…[In Rwanda] Dialysis is “generally unavailable.”  As are many treatments for cancer, strokes, and heart attacks, making those ailments “death sentences” more often than in advanced nations.  Life expectancy at birth is 58 years, compared to 78 years in the United States.  Rwandan children are 15 times more likely to die before their first birthday (7 vs. 107 deaths per 1,000 live births) and 25 times more likely to die before turning five (8 vs. 196 deaths per 1,000 live births) than U.S.-born children.  (If you want to meet some Rwandan kids struggling to make it to age 5, read my friend’s blog, Life of a Thousand Hills.)  And yet, the saddest thing is a healthy-but-uninsured American college student…..

But the NY Times isn’t alone in their idiocy (as usual).  Via Reason.com (here), they wonder how a floating grocery store can possibly be a bad thing?

Nestle has put together a floating supermarket barge, and on Friday it sailed the product-laden boatmarket (superboat? grocerybarge?) into brave new Amazonian emerging markets…

My first reaction: Neat!…

Apparently that reaction is not shared by all. At Alternet, Michele Simon, a public health lawyer and author of Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, calls this an “especially disgusting news item” about which “writing about it is the only way I know to release my outrage. My version of screaming from the rooftop.”…

Yes, apparently many pundits from around the world are working tirelessly to keep all the options they have out of the hands of lesser people… for their own good of course.  As reason writer Ms. Mangu-Ward summed it up:

…Nestle is sending its boat into the hinterlands precisely because those hinterlands are now full of people who might be able to swing the purchase of the occasional chocolate bar, something well outside the scope of their financial lives just a few years ago. Hardly the sort of thing that makes me want to take to the rooftops–or the Internet–to express my outrage….

Arlen Specter….you remember, the guy who was going to lose his Senate seat so changed parties from Republicans to Democrats…. only to be soundly defeated in the primary?  Well, if you care, you can see an example of the last, desperate gasp of a man losing all of his power (via Politico here).

Good news on the medical front.  Via Bloomberg, Stem Cells From Own Eyes Restore Vision to Blinded Patients, Study Shows:

Patients blinded in one or both eyes by chemical burns regained their vision after healthy stem cells were extracted from their eyes and reimplanted, according to a report by Italian researchers at a scientific meeting….

Howard Dean on Wednesday took the New York Times to task for running a “hatchet job” story on Democratic Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal misstating his service in Vietnam without acknowledging that the information came from a GOP campaign…

What do we know?  Mr. Blumenthal has deliberately stated publicly about those times when he served “in Vietnam” on a number of occasions.  We know it’s untrue, because he’s backed off and changed served in to served “during Vietnam”:

Blumenthal apologized for misstating his service “on occasion” during a press conference Tuesday.

But for Mr. Dean:

“Let’s be fair about this. This is a New York Times gotcha story planted by the opposition,” said Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “It was planned by the opposition. The New York Times did not acknowledge that in their front page article.”

Dean urged Connecticut voters to “listen to Blumenthal’s side” of the story before judging his candidacy.

Yep – kill the messenger, then use guilt by association, but ignore the simple truth that a man in a job which has a core component of deliberate communications deliberately misled people to believe he was something he wasn’t.

It’s sad really Mr. Blumenthal doesn’t think enough about his life – sad to think of his family having to deal with this humiliation as well.  Sad Mr. Dean still doesn’t get it.

…The Quinnipiac polls, conducted in three states across the past month, all find likely voters to have complex and contradictory views on these repeal lawsuits as well as health care reform itself.

By a slight majority, likely voters tend to oppose the health care reform law. But they also tend to oppose the repeal lawsuits as a “bad idea” that would, for a sizeable portion of voters, make them “less likely” to support a given candidate….

Which seems roughly equivalent to wanting to win the football game, but not really wanting to deal with scoring points…. or as Politico reports:

…In short, voters simultaneously don’t want to [sic] health care reform but don’t want to challenge it either…

There is a scientific explanation for this called cognitive dissonance (DA posts here).  There’s also some logical evidence that helps explain why we as humans seek to reduce anything seen as contentious by the rest of society.

It’s frustrating because time and time again it seems the majority does understand that government is not some Utopian solution.  For instance, they seem to understand that the current tax code is 60K pages of government sponsored corruption where the normal citizen or even the IRS agent has little idea exactly what all 60K pages means together, but special interests, nonprofits, businesses, and others all work to make the code a little better for themselves. (Freedomworks – Top Ten Reasons to Scrape the Code here).

Yet polls showing voter disgust, such as the dismally low congressional approval ratings, only show feelings.  The reality is even with rates of congressional approval as low as 16%, the rate for the election of incumbents is well over 90%.

There’s a Japanese Proverb that begins with “Vision without action is daydream.”  Well, here we are, proving, that some truths are universal.  Proving that believing in something strongly or knowing something real well is meaningless if never acted upon.

Use a simple analogy to prove this true – what good is the best doctor in the world without patients or students?  What good would have come out of Newton’s genius, or Salk’s genius, if their abilities were followed up by only inaction?

The only good thing that can really be said about genius without action, is that it doesn’t directly harm anyone.  You can make a moral argument that Salk had some level of obligation to help since he could, but inactive genius shouldn’t be the main concern as the real problems will come from people acting without understanding.

& there’s where the second 1/2 of the proverb comes “Action without vision is nightmare. ”

Too bad we’re seemingly in a society today where both are true depending only upon the group in question.

…At a time when America’s economy is still in bad shape and when we face numerous problems abroad, Obama has put the country through a shattering political battle—and, with legal challenges and promises of repeal, the fight may be just beginning.

This seems, at the moment, less a monument to idealism than to hubris.

Rep. Mike Honda, D-CA seems to think Fannie Mae knows their stuff (via Politico here).  In asking for more money to prevent legal foreclosures, he gives us this:

…In addition, Fannie Mae estimates that as many as 50 percent of the minority homeowners who received a subprime loan should have qualified for a prime loan. This clearly indicates the need for housing counseling services….

With all due respect to Mr. Honda, I think all this clearly indicates is poor critical thinking skills.  When a GSE which apparently knew nothing about the impending crisis and was proactively laying down on the job when it came to auditing loan standards gives you estimates on who might or might not have qualified for what kind of loan – laughter is the appropriate response.  Not regurgitation.

Cato on telephony deregulation, cell phone innovation, & ingratitude (here).  Discussing his memories as a child where phone line were costly and long distance was only slightly less expensive than actual driving as compared to today’s age:

Then came the breakup of the AT&T monopoly in 1984. Phone technology and competitive service provision exploded. In 1982, Motorola produced the first portable mobile phone. It weighed about 2 pounds and cost $3995.

Within a very few years they were much smaller, much cheaper, and selling like hotcakes.  Today there are some 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world, and counting, or about 67 per every 100 people in the world.

Then he moves forward to the ingratitude:

And to celebrate this incredible achievement, Slate and the New America Foundation are holding a forum titled “Can You Hear Me Now? Why Your Cell Phone is So Terrible.”

From the CEI (Competitive Enterprise Institute), we learn the EPA is about to expand its powers (here):

Washington, D.C., March 30, 2010 – The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) are expected this week to finalize their joint greenhouse gas (GHG)/fuel economy standards rule. This will make carbon dioxide an “air pollutant subject to regulation” under the Clean Air Act for the first time. The rulemaking, and the endangerment finding that is its prerequisite, will allow EPA to immediately exercise and continue to amass powers never delegated to the agency by Congress….

I suppose those supporting the decision know nothing about the EPA’s massive failure in just the Energy Star program.

Lastly, as a reminder, most places and people in the US did NOT buy homes they couldn’t afford (via WSJ here):

The U.S. still is feeling the effects of widespread housing bust, but a new report serves as a reminder that large swaths of the nation didn’t experience a boom in home prices and hasn’t suffered from the bust….

In fact, most of the insane double digit growth in real estate prices were in 5 main areas – NY corridor, Florida, Arizona, California, Nevada.  Make of it what you will that almost all flyover states never experienced the irrational boom, to be inevitably followed by the burst.

John Podesta, the president of the Center for American Progress who led Barack Obama’s presidential transition, acknowledges the White House has been unable to successfully drive the debate on health care reform.

“They lost the narrative,” Podesta told the Financial Times. “They lost the perspective of how all of the activity they were engaged in was knit together.”…

This was followed up by pundits everywhere showing the signs of the WH’s pursuit of changing the current narrative (here @ WaPo):

…White House officials are retooling the administration’s communications strategy to produce faster responses to political adversaries, a more disciplined focus on President Obama’s call for “change” in Washington and an increasingly selective use of the president’s time…

[Dan Pfieffer Communications Director] “In 2010, the president will constantly be doing high-profile things to be the person driving the narrative.”

Continuing the Post reports something I think should be more controversial:

Senior White House aides described the changes as an aggressive response, aimed at producing fresh momentum for the president’s faltering agenda and regaining the advantage ahead of the congressional midterm elections in November.

I believe that’s an admission that the main reason they plan to change the topic at large and how that topic is described is for the mid-term-elections.  You’d think they could feign some empathy and argue that the policies are for the people, but instead they only discuss power.

But I digress… the main thing I think is important to see in all this discussion about narratives is two-fold.  They are coming out and honestly saying, the only reason we lost “the conversation” is because we didn’t sell it well enough.

& to be fair – it might well be true.  There are seemingly many more citizens willing to vote based on the narrative than they are willing to critically analyze the facts, therefore changing the way something is being sold will have some success.

But seriously – just because you have the opportunity to take candy from a baby, doesn’t mean that you should.  Meaning, if you can honestly argue that changing the narrative will push people to change their minds, you’re honestly arguing that winning is more about propaganda than ideas & facts.  & just like taking candy from a baby, just because you might be able to exploit people through emotional appeals, doesn’t mean you should do so.

What is more worrisome however, is the lack of reaction by people.  They read these things and mostly argue based on their political beliefs more than anything else.  & they do so, all without asking: what’s the difference between a narrative and the right policy?

Yes, what is worrisome is not only that people are ignoring this question, and thereby agree through silence, but that many of them may not even understand the difference.

In a very interesting post @ The Decision Science News, notes that:

There are those who consider the field of Judgment and Decision Making to be much like the field of Social Psychology, and others who find them as similar as vodka and water.

How can we, as the French say, préciser la différence?…

Using word analysis from two recent conferences, one from the SJDM (Scientific Journal of Decision Making) & the other done at the conference of SPSP (Society for Personality & Social Psychology) and noted the differences.

Now many should be able to logically recognize there are likely significant differences as well as assess some of the differences, all just with the names only.   These appear to be vastly different undertakings, but I think one can see in society behavior that seems to agree with the premise that many believe this to be closely related fields.

As one might suspect, the most used SPSP words were emotional and included using these words fairly often ups and downs, positives and negatives, attitudes, personalities & the SJDM words?  Choice, risk, future, uncertainty.

The full analysis easily digested and well worth the look.  After showing the most used words, using the scale of how many times each word was used per 1000 words, they plot both conferences words against each other.  IE – they show SJDM’s most used words and how many times those words were used by SPSP and vice versa.

The two commentators add weight to DSN’s premise that many are confused as both asked, “Why can’t it be both?”  Which might certainly be a noble thought, but ultimately wrong and dangerous when making critical decisions.

To begin, a disclaimer:  my intention is not to prove that emotions are evil.  Emotions are very important to our humanity, our culture, and our life.  Additionally, some decisions should include emotions, and not just in the mate selection process, but also just when buying a car or an engagement ring.  Money constraints might limit your choices, but you still don’t want to buy something you believe isn’t you.

What I see however in society is the desire of the posters, to make the best decisions possible, while still maintaining some nebulous idea of positivity, no matter what.

& again to be fair, this is itself a necessary goal if you are making group decisions consistently interacting with the same people.  However, it can never be an end in itself, and that seems to be where we are today.

You can see this in our leadership, both in business management as well as local, state, and federal government.  Their constant flip-flops belie any notion that a core set of beliefs is needed.  At times, these people seem to almost be arbitrarily making decisions.  For business, you can see this in constantly changing priorities as public winds shift.

All of this – is an anathema to critical thinking and analysis.  In a completely theoretical sense, using a specific slice of time, there is always a “best” decision.  This decision sometimes happens, but many times not only do groups fail to get the best decision, but seem to do just the opposite.   And this is true for many consistent reasons such as dealing with group dynamics and personalities.

Two recent examples @ Reason.com’s Blog by Tim Cavanaugh demonstrate not only shockingly bad decisions, but that those decisions have defenders.

Read here about a kid whose parents are suing the school district, because as owner of one of the 1900 laptops given to students, they didn’t seem to be aware that the school can at anytime remotely activate the built-in webcam and mic and secretly watch whatever it sees.  As the FBI investigates, the District Superintendent is still defending the policy as they cancel it.

& here as well, about a man named Terry Hoskins, who took a bunch of money from banks for a business which ultimately failed, used his private home as collateral, then when the bank went to foreclosure as freely agreed upon by Mr. Hoskins; he balked, then destroyed the home.  This is an event that should and will likely land Mr. Hoskins in jail on fraud.  He promised the bank the property, didn’t like the terms, the removed their ability to recoup.  The oddest thing isn’t a common thief in existence, it’s the fact he has supporters including local media.

From here all I can do is speculate as to why anyone would defend allowing the school district to spy on kids at home or hail as a hero a deadbeat who destroys property just to spite those who have ultimate rights to it because he didn’t pay his debt.

I say speculate, because more local analysis of the debates and media spots would be needed to know, but I think the school district is likely an extreme case of group think.  Likely exacerbated by administration pressures of some sort.  The debtor’s defenders however are more likely not only falling into group think, but projecting their anger on the current economic situation to this criminal’s seemingly anti-authoritarian behavior.

But regardless what the reasons for their failure in thinking, I think objectively we can say that those defending either action are wrong.  For the school – while states everywhere are sending kids to jail for child pornography because one 17 year old sends photos to another 17 year old – how would they ever believe that having the ability of spying into kids rooms wouldn’t increase the potential of breaking those laws themselves?  Do they not know that unreasonable search and seizure?

It’s really hard to believe that someone didn’t know about these things, just more likely the objections were either dismissed or never heard, due to emotionally imposed, nonexistent constraints.  While worrying about all these complex social issues, they failed to focus on exactly what they were doing through critical thought.

& this is where I think the idea of narratives working, the inability of people to understand true critical thinking requires removal of emotion, and people hailing bad decisions all stem from the same basic idea:  we so fear being uncomfortable or making others uncomfortable that we have weakened as a society in making the right decisions.

I’m not exactly sure when this cultural shift happened, but if we want to move forward in the best possible way we can; we must understand that sometimes people will be upset when they are challenged on beliefs for which there lies no logical foundation.  Additionally, sometimes telling people “negative” things, is in fact the best help you can give.  Your best friend might not like to hear if they are failing to meet up with their responsibilities, but they might need it.

I can dream though, right?  Dream that maybe, just maybe at a time in the future…. when the next administration is working to adjust the narrative and effecting elections through White House communication, the majority of people will simply ask, “Why the hell do I care about your narrative?  How about giving me the details of your proposals and I’ll decide on that?”

One day….