President Barack Obama has boldly intervened to trim wasteful defense spending, much to the consternation of the military. The Onion reports:
Obama Axes Pentagon Plan To Build Billion Dollar Tank In Shape Of Dragon
Conductor Edward Downes and his wife Joan decided to end their lives on their own terms:
He spent his life conducting world-renowned orchestras, but was almost blind and growing deaf – the music he loved increasingly out of reach. His wife of 54 years had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So Edward and Joan Downes decided to die together.
Downes – Sir Edward since he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991 – and his wife ended their lives last week at a Zurich clinic run by the assisted suicide group Dignitas. They drank a small amount of clear liquid and died hand-in-hand, their two adult children by their side. He was 85 and she was 74.
Many people feel that suicide necessarily cheapens one's life. In many cases, I don't agree. I do think that the choice of when and how to die belongs to each person individually, as long as the decision was not made impulsively or under the influence. If the day comes when I decide that I can't bear the pain, or that I no longer find joy in my life, I would hope that I wouldn't need to travel all the way to Switzerland because inter-meddlers think they know better than me about the meaning of my own life.Stan Lebar worked for Westinghouse in the 1960s. He led the developmental team that produced a state-of-the-art camera for NASA---the camera that was taken to the moon on Apollo 11 and recorded the first moonwalk. Most people have seen those images, many times---grainy, fuzzy black & white pictures of something that looks kind of like an astronaut slowly descending something that kind of looks like a ladder on the side of a large object that we are told is the lander. Whatever. We suffered through these scenes, probably many of us annoyed at the quality, impatient that better pictures weren't available. (Better still pictures became available, shot with specially-made Hasselblads, that remain absolutely stunning in clarity and detail, so made up for the sub par video, at least for some of us.) After all, even Hollywood, using by today's standards primitive technology, could create vastly superior space vistas---compare the images from the 1966 film 2001: A Space Odyssey with the NASA footage from a few years later and you grasp the disappointment. (It has long been my opinion that support for the space program waned because NASA managed to take something as exciting and sexy as space exploration and turn it into the equivalent of a lecture on statistics. The late, great science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein chastised NASA at Congressional hearings for not doing more P.R., better P.R. When he was told that the government didn't do P.R., he had further things to say about campaigns and such like and then pointed out "NASA has a press department, doesn't it? That's the job of the press department." Anyway...) The camera built by Mr. Lebar's team was far superior to the poor images we all saw---and continue to see. The recording medium, however, was incompatible with broadcast television at the time.
I've criticized President Obama for not keeping his campaign pledges to end the faith-based initiative and restore transparency to government, but when he does something right, I'll give him credit where credit is due. So, it's good to see him taking this unapologetically progressive stance on an issue where some reason is badly needed - the precautionary use of antibiotics in animals raised on factory farms:
The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans. ...In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle — done to encourage rapid growth — should cease. And Dr. Sharfstein said farmers should no longer be able to use antibiotics in animals without the supervision of a veterinarian.Feeding massive doses of antibiotics to farm animals enables them to live in crowded, unsanitary and often inhumane conditions. It also encourages the evolution of antibiotic resistance to the dangerous bacteria that inevitably live inside them, and when those bacteria spread through the food chain to humans, the result is outbreaks of virulent, drug-resistant diseases. Having recently seen the movie Food, Inc., it's easy for me to appreciate how serious a threat this is. Antibiotic use, like fossil fuels, have promoted a dangerously unsustainable way of life in our culture. This first attempt may or may not make it past the powerful corporate food lobby - but kudos to the Obama administration for bringing it into the national consciousness in a bold way.
I’m enjoying my newly and consciously chosen path: things don’t need to be perfect. Not that I ever really was a perfectionist. But especially when it comes to consumer purchases, I’m much less a perfectionist than I ever was. Here are a couple cases in point. The rear (electric) window of our ten year old car no longer goes up and down. My immediate thought was to have it fixed. I got an estimate: $270. Gad. My wife and I decided that we can do without that window going up and down (even though my daughters (who sit in the back) would prefer that it work. $270 is a lot of allowance money. I asked the repair guy how much it would cost to make the window permanently stay up (because it kept sliding down). He said that he could do it for $100. I turned down that offer, went home and glued it shut. Far from perfect, though quite satisfactory. A friend visited today. The lock on her car’s passenger-side door was broken. She said: “Passengers can get into the car on the other side.” She added that not fixing minor things is a big time saver. Why make appointments and burn hours fixing something that isn’t really a priority? These car stories won’t resonate for may people. I’ve known dozens of people who freak out if there is even a single little scratch on their car. Nor would they ever try to fix it themselves. They will run it to the dealer, especially if someone else was at fault. A man accidentally collided with our other car 6 months ago. I suggested that I find a body shop that could bang it into shape, but said that I didn’t want it to be “like new.” After all, the car is 8 years old. I found a shop that straightened out the bends and sprayed over the scrapes for $400, instead of getting a “like new” job that would have cost $1,500. It’s good enough for me. There are days when I intend to get x number of things done. I’ve found that my life goes much more smoothly if I let some of those things drop off the list, unaccomplished.