argues, can make an enormous difference.

Aetna ran a more modest concurrent-care program for a broader group of terminally ill patients. For these patients, the traditional hospice rules applied—in order to qualify for home hospice, they had to give up attempts at curative treatment. But, either way, they received phone calls from palliative-care nurses who offered to check in regularly and help them find services for anything from pain control to making out a living will. For these patients, too, hospice enrollment jumped to seventy per cent, and their use of hospital services dropped sharply. Among elderly patients, use of intensive-care units fell by more than eighty-five per cent. Satisfaction scores went way up. What was going on here? The program’s leaders had the impression that they had simply given patients someone experienced and knowledgeable to talk to about their daily needs. And somehow that was enough—just talking.

But our system isn’t set up to encourage doctors and patients to have these conversations; it’s set up to fight to the last bitter breath. And even providing funding to pay for health care to include having conversations about dying well is fraught with difficulties, as Democrats found out last year when they had to back away from sensible, humane policies that conservatives labeled “death panels.”

This is a case that should be low-hanging fruit. Reforming the way the US health care system treats dying patients is something that could give patients more choices, let some patients live longer, let many patients live better, and save everyone money.

But is our health care system — and our political system — capable of grabbing even the low-hanging fruit? I don’t know. But it should be possible.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Health Care and Related Issues | 12 Comments

Hereville is a "staff pick" in Previews! Plus, please tell your local comic book shop about Hereville.

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Ampersand

Previews, for those of you who don’t know, is the monthly catalog of available comics sent to comic book stores all over the USA (and I think Canada as well?). Each month is a huge, glossy brick of more comic books than anyone could ever read — so it’s easy for a new and unknown comic to get lost.

(Unless, of course, people like you call your local comic book store and ask them to carry Hereville. Hint, hint.)

So I’m relieved and thrilled that in the August issue, Hereville will be one of seven “Staff Picks.” Woo!

Here’s what Kate Henning wrote in her review of Hereville:

Witches, trolls, talking pigs, and knitting lessons — yup, Hereville brings the goods. With its heroine growing up in a blended family, an orthodox Jewish community, and a rich fantasy world, there are a few different gimmicks this book could lean on, but Deutsch neatly balances these elements rather than belaboring them, making for a fun and endearing story.

Eleven year-old Mirka Hirschberg is a sympathetic, dynamic protagonist who will appeal to fans of Raina Telgemeier’s Smile, Jone Yolen’s Foiled, and even Joe Kelly’s I Kill Giants. As a sister, daughter, and aspiring dragon slayer, she joins the heroines of these other works as an appealingly imperfect character learning to understand her own goals. She’s also very bright, and it’s entertaining to watch her start debates with her stepmother Fruma, who is not so much wicked as wickedly clever.

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword is only the first chapter in a story that promises much more fantastic adventure and social tension. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in Orthodox Jewish culture, sword acquisition, or trolls with an affinity for needlecraft.

See PREVIEWS page #218

Thanks so much, Kate!

I loved both Smile and I Kill Giants, so it made my day to be listed in that company. (I haven’t read Foiled, but now I think I really must.)

By the way, that last line — “PREVIEWS page 218”? That’s what you tell your local comic book store, when you ask them to stock Hereville — they can find it in the current issue of PREVIEWS, on page 218. And, of course, you’re going to call them and ask them to carry Hereville, right? Please? Pretty-please? Do it today? Pretty-please with sugar on top?

(I’m not too dignified to beg. Heck, I love begging.)

Of course, you can also buy Hereville in bookstores (on shelves November first), or you can pre-order it from Amazon and other web outlets. In addition, I’ll be making pre-orders available in the next week or two for people who’d like to buy autographed and/or sketched-in copies — I’ll post once I’ve got the details worked out.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Hereville | 7 Comments

What would happen if the earth stopped spinning?

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Ampersand

This might make a fabulous setting for a science fiction novel. From Esri.com:

If earth ceased rotating about its axis but continued revolving around the sun and its axis of rotation maintained the same inclination, the length of a year would remain the same, but a day would last as long as a year. In this fictitious scenario, the sequential disappearance of centrifugal force would cause a catastrophic change in climate and disastrous geologic adjustments (expressed as devastating earthquakes) to the transforming equipotential gravitational state.

The lack of the centrifugal effect would result in the gravity of the earth being the only significant force controlling the extent of the oceans. Prominent celestial bodies such as the moon and sun would also play a role, but because of their distance from the earth, their impact on the extent of global oceans would be negligible. […]

If the earth stood still, the oceans would gradually migrate toward the poles and cause land in the equatorial region to emerge. This would eventually result in a huge equatorial megacontinent and two large polar oceans.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Posted in Mind-blowing Miscellania and other Neat Stuff | 7 Comments