Two-Year Follow-up on Diets and Deities:

It’s now been a second full year since the weight-loss campaign of ‘13 and time for a report. The scale this morning said “186” so we’re about where we were a year ago. It’s looking like we’re going to be able to maintain this.

Again, I still get into the fitness centre (yeah, ‘re’ — it’s just over the border, in Canada) two or three times a week. I still have a pot belly. I don’t think that’s ever going away. My father was thin as a rail with a pot belly so I guess it’s just one of those things…

I’m also now an interesting statistic. I’m in the group of roughly 20% of those who lose 10% or more of body mass and maintain their new weight for a year or more. This 20% figure came from a careful analysis of recent research by nutritionists Rena Wing and Suzanne Phelan. In the past most authorities were more pessimistic, believing that fewer than 5% of dieters were able to maintain their new weight.

When Wing and Phelan examined the data carefully they found that a cluster of life-style changes characterized the successful dieters — and all make perfect sense. They maintained an active life, exercised regularly, snacked less, routinely had a small breakfast and generally kept portion size down.

I do these but Wing and Phelan didn’t identify what I think is the key activity: buy a good scale and get on it every morning. By monitoring my weight I spot any drift upward immediately and adjust intake.

And that is my contribution to this issue.

For the curious, there’s also been no change in my theology. I still cling to no god(s) but respect those who do so long as their beliefs call them to behave in ways that reduce suffering.

On the American South: Wayne Don Lively, Guest Blogger

This essay was stimulated by an article in the NYTimes by an Englishman who had moved to rural Mississippi.

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You don’t know a place until you’ve been there for awhile. The author says they have lived in Mississippi for three years. He didn’t say how long he’d lived in NY, but as an Englishman he’s probably as well-suited to have a good opinion as anyone. I’ll take his observations as true, if only because they square with my own.

I’d say going from California to West Virginia is in the same ballpark. How about my going from Dallas to New England to Florida to Las Vegas. I’ve lived now in LV for ten years and probably know less about it than 13 in Mass and 5 in SW Florida (with a brief stop in Pensacola). I know much more about them, which might say something about Las Vegas more than the others. I believe I have a pretty accurate picture of all of them. 

But growing up in Texas—the Southern part, not the Western part—I think I have an even better handle. They are both the kindest people in the world, while also the meanest. They are loving, and suspicious. They are polite to a fault, and judgmental to a flaw. This was all brought out by the author. I’m probably going to end up buying his book. I don’t have a “hankerin’” for living in Miss, maybe Texas, but that doesn’t mean I won’t find the book entertaining. From this piece, I’m looking forward to it.

The more I understand Southerners, the more I’m dismayed. I am reading In the “Heart of the Sea,” which oddly is the name of a movie directed by Angelina Jolie and starring Brad Pitt. (Who is, btw, WAY too old to play one of the characters in the true story.) There was one fascinating passage which rings true today.

Their ship, the Essex, was sunk by a whale. They were left in 24 ft rowing boats with makeshift sails. The captain and his two mates had to choose between sailing through nearly impossible conditions for twice as long, and sailing on the prevailing breezes to the islands in the western Pacific. Two months v a month. They feared cannibals more than the sea. They tried to return 2,000 miles to South America, instead of Tahiti where the British has established a base. The author of the biography says they were victims of the (Nantucket Quakers) culture, which was “profoundly conservative.” They distrusted anything that didn’t come from the lips of someone they knew, someone they knew very well. They didn’t believe what they read, but the rumors of being eaten had been repeated for a generation. Sound familiar? 

This is true of conservatives today, too. We know this. There are none more conservative than the Scotch-Irish of Appalachia, and those descendants dominate the South. Those are MY ancestors, too. I know these folks, and I barely understand them. They all share the same characteristics—clannish, suspicious, and fiercely independent.

Good Republican Tea Party stock. The Republicans have finely settled on what they are all about. Forget about the country club Republicans regaining control. It’s now and forever more will be radically right-wing, white, and decidedly redneck. Even if they have an education, they will still identify with the clan, or should I say Klan. Trust me, the Klan is not dead. It is still alive and well and prospering in the South. They probably sell more guns both legal and illegal than anybody in the world.

I love the South. I wish they could change. I have to accept they can’t. We can look at them in the same way we can enjoy Lewis Carroll and his Alice’s Wonderland. It’s not going to change. Ever, or at least in my lifetime. The GOP mainstream will never get it back from them. They can end up becoming right-leaning Democrats, or try to take enough conservative Democrats along with traditional Republicans and make a third party. But the party of Ike, Nixon and Ford is never, ever coming back.

Can the country survive them?

I am coming the final conclusion that conservatism as practiced in Appalachia is a disorder. I think the Tea Party people are delusional. Doubting is normal. Believing, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, is a hole in the mind. It resists growth. It causes suffering. So far—not even with education, although that sometimes relieves the worst symptoms—there is no known cure. They are the broken half of humanity.

I wish someone, anywhere, would prove me wrong.

Middle-aged White Folks are Dying at Unprecedented Rates

The headline says it all: White people, middle-class white people are dying at a rate not seen before. They are dying from liver failure, heart attacks and strokes, from alcoholism, drug overdoses and suicide. Other groups like the elderly, middle-age Blacks and Hispanics are all showing declines in death rates.

These data come from a Princeton University study looking at mortality rates since 1999. The findings surprised the authors of the paper as much as they are surprising everyone who’s seen the numbers. There’s a nice summary of the research here.

The age group most compellingly affected is those who were between the ages of 45 and 54. Educational levels were a factor with those just completing high school (or less) faring the worst but even having a college degree didn’t immunize one from the problems. In addition to dying, this cohort report higher levels of depression and despair, more chronic pain, inability to work, greater poverty and more just plain miserableness in their lives.

Actually, no one who has been charting life in America over the past half-century or so should be surprised by this pattern nor should we shy away from the reasons for it.

It began with Reagan. It is the natural outcome of thirty-plus years of the United States slowly stripping away the kinds of support systems that every other industrialized nation on the planet has been shoring up. Unlike the European Union, the folks “Down Under,” Canada, Japan, South Korea, here the safety net has been pulled out from under these folks, the opportunities for advancement have been systematically removed and the organizations that once gave them a voice like unions have been demonized.

When this group entered the work force life was generally improving, wages were reasonable and someone with a high school education could anticipate a decent paying job on an assembly line or in retail. Unions were strong, wages fair and benefits reasonable. The top earners made a bit more than those in the middle class but the disparity was nothing like it has become.

Housing was affordable, the banks hadn’t yet become the grotesque monstrosities they are today. Taxes were higher but the rates more progressive ensuring that the wealthy paid their share. Government could provide support for the thousand little things that make life livable from educational programs, funding for science, the environment, roads and transportation, parks…

But as Republicans, with their no-tax, weak government, pro-oligarchy, hyper-individualistic message, slowly took control the decline began. Exasperatingly, it has been accompanied by a well-funded, richly-written false narrative that has turned these poor bastards into their own worst enemy.

They are the Tea Party. These are the people who, recognizing the terrible shape their lives have become but failing to grasp why, have morphed into the craziest irrational voting-block this country has ever seen. They support the most insane positions imaginable.

They hate Obamacare; they’ve become virulently anti-union; they undercut women’s rights and health care. They’re against funding science; they’ll back any candidate who promises to cut taxes on the wealthy; they’re pro-business, pro- big oil; they deny climate change — and in so doing, they undercut themselves at every turn.

They’ve become convinced that their misery stems from the left, mainly the Black Dude in the White House. They think teachers unions are causing the decline in education instead of slashed school budgets. They’ve convinced themselves that cutting corporate tax rates will create jobs, that increasing the minimum wage will strangle the economy. They’ve bought Randian BS, lapped up Kochian visions and twisted their image of government, like some frightened, confused child who is convinced there’s a ghost under her bed.

Unhappily, it’s going to take a long time to undo this mess and it likely will require that a lot more of these poor bastards die because they’re completely refractory to learning what the real cause of their misery is.

The '15 Election: Strange Things in Washington State

The GOP here in Washington State is crowing and, given the way many of the ballot issues went, they should be. Alas, over in stupid-land they, as usual, don’t understand even the simplest aspects of economics or how a modern society functions. Nor do they grasp what they have wrought.

There were a bunch of ideologically tinged issues on the ballot but the one I want to focus on here is the one known locally as the Eyman proposal, named for arch-conservative Tim Eyman who, FWIW, is currently under investigation for unethical conduct. It  had been put to the public before. It lost the first couple of times and when a version of it was passed, it was later deemed unconstitutional.

The proposal is extremely sneaky. It cuts the state sales tax by 1¢ unless the Legislature sends a constitutional amendment to the ballot calling for a two-thirds legislative vote — or a public vote — to impose any tax increases. Because the latter is highly unlikely and will be a protracted process, the sales tax will almost certainly drop and put a huge dent in the state budget.

The right wingers are triumphant saying “the people have spoken.” Well, in a sense, they have. The proposal won with 54% of the vote. But, as is typical in off-year elections, a mere 31% of registered voters submitted ballots. So, in this case, “the people” represents roughly 17% of eligible voters. A pathetic outcome.

Now, why is this proposal so awful? It’s actually simple, once you stop and think — something, alas, that the electorate seems strangely uncomfortable doing these days.

First, it will force a dramatic decrease in services. Funding for education, the police, the courts, the infrastructure, health and hospitals will be reduced. It will be very much like what happened in ‘08 and ‘09 when the recession cut tax revenue dramatically. Memories that have faded will be refreshed in the years to come.

Second, it will not have any impact on the lives of ordinary folks. The reduction in sales taxes will be so small that it will barely to be noticed but, because local governments need funds to function, there will be increases in other areas to try to compensate. Property taxes will go up. Permitting and license fees will go up. Fire, hospital and school districts will ask for increases which will come from property taxes. Nuisance taxes will increase. In the end no one will save anything. This, of course, is precisely what happened after the ‘08 recession.

The answer to the tax revenue problem is obvious: a progressive state income tax that doesn’t kick in until upper-middle class income levels. A good place would be to start at $200k/year. Interestingly, a proposition like this was on the ballot a few years back with people like Bill Gates, who would be taxed the most, arguing strongly for it. It failed.

We are where we are. The GOP has deluded people that their policies are the right ones (well, 17% of them anyway). It’s obvious they are not.

It’s then reasonable to ask what are the Republicans really up to?

The destruction of government, plain and simple. The ultimate goal here in Washington State, where left-coast liberals actually make up a majority and urban centers like Seattle and Bellingham are flourishing, is to defund government to the point where it cannot function. Then they can say, “see, like Reagan told us, government is the problem.”

Who will then run things? The oligarchs, big business, the conglomerates, the people who’ve been selling the poor benighted bastards who vote for idiotic measures like Eyman’s proposal a bill of goods. There’s a name for this form of government, where the corporate sector works hand-in-glove with a limited government and cuts citizens out of the decision-making process. It’s called Fascism.

The future is going to be ugly if we can’t turn this around, hopefully in ‘16. And, in a sign of things to come, I was elected water commissioner in a mini-landslide (58% - 42%).

The Whiners in the GOP and The Millennials

All this whinging and whining from the RNC and the GOP contenders about the nasty, “gotcha” questions from the CNBC moderators at last week’s debate raised some interesting thoughts.

First, it’s actually pretty funny when you realize how stupid they sound now. What do these folks think awaits them, should one of them actually end up in the White House? Do they expect Putin to pull his punches? That Iran’s Ayatollah is going to play nice?

Yeah, some of the questions were pretty rough but so what. Hillary was asked whether she’d “do anything to become president” and Bernie was asked if he thought anyone who called themselves “socialist” could ever win the election. Not exactly underhanded tosses. I didn’t hear any bitching from the Dems.

The GOP’s childish response (we’re gonna take our football and go home, nyah, nyah) is hysterical — and has an intriguing parallel with what’s happening on college campuses where efforts are made to ban “trigger” words or restrict speech that makes someone feel uncomfortable.

All this infantile bitching turns on the same ironic point: Both the GOP pretenders and the thin-skinned millennials are the products of irrationally protected environments. The college kids were raised in families that worked so hard to shield their children from unpleasantness that they never learned to deal with that ugly place, The Real World.

The group of Republican candidates are used to being coddled by their best buds, the reporters and talking heads of Fox News. They’ve become accustomed to love-fests with Glenn Beck and make-nice parties with Rushbo. And now they are finding reality to be something of a surprise.

The ribbon of irony that ties things together is that these faux-conservatives hate, absolutely hate, those left-leaning colleges and universities and constantly attack them for infringing on free speech.