The Razor

In May I wrote the following:

In January 2007 oil was at $50 barrel; in May 2007 it was at $60. Today, May 21, it traded at $134. So in a period of 1 year it the price of oil has more than doubled. In 16 months it has nearly tripled.

When prices rise quickly in a very short time you are in a bubble. It doesn’t matter whether you are talking about commodities, internet stocks, or tulips. When you have the feeling that you are on a rocket and the only way to go is up, then you are actually standing on the surface of a bubble. And bubbles always burst.

I even went so far as to predict that the oil bubble would burst the last week of July. As far as an educated guess goes, I wasn’t that far off the mark. Oil peaked on July 11. Oil is trading as I write, October 10, 2008 at $77.32 - a 47% decline from it’s high.

What happened? Several things. First demand slackened and the dollar strengthened. These two factors caused speculators to realize that the downside of oil was greater than the upside. As money started to flow out of the commodity, investors expecting the price to rise were forced to cover their positions. This lead to the slow deflation of the bubble until the last weeks of September.

For the last weeks panic has gripped the stock market as irrational exhuberance switched to fear caused by the credit crisis. Now everyone is expecting a deep recession which will caused demand for oil to plummet. What had been a perfect storm supporting the these of “peak oil” has changed into a “perfect storm” where the value of oil has collapsed.

As a contrarian by nature, I believe that the panic occurring in the market is ignoring the fundamentals. If I gambled, I would be plowing money into the market, buying stock in companies with solid fundamentals that have been caught up in the, I believe the economic term is “hoopla”. As for Oil, OPEC is going to cut supply, but the organization has a terrible track record in stabilizing prices so I don’t expect the official cut to do much (or stop countries from selling on the side to make as much money as possible before the oil price falls even further). Russia and Venezuela, two countries that have ridden high on the boom in oil prices will be hit the hardest.

So what does this prove? It shows that for every boom there is a bust, that economic gravity still exists. There is no need for exotic explanations like “peak oil”. I doubt we will be hearing that term much more over the next few months.

The Razor turned 7 years old this week. While it has never become a popular destination on the Web, I do hope that it has added something positive to the blogosphere during this time.

It all started with this….

Rohrschach Test for the Left

Currently there is a strain of logic that is appearing on college campuses and salons of the Left as America goes to war. This logic is what is called the “rape victim asked for it” defense of the indefensible. This logic which has been repeated in the letters to the editor of this and other papers states that the terrorists are not at fault for the attack on the Pentagon and WTC  - we Americans are. The terrorists were merely reacting to American policies abroad such as the support of Israel and continued sanctions on Iraq and are therefore ultimately not responsible for the 7,000 dead. The American government is - and since the government represents the will of our people, we Americans are to blame for the death and destruction of September 11, 2001. All that remains is for a call for reparations to the families of the dead hijackers.

As several commentators on both sides of the political spectrum have pointed out, this logic is flawed for a variety of reasons. First, it de-humanizes the terrorists by making them into thoughtless automatons, lacking the human quality of “free-will”. However, we know that these terrorists had the free-will to call off their mission by walking away, refusing to do it, or by contacting authorities. Instead they exercised their free-will by choosing to kill as many people as they possibly could.

Secondly, they excuse the attack by blaming American policy abroad. American support of Israel is mentioned as a possible reason for the attack. This logic seeks to ignore the fact that Israel is the only democracy in the region, and that for every atrocity blamed on the Israelis there is another one perpetrated against them. It also ignores the fact that the Israelis have never committed a terrorist act against the United States, unlike other groups within the region. Nor does it take into account the thirty years America has worked to build a lasting peace within the region, and the fact that the US is hated almost as much by the Israeli Right as the Islamic Right as a result.

Islamic fundamentalists have universally condemned the Camp David Accords negotiated by President Carter and signed by Egypt and Israel, an agreement which President Anwar Sadat of Egypt paid for with his life - assassinated by members of the Islamic Fundamentalist movement. These groups do not want peace between Israel and the Palestinians. What they seek is what Arab commentators have euphemistically called “finishing what the Germans started”, namely, the slaughter of all Jews present within Israel. This claim was reiterated this week by Osama Bin-Laden’s fatwa calling for the “killing of Americans and Jews wherever they might be”.

The motives of the attackers are still unclear - a problem which allows the imaginations to run wild on the Left, blaming the attack for American aggression against North Vietnam (a state currently seeking better ties with the USA), North Korea (a Stalinist regime known for its rattling of sabers while food bowls go empty), and the all-encompassing term, “American Imperialism”.

Such attempts at ascribing motives to the attackers simply show that the attackers didn’t have any. The attacks become a kind of Rohrschach Test for those bearing a grudge against the US government in which they see the motive they want to see. Such attempts have everything to do with the mindset of the explainer and nothing whatsoever to do with the true motives of the attackers.

In a sense this is an attempt by minds to make sense of the nonsensical. By providing motive to the attack, people feel better. They can take comfort in people having been killed for a reason, that the attack was some kind of message which we now must heed.

This attempt at understanding is the Left’s attempt at gaining control of the situation. However it is the kind of control exercised by a battered wife who seeks to take command of the violent outbursts and attacks of her husband by making him happy and avoiding the actions which set him off.

However, to an outside party it is evident who is in control in this situation: the husband is. And the only solution to the problem is to remove the woman from the situation or jail her husband. In our situation there is no “jail” that will hold Bin-Laden, nor is there anywhere that we can run. Imagine a scenario where a group attempts to free him by holding a city hostage to a small nuclear device. Our only solution is to hunt him down and kill him before he kills us.

This anti-American government logic also ignores the positive things America has done in the Muslim world. America has fought two wars against a Christian nation, Serbia, to halt atrocities the Serbs were committing against Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia. It has been the primary aid donor to Afghanistan. It intervened in Somalia in an attempt at bringing peace to the collapsing nation and attempted to feed its starving population while bandits robbed aid agencies and UN forces and Muslim militants shot and killed American soldiers. America’s experience in Somalia prevented its intervention in Rwanda a year later. 800,000 people were murdered in an orgy of violence which the US and UN forces could have easily prevented. Since Osama Bin-Laden has been implicated in the actions in Somalia against US forces, by the logic of the Left he would also be responsible for the resultant slaughter in Rwanda.

Finally, it ignores the failures of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. What has Osama Bin-Laden and the Taliban done for Muslims except starved and killed them? Bin-Laden killed more Muslims in the WTC and embassy attacks in Africa than the Israelis have in years of bloody fighting in the West Bank and Gaza. He is wealthy, yet how many hospitals has he built? How many clinics? How many Muslim children has he put through school?

Bin-Laden and his organization are nothing new - contrary to what you may be reading. We have seen his type before: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The Hutu Militias which like to explain their atrocities using political terms. Slobodan Milosovic and his fanatical followers of thugs, murderers and rapists which also resorted to religious imagery - albeit of a later time (13th Century vs the 12th Century espoused by the Taliban). Idi Amin in Uganda. And of course, Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

All of these men have stood up against the USA and been exposed as murderous charlatans. Bin-Laden and his Taliban supporters will as well - if not abetted in their conquest by the well-intentioned Left.

While I am a die-hard McCain supporter and Republican who believes deep down that electing Obama to the presidency will weaken the United States economically and militarily, I think its worth considering as objectively as possible whether any good could come out of an Obama win next month. Given the white-hot rhetoric at this point in the election it’s almost impossible to imagine anything good coming out of the election of the most liberal US senator to the Presidency without the constraints of a strong opposition party. But given the poll numbers it’s worth a try.

For the past forty years a large segment of the American population has been alienated from politics to the point where the most common public enemy in our culture is the American government itself. The United States government regularly plays the “bad guy” role in Hollywood movies, and TV shows from the X-files to the more recent 24 have the heroes battling against a government which knows everything and attempts to silence its critics using all means at its disposal. These anti-government conspiracy themes, once exclusive to the extremist right wing, have gone mainstream thanks to two generations of anti-government propaganda in the schools, newspapers, magazines, movies, music and nearly all forms of media. What once motivated only the likes of Timothy McVeigh has now become mainstream.

The distrust of authority is not new. In fact one could argue that it appeared at the genesis of the country as the oppressed fled their homelands in Europe for new lives and less interference in the New World. In fact distrust of government could be thought of as a common interest between Left and Right although for different reasons. While the Left distrusts the military industrial complex it paradoxically expects a check every month from its social services arm. The Right is the opposite, pouring money and power into the military while starving federal bureaucracies. Nevertheless there is a contradiction at the core of both political wings: both distrust the government with some things yet trust it completely.

Many of Obama’s backers have been disenfranchised from politics for generations. Voting and seeing the results of their actions should prove that the system works for everyone - not just the wealthy.  So far Obama has campaigned against an unpopular lame duck two-term sitting president. Upon his inauguration a President Obama would have to lead. This will require making choices, each of which will leave just as many unhappy people as pleased ones. His popularity will inevitably wane as his supporters realize that he is not a messaianic figure, just a normal politician that has risen to meteoric heights quickly through luck as much as political acumen. It is better for the schooling in political reality of the newly empowered to occur by their own man than his opponent.

The press and the mainstream media has openly championed the Obama candidacy. An Obama presidency would force the media to make a choice: Resume its antagonistic Fourth Estate role towards power or give up and become the propaganda outlet of the government. Faced with this hard choice some media outlets would no doubt opt for the former (newspaper outlets) while others like Jann Wenner’s rags would no doubt continue to mythologize an Obama presidency just as it has the Obama candidacy.

Budget reality - a deficit of 3% of GDP and rising heading into a recession - will constrain Obama’s spending programs much more effectively than an opposition wielding the fillibuster.

An Obama presidency will purge the last vestiges of the Clinton machine from the Democrats. Even a reality-chastened Obama will enter 2012 much stronger than the junior senator from New York, so it’s unlikely that Sen. Hillary Clinton will be able to mount a formidable challenge to his reelection as Reagan was able to do in 1976 against Gerald Ford and Ted Kennedy was able to do four years later during the Democratic primaries against President Jimmy Carter.

President George W. Bush has become a figure of hatred in the eyes of many both here and abroad. His replacement in office by Barack Obama, a figure that is viewed favorably abroad, would at least serve to temper rising anti-Americanism among our allies in Europe and South America. This would also take some of the allure away from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; while the Bush administration has been successful at wielding hard power of the military, it has been much less successful at using soft power such as the international media to further American interests abroad. An Obama presidency could give the appearance of change while America’s military might remained.

Iraq is relatively stable and quiet going into an Obama presidency. If in a year or two it destabilizes then Republicans could capitalize on the situation using the meme “Obama lost Iraq.” If it remains stable, then the Bush presidency will look less a disaster than it has been portrayed by the media, although the “success” in Iraq will no doubt be attributed to Obama. For those of us who have never waivered in our support of a free and democratic Iraq, it doesn’t matter who gets the credit as long as Iraq thrives.

Which brings us to terrorism. Terrorism is Obama and the Democrats Achilles Heel. Any successful attack on US soil under an Obama presidency would force the Democrats to “own” this issue in a way that they haven’t done in opposition to Bush. Under the Bush administration Democrats have used their opposition status to champion the closure of Guantanamo Bay and the extension of civil liberties to terrorism suspects without bearing the responsibility of those policies. This would change if and when a terrorist attack occurred on Obama’s watch. While the 9-11 Report blamed the policy failures of the prior administrations for the event, the public and many commentators viewed the attacks as such a shock that they gave a pass to those who formulated policies that allowed the attacks to happen. Such forgiveness would not occur to an Obama administration that failed to take the lessons of the 9-11 Commission to heart. Either the adminstration would swing further to the far left to justify this failure, which would result in its removal from office in the next election or worse, impeachment, or it would advocate many of the same policies the Democrats opposed under the Bush administration.

Finally, the complete loss of power would force some much needed Republican soul searching. Either the party will return to the ideals of small government and fiscal responsibility that swept Reagan to power in 1980 or it will die and be replaced by a new conservative party. Such “creative destruction” is common in the free market beloved by Republicans, so it should be embraced when it applies to a political party. With a rejuvenated Republican Party or a completely new opposition party, either way the nation will be strengthened.

America is nothing if not resilient, and to absorb the rhetoric that Obama will ruin it makes Obama appear stronger than he really is, and America weaker. It has survived numerous wars and economic collapses. It has weathered bad presidents and managed to thrive. It will survive an Obama presidency and even be made stronger if those of us who oppose him recognize the opportunities that his presidency present us and use them to our full ability.

Congratulations to this week’s winners:

Council: Cheat Seeking Missiles: McCain’s Needed New Messaging Strategy

Noncoucil: American Thinker: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

Complete voting here.

Link

95 Democrats and 133 Republicans voted against the bill. Republicans blamed Pelosi’s speech for making the vote partisan. However that doesn’t explain how the Speaker failed to sway nearly a hundred - or 40% - of her own party. Bet there’s a whirring sound coming out of Tip O’Neill’s grave.

File this one under “D” for “Duh…”

According to the researchers, people who regularly recycle rubbish and save energy at home are also the most likely to take frequent long-haul flights abroad. The carbon emissions from such flights can swamp the green savings made at home, the researchers claim.

Stewart Barr, of Exeter University, who led the research, said: “Green living is largely something of a myth. There is this middle class environmentalism where being green is part of the desired image. But another part of the desired image is to fly off skiing twice a year. And the carbon savings they make by not driving their kids to school will be obliterated by the pollution from their flights.”

Some people even said they deserved such flights as a reward for their green efforts, he added.

Hattip: The Deceiver

Congratulations to this week’s winners:

Council: The Glittering Eye: Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There

Noncouncil: The Jawa Report: Hope, Change and Lies

Complete voting.

Three yahrzeit candles flicker on the mantel in front of a black and white photograph taken sixty years ago. The past few days have been a whirlwind of activity punctuated by fits of grief that seemingly come from nowhere and strike without warning.

I’ve been hit by these fits too, and I’m amazed. Over the years I have become so cold to the world, so disappointed by the way Evil and the stupid profit while the Good and the intelligent suffer, that I thought my skin was thicker. But there I was in the room of a dying old woman who honestly would have been appalled to know that I was at her bedside, turning away to look at the office buildings outside the window as I struggled to hold back the tears. “If you’re going to blubber I don’t need you here,” the Wife had threatened. I was supposed to be her rock, but my tears were quickly eroding it.

So I turned an objective and clinical eye to the proceedings instead and found comfort in Science. The “tree” of instruments and machines keeping her mother alive were accomplishing their task -maintaining her condition - and could have done so seemingly indefinitely.

Her body was racked with cancer. The metaplastic breast cancer that had been excised six weeks ago had been thought to have been contained; the metastatic work up on her had been negative. But the surgeon had seen a “few nodules” on the scans of her lungs, and we knew that this particular type of cancer really “liked” the lungs - as well as other viscera. Her surgeon and oncologist were confident they had caught the cancer in its tracks, but the Wife and I weren’t so sure. The mother-in-law began to experience gut pain, and her doctors felt that this could have been caused by a bowel obstruction brought about by the pain medications she was on. She was brought into the hospital and two weeks ago had a laproscopic bowel resection. They pulled out a fist-sized bezoar that “didn’t look like cancer”; of course a few days ago the pathology came back and it was.

During the scanning in the interim the “few nodules” became “numerous nodules” on her lungs, and were deemed “consistent with metastatic disease.” Up to this point God had merely winged her; He finally hit His mark - and it was up to the Wife to decide her mother’s fate.

The tree maintained her bodily functions. It fed her milky-white nutrition through a tube. It extracted her urine and feces from other tubes. Another tube filled what looked to me like a coin sorter with fluid from her lungs. Other tubes pumped in vancomycin, fentanyl and other drugs. Then of course there was the ventilator that every few seconds pumped her chest up with oxygen and made her head jerk backwards. Her eyes were slightly open but it was clear that she was gone. The tree of life kept her body alive, but my Wife’s mother was gone and nothing was going to bring her back.

The old woman had plans. She had planned a trip to the Copper Canyon in Mexico with the Wife in November. She wanted to stand on the Great Wall of China, and the Wife had struggled to find just the right tour package that could make her wish come true. In the days before her mastectomy she had insisted on getting her nails and hair done, and while in the hospital fretted about the condition of the bushes surrounding her house. We assured her that Fall was not the time to be trimming bushes, but she never seemed to believe us. She planned to see Beverly Hills Chihuahua with the Kid next week when it opened. But these plans like so many others of the dead simply evaporate with their final breath.

On Thursday there had been a change in her condition; the ventilator settings had to be increased and her blood pressure was falling. The Wife called me at work, and I came home to get her; we then stopped by the Kid’s school and pulled him out of class. “I knew this early dismissal wasn’t going to be good,” he said as we drove to the hospital.

The Wife met with the team of doctors assigned to the Mother-in-law’s case. There conclusions were undeniable. Her mother had metastatic cancer of the metaplastic variety - one of the rarer forms out there that’s so rare Medicine doesn’t know how to treat it. The fungal pneumonia which infected her lungs was not responding to treatment, and her prognosis was poor.

How long could she stay on the “tree”? The Wife learned that some patients in the ICU had been there for months with no hope. After awhile family members stop visiting, and they completely avoid the tough decision as their loved one lays entwined in the roots of the tree unable to escape on their own.

As as a doctor the Wife has seen death up close numerous times; I had not. I’ve reached an age where hiding from death is not an option and to support the Wife while her mother died.

An angel of sorts, a physician’s assistant named Carmelina, had attended to us throughout the ordeal. She took the Kid with her down to the cafeteria on break as the Wife and I stood at the mother-in-law’s side watching her draw her final breaths and our eyes glued to the heart monitor.

An old friend asked why the old woman disliked me. I wrote

I haven’t figured that out. When I first met (the in-laws)
in 1994 on the way to Africa I think I struck them as a bit of a
rube; my manners weren’t the best. The first time I ate brie was at a
restaurant with them and I made some stupid comment comparing it to
cheese-whiz. Her mother never liked the fact that I’m basically a shy
person; she often would force me to look her in the eye when I talked to
her.

Truth is I wanted to like them. Since my father died when I was a kid and
the Wife’s read science fiction, was a scientist and historian and liked
computers - interests that I shared - I hoped to make some kind of
connection with him; but I never did. The conversations we had were
forced, and I always felt uncomfortable during them.

I cut their grass and did minor repairs around their house. When her
father came down with pneumonia, I was the one who drove him to the
hospital. I skipped work to take him to his chemo. Every crisis I was
there for them. But her mother would always claim that I did nothing for
them. When you would point things out, she would be surprised and not
remember them - or impugn my motives. Her belief that I did nothing was so
deeply ingrained that it struck me as pathological.

On top of this I proved that I was completely devoted to their daughter
and our son. She wanted to go to medical school, and I supported her
decision. Every scrap she got into with anyone I would always take her
side. “You always take her side,” her mother often told me - as a freaking
taunt!

Meanwhile, slowly invisible lines were being crossed. On the Kid’s sixth
birthday we were at the in-laws house. Wife’s sister was at the time in
Cincinnati with her family. Wife and I were convinced that she was an
alcoholic and tried to convince the in-laws. She happened to call while we
were there, and the Wife refused to speak with her. This led to a huge fight
with her father screaming at me and kicking us out of the house. “This is
the worst birthday ever,” our son cried in the car. Her parents finally
realized that her sister was a drunk soon after, but the line had been
crossed.

Wife’s mother was an emotional sadist. She would get into moods where it
seemed she took pleasure out of making the Wife unhappy, and that made me
bristle. You could watch her press the Wife’s buttons, probing her weaknesses
until she got a reaction. She seemed to take pleasure out of inflicting
pain.

After awhile I stopped volunteering to help. If the Wife asked me to help
them I did, but you can’t keep kicking a dog and expect him to run to you
when you come home.

Things worsened after her father died; her mother became extremely
negative and never really emotionally recovered from the loss. She also
became jealous of our relationship. “You have Scott,” she would
say to the Wife, “I have no one.”

I’ve shed some tears over her death, but I’m not sure why.

Why they didn’t like me? I don’t know.

She would have been horrified, but as I stood beside her and watched her agonal breaths I felt a deep sadness. This photograph had been slipped in a baggie and rested on her abdomen, a reminder of the life and vitality of the dying old woman. The fact that she had lived a full life did little to take away the sting I felt, and provided no comfort at all to her daughter that placed cool washcloths on her head and spoke gently to her, “It’s okay. Go to dad. He’s waiting for you.”

The heart monitor showed a rhythm over 90 beats per minute, but then it began to dip into the seventies, and surely but slowly it began a gentle descent. It reminded me for some reason like an aircraft coming in for gentle landing as it plateaued in the seventies for a few moments then glided into the sixties, then the fifties. The gradual descent continued and I noted the last vestiges of humanity leave the old woman’s body - what little there was left after all the suffering it had experienced over the prior weeks.

And a deep realization struck me. Whatever my rational mind tried to explain, my instincts told me that I was missing something. This was Death but it wasn’t the end for the old woman; there was something else that existed beyond it that was as real as the machines and tubes before me. It is an innate knowledge - something so visceral that I really can’t explain it.

All I can say is that I may deny the existence of a God, but it’s getting harder for me to state that there is nothing beyond death. Granted I have no proof of this beyond a feeling, and recognize that feelings can be viewed as the results of uncontrolled emotions, hopes and dreams. But when I objectively consider this feeling, the rationality seems almost as childish and empty as an atheist considers a belief in heaven to be.

The mother-in-law is dead, but I feel that she isn’t gone. It doesn’t make sense I know, but then again so many things don’t. Wrap your mind around the wave/particle duality and tell me afterward if that is any less stranger than the possibility of life after death. But I have no proof beyond pure instinct; there’s no double-slit experiment that can conclusively prove it.

Science and Faith. Both have their faults, both their strengths. Blend them together and I think you have a better more accurate representation of reality than either alone.   At the very least the combination strikes me as more humane.

The heart monitor descended into the thirties than glided in for a landing at 0. A nurse came in and turned off the monitor. I hugged the Wife and we turned and left the room.

The photograph sits on the mantel and the yahrzeit candles burn into nothingness.

The mother-in-law passed away at 6:03 tonight with the Wife and me at her side. She would have hated knowing that I was there, but I was.

She was a good woman who missed the man she loved.

Now she’s with him.

May they both rest in peace.

As I laid in bed trying to sleep and not disturb the Wife or the sleeping animals on the covers I heard a garbled voice on the answering machine. Phone calls in the early morning hours are never good. The 83 year old Mother-in-law has been in the hospital for the past month with one thing after another, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise when I crept out of bed, listened to the message and called the hospital back. “It’s family,” the nurse said as she handed it to the doctor. He needed to speak to the Wife and had left messages on her cell phone. I said that she was asleep; he didn’t object when I said I would wake her.

Her family had once numbered over a dozen, now the Wife was the only one left to make life and death decisions over the fate of her mother.  Her father, a retired research chemist at Du Pont, died three years ago. Her eldest brother had died of diabetes complications thirty years ago. Her youngest brother drifted into madness of mindless matings with women and religious cults of one sort or another. Her sister, my last drinking buddy before I went into recovery, now resided in Las Vegas with her co-dependent. Once she had learned that her mother was in the hospital she had stopped calling; reality tends to interfere with one’s alcohol-fueled fantasies. Her two children, newly-minted adults both, haven’t called or visited their grandmother in months. One, who graduated high school in June, works at the local Target when not at college. We say “hi” to each other as we pass in the aisles as our familial relationship withers.

So it was left to my Wife while speeding on a highway patrolled by the occasional Delaware State Trooper and the lone drunk driver to make a critical decision.  Her mother’s oxygen level was dropping and they needed to place her on a ventilator . “But she’s signed a DNR,” she said. There’s no DNR on file she was told. The pressurized mask was failing to keep her blood O2 level up. Intubation was the only option. Would she authorize it?

Somewhere on a darkened stretch of I-95 the Wife relented and agreed. By the time she arrived minutes later she found her mother sedated and on the vent. Sure enough the DNR bracelet she had worn prior was missing from her arm.

When she met the hospitalist she learned that her mother had screamed, and the nurse rushed to her bed and found her short of breath and struggling to breathe. “Call my daughter,” she said before sliding into unconsciousness, “I want to say good-bye.”

—-

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the local hospital is a completely separate unit. Once a doctor signs off on the patient, he or she is wheeled through a set of locked double doors into a cluster of small vestibules facing the nurse’s station. A new team of doctors and nurses takes over control, and the hospitalist who had cared for a patient often may never see him or her again. Within each vestibule lays a patient attached to a tree-like stand of monitors and machines by roots of electronic leads and plastic tubes.These are the sickest of the sick, I later explain to the Kid. Anyone sicker than this dies. A bearded old man lays in one vestibule next to the Mother-in-law; on the other side of her lays an elderly black woman curled up in a loose fetal position. All lay sedated and are completely oblivious as the doctors and nurses pass from one to the other, checking vital signs or changing settings on one of the machines on the “tree”.

Fluids of various colors hang from branches of the tree. Some drip into my mother-in-law while others are collected below her bed as she lays asleep, mouth slightly open from the ventilator tube that causes her chest to rise and fall rhythmically, a barely perceptible hiss in between each “breath”. I notice that one electronic monitor reads “12:00″ like VCRs used throughout American households until they were replaced by DVDs and Tivos.

The Kid steps hesitantly towards his grandmother, and slowly takes her hand. “I love you,” he says, a hint of emotion to his voice as he squeezes her hand. She doesn’t respond, nor does she make any movement when her daughter leans close to her and whispers “I love you mom,” into her ear. I stand out of the way beyond the head of the bed next to the “tree,” allowing my curiousity to stand in the way of an inappropriate emotional moment.

As I examine the finely crafted tubes and machines, each the result of precise application of engineering and science, I’m left to wonder at the conundrum we now find ourselves in - “we” as a society as well as “we” the family. While my mother-in-law and I do not get along for reasons that I’ve never quite understood, I wish her no harm. Yet I recognize the question that my Wife must answer alone, and the larger one our society must grapple with.

When is it enough?

A mastectomy leads to a colon resection leads to possible sepsis in an 83 year old woman. Where is the line that says simply, enough?

Try as we might we desperately look for it but it’s nowhere to be found. In our case the Mother-in-law can survive the sepsis and slowly gather her strength. As she becomes stronger she can move to a rehab a facility and by the Holidays could be busying about her daily life as independently as she was before the breast cancer.

Or God could take another pot-shot at her and she could become sick with something else.

If there is a line that we cross that says clearly, emphatically, “that’s enough,” we have yet to see it. Unfortunately its lack is making us question the lines very existence.

One of the more painful arguments I had on this website came from my unwavering support of Terry Schiavo-Schindler family’s fight to keep her alive. I don’t regret my support of her family against her husband, and while I believe her case to be fundamentally different than my mother-in-law’s I do think it holds some similarities. For one thing in Schiavo-Schindler’s case there were no definitive lines (although her husband and his attorney would disagree) just as there aren’t any today with my mother-in-law’s condition. My mother-in-law is also 83 years old; she’s live longer than most people born the same year she was.  

So without the lines, without the clarity that they bring we are left to weigh in the end, what she would want us to do. This is what the Wife is doing as she carries the burden of making the decisions for her mother’s care. All I can do is listen to her, agree with her opinions and rub her back as she unloads the burden for a few minutes.

Her mother doesn’t know it but she is in the best of hands.

More to (surely) come…

Congratulations to this week’s winners:

Council: Bookworm Room - False Syllogisms

Noncouncil: Brits at their Best - 9/11/1777 What if

Full voting here.

Who was right? John McCain.
Speaking May 25, 2006:

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

Who was wrong? Barack Obama - who pocketed $126,349 in contributions from the two, second only to Democrat Christopher Dodd. The bill never made it out of committee thanks to Dodd - who headed it while receiving favorable mortgage terms from Countrywide.

Will the Democrats be filleted by the Mainstream Media for their ties to “Big Mortgage” the same way the Republicans have been tarred by the epithet “Big Oil?” I’m not holding my breath.

One of the greatest weapons in the GOP’s arsenal in the battle for the White House is Joe Biden’s mouth.

Biden says he and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama want to “take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people.”

Under the Democrats’ economic plan, people earning more than $250,000 a year would pay more in taxes while those earning less — the vast majority of American taxpayers — would receive a tax cut.

Biden told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday that, in his words, “it’s time to be patriotic … time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut.”

I don’t make it now, but I hope to someday thanks to the Wife’s income. What Joe doesn’t realize is that for many Americans, a quarter of a million a year is imaginable. While our household is nowhere near that number, we can imagine it; it’s not like the CEO salaries we read about where they take home tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Even winning the lottery won’t net you annual salaries like those.

But a quarter of a million could be a combined household of two IT managers, or a vet and a vet tech, or a lawyer and a school teacher, a household that owns a small business or numerous other combinations. Note that at this level we are not talking about the idle rich; even $250k worth of investments will not net you more than $25,000-$50,000 annual income, so $250,000 is income from those working and contributing to society.

$250,000 is within the realm of possibility, and by redefining the wealthy at that level the Democrats prove once again why their message of “socking it to the rich” usually fails. I’m all for punishing those who took no risks and yet received all the rewards before the latest economic meltdown, but not by setting the “wealth” bar at such a low level.

UPDATE:
Meanwhile Joe gives a measly $369 a year to charity on his income of $319k. People earning that income average $40,000. I don’t know about the average, but I make far less than Joe and give away roughly 4 times that a year.

Being from St. Louis and a former Democrat I have a warm spot in my heart for Sen. Tom Eagleton. Not only was Sen. Eagleton a fine senator for Missouri, he also played an important role in my brother’s adoption of a Vietnamese orphan in 1973. This was months after he was dropped by McGovern like an ugly puppy from McG’s ticket, who went on to lose in one of the worst political shellackings the Republic has ever seen.

Eagleton was a good man regardless of the fact that he had electroshock therapy, and I was quite happy when I recently came across his autograph that he had given my sister on a TWA flight in 1974. I have never quite forgiven McGovern for his stupidity in 1972, and everytime I’ve seen the old liberal get trotted out of his padded cell by the Democrats I remember what he did to his fellow senator from the Midwest.

Realclearpolitics is reporting that some leftist blogs are pushing for the One to ditch Biden from the ticket and substitute Hillary. I don’t think it’s very likely for several reasons, but especially because I don’t believe the clique around Obama really understands Obama’s failure to electrify the electorate as he has the mainstream media and Hollywood elite. You would think that with the press exposure and star-power behind him the election in November would simply be a formality on his way to his coronation in January; yet he’s running even in the polls.

 I also don’t see them as being able to roll over on their backs and show their bellies to Hillary Clinton, nor do I see HRC accepting the position. If the Obamassiah is in trouble, it’s in her best interest to let him sink beneath the waves and prepare herself for her coronation as the Democratic candidate in 2012.  

The economic meltdown of firms like Merril Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Frannie and Freddie, and soon AIG is doing what no Marxist college professor or Soviet-era sleeper cell has ever managed to do: nationalize a huge swath of the American economy. Laissez-faire capitalism has been chucked out a Wall Street window in a panic, followed by desperate phone calls and face-to-face meetings with the Fed. European socialists are left scratching their heads as America races to nationalize an industry that had just recently been the “poster-boy” of American capitalism.

The US taxpayer is paying for the collapse. This is the same tax payer facing plummeting home prices and 35% credit card interest rates, the one who cannot escape thousands of household debts thanks to the Bankruptcy Reform bill of 2005. Yet the people running 100 year old firms into bankruptcy with hundreds of billions of dollars of debt are able to walk away with tens of millions of dollars in stock options and bonuses.

It’s time to sharpen the headsman’s axe and erect the scaffold. If the US taxpayer is going to pay for the hubris of the banks and investment brokerages, their leaders must be sacrificed for nothing less than the future of Capitalism is at stake. If they are able to walk away from this mess unscathed, then the politicians who allow them to get away must replace them on the scaffold. While this option may superficially appeal to the Obamanistas, his Number Two Joe Biden would be in the first group due to his sponsoring of the Bankruptcy bill that provides more onerous terms on those making thousands a year than those making tens of millions. Politicians from both parties including The One himself have received millions of dollars from the same firms they now criticize. Anyone who thinks that the bloodletting will stay on the GOP’s side of the aisle hasn’t been paying attention.

Lehman Brother’s CEO Richard Fuld’s Future?

There must be blood if faith is to be restored in the capitalist system, where one is rewarded for taking risks and should things turn out badly, suffer accordingly. Being forced out by the board or losing face at the country club is not enough. Corporate leaders must be held personally accountable for the mess they helped create and manage. If we live under a system where the owner of a small restaurant that fails loses everything, then in fairness so should the top executives of a firm.

There is no bailout option for the small businessman. The Fed is not arranging a bailout for Mitchell’s Train, Toy and Hobby store, a local institution after 55 years in North Wilmington that has fallen on hard times and is now closing. There are no golden parachutes for Joe Mitchell, Jack Mitchell and Joan Hicks the current owners. Their employees will receive little if any severance pay, and the loss of the store will mean just as much to the residents of Brandywine Hundred as the loss of Lehman will mean to the denizens of Wall Street.

If there is no safety net for the small business owner or the consumer (thanks Sen. Biden), why should there be one under CEOs like Merril’s John Thain, AIG’s Robert Willumstad or Lehman’s Richard Fuld? Do we live in a country where the government provides a safety net for the nation’s few woven together from the sweat of the working many? If these institutions are now too big to fail, should they also be too big to succeed on their own? Should draconian regulations be put into place along with the bailout- or is the American taxpayer expected to fund the debacle knowing full well that he or she will be responsible for the next sure-bet placed by a company CEO that turns sour?

These are important questions that must be answered, but until they are there must be blood. The human beings on the boards of these dying and defunct companies should lose everything, and have their income garnished by their creditors - the shareholders of the firms they drove into the ground - just like anyone who files for bankruptcy and does not have their debts discharged (thanks again, Sen. Biden).

There must be blood for nothing less than the very soul of the capitalist system is at stake. Great rewards can only be justified by those who take great risks, and if it turns out that those risks weren’t real, than the rewards should be forfeit. Without blood the system is a sham, and its critics proven right all along.

UPDATE:
Bloomberg columnist Michael Lewis suggests that the following three men should be at the top of the scaffold stairs:

1) Christopher Cox. He’s the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and so has the job of regulating these companies that helped make it possible for every poor American to get a mortgage and are now, as a result, falling apart.

That, in itself, is no reason to blame him. He inherited a broken operation: the SEC has been morally bankrupt for some time now. The people who work for the place — especially the ones who call the shots — have for years had a disconcerting habit of leaving their low-paying government jobs regulating Wall Street firms for high-paying ones at those same Wall Street firms.

Systemic Corruption

They are meant to guard against systemic corruption when they are themselves systematically corrupt. It’s hard for people who are paid $85,000 a year to police people who are paid $15 million.

Happily, you can still blame Cox for something. He went as far out of his way as he could to enable the brokerage firms by harassing the small group of informed financial people who have been trying to tell the truth to the markets: the short sellers. They bet against the stock price of a company and so have always had a bad reputation with the public. But in this case, they are the closest thing we have to heroes.

A man named David Einhorn is a case study. He runs a hedge fund called Greenlight Capital, which sells short some stocks and buys others. That is, he doesn’t just bet against companies but for them, too.

Blaming Shorts

Still, for some time now, he’s been standing up in front of large audiences, announcing that he was short Lehman Brothers stock, and then explaining in great detail its dubious accounting practices. The SEC responded by demanding to see his firm’s e- mail, hinting darkly that he was part of some conspiracy to drive Lehman Brothers out of business, and generally making him feel that he’d pay a price for telling the truth.

Christopher Cox is probably a nice man who has no real idea what just happened. But for the way he treated people with the nerve to speak the truth to power you should feel free to blame him anyway.

2) The Wall Street CEO.

Stan O’Neal was the chief executive officer of Merrill Lynch, Dick Fuld was the CEO of Lehman Brothers, James Cayne was the CEO of Bear Stearns Cos. Each took home tens of millions of dollars in pay for making the decisions that destroyed his firm.

Stan the Man

Of the lot, O’Neal deserves perhaps the greatest scorn as he took a business that wasn’t well designed to take huge trading risks and wagered it all on a single bet.

He screwed up the lives of more innocent people than the others. But interestingly, if any of these men had behaved well and resisted the pressures and temptations of the moment, his firm would have, for several years, dramatically underperformed the competition. Probably he would have lost his job.

Let the axe fall and the blood flow into the gutters. The time of reckoning is at hand.