I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that it is extremely crappy. Unfortunately, if you depend on resources such as the Washington Post, you do need me to tell you that.

For years, President Bush and his advisers expressed frustration that the White House received little credit for the nation's strong economic performance because of public discontent about the Iraq war. Today, the president is getting little credit for improved security in Iraq, as the public increasingly focuses on a struggling U.S. economy.

Apologies for not posting yesterday. I wasn't feeling well (which is permitted of bloggers, you know) but more than that, I was just so knocked out by the idiotic state of political discourse in this country that words seemed inadequate. They still do but I'm typing anyway.

The Emperor of Mespotamia is about to go on TV and tell us about his new, strong and resolute plan to win the long-promised Glorious Victory. While there has been concern among the courtiers in both the Pentagon and the corporate media over such problems as the state of military readiness and whether the current policy is Making Us Safer™, they are all pleased to note that the level of violence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced. It is fortunate that when American helicopters and fighter jets fire missiles into residential neighborhoods and kill dozens of people, it is not an example of violence, otherwise that statement might be untrue. Come to think of it, it isn't necessarily true anyway, but it is virtually true by virtue of incessant repetition.

What is the DSM-IV diagnosis for this?

WASHINGTON — President Bush, saying that "normalcy is returning back to Iraq," argued Thursday that last year's U.S. troop "surge" has improved Iraq's security to the point where political and economic progress are blossoming as well.

Bush coupled his description of the situation in Iraq, meant to lay the groundwork for next month's report to Congress by U.S. military and diplomatic chiefs, with a forceful slap at war critics.

"Some ... seem unwilling to acknowledge that progress is taking place," Bush said in a speech at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. He accused war opponents of constantly shifting their critique, adding: "No matter what shortcomings these critics diagnose, their prescription is always the same — retreat."

In touting progress in Iraq, however, the president appeared to gloss over developments that most would characterize as a far cry from "normalcy," even by Iraqi standards.

Tom Engelhardt is, but even he seems to stop one step short of the abyss.

What happens if, three months from now, or even a year from now, the people in metropolitan Atlanta - almost 5 million of them - open their faucets and nothing comes out but air? Engelhardt seems unwilling to follow through on the thought experiment, apparently because he's afraid he might be missing something, but I'm willing to be educated if what seems obvious to me really is not.

With no water in the pipes, people cannot flush toilets, bathe, do laundry, wash dishes, clean kitchens, bathrooms, hospitals -- not that there would be much point because all of those facilities would be useless. Obviously every restaurant would have to close, but so would all of the factories and offices, regardless of whether they use water in their operations, because the workers would be unable to perform the bodily functions of excretion.

But they do try to predict health care costs ten years out. You may have seen a news brief about the new prediction that health care spending will be 19.5% of GDP by 2017. Health Affairs has made this open access, so go for it if you are turned on by wonkery.

Now, there are a lot of assumptions that go into any such prediction, and it's pretty obvious that unless the McCain campaign succeeds in its increasingly transparent plan to make voters believe that Barack Obama is a secret muslim extremist who has been planted by al Qaeda to turn the country over to Islamofascist infiltrators and give Tomahawk cruise missiles to Hamas,* some of those assumptions will be overturned somehow some way, and they probably won't all work out anyway. But, for what it's worth, the broad outlines of what these perpetrators of deep wonkery expect assuming that nothing major changes are as follows.

I'm starting to see the following expression used more and more in various publications these days, particularly by journalists:

Searching for X on Google produces Y results in Z seconds.

If you haven't seen this before, let me give you a couple of examples:

From Law.com:

Online virtual worlds are wildly popular, attracting millions of people every day, and a recent Google search for MMORPG yielded approximately 32 million results.

From the Toronto Star:

Partner new Blue Jay shortstop David Eckstein and the word "scrappy" and a Google search will advise you of some 5,300 possibilities. In just 0.38 seconds, too.

From Jose Canseco's new steroid book, Vindicated:

Put in 'Alex Rodriguez' and 'infidelity' and you'll get like fifty thousand hits.

The gist I guess is that there is supposed to be some correlation between X and Y.

John Kenneth Galbraith's popular economic history of the first part of the 20th Century is called The Age of Uncertainty. My history of the present era -- once I get done with the other three books I keep meaning to write -- will be called The Age of Denial.

The presidential campaign we are now enduring is utterly surreal. Barack Obama, rightly, has gotten a major wacking for talking about a Social Security crisis, when there actually isn't one. But helloooooooooo Barack, Hillary, John, Chris, all you characters -- there really are crises out there, major problems that we need to acknowledge and get to work on. I don't expect the Republican candidates to be connected in any way to reality, but somebody has to be.

As I'm sure you know, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change has opened a conference to produce what amounts to an executive summary of its work. Most people don't know that the term "executive summary" refers to a summary of a study intended to guide action - hence "executive" as in "execute," to carry out. That's what this report is intended to accomplish -- to provide policymakers with a basis for action.

And no free pass for President Obama either. As you know if you've been reading -- because I mentioned it a few days ago -- Obama's health care proposals include requiring insurers to cover preventive services, which he claims will reduce health care costs. Hillary Clinton makes some vaguer claims along the same lines, to the effect that universal coverage will end up saving money because people will get timely preventive care.

Joshua Cohen and colleagues in NEJM consider this proposition. (And you'll be pleased to know that this is one of those articles of broad public interest that the editors have made available to the rabble, so go ahead and read it.)

Alas, as a general proposition it isn't so. Screening and prevention may be worthwhile, but that isn't the same as saving money. Very few procedures actually produce a net cost saving. Cohen et al don't point it out, because it isn't really the focus of their analysis, but the really bad news is that extending people's lives actually costs money. If somebody drops dead of a heart attack, you only have to pay for the funeral. But if they live for 20 years taking beta blockers and ACE inhibitors and statins and getting angioplasties etc., you've prevented a heart attack, but spent a helluva lot of money.

I'm not a clinician, I'm here as a project evaluator with the intention of getting sense of the what the field of mental health care for traumatized children is like these days -- at least for those community based agencies and academic experts who are fortunate enough to have support from SAMHSA as part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.

There's plenty of good news here -- then I'll give you the bad news.

Good news bulletin #1: I have heard scarcely a word about psych meds. The only way pills have come up is as a peripheral note that somebody who is part of a case scenario had been prescribed something. The NCTSN is not about drugging kids.

Bulletin #2: The DSM-IV is equally conspicuous by its absence. There is absolutely no interest in classifying kids' problems as diseases, tossing around disease categories, or using diagnostic labels to guide treatment.

I realize they aren't mutually exclusive, but I'm leaning toward more of the latter than the former. The point is, I don't know for sure whether he believes in the alternate universe represented in his public pronouncements -- most recently his triumphalist crowing on the fifth anniversary of his world historic crime of invading Iraq -- or whether he knows it's all fantasy and he just figures that when George W. Bush lies, it's not a sin, because he's God's anointed.

That is the lede to a rambling post today, and the reason you're getting this, and didn't get one yesterday, is because of traveler's burnout. Honestly, I don't know how the candidates do it, constantly changing time zones, eating too much or too little and usually badly, sleeping erratically, but having to keep working and stay alert through it all -- it's just too much for a hairless ape from the African savannah to endure.

The residents of Alamosa City in Colorado do - and it's contaminated with Salmonella.

Here's a news article from this morning's Denver Post:
Alamosa Water Tainted: At least 33 contracted salmonella, and use of bottled water is urged

Here's the Colorado Department of Public Health's News Release:
Bottled Water Advisory Issued for Alamosa Residents

Residents have been advised not to drink the water. Boiling the water is not good enough. There are 33 confirmed cases and 46 suspected cases of Salmonella in the City so far.

This is not a good story. Lettuce you can clean (maybe). But, if it's in the water? Ouch.

Ars Technica (Art of Technology blog) reports that Google is prepping it's own entry into the field of Virtual Worlds, potentially named "My World". Students at ASU (a school Google has a strong working relationship with in the past) this weekend received questionnaires that "hinted strongly" at the possibility that they would be among the first to test such an app later this year.

(Screengrab of the questionnaire courtesy of the MacRumors forum).

As Marty has detailed in multiple posts (including below), the Bush Administration has argued that water boarding is not "torture," and it has argued that water boarding is not "illegal" if a Justice Department official so opines.

In conjunction with those arguments, the Bush Administration also appears to suggest that whether water boarding constitutes "torture" depends not only on the water boarding itself but on the urgency of the situation. By this reasoning, a water boarding session under urgent circumstances is not "torture," while the same water boarding under less dire circumstances is "torture."

The Administration's position is described as follows:

The White House on Wednesday defended the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding, saying it is legal — not torture as critics argue — and has saved American lives.

President Bush could authorize waterboarding for future terrorism suspects if certain criteria are met, a spokesman said....

...and it looks like it shares my reluctance to go back to the laneway. Today — now that I've had time and distance from it — for the first time since I left, I had decided to drive back there. Not to sleep! Just to park up under the trees and to sit in the car and think for a while. It's a bit of a trek back there these days, particularly in this heat, but this morning I was determined to go, was even looking forward to it in a way, and drove off at about nine. But driving down the highstreet (still only a mile or so from home) I stalled, and when I turned the key in the ignition and desperately tried to start it nothing happened. I panicked because I didn't even have my mobile on me, but even if I had I wasn't sure what I could have done. Luckily, some workmen who were repairing the road further up had seen and came to push it over to the kerb for me. One told me to open the bonnet, that he'd take a quick look.

I haven't ranted very much lately about the democratization of science, and mea culpa. So the theme for today is that we can't have a more democratic scientific institution if most people lack the basic knowledge they need to participate.

This is the story of my professional life, actually. My day job is with a community based public health agency, and my academic half is concerned with people's control -- or usually lack thereof -- over their own health and health care. (As I often say, I am a community-academic partnership.) My work concerns all sorts of issues -- mental health, addiction, environmental justice, diabetes, heart disease, you name it -- but HIV is a particularly big piece of it, in part because it has paradigmatic qualities that make it particularly instructive for many of the principal concerns of medical sociology.

Sen. McCain says, "Al Qaeda is in Iraq. It’s called ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq.’ My friends, if we left, they wouldn’t be establishing a base. They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen." He's running largely on the strength of his claimed foreign policy expertise. He says -- and he reiterated yesterday -- that if the United States withdraws from Iraq, al Qaeda will take over the country.

The pundits and so-called "reporters" who work for the corporate media, including, as in the link above, the New York Times, aren't going to tell you that this is completely nuts. They treat this analysis as credible and therefore, undoubtedly, many people will believe it.

This morning we heard from Dr. Kelly Kelleher about how it's a great idea for primary care doctors to screen for alcohol and other drug abuse problems. There are, however, some difficulties.

Every disease advocacy organization in the world wants primary care doctors to be screening -- for asthma, diabetes risk, cancer, depression, domestic violence, you name it. In fact there are something like 700 questions that primary care docs are supposed to be asking their patients. However, they generally see 4 or 5 patients an hour. Since the patients are presumably there for some reason other than to be asked the first 30 or so of 700 questions, it's unlikely we're going to get very far with that.

This morning we heard from representatives of the Children's Defense Fund, who discussed the Fund's report and campaign called Cradle to Prison Pipeline. Using what a take to be the method called Life Table Analysis (although they didn't actually say so), CDF has figured out that a Black boy born today has a 1 out of 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime, and a Hispanic boy a 1 out of 6 chance, compared to 1 out of 17 for a white boy. Ratios for girls are similarly disproportionate, although the absolute chances are lower.

The CDF points out that 1 out of 6 children in the U.S. are living in poverty, and that the numbers living in poverty, and the poverty rate has increased during the reign of the current Christian moral values administration -- most dramatically among the very poor. Poverty is of course associated with all sorts of problems for children -- failure in school being the most pervasive. The CDF goes on to talk about all the other ills that afflict poor children, and disproportionately afflict poor and minority children, but I want to get to the bottom line.

Sorry to have missed a couple of days -- I've had a bit of a cold, nothing major but it's left me at a low energy level and I've had to devote what I had to other projects. In the coming week, I'll be away from Your Intertubes quite a bit as well so I may post only on a couple of days.

In the last episode of our Hinges of History Review, I discussed the magical cloak of invisibility over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, I've been nibbling at the edges of another Great Denial, known as peak oil. This is the most important geopolitical fact of our age, far more important in the context of international power struggles, war and peace, than global warming, infectious disease, water supplies, deforestation, mass extinction, human rights, you name it. Yes, you may care more about some of those other little problems, but governments, especially the ones that wield powerful militaries, do not.

From KCRA: Domestic violence counselors in both Stockton and Sacramento have noticed that as husbands and wives struggle more and more to make ends meet, they're starting to take their frustration out on each other...The Women's Center of San Joaquin County said since August, its domestic violence cases are up 12 percent, due in large part the director figures to the growing number of families losing their homes -- or close to losing their homes -- through foreclosure.
...
One woman who was interviewed by KCRA 3 and did not want her name used, said for two years she owned a home with her now ex-husband, but when the payments went from $1,700 to $2,300 a month, he started to change.

As Laura notes below, in his most recent signing statement the President has reserved the authority to disregard several "provisions" of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008.

Okay, since the NYT decided to hire Bill Kristol over me, I'll have to restrict my punditication to this space.

You may have noticed that I've had basically squat to say about the presidential campaign. I did point out that of the three Dem contenders, Edwards has the best health care plan, and Obama has the worst, but who cares, really? It's not as if an Edwards presidency -- which seems unlikely at this point anyway -- will result in the legislation he has posted on his web site becoming reality. In the best case, a Democratic president and a somewhat more Democratic congress in 2009 will result in some marginal changes around the edges. Big Pharma and Big Insurance aren't going to get rolled no matter who is elected.

Much of the time, when people are furiously debating some question, it turns out they don't have any substantive disagreement after all -- they are arguing over the meaning of a word. On the other hand, it may not be quite that simple, because the words in question may be embedded in larger constructs, so that disagreements about their meaning can reflect differences in substance after all.

GWEN IFILL: Let me ask Senator Bond a little bit about this issue of waterboarding. And let me describe for our viewers first to remind them what it is. It's when there's a piece of cloth that's placed over the mouth of a person who's been strapped down, and water is poured on their face so they feel like they're inhaling water, and it gives a sensation of drowning. Do you think that's torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: [Long, non-responsive answer.]

GWEN IFILL: I just would like to -- but do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming: freestyle, backstroke.

Truly grotesque.

Back when I was in college -- not so long ago really -- the deep thinkers had us deep in the doo doo. Robert Heilbroner's Inquiry into the Human Prospect was required reading. Hint: He didn't think it was exactly fabulous. Some very convincing dismal futures were being painted by science fiction writers like John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar made an impression on me, for sure. The Club of Rome, a group of high powered movers and shakers, foresaw catastrophic resource scarcities, the WorldWatch Institute was busy meticulously documenting the fall of civilization. There was Moment in the Sun and The Population Bomb and you name it.

The common theme was that the world was running out of resources to sustain its growing human population and the whole edifice of industrial civilization was heading for the crapper. Then two or three decades went by and the spring wasn't silent and the oceans weren't corrosive and whole nations didn't die of thirst. Our motor vehicles just got bigger and heavier and more and more of them and the so-called Green Revolution managed to feed a population that exceeded the maximum level of doom by a billion or more.

As I write this, we're somewhere in Western Nevada a few hundred miles from home. We all had a great time at the race, despite the weather which, incidentally, was absolutely gorgeous on Sunday.

The Google Earth expo tent was a big hit. We handed out hundreds of water bottles, Sketch Up socks, and blinky pins.