All that Jazz

I liked this NYTimes piece about the jazz scene in Seattle, and how it is being well nurtured by programs in the city. I knew a few jazz musicians in Seattle but never knew much about the scene, though I'm happy to hear that it's thriving.

Another reason to soak the super-rich...

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman has spent $91 million of her own money on her campaign for governor of California... that's just disgusting. But I don't know what's worse: that she can essentially buy her way into an elected spot, or that despite the spending so much, she's still going to lose.

There's one for you, 19 for me

Sorry George, though so much of the Beatles' work is equal in my eyes, this short New Yorker article make the case that not all of the rich are equal to one another, and that we need a tax system that reflects that.

Four things about Google's Super Bowl ad:

1. I did like it, it shows how search engines play important parts in our lives, and it is interesting to see how a story can be told with just the search queues.

2. Despite that, it seemed very similar to the montage (spoiler!) at the beginning of Pixar's "Up," so its not too original in my opinion.

3. It makes me think of this interesting and entertaining contest from Slate last year.

4. I've started working on a parody/sequel of it where it turns out the kid is not his. It shouldn't be too difficult to put together, i don't think.

High Impact Sports

David Brooks has a pleasant piece in the NYTimes about the different eras of sports, and how our current era reflects the earlier ones. I like his conclusion about how rooting for your favorite team cuts across many lines of division and brings people together. I agree with this, and its one of the reasons I admire sports and athletics. I love the ideas of cooperation within a team and competition between teams. I also liked Brooks’ mentions of how we form much of our morals and sense of fairness from sports.

Though I enjoyed Brooks’ article, I can’t help but think that football isn’t the best sport that to use in this case. Sure, it does illustrate very well the loyalty and devotion to the team that Brooks wants to show. But, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in this New Yorker piece from late last year, football is, if not like the coliseum death matches that the Roman government sponsored, a lot like dogfighting.

Gladwell comes to this conclusion from his investigations into the head injuries that many football players are afflicted with. Reading the article, you will find that while a player may not suffer a serious head injury on the field, he will be impacted brain problems later in life from the many blows he has taken on the field. This article in the NYTimes also addresses this issue.

Aren’t sports supposed to make us healthier and to improve our bodies? That’s why I partake in the sports, and why I admire my favorite athletes and team. But the retired football players with scar tissue in their brains certainly don’t seem to fit this vision of an athlete. And most of us are blind to the damage that is going on. As this Freakonomics podcast notes, there hasn’t been an on-field deaths in the NFL, but football players do die on the field in other leagues and also suffer later in life the serious consequences of continuous blows to the head. By not seeing these injuries or being shocked into a changed attitude, we don’t see this as a problem, and we are implicitly giving reassurance that football and similar contact sports are safe.

In addition, this Freakonomics podcast also looks at this by investigating the safety of football helmets. In turns out helmets are great at absorbing a hit and preventing the player from being knocked out cold. What they don’t do anything about are the cumulative effects of being hit in the head over and over again, and there most likely won’t be a helmet that will do that.

This hypothesis in the Freakanomics podcast also makes me think of the recent attention to barefoot running. As Barefoot Ted remarks in this interview, while wearing conventional running shoes, runners are more likely to overstride, causing more impact because of the cushioning that the shoe provides. This leads often to injury and imbalance when running. While this may not seem as serious as the consequences of brain injuries, it does present the same point that the feeling of safety may actually encourage risks, and the negative results of those risks accumulate over time and impact you in a way that you could not have foreseen.

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl, and I am still going to watch this Sunday’s big game, and I will continue to root for the Wolverines every Fall, but I will also keep aware of any new findings and hoping that steps are taken, no matter how necessarily drastic those steps may have to be.

the difference between compromise and surrender

I recently received an email about how Sen. Barbara Boxer will go against the Stupek Amendment in the health care bill when it comes to the Senate. So is the Stupek Amendment something to fight against, or is it just a necessary compromise in a Democratic Party that is a “big tent” that wants to achieve one goal that all Democrats can agree on: health care reform?

Jeffrey Toobin’s editorial in the New Yorker is a great analysis of the role of abortion in the health care debate. He explains how the Stupek Amendment will affect the health insurance exchanges that will be set up and eventually lead to insurance plans that will not cover abortion services, which virtually all insurance plans currently do. (I wonder, if the Stupek Amendment goes through and passes along with the current health care bill, can’t it just be ruled, eventually, as unconstitutional? Perhaps, but even so, that may depend on the makeup of the Supreme Court.) I especially liked Toobin’s remark about the lobbying for the amendment by the Catholic bishops, who never seem to be so politically involved in other issues that go against church teaching (like massive incarceration, the death penalty, treatment of the poor, environmental justice, just to name a few of many). You do have to give them credit for being for health care reform; they just want it on their own terms.

But the fact is that Democrats are trying to represent the viewpoint that we need a strong government hand in health insurance, but that those who can agree on that may not agree on other issues, like abortion. Another article, from the Daily Beast, which overall I find flawed, nonetheless gives one something to think about when it comes to “Big Tentism:” with the Republican Party representing fewer and fewer people and viewpoints, the Democrats are in a better position to recruit more people with more viewpoints, and in fact have done this by intentionally recruiting anti-choice Democrats to run for office. So as Toobin and the Daily Beast article point out, what’s the price of this? The Daily Beast article paints it as a necessity to get things done and move on with very big, progressive reforms, while Toobin encourages us to rethink that.

Health Care Bill Does Not Mean Progress

My initial joy over the health care bill passed by the House has waned considerably. We all knew we wouldn’t get exactly what we wanted, that there’d be a lot of compromise, but I thought most of that would be in the form of compromising with insurance companies over profits—not that the health needs of half of the people in this country would be purposefully neglected. It’s not just the anti-abortion Stupak amendment that I am referring to, but the lack of coverage even for birth control. Apparently it’s not just pregnancy that is a preexisting condition, but so is just having a womb.

And why the hell is the Catholic Church involved in writing bills at all, but especially writing bills that that are relevant to women’s health? There are no women in the leadership of the Catholic Church, and it is set up so that their can never be; and I can only assume that the leadership is has no realistic knowledge of the female body, seeing how the body of its most beloved female figure is treated as a magic vessel rather than an actual biological person. This does not make the Catholic Church even remotely and advocate on behalf of women, let alone an authority on the women’s health issues.

Passing this health care bill seemed like progress for this country, and I felt extremely proud when it passed. It made me happy to have representatives who were finally acting on the needs of the American people, and made me satisfied that the Democrats didn’t back down from health insurance reform. But it’s highly disappointing to have abortion yet again be the sticking point in a debate where it doesn’t belong, as well as having a health care bill that gives in to the continued social engineering of women’s bodies.