Nuisance blogs the detailed, graphic, NC-17 basis for the superiority of the banana slug as a school mascot, and the careful bloc voting that went into its inevitible electoral triumph.
But I was there at the beginning (or, as my sons point out, when tools were made of flint). And the reason for choosing the Slug as a mascot seemed obvious to us then.
Santa Cruz would never be able to have a football team. C’mon…try and imagine the cheers…

A couple of interesting comments on the whole public health thingie:
John “Akatsukami” Braue from Rat’s Nest comments:
[Update: Just went to his blog to get an email address, and saw that he’s posted some suggestions. I already owe him a bunch of attention and comment, so this just will have to get added to my giri.]

Hmmm.
There are a number of issues here, some of which are explicit in your discussion, others of which are not. Let me suggest a couple that have to be dealt with:
1. You’re going to die. I’m going to die. Extropian yivshish to the contrary, we’re all going to die.

Fair comment; I think that the core corporate-liberal value is becoming ‘death avoidance’ rather than ‘life embracing’; but there are stupid and avoidable ways to die and some that are less so. You have to figure out where your personal point on that spectrum is and where the social point ought to be. And I don’t think ‘We’re all gonna die anyway’, absent a framing philosophy (which from your Bushido nickname, I’ll assume you have) gets us very far. The issue is how we fit the inevitable fact of our death into what we make of our lives; but that conversation takes us fairly far afield.

1a. The usual standard for medical care has been “everything that we can do”. In 1925, this cost almost nothing, because it was almost nothing. Today, it’s a lot, and costs a lot.

Very true. Think about the classic conundrum of medical expense in the last weeks of life being the largest proportionally; personally, I went through this with my father. But I’m not talking about overall or encompassing medical care (although we will need to at some point), I’m talking about a narrow slice of care that deals specifically with communicable diseases.

2. Public health is not necessarily compatible with other civil rights. Would the forcible quarantine — that amounted to imprisonment — of “Typhoid Mary” be acceptable today? Even stipulating that we could cure from being an asymptomatic carrier, would forcing to take medications, remain where she could be found to have them dispensed to her, etc., be acceptable today. Think about anti-vaccination advocates before answering.

Yup. Closer to home, think of the bathhouse issue in San Francisco. I have a dog in this fight, as my best friend and the godfather of my older sons died of AIDS, which he probably caught at a circuit party or bathhouse.
As I’ve said before, people have the right to be stupid. The question becomes where we draw the line; I’ll suggest that there is a balancing act between rights and health and that we have stood firmly on the side of rights and perhaps ought to slide a step or so over toward health.
Sassafras of the eponymous blog, says:

We’re going to get government healthcare in times of major epidemics whether we like it or not. One thing that would make it much easier to adjust in the event of epidemic, whether natural or bioterrorist, would be implementing some form of universal health coverage *now.* Side effect of universal health coverage: more people treated in clinics, instead of going to the ER where triage nurses put adults who are not accident / trauma patients or suffering heart attacks on the schedule to wait for 6 1/2 hours.

I just returned from a conference, and in my hotel were people attending a national conference on public health. It was sobering to hear their views …

I have to agree; I think that when we get a good scare and 10,000 or so people die of something transmissible, we’ll be reacting quite vigorously rights be damned. One of my thoughts is that by implementing some kind of skeletal public health/healthcare system we can begin to build the infrastructure for identifying and coping with the kind of public health shock I think we’re gonna get.
Andy via email forwards a libertarian friend’s thoughts:

But here’s the thing: here’s where “public” as a word falls apart… Not in its first usage, but in its *second* usage. Change it to
“others’ health is truly good for you”
and now you have the beginnings of a campaign to get people to voluntarily “pay” for healthcare for other people, *because it is in their own very personal private individual interest*. Campaigns for the *public* good are never going to get people to voluntarily participate; but campaigns for their own *personal* good might.
I put “pay” in quotes because there is a LOT of room for creativity, innovation, and personal choice in terms of who will pay into what kind of system, just like private charities operate in different modes.

There is certainly room for voluntary and charitable action in these areas. But the kind of health infrastructure I’m talking about is to some extent atomic (meaning it comes in indivisible chunks), and as a consequence, it only works if everyone plays. I’m sympathetic to the libertarian striving for a purely voluntary life, but somehow it seems like it would work about as well if one could make gravity voluntary as well…I’ll now flee the room in anticipation of the net-libertarian response…

Is there a word for that yet? Or is it just a pleonasm?
First, and foremost, think good thoughts about this guy, currently in the second week of a coma in the Kern Medical Center. I want to say something like “If everyone who believes in faeries…” and somehow focus all the good thoughts of folks who read this on George.
Big props to that cigar-chompin’ unbent liberal, the Bad Dude himself, Brian Linse. We had our abortive trip to Bakersfield cut short by riots in the Sarge’s GI tract (was that appropriate, or what?), and spend the afternoon and evening downing soda and iced tea (yes, we are manly men…in fact, so manly that when you go here, they are afraid of us…’Your testosterone level is perilously high. Frankly, you scare us!’ It’s OK, I scare myself sometimes). Good time, and thanks again.
Why put those together? because it’s a reminder that the only thing that matters is the people in our lives, our friends, as simple as that may be. Found a new one, and hope like hell to keep one I’ve got.

Palestine is in the news: Bush’s speech sets the U.S. in opposition to the currently constituted P.A.
I’ve owed Demosthenes a response, and this gives a great frame for it, and both Lean Left and Max Speaks have recent comments I need to respond to.
Here’s Demosthenes’ point: (btw, I’ve gotta spend more time reading him…)

So, how to stop (or at least reduce) the bombings? Well, you need to disrupt one of these three elements: either disrupt access to the explosives, the target, or the bomber. The former is practically impossible; anybody who’s watched Fight Club knows that explosives are pathetically easy to make with the right knowledge, and trying to keep that knowledge under wraps is impossible. Trying to disrupt access to the target is, of course, why Israel is building their wall, has all their checkpoints, and are currently invading and occupying sections of the territories… an arrested or dead terrorist loses access to all three, but principally the target. (After all, he could simply become the bomber). The measures that attempt to prevent access to the target, though, are creating more and more possible bombers, and with that are increasing the accessibility of the third element: a bomber.
This is, of course, the element that those that are calling for either a Palestinian State or at least less repression are trying to disrupt. If you remove that sense of desperation and hopelessness, then fewer bombers become available. If you create the impression that there are other ways of changing your environment and your situation, you remove yet more bombers. If you reinforce the idea that terrorist bombing is wrong and that vengeance will only create more vengeance, then you remove yet more potential bombers from the pool. Yes, you’ll still have the hardcore extremists, but those are far simpler to track and predict than a random teenager who has lost their fiance… and they may be dissuaded as well by others that don’t want to deal either with the repercussions or the loss of that person. (Secular interests can outweigh religious ones). Besides, there would be more people who, like Ms. Ahmed, morally object to the bombings, not having had their own personal grievances outweigh their moral qualms.

Lean Left has interesting posts on this, including one dated June 23 (note that his permalinks are broken), in which he says a few nice things about me and then goes on:

have come down on the side of laying the culpability at the feet of the Palestinians, all the Palestinians, and only the Palestinians. Everything they say is true – suicide bombing is a horrible evil, statehood will not stop groups like Hamas, there are some Palestinians who want to do nothing but kill Jews. All of that is true, but acting solely on those truths (whether because of the one percent rule, or for some other reason) will solve nothing. The problem with a Sharon like plan is that it is only temporary. I can think of no insurgency that has ever been stropped by outside force alone.

[Note: Hmmm. I need to go over my military history on that one.]
Their points are good; they speak to the fact that in terrorism, like in crime, the ultimate answer is to stop growing terrorists (as the answer to crime is to stop growing criminals). But it begs a simple problem: who will bell the cat? Exactly who is it that Israel can offer peace to? Who will help create the culture which stops growing terrorists?
The problem is that for a variety of reasons, either a temporary aberration or a deeper cultural dynamic (in my darker moments, I side with Eric Raymond, in believing that this is a characteristic of Islamist culture; in my better ones I realize that temporary insanity has been a characteristic of human societies for a long time, and hope that that’s the case here), the current ruling culture in Palestine and much of the Arab world, is more interested in growing terrorists than in gaining what we would consider to be rational political ends.
Now Raymond and others would argue that this breakdown is inherent in the modern Muslim culture/religion/worldview. Someone like Bernard Lewis would agree with him (I still remember reading his article ‘The Roots of Muslim rage’ in the Atlantic what, ten years ago?), others like Edward Said, would not. Now while I think Said is an idiot, I will say that I don’t yet know enough to have a hard opinion yet, and that we need to be very careful here. If Lewis is right, we are facing Huntington’s ‘Clash of Cultures’, and it’s gonna be messy and probably radioactive before we’re all done. If not, then the answer is to find the voices in the Palestinian community who do want to engage us on terms that we consider rational
That’s my hope, my path through this mess. And that’s the gauntlet, I believe Bush has just laid down.
My overall criticism of the Muslim (note that I don’t say ‘Islamist’) world in response to 9/11 and the terrorist war in Israel has been to the moral and political silence of the ‘mainstream’ Muslim community, who has responded consistently with “Yes, but…”
Hint: That’s not good enough. If we are to take Demosthenes’ path, there has to be someone standing there to meet us, and right now the onus is on the Palestinian/Arab community to put forward that person. This is the window.
It’s a waste of time to negotiate with Hamas, with Arafat, and with the others who have created their personal and cultural identities around Islamist aggression. It’s time for there to be someone else.
And the challenge is for the U.S. and Israel (I don’t see anyone else in the West as a player at this point) to hold open opportunities for that ‘someone else’, for the Arab world to step up and support them, and for the Palestinians themselves both to be that ‘someone else’ and to keep the people who would kill that ‘someone else’ from doing so.
Period.
Mo’ Moral Equivalence
Max Sawicky, in MaxSpeaks, lists a litany of IDF ‘crimes’, and raises a challenge:

MORAL CLARITY WEEK, DAY TWO. I regret to report that in my admittedly limited investigations, our jingoistic warbloggers (JWs) have not yet seen fit to acknowledge the three stories I cited yesterday. I am certain this oversight will be swiftly rectified, since the possibility that the JWs do not value Palestinian lives as much as Jewish ones is almost too painful to contemplate.

Here’s his litany:

* An Israeli tank shelled a Palestinian marketplace, killing three children and a 60-year old man. (Link)
* Following a funeral for an Israeli mother and three children murdered by a Palestinian infiltrator, a group of Jewish mourners went on a rampage in a Palestinian village, burning a house and cars, and murdering a Palestinian. (link)
* In Jenin, the IDF wrecked a hospital. (link)

Max, I’m the last guy in the world to tell you or anyone else how to make your arguments. We’re all grown-ups here. But please know that the mode of discourse you’re taking on here is exactly the one that has alienated me from many of my friends on the Left and from the current corporatist-Leftist media coverage of the war. Any error on one side is immediatly prima fasciae evidence of bad behavior. The perfect is, quite literally, the enemy of the good.
Let’s get two things straight:
1) In any activity…including blogging, firefighting, police work, combat, anything like or between those…there is a level of bad behavior, carelessness, imprecision, error, and just plain old bad goddam luck that happens. On my planet, Earth, friendly fire kills combatants. Innocent people are shot or beaten. Noncombatants are killed. Buildings are destroyed. From the comfort of our desks, it’s relatively easy for you and I to condemn, because ‘it shouldn’t have happened’ and in our imaginations, we could have done it better. Well, guess what, it does. There is no perfectly executed human activity, and it just amazes me that academic or journalistic critic seize on every innocent victim of war as a justification for not waging war. Do you know how many innocent civilians died in World War II? Are you suggesting that to save them it should not have been fought?
2) The test is both the ‘level of error’ of the organization we are critiquing and how they respond to it. If, every time any squad of IDF soldiers went on a mission, they made it a point to kill innocents or wantonly destroy property, that would be one thing. Make a case, Max, that this is happening hundreds of times aday, as there are probably thousands of IDF actions daily. You can’t, because I’m willing to bet, there aren’t. There are bad, negligent, stupid, careless, tragic actions. You don’t need war or racism for that to happen; soldiers die in training here in the US every week. But I’ll ask you Max, what’s the acceptable level of error? How many errors do you make in the course of your day, and how often do you have to do things under the kind of immediate pressures the soldiers you so freely criticize face? Show me some concrete evidence that this is policy and come talk to me about this. Show me that the tanker who negligently fired on the marketplace crowd was promoted, and his picture run in the front pages of the Israeli press as a hero, and you’ll have a point.
Well, Max, here’s your response.

From today’s LA Times: Davis Opposed Timber Industry Tax Hike; this alone isn’t news, but the $105,000 contribution associated with it is.
My earlier comment stands:

At this point I can’t in any conscience vote for Simon; but in opposition, I’d rather get my hands chewed off by a woodchipper than vote for Davis, who is a corrupt, small-minded, visionless functionary. Fun decision, no? Is Mel Brooks running?? Gov. LePetomaine, anyone?

Public health is a truly public good.
Let me give an example.
Yesterday was the Biggest Guy’s last day here before he headed back East. So here were our schedules:
Tenacious G took me to the doctor, where the packing was taken out of my nose…wow!! Who knew all that stuff would fit?? And I don’t even have that big a nose!! We stopped off and had brunch at a café on the way home from the Doctor’s office.
Biggest Guy slept in, as he’d been out with friends the night before. When we got home from the doctor, we went to the car wash, then I crashed for a few hours (made easier, now that I can breathe). When I woke up, we took Biggest Guy down to the beach in Redondo for a walk, some time to talk, and a snack. Then we came home, he went out to dinner, and when he came home, we took him to the airport, where, after secondary screening, he left.
What the hell does this have to do with public health? Here goes.
I’m guessing that we each swapped germs with maybe a hundred people that day. TG and I shook the doctor’s hand; we were served brunch by a server at the café, and water and tea by the busboy; the guys at the car wash sat inside the car; we walked down the bike path in Redondo, where we brushed against (as opposed to walking past) thirty or forty people; we had lunch, where we were again served and bussed; finally, we handed bags over to screeners, got tickets from ticket agents, and probably brushed against another ten or fifteen people. I’m sure each of us used a public restroom at least once that day.
So our health…our physical health, as opposed to our moral, or spiritual health, is dependent on the physical health of roughly a hundred strangers we each encountered that day.
For a long time, the growth of cities was essentially self-limiting. It was limited both by economics, in that the ‘support area’ for the city had a size limited by transportation technologies. But there was another, darker limit, which was plague. Periodically, a germ culture would arise in the human petri dishes of cities, and lots of people would die.
As noted above, it’s hard to prevent this, because it’s hard to live in cities and not contact lots of other people.
So you and I have a direct interest in the health of every person we contact in the course of a day.
I want everyone I contact to have access to a doctor for that ugly rash, dripping nose, draining sore…not only out of humane considerations, but because I want it to be cured before they come in contact with me and mine.
The ultimate social capital a society can create is embodied in healthy and productive people. But so far, we have three systems for delivering health care in most of the Western world…and none of them seem to work.
Our system here in Southern California is imploding as we speak.
The LA Times (intrusive registration required, or just use ‘laexaminer/laexaminer’ – thanks Matt) has one of the ‘deep and slow’ series running on this. The first story is on the slow-motion collapse of the trauma network, triggered by the crisis in emergency room healthcare.

“People call 911 and they think if we bring them in, they’ll get seen by the doctor faster,” said Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic Orville Wright, who waited more than two hours last week with a respiratory patient at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. “That’s not the case.”
Hospital officials say the most critically ill patients are treated immediately. But paramedics and some emergency physicians say the congestion is endangering patients’ lives.
The danger extends beyond the ER. While paramedics are waiting for a bed to open up in the emergency room, ambulance responses are often delayed in the communities they cover. If an ambulance is taken out of commission, response times in its service area increase by four to five minutes on average, fire officials say.
Ambulance backups are worsening because more patients are seeking emergency-room care, even as hospitals are closing ERs. In the last decade, more than 20 ERs have shut down in Los Angeles County, narrowing treatment options in a sprawling region of 9.6 million people.

Today’s story is about the larger decisions being made to try and keep the public health system afloat.

One night a few years ago, a man crashed his car into the side of Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. In his hand, doctors recall, was a crumpled piece of paper from a local physician’s office. On it was a map showing how to get to the Boyle Heights hospital and the words: “You are having a heart attack. Go to County-USC.”
County-USC doctors recount this story to illustrate a dynamic that makes them both proud and frustrated: People who are turned away from other medical facilities for lack of funds come from across the region and the state, even from abroad, to L.A. County’s public hospitals for a wide range of essentially free medical care.
But the strain of caring for the poor and uninsured is forcing local officials to reconsider the amount of care they offer. The health department is asking the Board of Supervisors this week to adopt a strategy that would reduce the number of places patients can receive general medical care but, for the time being, preserve high-end hospital care and emergency rooms.
By doing that, the county will be attempting what critics say is an impossible balancing act—maintaining its commitment to take all comers, even while making it more difficult for patients to find medical help. It may also run the risk of flooding already overburdened emergency rooms with patients who have been unable to get basic medical care.
“We have been providing a higher level of services to the uninsured than any other county in this state,” Supervisor Gloria Molina said. “We’re going to have to downsize the number of services we provide. They’re just going to have to drive farther, wait longer.”
The supervisors will debate what would be the deepest cuts ever made to the $2.4-billion health department—closing nearly a dozen clinics, reducing beds at County-USC by more than 10%, and ending inpatient services at High Desert Hospital in the Antelope Valley.

I’m not advocating specific policies yet. Along with a lot of other people, I’m jumping up and down pointing at the horizon, and saying “there’s an iceberg right up there!! DID YOU HEAR ME?? THERE’S AN ICEBERG UP THERE!!”…as the band tunes up to play “Nearer My God to Thee.”
More tomorrow, gotta go.

War Liberal scores in talking about core Republican values.
Crime is up, the deficit is up, foreign policy is a mess, the War on Terrorism is taking a breather. And business…the country-club Republican (as opposed to pickup-truck Republican) bastion appears to be unwinding as all the CEO’s and board members head for Club Fed.

Alex Frantz, my fellow Slug over at ‘Public Nuisance’, has an even better response to Sawicky (although he was responding to Demosthenes)than mine. Go check it out, but here’s the payoff:

Since the Palestinians still massively support terror bombings, I can only conclude that the payoff the bombings produce is, in their minds, worth the cost. And that payoff isn’t improved chances of statehood, or reduced oppression. In both areas, the payoff of terrorism has been negative.
The only payoff the bombings get is dead Jews. And for the Palestinians, dayenu. That is enough.
Demosthenes’ own example shows it:`Ahmed is twelve: “calm, together and determined to kill Israelis.”` Not ‘determined to gain independence.’ Not ‘determined to get an education and help build his country.’ Just determined to kill.
In game theory terms, the Palestinians aim only at the strategy which has the worst payoff for their opponents. That the payoff is even worse for themselves they have deemed irrelevant.
And that is why I and many others are reconsidering our past support for Palestinian statehood. It’s why Glenn feels they are becoming a psychotic death cult and I pretty much agree. It’s why bloggers are saying that the terrorism has to stop and aren’t interested in talking grievances until it does. Not because they made a bad choice – anybody can do that. Not even because their bad choice was also immoral. It’s because their bad choice has led them into catastrophe and they don’t appear to regret it. They have made the decision that the ruin of their current and future prospects as a people is a small price to pay for the joy of murdering Jews. It isn’t violence for the sake of their homeland but violence for the sake of violence.

Go slugs! Slime ‘em!

From today’s LA Times (intrusive registration required):

San Francisco State announced Friday that it placed a Palestinian student organization on probation and cut off its funding for one year because of a campus confrontation last month.
The university also issued a letter of warning to a Jewish student group whose pro-Israel peace rally ended in the clash with pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
…
Nabeel Silmi, a San Francisco State junior serving as spokesman for the General Union of Palestine Students, called the sanctions against his group unfair.
“Things were said on both sides. However, the whole GUPS [being held] responsible for everybody’s comments on May 7 is completely unacceptable. We have sanctions put on us now, but we are going to continue to work with the administration, let them know what our opinion is, and where we stand. On an organizational level, we didn’t do anything wrong,” Silmi said.
Orli Bein, graduate program coordinator for San Francisco Hillel, said the university “has taken some important steps” to improve the atmosphere on campus.
But she said the warning letter campus officials sent to Hillel was inappropriate because of “the extreme care we’ve taken to abide by the rules.”
Bein called the letter a misguided “effort to criticize both sides to seem impartial.”

Max Sawicky is linked over on the left, and I read his blog regularly. He currently has been mirroring Tim Blair’s “critique a day” of Fisk with his own of Instapundit, which I’ve found pretty amusing. Up until Friday.
Friday’s post triggered a response, because in part here Max and I part company pretty dramatically in our interpretation of what’s going on in the Middle East, and, by implication, what should go on.

First I have to say a few things before I get to the thing I can’t say. The bombings create awful tragedies. I’m agin’ ’em. As a recent statement by Edward Said confirms, they have greatly harmed the cause of Palestinian self-determination.

But other than instrumentally, they’re OK, Max? Is that really what you want to say here? They create tragedies, but if they worked, if they got the Palestinians their state, they’d be fine?

I wish the Palestinians had launched a Gandhi movement. If they had, no doubt the IDF would have started shooting them down and blowing them up, as it has for the past 65 years. In any case, under this scenario I believe that by now there would be an authentic Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza. Imagine if half the Palestinian lives sacrificed thus far had been martyred in the context of non-violent resistance. (But have you ever wondered why nobody ever says, “I wish Israel would embark upon the path of non-violent resistance?” Never mind.)

The Israelis might have started by shooting, but British, who were easily more bloody-minded as the Israelis, lasted maybe what … ten years? … in the face of Gandhi’s movement? The Israelis, with their progressive politics, dependent on the goodwill and funds of Europe and the US, would have folded like wet matzoh if confronted with a coordinated, genuinely nonviolent nationalist Palestinian movement.
And the Israeli’s have tried nonviolent means in the past. An Israeli PM was assassinated for moving the country toward peace, while political figures in Palestine are assassinated for proposing peace.

Now the part I can’t say. The point of all this, getting back to IP, is that the Times article gives no hint of the bombers being either psychotic or a ‘cult.’ To the contrary, the dilemma reported is that the bombers seem to fit no profile that would facilitate their neutralization. Apparently, anyone could be a bomber, and this is said, understandably, to have the Israeli government perturbed.

Actually, Max, it’s funny. I grew up in California in the late 60’s and 70’s, and saw the heyday of the cults here. My second wife was aggressively recruited by a cult, and I had friends who fell into cults from EST to Lifespring and others. So my antennae are fairly cult-sensitive, and as I read the article about the failed murder bombers, my immediate thought was “Wow! They’re being processed like new cult members!” Quick decision, isolation, and…boom! From the Times article:

’ A chain of events was dragging her down with a speed that left her frozen, unthinking.
It was only five days before that she had offered her services and maybe her life to a member of a violent Palestinian group in Bethlehem. It was only the day before, she recalled, that her offer had been suddenly, even greedily, accepted.
It was only on this day, Wednesday, May 22, that she had been pulled away from a marketing lecture at Bethlehem University, shown the backpack and how to trigger the bomb inside, put in a beat-up car with another would-be killer, and sent on, dressed to pass as an Israeli woman.

From an article in Ha’aretz, about a meeting between the Israeli Defense Minister and the failed murder-bombers:

Ben-Eliezer: ‘You have parents, brothers, sisters, family, friends. Did you think about them?’
Stiti: ‘Yes.’
Ben-Eliezer: ‘Did they know?’
Stiti: ‘Yes. My parents begged me not to do it. My father told me that I’d be very sorry if I dared to go ahead, but it didn’t convince me. What they told me at the mosque was more powerful. They told me to just think about the commandment and the reward, up above, in Paradise, with the virgins that would be waiting for me and all the honor I would receive.’
…