FYI:
DIAGNOSIS CRITICAL:
An Urgent Call for a Healthy Los Angeles
A Town Hall Meeting on health care issues in your community
Sunday October 20th, 2002
2:30 – 5:30pm
Agape International Spiritual Center 5700 Buckingham Pkwy Culver City, CA 90230
with featured guest speakers:
Warren Olney – Panel Moderator from Radio Station KCRW
Assemblyman Gil Cedillo – California State Assembly
Dr. Thomas Garthwaite – Director and Chief Medical Officer for the LA County Department of Health Services and Local Community Leaders
Eleven public health clinics and all school clinics closing. Trauma centers threatened. Reductions in hospital beds and funding for private clinics anticipated. 5000 jobs lost. 2.5 million residents without health care covereage.
There are solutions for a healthy LA. Find out what we can do!
PARTNERS
Community Health Councils
Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace
Office of the Americas
www.NonviolenceWorks.com
ADDITIONAL SPONSORS
Councilman Mark Ridley Thomas
Agape International Spiritual Center
SEIU Local 434B
The Gas Company
T.H.E. Clinic
–thanks to Bob Morris!

In Monterey being a corporate spouse…back Monday.

In recent news, Los Angeles County is hustling to keep from rolling down the shutters on a large portion of the public healthcare infrastructure.
Meanwhile, voters in Oregon are looking at a statewide ‘one-payer’ plan (which appears to be getting mixed reviews, at best).
So here’s another thought-question for the folks out there: How would we know when the public health system here had collapsed? What would that collapse look like, and how would we react?
The problem seems pretty simple; Hospitals are morally and legally mandated to care for patients with little regard for their ability to pay. Some of those costs are covered by state and local government, some by the owners of hospitals (who are simultaneously declaring record profits on one hand, and going out of business on the other), and some by insured patients, who face cost pressures as hospitals try and stay solvent.
So the cost of taxes and insurance goes up, meaning fewer people can pay until < sarcasm> there is only one insured, tax-paying patient, and he (Bill Gates) is covering the costs for all the rest of us.< /sarcasm>
Clearly, we’re in an untenable position, and headed into deeper water on a leaking boat.
So, back to my original question: How do we know when the system has finally broken? What will it take to get the necessary political will to deal with the problem?

Frequent commenter Mostafa works in the securities industry and has now started his own blog (hopefully we will keep at least some of his frequent and smart comments, even if he persists in disagreeing with me once in a while). He’s starting a series on the markets which promises to be interesting.
Permalinks aren’t working (is happening to me as well, so it’s a Blogger problem), so just go to meaux’s stream of consciouness…

Here’s someone who has some concrete suggestions to make:nathan_lott. He manages to both applaud the move of the African-Amercian polity to the mainstream (driven, I imagine by the black soccer moms I now see here in the formerly lily-white South Bay), and make some concrete and excellent suggestions (schools and housing) on what ‘reparations’ for Jim Crow might look like.
I’m wary of ‘reparations’ for slavery (or even for Jim Crow) as a justification for doing the right thing. I think the books on slavery were balanced by the blood of white boys spilled to free slaves during the Civil War…a simplistic construction, but nontheless true.
But that doesn’t mean nothing needs to be done. I like to think of it as nation-building…for our own nation.
Check nathan out and see what you think.

In a valiant effort to keep from becoming the perpetual ‘Gun Channel’ of the Blogoverse, I went to Barry’s reply to my post on calling Jews ‘Nazis’.
My points included:

The issue is that insult derives from context and intention.
To call me a ‘Nazi’ because I’m obsessed with and rigid about safety, or a women a ‘Nazi’ because she is obsessed with or rigid about feminism, or an ecologist a ‘Nazi’ because they are obsessed with or rigid about ecology is a different thing than to call someone by the name of the enemy who specifically targeted them out and attempted to exterminate them.

and:

The issue in criticizing Israel’s sometimes misguided policies is to distinguish one key fact: do you support Israel’s right to exist? As a Western and predominantly Jewish state? Because while I have been and will continue to be critical of many of their loonier policies, their right to exist trumps a whole range of other issues for me, and their opponents refusal to meaningfully agree to their right to exist and to take concrete steps to back up that agreement devalue their claims almost to zero.

In reply, Barry takes me to task for being dismissive of ‘feminazi’ as an insult, giving it roots in Rush Limbaugh’s overheated prose and pointing out in addition it is more hurtful in that most feminists are Jewish. I’ve never listened to Rush (really!), and the term may have a more overtly political history than I’ve granted it; I’ll take that under advisement.
But then he jumps the shark, as we say here in L.A. He explains that I missed his main point:

Unfortunately, none of the folks who responded to me explained how someone saying “I favor divestment from Israel to pressure the Israeli government to remove settlements” is anti-Semitism. Instead, people responded to me about the word “feminazi.”

I thought my second point address this, but he goes on. I’d like to collapse his argument, but it’s tough to do, so I’ll just quote extensively:

It’s not Cathy Young’s opinion; it’s not Larry Summers’ opinion; and I presume it’s not the opinion of anyone who agreed with Summers’ speech. Why? Because Summers’s speech presented a radical new idea of anti-Semitism: anti-Semitism in effect, even when there isn’t anti-Semitic intent. In this new version of anti-Semitism, an anti-Semitic action is one that hurts Jews, whether or not prejudice against Jews – “intent” – is involved. (Say, if an earthquake levels a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, is that anti-Semitism?).
But here’s my problem with Israel’s paritsans – they want to have it both ways. When it comes to criticizing liberals, they use the broadest definition of anti-Semitism imaginable, so that even a purely political action against the government of Israel, conducted by folks who have never shown any sign of anti-Jewish prejudice, is
anti-Semitism.

Here he makes the leap from Point A: I’m dismissive of a (potentially insulting) term that he argues is anti-Semitic (‘feminazi’); to Point B: I’m opposed to divestment and while divestment may harm the State of Israel, it has nothing to do with Jews – and therefore I’m a hypocrite, because I embrace a ‘tight’ standard in one case, and a ‘loose’ standard in another.
First, let me plant a flag on the hypocrisy issue. Lacking other values, it seems that the only meaningful criticism available to Bad Philosophers is internal inconsistency. The reality is that human thought and behavior is complex and ambiguous. Consistency is valued, but it isn’t the only value, nor, in my mind, the highest. I’m sure we’ll be talking about this later.
Next, in my original post, I concluded with the demand that Israel’s critics take a clear position on the survival of Israel, and it’s survival ‘as a Western and predominantly Jewish state’. My issue with Barry’s defense of the divestment petition and other criticisms of Israel’s actions – or one criticism, because as Meryl points out there are a host of others – is that they fail to either a) take a stand that says ‘Israel is an illegitimate country and needs to be dismantled,’ or b) ‘Israel has a right to exist in the face of outside attacks and here is a plan whereby it can do so.’
Because last time I looked, ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’ was still the rallying cry.
When ‘peace’ activists propose a plan in which they act as human shields in Israeli restaurants and schools, instead of for terrorist leaders, I’ll take the quotes off their label.
Meanwhile, I’m unconvinced, and I’m afraid Barry and I will have to agree to disagree for a while. I’ll think about the feminazi thing though (although it’s never been a term I’ve used, it has been one I’ve tolerated use of in my presence…I’ll think about that).
There’s more, and some of it even includes criticism of Israeli politics that have helped create the situation, and an interesting questions raised by correspondent Evan Weisberg:

Third — although this is less a point than a question — what does it mean for Israel to have a “right” to remain a “Western” state? What does it mean for it to have a “right” to remain a “predominantly Jewish” state? Does Australia have a right to remain Western? Does Armenia have a right to remain predominantly Christian?

This will serve as fodder for some interesting talk later, I’ll bet.

Based on emails and discussions below (and because I’m too damn busy to get any writing done right now), I thought I’d repost something I wrote some time ago. Looking at it, I don’t see anything I’d significantly change.
REPOST – WHY BE AN ARMED LIBERAL?
I’ve actually gotten a fair number of emails asking me this; they presuppose that the only valid position for a liberal is to be disarmed, and the only valid position for a gun owner is to be a conservative. I’m neither. I own guns, and have spent a fair amount of time, energy and money becoming at least moderately competent with them. And let me state bluntly that while the politic thing for shooters to say in public is “I just shoot [trap and skeet] [a few targets] [to hunt birds].”, that I do all those things, and in addition have trained hard to become competent in defending myself by, if necessary, shooting people.
I’m also a liberal, who believes that the government has the obligation, not just the right, to work to make our society, nation and world a better place. Which better place ought to be one in which fewer people are physically threatened seriously enough to need to resort to shooting people.
The intersection of those two beliefs – which on their face seem to be incompatible, but which I believe are not – defines a lot of what I believe about politics and the nature of good government.
Let’s talk a little bit about the armed side of it. Why be armed in today’s society?
Well, I’ll suggest four reasons:
1) It’s fun. Shooting is a pleasurable sport, things go “bang!!” loudly; well-hit clay pigeons gratifyingly disintegrate into a cloud of dust.
2) It is moral. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people who eat meat and have never killed anything are morally suspect. Some creature gave its life for the chicken Andouille sausages in the pasta sauce I made tonight. Pork chops and salmon don’t start out wrapped in plastic on the grocery shelf. I have hunted deer, wild pigs, and birds, and I can say with certainty (and I imagine anyone else who hunts can say) that it fundamentally changed the way I look both at my food and at animals in the world. I respect the death that made my dinner possible in a way I never would have had an animal not died at my own hand.
When I have a gun in my possession, I am suddenly both more aware of my environment, and more careful and responsible for my actions in it. People who I know who carry guns daily talk about how well-behaved they are how polite they suddenly become. Heinlein wrote that “an armed society is a polite society”, and while in truth I cannot make a causal connection, when you look at societies where the codes of manners were complex and strong, from medieval Europe or Japan to Edwardian England, there was a wide distribution of weapons.
I know several people who are either highly skilled martial artists or highly skilled firearms trainers, and in both groups there is an interesting correlation between competence (hence dangerousness) and a kind of calm civility – the opposite of the “armed brute” image that some would attempt to use to portray a dangerous man or woman.
3) It is useful. The sad reality is that we live in an imperfect world, one in which some people prey on others. They may do it because it is a kind of crude redistribution (you have a BMW, he would like one); because they are desperate, or because they are deranged. They may have been damaged in some way by their genetic makeup or their upbringing. Or they may just be evil.
Bluntly, at the moment I am under threat, I don’t care why they do it. My response is not very different from my response to my friends who said that “America had it coming” on 9/11. “Maybe. So what?” People who attack me or mine need to be stopped. If the only way I have to effectively stop them is to kill them, so be it. Once I am out of danger, I am happy to consider what it will take to improve education and job opportunities in the central cities, or to talk thoughtfully about helping the Palestinians figure out how to become a nation and a state.
There are bad people out there, folks. Some of them are tormented by what they do, some don’t care, some may revel in it. Someday, you may be confronted by one. What will you do?
4) It is the politically correct thing to do. I say this with all appropriate irony, but I am also a believer that an armed citizenry does two important things to the American polity:
a) it fundamentally changes the nature of the relationship between the individual and the State. I am pretty dubious about the apocalyptic fantasies of those who believe that a cadre of deer hunters could stand up against the armed forces of the U.S. or some invading army. In reality, I think that the arms possessed by the citizens of the U.S. are primarily symbolic in value, much like the daggers carried by Sikhs. But, having lived in Europe, I think that the symbolic value carries a political and social weight;
b) it makes it clear that we as citizens have some measure of responsibility for ourselves. The tension I talk about above is one between self-reliance and mutual reliance. In England today, a subject (I am careful not to say citizen) faces increasing limitations on the right of self-defense; the State is moving toward an absolute monopoly on the use of force. It should not be hard to imagine that the character of both the relationship of the individual to the state and of the individual’s relationship to society is vastly different under those circumstances. By being armed, I am taking responsibility – literally, the responsibility of life and death – on myself. When the state cannot entrust individuals to act with some significant responsibility, except as an adjunct of the state, we will have truly lost something that is a key part of what makes our politics work (note that I think that the same thing is happening in the EU today, with the same effect).
There’s more, which can be put simply that people will sometimes do stupid or evil things with their freedom. But without their freedom, they will seldom do great things. So by protecting society against one, you also deprive it of the other.
Sometime soon: how to be a liberal in a society that values freedom, and why freedom is critical to building an effective and durable liberal society.

Forbes.com: Massachusetts Finds CSFB ‘Smoking Gun’. I’ve been talking with some friends about the runup in wealth during the boom years, and I keep asking the question: was there any real wealth created, or was it all just staged market perception? (Yes, I know that one can lead to the other, but there must be some way to allocate between the two. Max?? Brad??)

Everyone has a Secret Plan. Admit it, if you were suddenly found to be the secret heir to an unknown branch of royalty, and your words was suddenly about to become law, you’ve got some kind of plan for what you’d do. Ban cars. Ban advertising. Ban fat people. Ban diet food. Make everyone buy a lhasa apso.
In my case, other than the obvious school for wayward supermodels that I’d be forced to open on the island of Catalina, it has involved gun regulation (driver regulation, too, and disarmament, and taxes, but we’ll have to wait on those…).
We have two problems to solve simultaneously.
On one hand, it is useful to carefully screen people who were buying guns to make sure they weren’t criminals, insane, etc. etc., and better still, had some reasonable amount of training. It would even be nice to be able to ballistically test all the guns out there so when a crime was committed, we’d know what gun did it and where it was likely to be, and to require that my guns be tested before I can buy ammo for them or carry them legally.
On the other hand, there are a large group of people in this society who hate guns, and devoutly wish to make them go away…at least except for the ones they get to carry (see CA state Senator ‘Beretta’ Perata) or their bodyguards carry (see Rosie). And these people are close to the levers of power, and it isn’t hard to imagine that one day they’d get those levers, and use them to do whatever they could to take guns away from everyone who wasn’t them.
Solving the first problem isn’t too hard (assuming people comply) technically. But you wind up with this big list somewhere of who owns guns and what guns they own.
And that feeds the potential that people like me see for the second problem, in which Rosie and Sen. ‘Beretta’ Perata team up to use that Big List to target all the known gun owners out there and forcibly take away their guns.
Which I think, for a variety of reasons, would be a Bad Thing.
So one day I was thinking about this, and then I had to go to traffic school. This is a California institution in which a traffic offender, such as I was once, get their record cleared and insurance premium protected in return for sitting through an eight hour class in traffic laws and traffic safety.
It turned out that there was a class just down the street from where we live.
Sadly, it wasn’t staffed by supermodels. But it was a private agency licensed by the State to certify that I had been trained.
Which gave me the germ of an idea, which as germs do, grew.
Why does the government have to keep the Big List?
Why can’t I get my certification from a private list-holder, who agrees that under specific conditions, they will release my data to the courts or police, or to a firearms dealer checking on me?
Some of them could be open and easy about my data.
Some of them could be run by rugged survivalists who keep their data centers under mountains in Idaho with EMP bombs next to the RAID arrays.
All of them would have to be subject to audit, and post an immense bond to assure performance. I’m sure the NRA and other gun-rights organizations would be the first to become registrars, and I’d be happy to have them register me.
They would store ballistic data about my guns, and training data about me, and check me against the government’s ‘do not sell guns’ list periodically.
When a crime was committed, the police could submit the ballistics to a query engine that would query all the registrars, and the one holding the registration would return the data.
When the police got the appropriate warrant, they could check an individual and see what guns they owned.
I can envision a time when an attempt is made to change the laws and pry the data out of the registrars, and I’m sure that the registrar that I entrust with my data would be happy to wipe the database before turning it over.
It’s not a perfect solution, or a fully-baked one (unlike the supermodel idea), but it keeps coming back to me as a framework that might allow both sides in this issue to get what they want. As usual, I look forward to people’s responses to see if I’m out of my mind again…

Here are some comments from the San Ysidro post below, with my comments interspersed.

My views on gun control aren’t as strong as they used to be, but I just gotta point out: at the airport, we’re dealing with armed f/t security prepared for the worst. (In several European airports, police patrol El Al baggage claim holding automatic weapons.) Unless we’re going to have armed guards right at the entrance to McDonalds (which they have in Israel now), a suicidal shooter is going to get off more rounds there than at the airport. Maybe not 21, OK. But some.
I get kinda worried by people who think a gun permit conveys Spidey-Sense, too. They’re gonna be shooting up mailmen and paperboys. Maybe even themselves.
Andrew Lazarus

Andrew: Two main responses; First that unless we are willing to live in a world where there is a policeman on every corner, with the concomitant impact on civil liberties, I’ll suggest that we’ll never get a high enough density of police/guards to effectively stop these events, as opposed to cleaning up afterwards, which is what typically happens now. Next, that I don’t know anyone who thinks possession of a gun conveys ‘spidey-sense’, and while I’m willing to let the implied insult roll, the simple facts…that shootings in states where CCW’s are ‘must issued’ haven’t skyrocketed…might give you some ground to reconsider.

I didn’t follow your reference to Australia. Care to clarify?
— tim Dunlop

Gun crime in OZ has declined, but not at any greater rate than it did before the buyback (see Guns And Crime: Gun Control in Australia I haven’t seen any data contradicting the data and conclusions there, including the INSA study in 2000.

Steve L., I think you missed my point. I think that the significant difference between the McDonalds shooting and the LAX shooting is that at El Al check-in counters worldwide, there are armed, alert security personnel whose full-time job is protection. I think it’s a dangerous fantasy to believe that armed fellow passengers in line could have done a better job of stopping this suicide attack. In fact, I put that right up there with dreaming that you’re Spiderman. A surprise attack where the terrorist just wants carnage and doesn’t intend to survive and there isn’t already someone on guard is going to be “successful”, maybe not as successful as the 21 victims in the McDonalds but a lot more than the two victims at LAX.
If we really have a lot of gun-toting honest citizens who think their superhuman reflexes are going to head off unexpected, unprovoked terrorist attacks by other gun-toting malevolent citizens, I think I’ll stay in the basement until the crossfire dies down.
— Andrew Lazarus

Yeah, I’ll agree. I don’t think San Ysidro would have been prevented by the presence of an armed civilian. But it might have been mitigated. And how many of the 19 people who dies in San Ysidro would have had to survive before you’d consider that a positive result?

Hartin’s post is an example of exactly the kind of thing I object to. He believes, and would have us believe, that England and Australia are terribly dangerous places. That’s false. I know that there are some statistics floating around, but I know people who have lived in both places.
He believes, and would have us believe, that armed self-defense has always been the primary source of personal safety. That’s false too — the rule of law works a lot better.
St. Onge says that someone carrying a gun is unlikely to use it in any given year. Sure, but a statistically small number of uses can be pretty awful.
If “concealed carry” is by permit, it is a form of gun control. And if carriers are screened, I don’t have a big problems with that. Most second amendment guys don’t want any regulation or registration at all, though.
Note that both St. Onge and Hartin are totally passive about the “causes of violence”. We’re just a violent country, nothing can be done about it, gun ownership isn’t the cause, and since we’re a violent place we should all arm ourselves. Somehow the fact gets lost that, even after arming ourselves, we’re still less safe than people in a lot of other countries.
If I have a gun, I can protect myself against fists, clubs, and knives. Against guns, only maybe. The initial advantage is lost, especially because an evildoer with a gun has the initiative.
Nobody took up what I said about the third-world places where every man is armed and armed self-defense really is the only safety you have. Those are NOT safe places.
— Zizka

Ziska: Your assumptions about England and Oz are off-base. I know people who live in Moscow right now, and they haven’t been mugged, so is Moscow safe today? The plural of anecdote isn’t fact; you have to dig into the real numbers somewhat, and the reality is that major cities in Europe are as dangerous or more so than major cities in the U.S. right now.
And at what point in history – before the foundation of modern police forces by Robert Peel in London in the 1820’s – was armed self-defense not the ‘primary source of personal safety’? You flatly misread history there.
It’s no more true that 2nd Amendment absolutists want ‘no regulation’ than that gun control advocates want ‘no guns’. The reality is that both political organizations are increasingly radicalized. Sadly, because I know that the large majority of gun owners would accept some reasonable regulation (I know I’m handwaving a bit here), as long as it was tied to some irreducible right rather than being this year’s slice of the salami.
No, the issue isn’t that we’re a ‘violent country’ so we should do nothing; it’s just that we are a violent country and this piffle about gun control gets in the way of finding and fixing the problems that make us so.
Your facts about armed self-defense aren’t true either; the average gunfight takes place at close range, a number of shots are fired, few if any hit, and it takes ten to fifteen seconds.

Hartin: I find your analysis simplistic. There are societies that are highly armed that are relatively safe against personal crime, and ones that are terribly dangerous. There are societies that are lightly armed that are safe and I suppose there are ones that are dangerous, although, frankly, I’m having a hard time thinking of one. I’ve spent about 2 months in the UK over the last 5 years, and believe me I wasn’t walking around scared. What bothers me the most about your argument, however, is that it appears to me to be based on symbolic or ritualistic thinking. In other words, the UK and Australia are going to have high crime because they’ve gotten on the wrong side of the Gun God and the right to self-defense. Sometimes you look like you’re writing a statistical argument (one which I suspect is false: Australia is a safe country), sometimes you seem to believe that a philosophical/historical argument compels the desired statistical results. I don’t think so.
I’ve decided that some gun control groups have indeed missed the target: the target is gun crime (and I suppose gun accidents), not gun ownership. But your metaphysical arguments don’t sway me.
— Andrew Lazarus

Well, we’re in agreement – the target is gun crime. But then why does everyone focus on the one variable that is a) relatively uncontrollable – there are more than enough guns in the world today to provide for criminals for the next millennium; and b) shown not to have major impacts on the gun crime we are concerned with?

This thread all got started from the comparison of the 21 dead in the San Ysidro massacre with the 2 dead at LAX, with the clear implication that more people carrying guns around McDonalds would have cut down on the death toll. And I’ve been saying that is only very partially true. Even people carrying guns (but who are not armed security guards looking for troublemakers) won’t get the drop on a suicidal lunatic who comes in gun[s] blazing. First they’ll have to put down their Big Macs.
You don’t seem to accept this. Hence I am very worried that your faith in the defensive capabilities of firearms is exaggerated.
— Andrew Lazarus

No, Andrew, I know for a fact what the defensive capabilities of firearms are; I’ve done force-on-force training and studied the literature on the subject extensively. It would be useful to find people who wanted to debate this issue who had done the samething. It might get us past rhetoric, and on to problem-solving, because (unlike many in the gun world – who won’t admit this I believe because they feel it’s like giving your arm to a shark) I believe we do have a horrible problem with gun crime in this country, and I’m ready, willing, and able to sit down with people who really want to solve it.
This has been a relatively civil thread on a heated and controversial topic; I want to thank everyone – even you, Andrew! – and look forward to more. Maybe we can find a path through this together. We certainly won’t do it alone.