More Easy to Solve Problems

Occasionally, only very occasionally, I'll read about a problem facing society and think, well that has an easy solution. I'm sure the solution is so obvious that others have thought of it as well. For example, here are two societal problems with incredibly easy fixes.

Problem number one. Runaway executive pay and our culture of greed. Solution? Bring back a progressive tax structure.

The rise of outrageous pay for CEOs and financial funds managers came about when Reagan drastically reduced tax rates for the wealthy. Before that time, it was considered a waste to offer multi-million dollar salaries and compensation packages because taxes were so high. Taxes essentially put a cap on mega-income.

Nowadays, the executive pay racket is an industry unto itself. People are paid to be on boards to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year or more for the sole purpose of rubber stamping outrageous pay for CEOs. It's a nice side income. My old boss, Nan Keohane, has made on the order of one million dollars by being a rubber stamp on several corporate boards. When I asked her about this, she said needed the money for her retirement. When you ask her about pay for executives, she'll put her brain on the shelf and recite the mantra that those executives are so important and make such difficult decisions, yada, yada, yada. So much for self respect. Whoops that was a tangent! Now back to the matter at hand.

If we brought back a progressive tax - taxing those making millions at a rate of seventy percent or more once again - we'd end runaway executive pay. We might also have enough revenue from standard taxes to get away from the gimmick of lotteries, which are essentially a tax on the poor. The income gap between the rich and the poor would narrow.

Ronald Reagan was like crystal meth for this country. He was a mood elevator. But ultimately, his policies were destructive. The decline of our intellectual capital, the rise of "greed is good" as a way of life, the abandonment of the less fortunate all stem from the Reagan years. Our manufacturing base declined, our dependence on the sketchy financial instruments of Wall Street increased, and our government's efforts at fiscal restraint were abandoned. If you want a change in economic values, we need to turn our backs on the Reagan years.

Problem number two. Apathy on the part of our youth. Solution? Bring back the draft and add a public service option.

When I was growing up, young people read the news. They paid attention to politics. Why? Because the political decisions that were made by our leaders might have forced them into a uniform dodging bullets in hot steamy rice paddies on the other side of the earth. When your ass is on the line, you pay attention.

The abandonment of the draft transformed our army; it is now dominated by the poor and undereducated. The middle class and rich knew the military was a bad deal for them. Since they could avoid the army, they did. Since they didn't have to worry about coming home in a casket, they stopped caring and worrying about what Congress was doing. Apathy among the young rose.

If we brought back the draft, the young would pay attention again. Their parents would pay more attention as well. They'd would all be checking out the news worrying about the next war we're going to start (and the two that we're already involved in). To ease the sting, I suggest adding a public service option in addition to the military. There aren't any good jobs for 18 to 20 year olds anyway. They might as well work on the cheap for the government in exchange for some decent benefits. We should also make sure that there is no college deferment like there was in the Vietnam era; every 18 year old, male of female, in decent physical and mental shape should give something back to the country before they make their mark in the world.

There I've done it. I've solved two major problems in this country without even breaking into a sweat. Everything in life should be so easy! The only hiccup is that these solutions - simple though they may be - are politically untenable. With regard to executive pay, people still buy the idea that the crystal meth Ronald Reagan sold to us was good stuff. Plus the class of the newly created mega-wealthy have Congress in their back pocket.

With regard to political apathy among the young, the public doesn't want their children doing public service of any kind. Plus the military is scared stiff of politically involved youth staging Vietnam-like protests the next time it decides we need to go to war for no reason except to use all those toys of destruction building up in military warehouses; the military actually likes the apathy of youth.

So, in the end it isn't solutions that are hard. It's the politics of those solutions. Damn. Now I know why these problems aren't so easy to solve after all.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, September 24th, 2009

Here's the AAA/Jazz radio chart for the week. Woodstock revisited is at number 2. My brother and his friends went to Woodstock. They came back early. They said it was disgusting. Muddy, rainy, stinky, with bad sound and bad drugs. I trusted their judgment. But then the album came out. Suddenly, what was a disgusting event was transformed into something sacred. Who knows why? All I know is that for a 12 year old kid, that album was magic. Now? I don't feel any need to hear it again, but I do value the memories of having my headphones on, lost in the music.

1 John Fogerty The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again Verve Forecast 2009
2 Various Artists Woodstock - 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm Rhino 2009
3 Roberta Gambarini So In Love EmArcy / Groovin' High 2009
4 Jackie Ryan Doozy Open Art 2009
5 Eldar Virtue Sony 2009
6 Aaron Parks Invisible Cinema Blue Note 2008
7 Tamir Hendelman Playground Swing Bros. 2008
8 Roy Hargrove Big Band Emergence EmArcy / Groovin' High 2009
9 Jon Mayer Nightscape Reservoir 2009
10 Robert Glasper Double Booked Blue Note 2009
11 Kurt Elling Dedicated To You: Kurt Elling Sings The Music Of Coltrane And Hartman Concord Jazz 2009
12 James Moody 4A IPO 2009
13 Monsters Of Folk Monsters Of Folk Shangri-La 2009
14 Various Artists Woodstock: 3 Days Of Peace & Music-The 25th Anniversary Collection Atlantic 1994
15 Heath Brothers Endurance Jazz Legacy 2009
16 Bobby Broom Bobby Broom Plays For Monk Origin 2009
17 Baaba Maal Television Palm Pictures 2009
18 Gerald Clayton Two-Shade ArtistShare 2009
19 Dave Matthews Band Big Whiskey And The Groo Grux King RCA 2009
20 Wilco Wilco (The Album) Nonesuch 2009
21 Jim Rotondi Blues For Brother Ray Posi-Tone 2009
22 Woodstock 2 Minutes of Peace and Music Legacy 2009
23 John Proulx Baker's Dozen: Remembering Chet Baker MaxJazz 2009
24 Freddy Cole The Dreamer In Me HighNote 2009
25 Joe Locke & David Hazeltine Mutual Admiration Society 2 Sharp Nine 2009
26 Joshua Breakstone Trio No One New Capri 2009
27 Bill Easley Hearing Voices 18th & Vine 2009
28 Poncho Sanchez Psychedelic Blues Concord Jazz 2009
29 John Beasley Positootly! Resonance 2009
30 Cecil Brooks III Hot D.O.G. Savant 2009
31 Erin McKeown Hundreds Of Lions Righteous Babe 2009
32 The Charlie Shoemake/ Terry Trotter Quartets Inside Chase 2009
33 Joel Frahm & Bruce Katz Project A Anzic 2009
34 Tommy Castro Hard Believer Alligator 2009
35 Mark Buselli An Old Soul Owl Studios 2009
36 Levon Helm Electric Dirt Vanguard 2009
37 Maia Sharp Echo Crooked Crown 2009
38 Alvin Queen Mighty Long Way Enja / Justin Time 2009
39 Phish Joy JEMP 2009
40 Cyrus Chestnut Spirit Jazz Legacy 2009

Good Water, Bad Journalism

Every year there are on average about 20,000 reported illnesses in the US due to contaminated drinking water and about 3 deaths. Even if you want to assume that actual illnesses related to water are underreported, you can perhaps add another 70,000 people to the list of those annually impacted by contaminated water, which translates into a compliance - in terms of human health impact - of well over 99.9% of the US population. Given that tens of millions of Americans drink water from their own private wells and surface water sources and that there is a tendency for those people not to test their water regularly, I find this to be a remarkable record of safety. This country does an excellent job providing tap water to its citizenry.

Excellent does not mean perfect. There are glitches. You certainly can make the case that we can improve on our compliance. But you cannot make the case that we don't do an excellent job already. The numbers say we do.

The numbers also say we are improving. The chart above shows the number of reported outbreaks of water borne diseases from the 1971-2002. Those numbers are going down. We have a success story concerning drinking water quality in the US. But not according to the NY Times.

Over the last couple of weeks, the NY Times has printed a series of front page articles designed to scare people about our nation's public water supply. These articles have been written by a business reporter, Charles Duhigg. I don't know him. You could chalk up the harem-scare'em writing style to the NY Times environmentalist slant, but I think that's off the mark. These articles probably have no purpose other than to sell newspapers by targeting people's worst fears.

The articles have made claims that the quality of our drinking water is degrading due to lax oversight and that 10 percent of America is drinking water dangerous to its health. How do you go from 20,000 annual reports of illness to 30,000,000 people drinking bad water? Essentially, what you have to do is assume that every illness reported represents about 1,000 exposures to hazardous drinking water. The other 999 exposures just didn't get sick or didn't report their illness. No 30,000,000 people are not drinking water that will make them sick.

Now I'll back up a bit and find a real way to inflate the numbers significantly. About half of all water consumed in the US is well water (about 1/3 of all water used by community water systems), and probably on the order of several percent of all wells nationwide have contaminants that are hazardous to all, a fairly common one being arsenic. But almost all of those contaminants are not industrial in their source. Arsenic for example is a natural constituent in well water sources. That doesn't make its existence safe. Arsenic is a carcinogen that has been linked to bladder cancer in some water supplies overseas. Add naturally hazardous dissolved solids like arsenic and dissolved gases like radon into the mix and probably on the order of five million people are drinking hazardous water according to drinking water standards. Most of those people are drinking water from their own private wells.

The risk of illness from drinking water with natural contaminants comes from long term exposure and the risk is generally very, very small. That said I personally would not drink water with contaminants above drinking water standards over a prolonged period. It is of course, a person's right to drink their own well water. They should, however, be cognizant of the risk.

The NY Times hasn't focused on this important issue of natural contaminants. It has never mentioned it in these articles. Why not? Because it would rather blame water contamination on big bad industry. It makes for a better story to have a villain. Agribusiness and the chemical industries are tagged time and time again as the source of all of our water problems. If only things were so simple.

There are cases of course where big business is indeed responsible for water supply contamination. You'd think that a newspaper like the NY Times would get the gist of those cases right. But it doesn't. For instance, consider agribusiness. Its liberal use of fertilizers on agricultural lands has caused many wells in farming regions to be contaminated with nitrate. At levels found in these wells, adults are not at risk, but infant and fetus health can be severely impacted. About 10 percent of all wells exceed drinking water standards for nitrate. It's imperative that people in agricultural regions with private wells and young families get their well water tested regularly.

Nitrate contamination should be a major point of discussion in any newspaper series on water quality. Not so in the NY Times. As a result, the newspaper misses a real opportunity to inform the public on an issue that truly impacts its safety. Instead the NY Times dwells on an isolated case of bacteria contamination of well water in Wisconsin by manure. Manure stinks. It's disgusting stuff, yes. But it only rarely leads to contamination of groundwater supplies.

In the NY Times article, the writer implies that manure spread on fields in Wisconsin led to the contamination of over 100 wells. But that doesn't appear to be the case at all. Instead a manure slurry pipeline burst above a limestone source of water riddled with large fractures. The writer focuses on the smell of the water, the ear infections, and the general anger of the population. He makes an unsubstantiated claim that manure was also the source of another person's problem far away from the site of the bursting pipe. This is just bad journalism. It titillates, but it also misinforms.

The NY Times water quality articles focus on outrage. They focus on the little guy with bad water, the kid with bad teeth. It's all about human drama and of course that's the kind of material that sucks the reader in. But where oh where are the scientists and engineers to back up the assertions in these articles?

Environmentalist magazines written for groups like the NRDC and Sierra Club write stuff like this frequently. They do it to get their members angry enough to donate money. But the NY Times should do better. It's an organization that provides itself on its professionalism. In this case it isn't being professional. Instead, it has taken high school level journalism and elevated it to the front page of the most influential newspaper in the United States.

Why Aren't Jews Republicans?

Recently, conservative pundit Norman Podhoretz penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about Jews being liberal. The op-ed was essentially a plug for his new book on the same topic. It was silly stuff really. According to Podhoretz, Jews are voting against their interests by not voting Republican. And of course, the op-ed contained a version of the current mantra of conservatives: Obama has so disappointed his followers, including Jews, that both he and the Democrats are in for huge losses in upcoming elections.

That hope among Republicans is delusional. No, Obama hasn't been a progressive. He's been a centrist. And yes, progressives haven't been happy about how Obama has governed. But the alternative major party, the Republicans, are a nightmare for progressives. That isn't going to change.

It isn't just progressives that will stay away from the Republican Party. It's just plain down the middle centrist Americans as well. The Republican Party has turned into something that is almost guaranteed to maintain its status as the second place runner in American politics. Republicans continue to stay on the far right. They are now the saviors of a lot of nutjobs, people who shout down congressmen at town hall meetings and refuse to believe Obama is an American.

I was amazed at just how idiotic the people at the August town hall meetings looked. Grown men behaving like two year olds. They screamed about government takeovers and socialism and yet they didn't want anyone touching their Medicare.

What used to be a party of normal human beings is now the party of the dumb and crazy. At best, it's the party of white, rural, Christian America. That's not enough of a voting block to win national elections and win majorities in Congress. For some reason after getting trounced in 2008 (they ran so poorly they couldn't even beat a black guy with one hell of a weird name), they've decided not to come up with a new approach at all. Nope. It's still full steam ahead with their nutty platform of war, no social services, no taxes, Jesus, and guns mixed with an innate distrust of anyone with an IQ over 95.

If Mr. Podhoretz wants to understand why Jews aren't Republicans all he has to do is look at simple things like the Republican calendar. Last weekend's conservative "Values Voter Summit," was held when? Over Rosh Hashanah, one of the holiest times of the Jewish year. Talk about sending signals. They might as well have put out a sign in front of that meeting, No Jews or Dogs Allowed.

Of course, the Values Voter Summit held a straw poll for 2012. And who was their leading candidate by far? A creationist who in the not so distant past didn't even understand how AIDS is transmitted, Mike Huckabee. Mr. Huckabee would make a great president...of the Confederacy. And that's just it. A party of the South is going to go nowhere.

Earth to the Republicans. It's not just Jews who won't vote for you. It's anyone with half a brain. Come back. Come back to the center. Forget about Ronald Reagan. Start thinking Dwight D. Eisenhower. And as for where I'll be in 2012, count on me making phone calls and giving money to whomever is the Democratic candidate. It's not like the Republicans are giving me any alternative.

As for Jewish "neoconservatives" like Norman Podhoretz, they are forever imploring people like me to come over to their side. I have a better idea. They should come back to the Democrats. Look at who surrounds them at any Republican gathering. It's yokel city nowadays.

Long ago, neoconservatives defined themselves as liberals who had been mugged*. That's pretty funny. But they'd be better off coming back from the intellectual wilderness of the Republicans and renaming themselves "neoliberals," aka conservatives who have found a brain. They would feel right at home. They wouldn't have to worry that the person next to him was mad as hell and legally (or illegally) packing heat. Plus I can guarantee them that the Democrats won't do what the Republicans can't seem to resist doing: hold major meetings on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

*Correction, it's "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." I think the shorter version is funnier, though.

One Thousand Words, Part 9

I mentioned in a recent blog post about hiking in Bolivia and that made me scour my memory box for photos. This one is from July 1990. It's an arial shot of the gold mining, Bolivian town of Llipi. Back then it was remote village. For a friend and I, it was the end of the line of a six day hike. We wanted to do something adventurous, go somewhere so remote that there were no topographic maps, but still allowed us some contact with local people. We were the same age, 34, with family responsibilities and mortgages. We'd both married young and I think we wanted for a week or so to be men among men or something like that.

I can't remember who picked this trail. I think it was my friend. But I thought it was a wonderful idea. Both our wives were crazy enough to think, why not? It was mentioned in a book as being remote, difficult, and at high elevation following a trail (the Camino del Oro or as the locals simply called it when we got there, El Camino) of gold mining villages. We saw no other people aside from locals on our trip. I remember stopping for a night at a village of about 20 people. They were so excited to see us. The trail must be getting popular they said. Just last month, three Englishmen had come by.

I could write a book about this trip. I really could. But I probably never will (who'd read it?), so a thousand words will have to suffice. In a lot of ways, it was the dumbest, most unpleasant, painful and exhausting thing I've ever done. We had rocks thrown at us by kids along the trail. My friend got hypothermia three days into it. He was in a lot better physical shape than me, though. We'd hike up and down these steep wet rock staircases built by the Incas hundreds of years before, worn down by I don't know how many footsteps and just hope we didn't slip, fall and break a leg.

But in a lot of ways, it was the most exciting thing I've ever done and probably will ever do. We started out in Sorata, a town that looked like it came from the Old West. Miners carried gold nuggets and scales in their fanny packs. They'd sell you nuggets for about $200 an ounce. They got us ridiculously drunk on some ridiculously powerful moonshine mixed with a little fruit juice. Then we were off on "El Camino."

Little old Indian ladies would pass us by on the trail (you can click on the terrain map to see more or less where we walked) like we were standing still. Then again, they just looked old; they probably were 25. When we'd get lost and ask directions, people looked at us like we were idiots. "It's El Camino! Can't you see it!" Sometimes they'd break out in hysterical laughter at our inability to spot what they thought was the obvious.

All along the way, people would frequently ask for aspirin. I came there with a bottle of about 500 tabs and they were all gone by the time we were done hiking. The locals worked long hours hydraulically mining for gold along and under the rivers. They told us they'd work one month, make about 30 dollars a day which was a ton of money for them, then go back home to their families for a month, before coming back. Except for the rock throwing kids, they were actually very friendly.

One night we were in a little town and we talked to a teacher. This place was in the absolute middle of nowhere. He was listening on the short wave radio intently to the news. We asked him what was going on. He said there was an impending national teachers strike and he wanted to know whether he needed to shut down his one room schoolhouse tomorrow. I'm sure I looked at him with amazement. If he worked tomorrow or didn't who would know or care?

I took the picture at the top of this post as we descended into Llipi. All around us vegetation had been stripped and mine tailings were everywhere. I looked down at the town, the river muddy from all the sediment runoff. I could tell my friend and I, both geologists, were thinking the same thing. I said it out loud. "This is a landslide just waiting to happen. That town is toast."

We actually joked about it in Llipi, where we spent a night before a harrowing ride back to La Paz (we almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning). We kept saying we shouldn't stay here too long. We'd be under a pile of a hundred feet of rubble if we did.

Two years later, I read a tiny article in a newspaper about Llipi. I think it was in the NY Times. The entire town had been buried. Hundreds died. Ironically, a rescue van crashed on its way to Llipi killing another 10 or so. I remember feeling terrible about how we joked about this when we were in the town. We even mentioned the obvious hazard to a couple of shopkeepers. They paid us no mind.

Any geologist could have told them mining the cliffs above that town would lead to a disaster. I'm sure the geologists and engineers who helped in the planning of the excavations knew it. The gold was just too valuable.

We came home safe and sound. My friend and I keep mentioning that we should take another exotic trip, but have never managed to do so.

A couple of years ago, though, he called me up to go hiking the first week in October. He wanted to go to the White Mountains. I told him no way. It was too far away and too high in elevation for that time of year. We settled on Kit Karson pass. Again, he was in better shape than me.

The first night a storm front came through, the temperature dropped down to the 20s and a few inches of snow fell. He had mistakenly brought one of his daughters' old sleeping bags, something designed for 50 degree weather that covered him up to about his rib cage. He and his dog shivered through the night. In the morning, I looked at him, his face white and a little gray, and I remembered him up above 14,000 feet in Bolivia shouting nonsense, and putting layer upon layer over him in our tent.

We'll probably take another crazy trip one of these days. It's been 19 years. We're way overdue. He wants to go canoeing along the Missouri, following the route of Lewis and Clark. But that sounds kind of dreary to me actually. Suggestions for exotic trips that no one in their right mind should take that are suitable for middle age guys with a high tolerance for pain are always welcome.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, September 17th, 2009

Here's the AAA/Jazz radio chart for the week. Down at #24 you'll find one of those odd records that show how good looks trump talent; Ms. Johansson, it's probably worth noting, acts about as well as she sings. Then there are these noir chick singers that keep popping up on the charts, but never seem to break through, like Hope Sandoval at #25. I'm guessing that Bjork has filled the femme-fatale-mysterious-arty pop girl slot and there isn't room for anyone else, kind of like Marlene Dietrich did many years ago. If it wasn't Rosh Hashanah, I'd drive over the hill to see Sandoval play out this Friday just to check out the crowd.

On the musical and much more positive side of things, Tamir Hendelman is well worth a listen.

1 NOMO Invisible Cities Ubiquity 2009
2 Roy Hargrove Big Band Emergence EmArcy / Groovin' High 2009
3 Jackie Ryan Doozy Open Art 2009
4 Roberta Gambarini So In Love EmArcy / Groovin' High 2009
5 Christian McBride & Inside Straight Kind Of Brown Mack Avenue 2009
6 Stefon Harris & Blackout Urbanus Concord Jazz 2009
7 Bobby Sanabria Conducting The Manhattan School of Music Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra Kenya Revisited Live!!! Jazzheads 2009
8 Freddy Cole The Dreamer In Me HighNote 2009
9 Robert Glasper Double Booked Blue Note 2009
10 Heath Brothers Endurance Jazz Legacy 2009
11 James Moody 4A IPO 2009
12 Levon Helm Electric Dirt Vanguard 2009
13 Wilco Wilco (The Album) Nonesuch 2009
14 Cecil Brooks III Hot D.O.G. Savant 2009
15 Tamir Hendelman Playground Swing Bros. 2008
16 Akiko Tsuruga Oriental Express 18th & Vine 2009
17 Kurt Elling Dedicated To You: Kurt Elling Sings The Music Of Coltrane And Hartman Concord Jazz 2009
18 Bill Easley Hearing Voices 18th & Vine 2009
19 Bobby Broom Bobby Broom Plays For Monk Origin 2009
20 Jon Mayer Nightscape Reservoir 2009
21 Phish Joy JEMP 2009
22 Gerald Clayton Two-Shade ArtistShare 2009
23 John Beasley Positootly! Resonance 2009
24 Pete Yorn & Scarlett Johansson Break Up Rhino / Atco 2009
25 Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions Through The Devil Softly Nettwerk 2009
26 Eels Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs Of Desire Vagrant 2009
27 Eldar Virtue Sony 2009
28 The Terence Blanchard Group Choices Concord Jazz 2009
29 Monk's Music Trio Monk's Bones CMB 2006
30 Yo La Tengo Popular Songs Matador 2009
31 Dave Matthews Band Big Whiskey And The Groo Grux King RCA 2009
32 Mike Stern Big Neighborhood Heads Up 2009
33 The Charlie Shoemake/ Terry Trotter Quartets Inside Chase 2009
34 Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow & Antonio Sanchez Quartet Live Concord Jazz 2009
35 Rodney Jones A Thousand Small Things 18th & Vine 2009
36 Grizzly Bear Veckatimest Warp 2009
37 Regina Spektor Far Sire 2009
38 Monsters Of Folk Monsters Of Folk Shangri-La 2009
39 Moby Wait For Me Mute 2009
40 The Bob Florence Limited Edition Legendary Mama 2009

The Dust Hasn't Settled But...

I did watch Obama's speech on health care reform. He is, as everyone knows, an eloquent speaker. He talked a little smack in between his lofty pronouncements, which I thought was a good idea. But what he is proposing isn't health care reform. It's health insurance expansion. I happen to think that it's a good idea for all to have health insurance, but Obama greatly oversold what this effort will do for Americans and greatly undersold its cost.

Obama rhetorically made the assertion that he would be the last president to tackle health care reform. I sure hope not. Because what is being created is far from what is needed: quality health care for all at a reasonable price. The dust has far from settled on what Congress will pass, but it does look certain they will pass something and it will have these elements:

Heath insurance for almost all citizens
No caps on insurance
A flat insurance rate regardless of medical history

To pay for this expansion of the number of people in the pool and changes in insurance policy, Obama says he will make Medicare more efficient. No one really believes this will happen. Instead we will run additional deficits of tens of billions of dollars a year unless we increase taxes to pay for this new program.

There is little or nothing in the proposed bills to truly control medical costs. Expect medical bills and insurance rates to continue to climb at a rapid clip.

Now I have to ask what's in this for me? I look at my own family's health insurance policy. I'm in the healthiest tier of my insurance pool. I pay a ridiculous amount of money for my insurance (which is very basic with a high deductible), 8K a year. People who aren't as healthy as me who have non-company sponsored insurance pay much more.

The new plans promoted by Obama will lump all of us currently paying insurance individually into one pool and include a mix of the young and the infirmed. Since I'm currently in the low risk pool, I full expect my already astronomical rates to go up. How can it not be so? I'm getting a more comprehensive insurance policy and I'm going to be included with a lot of sick people.

Now Obama is making the claim that by increasing competition between health insurers, I'll be able to save money. That makes some sense. Currently I have no choice at all. I'm stuck with one insurance company. They set the rates. I can't go anywhere else. But how much can I save even if there is competition? It's not as if California Blue Shield is making double the profit it would in a competitive marketplace. At best, I can expect a 20 percent reduction in fees from increased competition, something that will partly but not completely make up for my insurance rate increases.

When the dust eventually settles, I anticipate that my insurance costs will be high and continue to rise at a rate of 8-12 percent a year. I'll be essentially where I am now, with a little bit better coverage. Our government will be in the hole to the tune of about 80 billion a year. That's not a good deal for me personally although it's good that 40 million people will no longer be using emergency rooms for their primacy medicine.

I anticipate that my future deal with health care - a little better insurance policy, higher premiums and rapidly increasing costs - will be the future deal for most Americans. We should be able to do more than this. If we can't, both Congress and Obama are being irresponsible.

Obama has said that he is confident that not only will a bill pass this year, but it will be a good bill. I agree with his first prediction. But as for his second prediction, this bill looks like junk. In fact it looks a lot like Bush's drug benefits program for Medicare that was passed a few years ago. It's expensive. It's a bonanza for the health care industry. Like Bush's drug benefits program, it's the product of a well meaning, but poor decision-making president and a craven and corrupt Congress. I guess the more things "change," the more they stay the same.

My view is that after the Democrats manage to heave this bill over the goal line, they'll declare victory and avoid health care reform for another ten years at least. What they and the president should do is say now we have to get back on the field and do what we should have done from the beginning: try to figure out how to keep costs down.

Keeping costs under control will involve rationing care. It will involve changing from a fee for service model for care into one that is results oriented. It will involve taxing health care benefits to motivate employees to avoid expensive health insurance options. It will involve tort reform. Whether health care is private or public, costs cannot be controlled without fundamentally changing the nature of how health care operates. No wonder neither the president or Congress want to touch real health care reform.

P.S. It's September 16th and I just read the Baucus proposal published today. It's even worse than I imagined. It's a blank check to the health insurance industry. And personally, it would cost me a ton of money in terms of premiums. This isn't "reform." Democrat or Republican, the lobbyists control Congress. If Obama wanted health care reform, he should have written the bill himself.

Michael Pollan Thinks Health Care Reform Is All About Food and He Is Wrong

Michael Pollan, Whole Foods champion, came out with a very strange op-ed in the NY Times the other day. He tries to make the argument that our problems with health care in this country are not about "the system itself - perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed" but about what we eat. It's true Americans don't eat well and we have serious problems with obesity. But it is not true that our eating habits are the "elephant in the room" vis a vis health care.

Someone from the NY Times should do some fact checking on their op-ed pieces. Because the tendency in that paper is for op-ed writers to make quantitative claims that at first blush don't look right. Just a cursory analysis proves them to be wrong. So it is with Pollan's piece.

Let's look at some basic numbers. American obesity rates are twice those in Europe. If you really want to use the worst case numbers about 300 billion dollars of our health care expenditures are related to obesity. So suppose we were as skinny as our European counterparts. We'd save 150 billion dollars in health care costs out of the 2.3 trillion that we currently spend. We'd still spend much, much more than European nations on health care. Yet Pollan makes the claim that our higher obesity rates can "subtantially" explain the difference in our health care costs. It can't. To make such a claim is silly.

So much for silly numbers. Poor diets certainly contribute to our health care costs. But they are not the elephant in the room. If everyone stops drinking soda - an obsession of Pollan it seems - health care will not be fixed. The solution is not at all that simple. Losing weight is hard. Fixing health care is much, much harder.

Pollan then makes the leap to opine that health care reform will cause insurance companies to promote better eating. He seems to not realize they do this already. I get emails from my insurance company all the time telling me about diet and exercise.

The whole op-ed was so bad that I got the urge to drive over to Berkeley and force feed a six pack of Twinkies into Michael Pollan's mouth and have him wash it down with a liter of Coke. Just kidding. I really do believe eating well is good for you. I don't drink soda. I haven't had a Twinkie in 40 years.

But bad diet doesn't drive our rapidly escalating health care costs. It is a contributor, but other factors collectively are far more important. Plus soda water taxes will not suddenly make people eat healthier (or drink healthier).

Michael Pollan performed a valuable journalistic service in the past by showing how our agricultural subsidies promote the creation of cheap corn-based food that is ultimately bad for the public. I'll give him kudos for that. But he really needs to stay out of the health care reform debate or he needs to find a way to look at health care reform without blinders that make him believe diet is the only issue of consequence.

One Thousand Words, Part 8

This one is from sometime around November 1973 at a wedding in Nahariya, Israel. I'm the kid in the center. My arm is around my great uncle, who was the spitting image of my grandfather. The groom (next to the bride) is my cousin and his brother is next to me on my right with his then girlfriend now wife. My great aunt is on my far left. This may be the only picture I have of me in Israel. I have a bunch of photos in my memory box, but I think they are all of scenery.

At the time, I was living with the parents of my cousin's girlfriend on a moshav (small community farm) near Raanana. War had broken out in September of that year. I had actually been in Israel for August and much of September living with my great aunt and uncle, but wasn't there at the start of the war. In August, I had come with my backpack filled with a couple of changes worth of clothes and about 15 pounds of paperback books (philosophy and European novels in translation). They thought I was an odd kid, which I was.

I remember walking into their apartment for the first time. My uncle immediately looked at my hiking boots. He'd never seen such things he'd said. They were heavy duty, probably weighed about five pounds with thick leather and vibram soles. "Those will last longer than you," he said to me in Yiddish. He was right. I still have them. Then he looked me in the eye. "Why do you look so dazed?" He asked. "There's nothing new here. It's the same sky as in America. It's the same air." I told him I had jet lag. He'd never heard of such a thing.

I was there to see relatives and be a tourist. I'd travel around to see the sights for a few days and then come back to my uncle's apartment for a couple more. I'd been doing this cycle for awhile. One day I was sitting in their living room reading Gorky. My aunt looked at the cover of the book. She couldn't read English but she could read the name of the author. "Enough," she shouted. "What kind of teenage boy reads Gorky? Go outside! Go find a girl!" She was incredulous that I found enjoyment in reading such a thing. "I'm sure you don't have any friends in America," she said to me. When I told her I did have friends, she said she didn't believe me. At the time she was reading a romance-gone-bad novel, Naarah Mimishpacha Tovah, A Girl From a Good Family. We just had different taste in literature.

Actually those two were very nice to me. My aunt really hammered on my Yiddish and it improved dramatically. She loved soap operas on TV and would watch Jordan broadcasts of Peyton Place with Arabic subtitles. I'd sit next to her and give her the dialogue, translating into Yiddish.

The day before the war broke out I left Israel to fly to Switzerland. It was an odd time for me. I'd read the news every day about the war and feel guilty I wasn't there. Eventually I went to Athens, which was the only city in Europe that was flying planes to Tel Aviv during the war, and slept on the airport floor for a week trying to catch a night flight until I caught a plane back.

I had some vague plans of doing volunteer work for the Israeli Army. I went to a volunteer recruiting office and tried to lie about my age, but they looked at my passport and said no way. So instead I went to the moshav to help pick tomatoes and grapefruit. Because of the war, they had no labor, and the food was just rotting. They were very nice to me as well. I'd wake up early every morning, go out in the fields, plant, pick, and shovel chicken shit around. I grew about seven inches in three months.

The family would get infuriated, though, about how slow I picked. I remember one time the mom of the family watched me pick some tomatoes and just got exasperated. "Every time you pick you look at the tomato like it's a piece of art. It isn't a piece of art! It's a tomato! Just pick it!" But the truth was I knew they were pieces of art. They were beautiful.

After about a month on the farm, my right shoulder started to hurt horribly. I could barely lift it. I thought I must have pulled something. A cousin who was a physical therapist came by - the groom in the picture - to look me over. "There's nothing wrong. You've just never picked fruit before. Keep working. You'll get stronger and better." He was more or less right.

The war was a bleak thing, the first time the Israelis ever felt vulnerable, the first time they lost thousands of lives. It changed the complexion of the country completely. Women were weeping in the streets over lost loved ones. Before the war Israelis felt confident and cocky over their place in the Middle East. They felt comfortable as a colonial power in the West Bank and Gaza. All of that disappeared in the Yom Kippur War.

My aunt and uncle died sometime around 2000. I've completely lost track of the groom and bride. But my other cousin lives in a small community in northern Israel. He was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany and is probably about sixty years old, maybe sixty two. I recently "friended" his wife and a couple of his kids in Facebook.

When I got back home to the US, I called my house to have someone pick me up at the airport. My grandmother answered. She handed the phone to my mother saying, "There's this crazy man on the phone with an Israeli accent who says he's Shtulah." Shtulah was her name for me. My dad picked me up. My grandmother was still at my house. She looked at me up and down. "You're not Shtulah. You're too tall." Eventually I lost the accent. My height remained. I don't know when my grandmother decided I was Shtulah and not some imposter. Maybe she never did.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, September 10th, 2009

Here's what radio is playing this week in the word of AAA/Jazz. Note the Beatles remastered recordings are out. Elvis may one day be forgotten as a singer (he might turn into a religion though for all I know), but I'm guessing the Beatles will be a cultural presence for another 100 years or so. If you go to Facebook and look at college students' favorite bands, they still show up in the top 3.

Modern mastering by the way tends to be awful; it consistently sacrifices dynamics and fidelity for just plain being loud. But the reviews for the Beatles remastered recordings are glowing. That said, I'll stick with my vinyl. Back in god knows when, I won the White Album in a contest the day it came out. I thought I was the luckiest kid in the world.

1 John Doe & The Sadies Country Club Yep Roc 2009
2 Roy Hargrove Big Band Emergence EmArcy / Groovin' High 2009
3 Jackie Ryan Doozy Open Art 2009
4 Roberta Gambarini So In Love EmArcy / Groovin' High 2009
5 Jon Mayer Nightscape Reservoir 2009
6 Wilco Wilco (The Album) Nonesuch 2009
7 Bobby Sanabria Conducting The Manhattan School of Music Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra Kenya Revisited Live!!! Jazzheads 2009
8 Alvin Queen Mighty Long Way Enja / Justin Time 2009
9 Akiko Tsuruga Oriental Express 18th & Vine 2009
10 Fahir Atakoglu Istanbul In Blue Far And Here 2008
11 The Beatles I Want To Hold Your Hand/I Saw Her Standing There [Single] Capitol 1964
12 The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Capitol 1967
13 Joe Locke & David Hazeltine Mutual Admiration Society 2 Sharp Nine 2009
14 Son Volt American Central Dust Rounder 2009
15 Eldar Virtue Sony 2009
16 Bill Frisell Disfarmer Nonesuch 2009
17 David Bazan Curse Your Branches Barsuk 2009
18 The Beatles The Beatles [The White Album] Capitol 1968
19 Fruit Bats The Ruminant Band Sub Pop 2009
20 The Bob Florence Limited Edition Legendary Mama 2009
21 Robert Glasper Double Booked Blue Note 2009
22 Stanley Clarke Jazz In The Garden Heads Up 2009
23 Bill Easley Hearing Voices 18th & Vine 2009
24 Gerald Clayton Two-Shade ArtistShare 2009
25 Pete Yorn Back And Forth Columbia 2009
26 John Hicks I Remember You HighNote 2009
27 Willie Nelson American Classics Shangri-La / Blue Note 2009
28 Tamir Hendelman Playground Swing Bros. 2008
29 James Moody 4A IPO 2009
30 Pacha Massive If You Want It Nacional 2009
31 Two Loons For Tea Nine Lucid Dreams Sarathan 2007
32 Bobby Broom Bobby Broom Plays For Monk Origin 2009
33 Christian McBride & Inside Straight Kind Of Brown Mack Avenue 2009
34 Kurt Elling Dedicated To You: Kurt Elling Sings The Music Of Coltrane And Hartman Concord Jazz 2009
35 Laurence Hobgood When The Heart Dances Naim Jazz 2009
36 David 'Fathead' Newman The Blessing HighNote 2009
37 Heath Brothers Endurance Jazz Legacy 2009
38 The Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band I'm BeBoppin' Too Half Note 2009
39 Tommy Castro Hard Believer Alligator 2009
40 Grant Stewart Grant Stewart Plays The Music Of Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn Sharp Nine 2009

Another Day, Another Speech

Last week I went to SF and attended a health care reform (HCR) rally. A few hundred people showed up. It was rather depressing. There were some bright faces there, but most of the crowd consisted of union health care industry jobbers and Vietnam War protesting retreads.

If this is the public face of health care reform, then it's no wonder why it isn't going to happen. Yes, I believe some bill will get passed so the Democrats can save face, and I will support that bill, but it will be mostly a symbolic thing. Real health care reform - quality care with a real effort to constrain costs - will have to take place another time.

There is no wave of public support for HCR to counteract the nut job right wingers out there screaming about death panels and socialism. Many people are essentially like my Senator Feinstein: they have their health care, are in denial that they won't have it ten years from now, and are simply worried about one thing only: cost. They are in denial that the cost of health care is already ridiculously expensive, impeding their salary growth and impacting their taxes.

This issue is over. It was fumbled by Obama and Emanuel from the start. They had some ridiculous notion that they could achieve bipartisan support. They decided to play nice with the drug companies and give them a windfall in exchange for their support. They decided to play nice with the health insurance companies as well. They decided to play nice with Congress and let them handle the details. It has been one bad judgment after another.

Obama and Emanuel needed to be tough from the start. They weren't.

Hopefully on future issues, Obama and Emanuel will learn from this experience. Forget about "post-partisan" politics. The Republicans simply hate you and will always hate you. They hate you as much as they hated Bill Clinton; get used to it.

Forget about "post-racial" politics. At least 10 percent of the US hates you for being black and president and another 10 percent hates you because they refuse to not believe you're a Muslim. They hate you as much as they hate Jesse Jackson; get used to it.

People will lie. They will distort. They are still lost in the culture wars. If Obama and Emanuel didn't understand that six months ago, they should have damn well figured it out by now.

Tomorrow Obama will give a speech about health care. But both public opinion and the opinion of Congress have already solidified. If Obama uses this speech to lay down the gauntlet and say that he's learned his lesson and he's done with being Mr. Nice Guy on future issues, the speech will be of value long term. On the other hand, if he continues to promote the idea that we need to come together as a nation on health care reform, he'll just end up looking like a wimp.

Land of Milk and Honey

I went to synagogue for my mother's Yahrtzeit (anniversary of her death) the other day. It was the Sabbath and they were reading from Deuteronomy, the chapters where Moses tells his people what to do when they first arrive in Canaan, some new laws they can't break, the blessings they will have if they follow God's rules and the multitude of curses that will rain on them if they don't. Many of the laws relate to incest; just to note the obvious, incest is bad. That means no mother-in-laws or half sisters either. No wonder the world Jewish population is so small.

Of course, the curses far outnumber the blessings. For some reason the stick seems to be more important than the carrot in religion. Many of the curses listed have happened to the Jewish people over the years; maybe we have been kanoodling with our mother-in-laws after all.

OK, enough one liners (for now). Let's get serious. No one knows the route that the Israelites took when they left Egypt. There are quite a few guesses. My vote belongs with one that follows the southern part of the Sinai, crosses into what is now modern Jordan and then circles back somewhere near the Dead Sea. Wherever they may had been along the way, Moses had some very specific instructions about climbing a 3000 foot mountain, Mount Ebal, when they got to their final destination. I've never been. But my version of the Bible says you can get a wonderful view of Canaan from up there.

Let's forget that the narrative is kind of dicey here because how on Earth does Moses even know of the existence of this mountain? The valley below, Canaan, is referred to as the "land of milk and honey." I've been to Canaan. It's hot. It's dry. It's a harsh landscape. Moses is overselling this place big time. Canaan is in fact a dump.

I try to imagine what the Israelites felt when they finally reached the promised land. It would sort of be the equivalent of spending 40 years wandering nomadically in the US and ending up in Yuma, Arizona. What a disappointment! This is it? Forty years and you're telling me the promised land is Yuma? It's a good thing Moses didn't come along for the final leg of the journey. He would have heard a litany of complaints.

Or would he? Look at where the Jews were before this. Once they were slaves in Egypt. That was a lousy gig, certainly. Then they wandered through the Sinai, a place that makes Canaan seem like Tahiti in comparison. And that's just it. It's always relative. The Jews don't know any better. They've lived a horrible life for generations. Maybe after all that, Canaan is truly the land of milk and honey. It's a dump, but it's their dump. And there's always worse somewhere else. I remember when I lived in NC and the annual average SAT scores of each state in the US would come out. NC was always almost at the bottom. But as a colleague of mine once said, "Thank God for Mississippi."

So my guess is that had Moses actually followed his people into Canaan, his people would have been thankful. He would have been revered every day. The mood of his people would have been ecstatic. Once long ago I went hiking in Bolivia with a friend. We were out on the trail for a week. After we got off the trail, we sat in the back of a Toyota pick up for 18 hours collecting dust and nearly dying of carbon monoxide poisoning before we got to La Paz. We found this dump of a hotel for twelve bucks. The shower was heated by turning on a spark creator at the shower head; do it wrong and 220 volts zapped your arm. The water barely flowed. But a half hour after being in that hotel I was clean. I slept in the crappy bed and was the happiest man on Earth that night. That dump of a twelve dollar hotel was my land of milk and honey. Everything is almost always relative.

One Thousand Words, Part 7

Tonight is my mother's Yahrtzeit. She would have been 80 years old. This picture is from well before I was born. The baby in the oven is my brother. My mom looks to be about six months pregnant, which would put this photo at around April 1951. I think they are standing in front of my parents' first house on 42nd and Auer in Milwaukee. But actually, those houses in the background look older than the ones in that neighborhood, so it could have been at my grandparents' house on 12th and North. Now both areas are seedy, but then again so is the neighborhood I grew up in (I was just there a few weeks ago). Back then they would have been modest working class kinds of places.

My father took this picture no doubt with his Leica, a rangefinder camera that he got in exchange for a carton of cigarettes back in Germany after the war. A few years after this picture was taken he would sell the thing for 100 bucks to my uncle because he was desperate for cash to build a house.

At the time of this picture, my father was working as a union carpenter making good money. He was strong and worked fast. Even in his fifties he could still pound nails three times faster than me. One set and one slam and it was done. I remember building a fence with him at an apartment building when I was 15 and he was 49. His rhythm was still amazing: set, slam, set, slam, set, slam. His hammer was going so fast it was as if his arm was attached to a gas engine.

My grandfather in this picture is about the same age as I am now. You can tell he was no weakling either. It was at about this time that my grandfather and father got into a slugging match. My father, who had a violent temper, hit my mother one night. When my grandfather saw what had happened, he came over and slammed a fist into my father's face. It went back and forth that night, two strong and willful men. My grandfather swore he'd shoot my father dead if his daughter was ever hit again.

I didn't hear about this event until I was 25 or so. But my father never did hit my mother again. He also never got along with my grandfather after either. They were both prideful. They kept their distance, respectful but cool.

Many years later about five months before I was to get married, my father pulled me aside. He wanted to talk to me about marriage. This was so unlike him. Actually it was unlike anything in our family. We don't give advice in general and it certainly isn't solicited. Everybody seems to want to learn for themselves. This little session was an exception to the natural way our family worked (and still does work).

My father then laid down his view of marriage. He said that a wife was your best friend always. You should trust her with everything and anything. You were a team. And you should never, ever raise your hand to her. He was adamant about that last point. He got all emotional as he mentioned this. I thought it was odd at the time. It was only later when I heard about him hitting my mom early in their marriage that I understood what had been going on in his head. He was trying to share hard earned wisdom.

My brother was born slightly premature, eight months and 18 days after my parents wedding. They worked fast. My parents delayed having more kids until they had enough money. I was born five years later. My mother nearly died giving birth to me. I was an incubator baby. Her doctor told her that if she ever had another child, she'd likely die. It was probably the one major disappointment of my mother's adulthood. She loved babies, absolutely adored them. She wanted far more than two children and especially wanted a girl. She wasn't big on regrets, but she would mention this one at least two or three times every year.

My grandmother was in her early 40s in this picture. She never once went to a doctor during all of her years in the US. My grandmother was convinced that doctors removed internal organs when you weren't looking just for spite. She was of course completely crazy. She also had horrible vision, probably as bad as my mom's vision, but she never wore glasses. Mostly she relied on sound to figure things out.

She did keep herself clean. The one health related thing she did was check her weight now and then. She didn't have a scale of her own, but whenever she would come over to our house, she'd pull me aside and take me to the bathroom. She'd stand up on our scale, but she couldn't read the numbers. That was my job. I don't think her weight changed more than five pounds during all of her years in the US. But if it went up a few pounds, she'd get fretful and say that was it for sweets for awhile. And it was. Both my grandparents possessed iron wills.

I never really saw the resemblance between my mother and her parents when I was a kid. My mother had fair skin, freckles, and brownish/red hair. My grandparents were swarthy. When I was little, I more or less assumed that my mom was adopted. Somehow using kids logic I thought my grandparents - with their dark skin and black hair - were Native Americans who spoke Yiddish. I'm not joking. I really did think this when I was very little. But in this picture you can see the resemblance between my mom and her dad very clearly. You can also see the resemblance between my grandparents, who were first cousins. They definitely weren't Native Americans. Instead they were the Polish-Jewish equivalent of rednecks, possessing a family tree with few branches.

Uncle Stuey's American Top 40, September 3rd, 2009

Here's what about 50 AAA/Jazz stations are playing this week. I'll be listening to the Concord CDs on this list over the next few days.

1 Bill Frisell Disfarmer Nonesuch 2009
2 Roy Hargrove Big Band Emergence EmArcy / Groovin' High 2009
3 Wilco Wilco (The Album) Nonesuch 2009
4 Jackie Ryan Doozy Open Art 2009
5 Imogen Heap Ellipse RCA 2009
6 Will Bernard Blue Plate Special Palmetto 2008
7 Roberta Gambarini So In Love EmArcy / Groovin' High 2009
8 Jon Mayer Nightscape Reservoir 2009
9 Bobby Broom Bobby Broom Plays For Monk Origin 2009
10 Robert Glasper Double Booked Blue Note 2009
11 Alvin Queen Mighty Long Way Enja / Justin Time 2009
12 Gerald Clayton Two-Shade ArtistShare 2009
13 Eels Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs Of Desire Vagrant 2009
14 Heath Brothers Endurance Jazz Legacy 2009
15 Tamir Hendelman Playground Swing Bros. 2008
16 Kurt Elling Dedicated To You: Kurt Elling Sings The Music Of Coltrane And Hartman Concord Jazz 2009
17 Bill Easley Hearing Voices 18th & Vine 2009
18 Moby Wait For Me Mute 2009
19 Joe Locke & David Hazeltine Mutual Admiration Society 2 Sharp Nine 2009
20 The Bob Florence Limited Edition Legendary Mama 2009
21 Stefon Harris & Blackout Urbanus Concord Jazz 2009
22 Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow & Antonio Sanchez Quartet Live Concord Jazz 2009
23 David 'Fathead' Newman The Blessing HighNote 2009
24 Christian McBride & Inside Straight Kind Of Brown Mack Avenue 2009
25 Pete Yorn Back And Forth Columbia 2009
26 Freddy Cole The Dreamer In Me HighNote 2009
27 The Low Anthem Oh My God, Charlie Darwin Nonesuch 2008
28 Regina Spektor Far Sire 2009
29 James Moody 4A IPO 2009
30 Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears Tell 'Em What Your Name Is! Lost Highway 2009
31 Dave Matthews Band Big Whiskey And The Groo Grux King RCA 2009
32 Levon Helm Electric Dirt Vanguard 2009
33 Kaki King Dreaming Of Revenge Velour 2008
34 Minus The Bear Menos El Oso Suicide Squeeze 2005
35 The Terence Blanchard Group Choices Concord Jazz 2009
36 Reuben Wilson Azure Te 18th & Vine 2009
37 Mike Stern Big Neighborhood Heads Up 2009
38 Sophie Milman Take Love Easy Linus 2009
39 John Beasley Positootly! Resonance 2009
40 John Proulx Baker's Dozen: Remembering Chet Baker MaxJazz 2009

One liner of the day...

AP Headline: "GOP senators seek go-slow approach on health care." Real slow. Like never.

The No Parking Gene

The other day I went to the new Jewish Community Center in my town. It's absolutely fabulous. I've been using the JCC's eventual opening as an excuse to put off exercising regularly. But now my excuse (or at least that particular excuse) has expired. The place is open. I worked up a good healthy sweat. It's got all the latest equipment, fancy shmancy digital lockers, wonderful showers, and a sweet lap pool. The staff is enthusiastic.

I'm sure there are many top notch facilities like this around the area. But I also know that immediately upon entry with my car, I could tell you that this was the JCC, not some Y or non-denominational workout facility. You can tell just by being in the parking lot. It's like every other JCC I've been to. Jews can't park. They just can't.

It's funny. I drove up to the place. Some old guy was ahead of me trying to cram his big car into a space made tiny by the fact that the cars on both sides ignored the lines. I waited. He gave up, backed up and then drove off to do his own butcher parking job.

It's like Tay Sachs, this no parking gene. It must run in Ashkenazi Jews due to too much inbreeding. I know it runs in my family. Often my mother wouldn't even try to park. She'd get out of the car in a parking lot, smile at the first man who looked like he wasn't an axe murderer and hand him the keys. My father used his car as a battering ram when he parked.

The odds of me inheriting this no parking gene were undoubtedly quite high. But somehow I avoided it. I'm a lucky fellow I know.

Not so for many others, though. The no parking gene is always in abundance at JCC and synagogue parking lots. I don't think what's going on is a willful ignoring of the parking stripes. No, no, it's not arrogance. It's incompetence, a basic lack of hand/eye coordination that involves the use of a motor vehicle. I'm sure it's related to the no sports gene. There are exceptions of course. Sandy Koufax is undoubtedly one hell of a parallel parker.

It probably goes back for a thousand years, this parking gene defect. I can just imagine a JCC from the year 1400, all those horse-driven wagons parked willy nilly on the dirt lot in front. Back then you lifted rocks and pedaled a millstone round and round. Or something like that. That was back in the days of the Flintsteins (yes, go ahead and groan).

Calvin Trillin, a nice Jewish boy obsessed with parking in New York City who claims to have written the first (and only) "parking novel," Tepper Isn't Going Out, may have already touched on this issue. I haven't read the novel nor do I intend to. But if Calvin Trillin didn't already include information about this no parking gene in his first novel, he has some great material for a sequel.

That Connecting Thing

A while back I was at the South by Southwest music conference listening to a new performer on a major label do her thing. She had looks. She sang like an angel. She wrote her own songs and some of them were damn good. She was going to be on Letterman that week. All signs were pointing toward success. Except for one thing. You could tell that the crowd, kind of small, wasn't connecting to her. I don't know why. I never know why.

When I tend to show up at industry things like this, people assume I must be someone who works or has worked for a label. I dress a certain way. I carry myself a certain way. I talk a certain way. And I'm of a certain age. I was chatting it up with a publicity guy from the label to whom the girl was signed. I was commiserating with him. We both agreed she had talent. But the crowd decides things, not us. We both knew the album would tank. And it did.

I asked him what the label had coming down the pike for the next year. This was back in the days when labels were gods. They signed talent. They promoted talent. Radio played what they promoted. It's fashionable to deride this system as predatory and view labels as greedy bastards. But that system produced a lot of multimillionaires. Take a look at Bob Dylan for instance. Because of label support back when he was starting, he is an icon, not some obscure nasally singer from Minnesota. He continues to earn well over two million dollars a year from his back catalog sales alone. But I digress.

The publicity guy mentioned about eight acts that they were going to release the following year. He was really high on a few of them. I don't remember their names at all. But then he got to the bottom of the list. "There's this kid. You can't even pronounce his name, Mraz. Little skinny guy with the sex appeal of a brine shrimp." He just shook his head and gave me an "I don't know what the higher ups are thinking" look.

If I remember correctly, Jason Mraz's first album sold well over a million copies. He went on tour. Huge crowds came to see him play. Critics didn't see what the fuss was about. I didn't see what the fuss was about either. Sales from that CD were propelled by one song, The Remedy, co-written with a team of songwriters that tend to create cheesy tunes for girl singers who can't write a lick. As far as I know, out of the eight acts the publicity guy mentioned to me that one night, Jason Mraz was the only one that was successful.

I'll digress again. Labels fail with almost all of the acts that they promote. Their business is like the oil business. Every act is like drilling a hole looking for oil. And most holes come up dry. That's why music costs what it does.

It's now about 8 years after my meeting the publicity guy from the label. Jason Mraz is still going strong. His latest hit tune, I'm Yours, miraculously has been on the charts for over a year. Crowds still come to see him play. I've seen him play live as well. The publicity guy was right; Jason Mraz has the sex appeal of a brine shrimp. Critics think he's a big nothing. But all of that doesn't matter. The crowd decides things not me or the critics. People love this guy. They go to his concerts. They buy his tunes.

For whatever reason, Jason Mraz connects well with large audiences. I don't know why. I never know why this happens. I can only watch it happen and smile. He has that gift. It's magic. Who knows where it comes from?

Now I'll digress again. Mr. Mraz makes millions of dollars a year. His success is the result of his label plunking down a ton of money on his first CD. They took a risk on him. That risk has paid handsomely for both his label and Mr. Mraz. Without that label support, Jason Mraz would still be playing the folk clubs of San Diego for a couple hundred bucks a gig. That system of promotion - so reviled by the public - is now by and large dead for new acts. What is the future of new music? It will be made certainly. But the prospect of any one act making a good to great living has been severely diminished.