You want to fix the medical system? You want reform?

I've got a very simple law that we could pass that will go a LONG way toward medical healthcare reform.

Require that, within one business day, the healthcare provider give you a straightforward answer to this question:

"How much is this going to cost?"

Mom is in rehab for her new knee, which she had put in last week. The orthopedic surgeon called it one of the worst --if not the single worst-- knees that he's ever had to replace. He told me that Mom should have come in 10 years ago to get that knee swapped out. Mom's answer (she walked 150 yards in to the pre-op room, unassisted) is simply, "Yeah, but think of how far that replacement knees have advanced, in the last ten years." Good point.

Mom's a super star at rehab, and is actually being released early. This makes her cranky elder son very happy; we've been missing her next door. (Yes, I've been visiting daily, but it's not the same.) But when her family liaison person called me to ask me if I had any questions, I asked her, "What's the cost of this? How much are we saving daily by having her come home early? What is the average daily cost of her care?"

She didn't know, but turned me over to a person at their facility who could "better answer my questions." That lady didn't know, either. "We don't do any billing here," she told me. "That's done from the corporate offices in Pennsylvania."

But she went on to assure me that the bill was to be sent to Mom's insurance companies, who typically covered most of these things, before we'd ever get a bill.

"But somebody, somewhere, knows what this costs," I protested.

"No, we won't really know, until we bill the insurance companies, and see what they pay," she told me.

This is ridiculous.

The attitude that it doesn't matter, because there is insurance, is the reason why the costs are spiraling.

On the first of this month, I changed over from my old PPO to a new Health Savings Account*. Thus, when it's medically-oriented, I want to know what EVERYTHING costs.

I know what I make per hour. I know what the overhead is for my job. I could, after checking a few figures, answer the question "How much does it cost to run the police department in Matt G's little town for a single day?"

Why is this so hard?

________________________________
*I've got a $3000 deductible to fill each year, before my account turns into a classic PPO. My job kicks in $180 a month to a savings account that I pay out of.

About as good as we'll probably get.

I suppose we've got as good of a deal as we're going to get on the Polanski situation. He's served some time, and the warrant in the US is still extant, meaning that he'll not come to the U.S.

But most of that time was in house arrest, in Switzerland, not especially known for their horrific prisons.

Best would be if we as a nation would quit buying the product of a felon. But so long as the felon's product is bought and sold and produced in a land of insanity, this pretty much amounts to trying to buy things not manufactured by slave labor.

Getting a bit silly, aren't we?

I've been looking at getting a set of the superb LG-405 Crimson Trace laser grips for my M37. These are the short "boot grips" that are compact enough for concealed carry. I've handled them on several J-frame revolvers, and have found them to be a useful addition to a very useful, yet hard-to-use, Always Gun.

The price on the LG-405 (or LG405, it's listed both ways), however, refuses to come down like it's slightly larger sibling, the LG305, has. The 405 is not found for less than $235, while the 305 can be had for about $170. So I save up my pennies, and wait.

What's funny, though, is that Crimson Trace ships the laser stocks with warning stickers (note page 4) that they expect you to put on your firearm once you've mounted the sights.

The stickers are most amusing. One declares compliance with a standard of radiation. The other, meant to be mounted on the firearm in front of the laser aperture, has an arrow pointing back, and reads: "AVOID EXPOSURE. LASER RADIATION EMITTED FROM THIS APERTURE."

Why are these stickers so amusing? Because, as the lasers are actually pistol sights, the only way that you could receive radiation from them would be to view the frickin' laser beams from this view:

At which point, you have more pressing concerns.

Lemme get this straight:

According to Pat Robertson, if Haiti hadn't made a pact with the devil 200 years ago, there would be no earthquake there, and the horrible poverty that preceded it likewise could have been averted. "True story," he said in his telecast on The 700 Club.

Because, as we know, there's NO other way that anyone could have possibly defeated the French. Only by using Faustian strategy could such a thing be accomplished.

And it took two centuries before the time was just right, eh, Pat?

Folks, there was a time when this guy had a real shot at the Republican presidential nomination. [Shudder.]

Political Distribution.

There are shades of gray.


It would seem that people are so busy identifying the difference between black and white, that they forget that the vast majority of the world falls somewhere in between.


Most people tend to think of their political affiliations as falling along a single line, like this:

But it's not really that simple. It's at the very least two-dimensional, like this:

The above graphic is one that I sketched from memory, from a lecture by Dr. Robert Taylor in a graduate class on terrorism. This was early on in the class, and we were discussing what drives people that were allegedly on opposite ends of the political spectrum to take up very, very similar positions and tactics.

It's funny how worked up people get in their identity with regard to which side of the centerline that they fall.

I worry about the polarization that I see in our nation.

I worry about the civil Cold War that looms.

Come one, come all! (Sheesh.)

Want to know why the news media are having to beg for audiences? Why newspapers are going under?

Markets are different, sure, but the main thing is: They don't even respect themselves, anymore.

They invite user participation. "What Do YOU Think?" "Sound Off!" "Log On To WWW.NewzKrap.Com, And Give Your Opinion!."

Remember when you had to be a trained journalist to end up in the newspaper? Or at least have your letter vetted by an editor, to appear on the editorial page?

Nowadays, they put up Comments sections of their news sites. Worse, the comments are allowed to be submitted anonymously. Still worse, there's no review of them before they are posted.

Case in point: Yesterday, the story came out that a mentally ill young man was shot with a taser by Fort Worth Police officers, and the man died. They precise mechanism of death is unknown. The precise actions by the officers before the tasing are unknown. The exact actions of the deceased and the description of the setting are unknown.

But there's a comment section following the sparse NBC story. 1/2 of the comments say the cops are thugs who should be put in jail for killing that poor little black boy (Oh, did I mention that there was a racial component to this?), and 1/2 the comments declare that any cop who kills "one of them" is a hero, regardless of the circumstance. The comments run into the hundreds, and eventually turn into a back-and-forth, which becomes less about the story than jibes at each other.

And why?

While I know that this is the Age Of The Common Man, let me just point out that when the journalists seek amateur input and it seems common and natural enough, we'd either be horrified or laugh our collective butts off if an amateur tried his hand at impromptu attempts at other professions, like surgery, or aircraft piloting, or electrical engineering.

Everyone is NOT special. Everyone, including me, is NOT a writer.

Your opinion? Just might not matter enough that I need to read it.

Hey? News venues? Turn off the comments to your stories. The irritainment just isn't worth it.

_________________________
"Everyone is special, Dash."
"Which is another way of saying no one is." (At 6:10)
__________________________

"You won't even go to your own son's graduation."
"It's not a graduation. He is moving from the fourth grade to the fifth grade."
"It's a ceremony!"
"It's psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity!" (At 6:12)

Wish for the new year.

Tonight, I'm going to patrol around my little town, and do what I'm able to do to keep the peace.

On this, the last evening of 2008, I wonder how many others are considering doing the same, for themselves? For, instead of a contemplative pint and perhaps a celebratory kiss of the neighbor near them, it's pretty common to see folks who take this passage of the year as a challenge to remove reason from the equation, through the magic of ancient biochemistry.

Why are we so very reluctant to be alone with our own thoughts?

Even sober, we demand to be distracted from ourselves. Car radios and iPods while driving (with DVDs and video games in the back for the kiddies). Perhaps a quick cell call to someone. If worse comes to worse, even a book on the highway. (Done it. Seen it done.) At home, there's the TV, the DVDs, the music, the InterWeb, the books, magazines, and whatnot. We feel the need to be outside of our own head.

Peace is a damned hard quality to find, within. Yet we claim to hope to find it, or even enforce it (!) without. Interesting.

Hamas is firing rockets into Israeli kindergartens even as the Israeli cabinet meets to discuss the immediate cessation of airstrikes in Gaza, and then claims that the Israelis refuse offers of peace and truce. This isn't even particularly good theatre; Hamas doesn't want peace. Firing rockets 28 miles into a town over the horizon isn't tactically very useful, but it certain pisses off the folks that you'd like portray publicly as your oppressors, eh wot? Very much the same as walking a bomb into a marketplace. It causes retaliation, which is actually what you want. Even that rather ineffective idjit Che Guevara knew that.

I'm drinking today, but only coffee, and lots of it. The warmth and the pleasant buzz of the caffeine go well with this sunny, bright, cool and breezy winter day.

I have regrets from this past year. I regret getting B's in graduate classes that I could certainly have obtained A's in. I regret putting on about 15 pounds that I shall have to cut this spring. I regret some things I've said, and some opportunities that I missed. I've yelled at my kids louder than I should have, and I've failed to give them time when I should have done so.

But I have some things that I'm glad of. I still look down at the daisies, rather than up at 'em. I bought, renovated, and moved into an old house that looks fairly decent these days. I've advanced myself to within two classes and a thesis of my Masters degree, while working. I put a few bad guys in jail, as well as some good guys who just weren't acting right, and I treated them all professionally. (Every one. Even the ones that potentially endangered my family.) I've watched my kids grow, and have taken a pretty strong part in making them grow. My elder daughter can do 25 perfect push ups (she's beginning to practice fingertip push ups), can disassemble and reassemble firearms, and reads voraciously, sometimes in the quiet company of her surprising array of friends. My younger daughter has learned to read, calls her best friend daily, and shows manners. I had something to do with all of that. That gives me peace, friends.

My new year's resolution will be to obtain more peace. Eliminating regrets is one way. But my friend John Shirley says that eliminating desire is another. That's a tall order, right there. And my need for an early Webley .455 is great.

May you have a happy new year. And may peace be with you.

Early Christmas Present.

A citizen wanted me to enforce access to an easement which he swore that he had, which people parked in front of. Although his otherwise landlocked property plat has another easement to another street, he told me that he thought that his deed gave him a new easement to drive his cars out to this street. He wanted me to make these people quick parking where they had thought that they were doing so legally.

Hm.

I researched the issue. I looked up CAD drawings of the plats, and saw the other easement, plain as day. I didn't see the one the citizen wanted me to enforce.

I went to the City Zoning Clerk.

Pretty much my only dealings with this woman have been in her capacity as a municipal court clerk. And frankly, she's been having to train herself to do that, and the learning curve has been steep, causing both of us to be a tad frustrated, at times.

But now I got to see her in her element. Not only did she have some training as a zoning clerk, but she was interested in it. She briskly took me to a very large cabinet full of site drawings and blueprints, standing in a room full of them. She went right to the subdivision after consulting a rather ingenious index that correlated to a city map on the wall-- her own invention. She pulled out B&W CAD drawings, and blue print CAD plots in both blue-and-white and white-and-blue, and then pulled out original graphite-and-vellum pencil-drawn originals. She had a semi-grin on her face, as she pointed to three generations of maps that proved that n0 such easement had been registered. Actually, four generations, when you included the online view of the county appraisal office.

I knew that grin. It had nothing to do with whether the man's easement was a figment of his imagination, or not. It had to do with the fact that she had solid, irrefutable proof that no civil engineer or surveyor or whatnot had registered such an artifact with her office or the county in 70 years.

"You love this stuff, don't you?" I asked.

"Yeah, I really do. I love maps," she grinned.

"I'm kind of a cartographile, myself," I said.

I asked her what the city code was on driveways, and she rattled off from memory the prima facie dimensions for driveways and the minimum distance that they had to be from property lines.

She zapped me a quick couple of copies for my citizen to see, and we came up with the contact info for registering such items on the deed with the county and herself. The citizen was going to have to use his other easement, until such time as his other one was recognized.

As I started to leave, I said, "Hey, lady, you're pretty good at this."

She responded, "Thanks..." and looked up from the maps that she was re-filing, and smiled. She just picked up on what she had gotten from me: My genuine respect for her ability.

I don't know what it means to her. I just know that it means something to me.

Revisiting Miami, 1986.

In my reading today, I had occasion to look again at the Miami shootout of such notoriety. And I came to a couple of conclusions:

After the famous 1986 Miami FBI shootout, there was a lot of fallout. Contrary to the opinions of many who know little about the event, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation did NOT sweep the issue under the rug. In fact, they made a major investigation of the incident, piecing together who among the 9 participants in the firefight had fired which of the 129 rounds in that shootout. You can read about it here, or here, if you'd like. I don't have personal knowledge of any facts that would conflict with the FBI findings, or the facts presented above.
What we do know is that the aftermath was controversial. How, wondered many, could two crooks beat a whole squad of FBI men?

Well, first off, they didn't. Both bad guys died, right there on the scene. Unfortunately this occurred not before they killed two and seriously wounded two other FBI agents trying to arrest them. In fact, only one agent managed to avoid injuries.

But that's not good enough.

Well, no, it wasn't. Platt and Matix, the bad guys, almost managed to get away from the shootout scene, with an agent's car.

What were the major problems hindering the FBI? Was it that their guns were insufficient?
Well, no.
Or yes.
Yes and no.

One of the major rules in gunfighting is to have them, if at all possible, using a long gun. Both Platt and Matix adhered to this rule, and the FBI failed pretty badly in this regard. Platt fired 42 rounds of .223 out of his Mini-14 rifle at the agents, and scored lots of hits for effect. No concealable body armor would have stopped those rounds, and only two agents were wearing body armor. Platt was varsity. He had practiced a lot with his Mini-14, and knew how to use it. He had military training, and when the agents ducked behind cover, he advanced on them shooting. Matix fired a 12 gauge shotgun at the agents, getting off only one round. He was shot early on, by one of the agents (McNeil), and that fact likely saved lives. The first order in operations when faced with two such hostile armed men up close is to take out the shotgunner.

Yet the rounds that stopped both men were .38 Special +P lead semi-wadcutter hollow points. These were fired by one of the gutsiest lawmen ever to clank when he walked, Edmundo Mireles.

Mireles deserves special mention. After he was wounded in his left arm, he used his one good arm to cycle and fire his Bureau 12 gauge shotgun 5 times at the two men as they struggled to drive an FBI sedan away. He then advanced on them from the front, killing both men by firing through the windshield with his S&W revolver.

Fiat that the stop was going to happen when and where it did, with that number of agents. What should we have done to equip them differently? Well, shotguns all around would have been nice. Rifles would have been nice. (Notice: LONG guns.) These both would have improved the good guys' hit ratio, but just as importantly would have improved the likelihood of stopping the bad guys with their hits. Matix was hit three times before Mireless made his heroic charge, and Platt was struck at least 9 times before that charge.

How else could we have equipped them better? The FBI decided that the day had dawned when agents should be issued auto pistols of bigger and better calibers. They went through a bizarre process of obtaining 10mm S&W auto guns, then requesting a lighter loading, then ditching the whole 10mm concept altogether and getting .40s, a round that arguably could trace its lineage to the lesser 10mm loadings, which arguably stemmed from reactions to this shootout.

I submit that, while a good auto pistol of a caliber starting with a "four" is a decent start, they would have done better in getting every Bureau car outfitted with a quality auto shotgun.
I have NEVER heard anyone make this argument, and it surprises me. Listen to The Gun Zone's description of the only use of a shotgun by any agent in that gunfight:

"As Platt entered the FBI's Buick and his partner appeared out of nowhere to slip into the passenger's seat, Mireles carefully supported his Remington 870 on the right rear bumper of McNeill's Olds, and fired a round of 00 Buck at Platt, hitting him in the feet. As the man slumped into the driver's seat and sought to restart the car, Ed deliberately pulled the 12 gauge shotgun down between his thighs in his sitting position and with only one hand, worked the action to rearm his weapon, then painfully rolled out and somehow managed to fire at Platt. Four times Mireles did this."

I submit that a shorty Remington 1100 with an extended magazine and 6 shots of anybody's brand of buckshot in each car could have ended that fight fast. I would certainly submit that Mireless sure would have appreciated one that day.

Oh, other lessons? Have backup guns. Have reloads. Only center hits count. And never, ever, ever give up.

Dayum.

I'm not much of a sports person, but I'm astonished that the sports broadcasts aren't plastering Dara Torres' story all over the airwaves.

The first U.S. swimmer to compete in her FIFTH Olympics, Dara Torres yesterday earned a silver medal for anchoring the 4×100 meters women's relay swimming event, at 41 years of age.

But she's not just a team event competitor; she's still got her chops on her own. Last year, she broke her own U.S. record in 50 m freestyle, a cool 26 years after she set the damn record. Then she did it again, on the same day.

Nine Olympic medals, and counting.

Oh yeah... and she's hawt.

Tell me again why the felonious football players get all the airtime on the sports broadcasts?

Stimulus: Response. Share with me.

Remember when, for a few years in the 1980's, music videos actually would, with some regularity, tell you a story?

No, I never had MTV.

But I saw a few videos back then, which were the years of my teens. I remember enjoying most the ones that at no point showed the musician singing, or did so only in the far background. Oh, the "Money For Nothing" video with Dire Straits shown on one of the background televisions was okay, I suppose. (though that video didn't tell a story-- it just set a mood.)
_ _ _

I am a big one for associating senses with occasions.

Strangely, I recall the lead-in riff from that "Money For Nothing" song best as playing in the background while my best friend Scott and I threw clay birds for each other in the August, getting our shotgunning eye ready for dove season.

The sight of an unearthly-orange cheese doodle receding to a tiny dot as it fell away from me as my girlfriend and I leaned over the rail of the Rio Grande gorge bridge west of Taos in 1992 is one image/memory my wife brought up to me the other day. (I married that girl.)

The smell of the rain up the valley hitting the desert creosote on a hot summer day brings back Alamogordo, NM, 1988.

The sulforous smell of a flare that I pop for traffic direction briefly pops flashes into my head the memories of:
--sitting on the front lawn with my dad and a large brown bag of firecrackers on an Independence Day in the mid-to-late '70s.
--another Boy Scout pounding my back in congratulations as I ejected the case from the little Stevens single-shot .22 at Boy Scout camp, some time in the early eighties. Our patrol had just won the marksmanship award in the only event that I could compete in, with my broken ankle.
--fear of getting caught, playing with a book of matches that I had sneaked out of my baby-sitter's house after school, in the fall of 1977.

The after-image on my retina left by my car strobe suddenly reminds me of my paternal grandmother "Big Mama" touching off a flash cube on top of the Instamatic 110 camera after much cajoling for me and my cousins to "scrunch together" in front of the Christmas tree.

The smell of broken evergreen needles always reminds me of a dozen different childhood Christmases.

The sound of compacting snow usually brings to mind the smell of snow. Please don't ask me to describe it.

The smell of popcorn and freshly-turned animal manure and hay (note to city folk-- Not necessarily a bad smell, unless you're near the carnivores) will inject very powerful circus images in my head.

The smell of clean hair and a whiff of some perfumes, along with perhaps the whiff of school (chalk dust and pencil shavings with floor wax) will sometimes bring back those angst-filled memories of teen interactions with girls. [To quote Rich Lucibella when referring to his love-making and his shooting: "Long periods of shameful failure, interspersed with occasional flashes of brilliance."]

The touch of unplucked feathers brings back memories of going through Dad's game bag when he came back form duck hunting in the early-to-mid '70s.

The sound of locusts always makes me feel hot.

The taste of boiling-hot, percolator-brewed coffee in a metal cup pops numerous camping and hunting memories into my head. (Of course there would be a coffee memory.)

Closed-knit, nappy green carpet evokes immediate memories that low brick rent house that we lived in when I was a young boy. Look down, see dark olive carpet. Look up, see bulls eye central air registers.

When I hear a small engine with a hole in the exhaust system, I'm taken back to numerous jalopies that I drove in my teens and early twenties.

When I feel scratchy crocheted mittens and scarves, I immediately flash back to being overheated from running, with frostbitten fingers and toes, taking my aluminum saucer up the hill to slide down yet again on a snow day, in the sleet and snow as a kid.

_ _ _
You know, I initially started this blog as a reference to a decent little video that I had run across, putting a pretty cool science fiction twist to a modern song by way of simple (today, I mean. Back in 1987, this would have completely blown the minds of professional videographic artists) computer graphics. The concept of stopping the waste of your "life" and going on to find joy is powerfully presented there.

But instead, I've taken you down a short walk down memory lane, regarding the way different stimuli can evoke powerful memories. Please: share with me (in comments) some of the more powerful ones that you've noticed in your life.

Deadly force is authorized.

Through Marko and John Shirley, we hear of the story of scumbag Paul Landingham, a 37 year old Salem, OR man who attacked and began to rape a woman on crutches. While residents of the apartments behind the scene listened and looked on, the woman called for help. NOTHING would have been done, but for a car full of good Samaritans stopping. Three men hopped out and issued Mr. Landingham the ass-whipping he so richly deserved before he was arrested by the police.

Pretty-boy, Emo-esque, whiney Keith Cole is seen on camera, telling of how terrible it was that this bastard could just try to take her humanity. . . but he did nothing. None of the other apartment residents who heard the attack did, either. Shades of Kitty Genovese. John quite rightly points out that Keith Cole should be ashamed of himself. Indeed, he must never again call himself a man. Stopping a sexual assault in progress is certainly a worthwhile time to employ deadly force, if you're not tough enough to beat the bastard up.

_ _ _
Even after Tennessee v. Garner, deadly force is still authorized to re-apprehend escaped prisoners. Especially escaped armed murderers. Who just killed a cop to escape.

But the cops in Providence, RI didn't kill Esteban Carpio after he shot Det. Sgt Allen with the detective's own gun in April, 2006. They re-arrested him 45 minutes later, and he was shortly marched into a courtroom with a spitmask on. His relatives declared police brutality when they saw his swollen face. Interestingly, so did the reporters and analysts in this news story on the situation. Apparently, they were able to determine that Mr. Carpio's head injuries (which he fully recovered from) were sustained from unlawful force, rather than from the 60-foot leap from the interview room window, or from lawful struggle with him while he was being detained.

"The boy clearly took a beating," says a news woman. Carpio (the "boy") was a 26 year old man, in custody for the stabbing murder of an 81 year old woman.

It's frankly impressive that he walked into the courtroom alive and under his own steam, after having been arrested by the acquaintances of the cop he had just murdered. An FBI inquiry found no improper actions by the arresting cops.

Look-- I'm a professional cop, and I've NEVER given a late hit on an arrestee. I don't advocate it, and I never will. But in these situations-- both of which would have merited deadly force-- I frankly wouldn't have been too critical of the occasional fist or boot to the noggin of the bad guy.

I'm sorry.

You may have noticed an absence in my posting lately.

Some of that's because I'm kind of busy in Meatspace.

But really, I'm preoccupied with guilt.

• I'm offensive.
• I'm insensitive.
• I sometimes speak without thinking.
• With some frequency, I make jokes that offend people who don't find them funny.
• I forget to say "Thank you."
• I forget to remember (redundant, but I need the redundancy) to honor people I know and respect.
• I think that I'm right, and refuse to admit that I'm wrong about things I clearly don't know very much about. Worse, I'll sometimes tell the person that does know about the subject that they're wrong.
• I get angry and say things I shouldn't and don't immediately apologize.
• I needle people sometimes, just to goad.
• I question if I'm a very good person.
• I suspect a lot of the time that I'm not a very good friend, relative, or loved one.

And I really am sorry for that.

I don't say this to ask for atonement or forgiveness or to have people tell me that it's okay or I'm a good a guy; I think I know the real score. I don't actually hate myself.

But I sure am sorry.

Something doesn't smell right.

Why are Russia's main stories lately ones of sabre-rattling, partial regime change, and new armaments?

When you're a poor country starving for recognition as a major world power, it's almost understandable that you'll feature any new developments that you can on the international news. Sort of a "Hey! We're still here!" Often the only thing that some countries have to show off is their military, and advances for same.

But this gives me an... unstable feeling.



(H/T to Tamara)