Thoughts on Newtown

When the new broke Friday morning, my mind was shooting off in twenty directions at once.  The hurt and grief I was feeling can only be compared to my first reactions on 9/11, just overwhelming.  As I tried to find out as much as I could and weed through the errors in reporting (how I hate body counts), I kept coming back to the how.  How could anybody do this?  As so very soon, my focus turned to mental health.  There would be a need to discuss assault weapons and gun safety and school security and a myriad of other aspects and tons of questions that were going to need answers.

So why did I get so fixated on the mental health issue.  Well for one thing I’ve always felt that murder is committed by someone not in control of reason, even if only for an instant.  That those who plot and carry out killings make an irrational decision at some point and then stick to it.  Others commit crimes of passion, where a moment’s anger blurs that rationality I keep coming back to.  Killing 26 people, with 20 of them 6 or 7 years old has to take an inability to distinguish right from wrong.

My exposure to the Mental Health system was in the 60’s and 70’s, when the state was still warehousing mental patients in places like Morris County’s Greystone State Hospital.  My first experience with such a place was actually Greystone, but it was followed by other state and veteran’s administration hospitals.  Some were better than others, none were good, all were intimidating places that seemed to medicate patients heavily and keep them locked inside.  They stunk of urine.  At Greystone I had to pass through a maze-like series of wards, no doubt housing a unique category of patients in each – some had stronger urine smells that others.  They all had people standing in hallways, rocking back and forth, others leaning with their foreheads on the walls, muttering or singing.  An uneducated person like myself assumed the word for these people was “crazy”.  Today the huge lines for an iPad are “Crazy” and rush hour traffic is “Crazy” unless its a bad day and then its “insane”.  How we’ve lost the language!

Through that time a movement was building in the health profession that favored reintroducing these patients into society while under supervision and medicated.  That movement was prodded along and supported by politicians until it resulted in closing the warehouses down and saving tons of money.

To accomplish this, we changed the criteria for commitment to an institution to make it nearly impossible and all through this the stigma of mental illness grew and grew.  Now they walked among us and the fears that resulted made people very protective of their loved ones and very secretive as well.  If people were to find out a person was mentally ill, a shame would be visited on the whole family.

Things continued to change as more and more diagnoses were for Autism and Bi-Polar disorder and fewer and fewer diagnoses of the more serious conditions were made.  Today, if you can get help for your suffering relative (cost and access are issues),  They get evaluated, labeled and categorized, prescribed and maybe counseled.  If we get a confirmed diagnosis of ADHD or Asbergers, we’re done, get the pills.  Unfortunately, mom and dad lack the letters after their name to do their own diagnosis and must go along with what they’re told.  If the patient regresses, we find another diagnosis box to put them in and just give different meds.

The problems become easier to see when a Newtown occurs, and the experts come out to tell us that Asbergers doesn’t lead to violence.  I can’t dispute that, it wasn’t in Psychology 101.  But let’s assume the Asbergers box was entirely right for this case.  Other issue are present, or as they say Asbergers patients don’t generally manifest such behaviors.  So to my way of thinking, if a patient exhibits behavior “X” and Asbergers patients don’t exhibit behavior “X”, then Asbergers isn’t the right diagnosis.

Many have had to fight for Mental healthcare for their children, and many don’t get it, or get inappropriate treatment.  Keep in mind that parents need to get past the stigma to even seek treatment.  Then if your child needs constant care, the only way you can get it for him/her is if there are criminal charges against them.   The California Prison System operates the largest Mental health Program in the United States.  Get your child arrested and they’ll get the help they need.  Most parents I know would tend to shy away from that (stigma again).

So where’s the answer?  I think it must lie somewhere between treatment in society and treatment in an institution, but we need much more humane institutions that we had before we closed them all.

We need a mental health system that can reach the larger audience, properly identify those that need hospitalization and commit them, and closely treat the rest with an eye toward changes in condition.

Then we can change gun laws, security systems, parental education and anything else we can identify that will move us forward.

Hawk or Dove

Author's Note: I apologize for the length of this, but I couldn't think of anything else to say.  Also for the title, since it isn't about military/political leanings and only has one insignificant mention of doves.  Poetic license.

I’m not an avid birdwatcher, probably because I couldn’t pick an avid bird out of a lineup.  Where I grew up, we had pigeons and that’s about it.  Many an idle minute was spent in my youth taunting them with any inedible object I could find.  I’d toss it near a herd of them (or bevy or coven or whatever) and then watch them compete for who could be first to find out that it tastes like a cigarette butt (later I would find out that this works great with seagulls, too.)  Also, you could run toward a pride of pigeons (or warren or whatever) and see how many would just run and how many would actually fly (six is the answer).  I never figured out what their purpose was, although I suspect they filled a critical need for pigeon poop.

I’ve lived in the country now for over 27 years and have seen hundreds of different species in that time.  Okay, maybe it’s only ten or twenty, but it’s a lot more than one.  I bought feeders and a birdbath, I bought “The North American Field Guide to Birds” and  out of the thousands of different species I’ve seen, I can easily now recognize at least six or eight of them.  As I write this, I’m thinking that book wasn’t a very good investment.  My birds almost never look exactly like the picture.  Sometimes you have to narrow it down within a broader class like brown ones, then use size and the fact that they’re only found in Arizona to whittle it down.  I settle for close enough.

So we have grackles, crows, blue jays, finches (gold and not), cardinals, mourning doves, pileated woodpeckers (absolute positive id on these), “Woody”-type woodpeckers, robins, wrens, hummingbirds and those little bastards that won’t stand still long enough to get a good look at them.  I don’t see well enough to pick up the features that would confirm a species, like bands on the legs, spots on the underside or a third wing.  So I get close with the book’s help, but then I realize that mine has a yellow beak and the book shows a black one, or mine is about 5 inches long and the book says 36.  Close enough, I tell myself.  Maybe it’s a female, I tell myself.  I can talk myself into just about anything.

I’m just now realizing that I haven’t gotten to the point of all of this, but please know that most of what of I’ve already told you is totally irrelevant to the central theme, which by now the sleuths among you have probably figured out.  I just saw a bird up fairly close that I’ve never seen before! 

But before I get to the point, which I didn’t really do in the last paragraph, I must digress a little.  In my earlier list I intentionally failed to mention turkeys and vultures (the turkey kind of vulture as well as the dead body kind of vulture) because these birds show up on my deck or in the backyard trees exactly never and almost never, respectively.  So why bring them up now, you ask?  Because I see them all the time as I move about my town and the surrounding area.  Quite often while driving, I’ll spot a large bird soaring high above, and again owing to my remarkable vision, I don’t know if they’re vultures or falcons or hawks.  Which gets me finally back to the point.

I was sitting in my kitchen enjoying a cup of freshly brewed coffee from our brand new Keurig Vue coffee maker, which we bought to replace a regular Keurig coffee maker.  We bought the Vue version for several very sound reasons.  The Vue cups are recyclable – you just peel back the foil and the little pod comes with it sometimes.  Sometimes the pod breaks and wet coffee grinds go all over the floor, which I have to clean up right away because my wife just vacuumed.  Also the Vue cups don’t come in as many varieties as regular K-cups, but they cost a lot more.  I think it’s cool.  It takes up more counter space than the old one, and it’s a lot noisier.  These two factors alone will enable our guests to very quickly see just how cool we are.  I digress again.

Okay, so I’m sitting there and this massive bird lands on a large branch of a tree right there in my back yard.  It has to be close to two feet tall, has a golden breast and black, brown and white wings.  It doesn’t have a large beak and the beak is yellowish, but it kind of looks like a hawk to me (what do I know?)  So Google it is.  I go to Images and type “hawk”.  I’ve found that you don’t need to capitalize, but you do need the correct spelling, since a one-letter mistake will get you tons of pictures that will get you arrested should you save any of them.  This is true regardless of what you’re searching for.  The best thing you can do is to Google “dictionary” first and check the spelling (print this and save it, since I already verified the correct spelling of “dictionary”).  But I digress.

Among the images is one picture that is very, very close.  It’s a “Red Shouldered Hawk” common to the Northeast, the right size and coloring (except for the beak) and since it didn’t make any noise in the almost 6 minutes it hung around, I couldn’t verify that is made a “kee-aah” noise (all of this identifying information came from the page that came up when I clicked on the picture.  Strangely, when I clicked on a sound clip of this hawk’s call, it didn’t sound much like “kee-aah” at all, it was more like a bird noise.)  I just needed to clear up the beak color thing.  Scrolling through about a thousand more pictures, I finally found another picture and this one had a yellowish beak.  Ta-Da!  By the way, I couldn't find the book without actually getting up.

I just saw a Red Shouldered Hawk.  I am cool.

Creme-Filled Skulls

Hostess Brands today ceased baking operations and blamed a union strike for the decision.  The keyword in that sentence is “decision”.  Management chose this seemingly drastic choice after declaring bankruptcy not once, but twice in the last 3 years.  Two reorganizations failed to right the ship so management decided to scuttle it.  When they went Chapter 11 the first time, they threated a complete shutdown but never did it.  This time they’re serious.

Before wholesale panic sets in, rest assured that there will be no shortage of bidders for the intellectual property (big word for recipes) and the coveted brand names that Hostess owns.  How much would you pay to sell under the names “Wonder Bread”, “Twinkies”, “Ding Dongs” (he said dongs, hehe) and “Ho Hos” (he said… nevermind).  If you think for a moment that somebody hasn’t already considered that huge additional potential created by the recent votes in Colorado and Washington (and the trend they likely have started), you’ve missed the boat more than Hostess management.

A strike by one of the unions representing Hostess workers is being blamed unfairly in my opinion.  They do share a small part of the responsibility for refusing to accept further wage and benefit reductions.  This union represents some or all of the bakers (as well as tobacco workers, for some reason) who have no doubt agreed to serious cuts in pay while Hostess pissed away any hope of profitability by maintaining an ineffective distribution and sales strategy.  Hostess’ website has been all but shut down.  The only page I could find was the “Careers” page, which lists over 600 open positions.  More than half are for sales jobs, another third for operations (line management) and exactly none for bakers.  These open admin jobs are in over 300 locations across 45 states (no Delaware, Hawaii, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermont facilities have openings, but that doesn’t mean Hostess doesn’t maintain plants or offices in those states).

Many years ago while working at Texaco’s headquarters in White Plains which is actually not in White Plains but in Harrison, NY, which you can tell because when you enter the driveway, you’re in Purchase, NY – they’d prefer you not know where you are, but I digress.  Anyway, one day I bought a Drake’s Coffee Cake from a vending machine in the building and to my great delight, two Coffee Cakes came out of the machine.  Owing to the nutritional value of Drake’s in general, I put one of them into a desk drawer intending to save it for another day.  It got lost under some hanging folders and I didn’t find it again until at least 18 months later.  The cellophane package had swelled as though it had been inflated, but there was no mold, no decay and on opening it, it smelled just like a brand new one.  We laughed and joked about for hours (which contributed to higher gasoline prices, I’m sure).  One of guys observed that you could put a Twinkie on the railing of the Staten Island Ferry and it would last 5 years.  Long, dumb story for what purpose, you ask?  If the stuff doesn’t go bad, why would you need to make them everywhere?  If seems to me that transportation costs would be offset by not maintaining so many bakeries, and most of the jobs would be shifted to the ones that remain.  Sure some jobs wouldn’t be needed as a result of economies of scale, but that’s what management is supposed to do.

Next on the hit list is the sales force.  Does anybody really need to sell Twinkies?  Shouldn’t they just be able to deliver them.  Excellent observation and yes, they should.  But a lot of what they pay sales people to do relates to product placement.  This is another example of horrible management at Hostess.  The people who buy their products would find them if they were between the mops and the SOS pads.  Product placement doesn’t come into it.  Close two thirds of those office they have et voila.  I know what you’re thinking, “What about the economy and unemployment?”  Better to fire 2,000 sales people than put 18,000 out of work.

But the American entrepreneurial spirit will prevail and Twinkies won’t go away.  So party on, Garth.

 

21 Days to Go

While there are some on the left who are focused on issues such as ending the war, and others on the right looking to impose their version of morality on the rest of us, the overriding concern of most voters is the economy and jobs.  The stock market is way up, unemployment is slightly down, we’re no longer bleeding jobs but we need to do a lot more.  So now that we have three weeks to confirm our choices for the next few years (Congress and the Presidency).   I offer this primer for your consideration.

The fundamental economic principle is the Law of Supply and Demand.  It is very easy to over-simplify this law, but I don’t think it would be as helpful to overload you with nuances and details.  The basic concepts should be sufficient.  Like any other view of the world, there is disagreement on the details, but keep in mind that if one relies on a detail or two to form an overall conclusion on what to do about the economy, you miss the bigger picture.  It would be like focusing on the curtains when the foundation is crumbling.

The law basically says that as demand increases, prices rise or remain high until production increases the supply in response.  When supply exceeds demand, prices fall in an attempt to create demand – think of last year’s iPhone.  So let’s think about job creation.  When demand increases, production increases follow since there’s profit to be made.  Increased demand therefore creates jobs.  In the absence of increased demand or declining demand (lots of folks out of work), job creation can’t happen, since the increased supply with no demand would cause prices to fall along with profits.  But how does tax policy influence this phenomenon?

History shows that tax tweaks have very little impact on jobs.  This fact is not my opinion, but rather a well-documented reality.  Before you dispute this fact, do some research – you’ll not find contradictory evidence.  So what do tax tweaks actually do?  They primarily create cannibalization, a shift in demand from one good or service to either a cheaper or more costly alternative depending on the type of tweak.  Bottom line is that the identities of the unemployed change without changing the net unemployment.  There are those that will claim that this substitution has created jobs to meet the demand shift to another product or service, while at the same time ignoring the loss of jobs related to the replaced goods and services.

One curveball before I close with my conclusion – corporate and business taxation changes will bring about a change in strategy, since profits must be retained.  Encouraging or punishing outsourcing through taxation for instance, does have a very real effect on jobs.

The Law of Supply and Demand clearly tell us that reducing taxes on the “Job Creators” can’t create jobs, since added demand for increased work isn’t there.  What business owner would hire more people to do anything that won’t increase profits, but would only take money out of her/his pockets?  Demand stimulation creates jobs as business scrambles to get the potential profits.  The building of hydroelectric facilities and the interstate highway system, along with the space program are examples of government action that created demand and growth.  Government investment in infrastructure, energy and technology worked in the past and will work again.  Or you can ignore history and ignore the facts come election day.

Why God invented Plumbers

I shouldn’t say this and I’ll probably regret it, but at least half of the major problems that have plagued my adult life involve water, so I hate water.  Not all water – I can successfully shower without incident most days, for instance.  I’m talking about the kind of water that ruins stuff, like carpets, subfloors, ceilings and cars.  If the Great Flood ever returns, I’m pretty sure it’ll start in my laundry room.

When we got back from our sick-shortened vacation (she probably drank the water), I noticed that the water pressure in the kitchen was pathetic compared to the Annapolis Doubletree’s bathroom sink.  Twice I drenched the front of my pants by foolishly turning on the hotel faucet to wash my hands.  Now years ago I installed a cartridge water filter to remove sediment from our well water.  This contraption is in the main water line and uses long cartridges that are made by wrapping some string around a plastic tube (brilliant!).  After about 45-60 days, these cartridges get clogged with rusty dirt and fool’s gold flecks.  I picked this particular unit because it used compression fittings (non-plumbers can look it up, plumbers can just laugh knowingly).  Anyway, that means no soldering is needed to install it and based on my past soldering experiences, this is a wonderful, winning feature.  Changing the cartridge is a simpler matter of turning off the water, unscrewing the body of the unit, spilling water all over the floor and then moving to step two.  Since the water is now off, step two gets tricky.  You need to rinse out the body before putting the new cartridge in.  I saw the plumber do it once by turning on the water a little while holding the body underneath the unit to put some water in it, then turn the water off, swish the thing around, dump, and presto!  When I do it, water goes everywhere, mostly on me and in the big puddle on the floor.  Anyway, I figured the low pressure would be helped by a new cartridge.

There are two shutoff valves involved, one shuts off water from the well pump, the other needs to be shut to keep all the water from the pipes from running back down and into my puddle, which is by now threatening to expand to the family room and garage.  I have a rag draped over the pipes to help turn these balky valves off, and it was already soaked.  It wasn’t soaked by steps one or two, but was soaked from you guessed it, a leaky valve.  When I turned the water back on, the leaker was putting out almost a stream of water it was dripping so bad.  So I go to the garage to look for a wrench to tighten the valve and of course, if you never put things where they belong…  I improvised, first trying vise grips, then pliers.  This puppy wouldn’t quit leaking.  I put the dishpan under it and went upstairs to plan a repair.  I figured it I bought a new valve, I could just take the new one apart and put the new stem and washers into the old valve, since the soldered joints are still sound.  I went to Lowe’s and bought a new valve, and when I got home I discovered that like every component of the plumbing system in my home, “they don’t do it that way anymore”.  In fact, “they haven’t made those in years”.  These new parts are not interchangeable with my antique (circa 1981) valve.

 

I then researched what I would need to buy in order to solder on the whole new valve.  I have propane bottles, so I just needed the nozzle and the consumables (solder, flux), or so I thought.  Lowe’s website has about ten options, running from $8 to $80 and using four different types of gas.  It didn’t take me long to figure out that propane is for homeowners stuck in the seventies.  I was particularly enamored of this one that looks like a ray gun and has this cool trigger and you don’t have to light it or nothing and its only twenty bucks!  I’m leaning that way when I go to Lowe’s the next day.

As I’m standing there admiring the ray gun, I was smacked over the head by the reality fairy who whispered in my ear, “you’ll screw it up and have to call the plumber anyway, and then you’ll never use the ray gun again, so why not buy the package containing the old-style, very low-tech propane torch, the flux, brush for the flux and the solder for $17”.  I really wanted that ray gun, but I had no credible defense, so I did what the fairy said.  Amazingly, before I even left the aisle I realized that I need when of the lighter thingies that has a flint or something in it and you squeeze it and the propane lights (plumber’s have a one-word name for it, but that’s why they charge $90 an hour, so I’ll call it whatever I want since I’m free).  Well let me tell you, it is so freakin hard to get this thing to light the torch, I really thought I was either going to have an explosion or be overcome by propane.  Now you have to heat the old valve until you can melt the old solder and knock the valve off the pipes (one joint at a time) and then you have to heat the new one on the pipes to solder it in.  I think I must have had to light that thing ten times at least – every time fearing for my life.

I got the old valve off, cleaned the pipes thoroughly with the Dremel and a sanding drum, liberally brushed on flux and soldered away.  This valve sits about a foot away from each wall in a corner and you can’t really get behind it, so some of this process gets awkward.  I get all done and turn the water back on.  One solder joint is holding tight with not a drop of water showing, the other side is leaking more than it was with the old valve and the Dremel with the sanding drum on it is plugged into an extension cord that is now under water.  Death is imminent.  Unsolder, reclean and resolder and finally the flow stops.

You’ve just read one of my least awful plumbing tales.  Normally, we get a leak or a pump breaks, or no heat or no hot water and after breaking down and calling a plumber after my own failed attempts to fix it, I have to get a new deck, or a car or completely remodel a bathroom.  I hate water.

Just so you know, I used to play golf.  I could lose my ball in water that was on a hole two holes away.  I stopped playing golf when I couldn’t find a plumber to play with me.