This week’s Times magazine has an excellent (and long) article on the medical ethics battlefield that memorial hospital in new orleans became in the hours, months, and now years, after katrina. amazingly, it doesn’t throw the blame on anyone (i say ‘amazingly,’ because the scene at memorial was truly apocalyptic: overweight patients left behind, families of patients turned away, doctors administering lethal doses of morphine as the electricity, and then patient respiratory machines went out); instead, it represents a clearheaded call for resisting/rejecting the insularity and opaqueness of medical ethics boards and a plea for more thorough emergency action plans. read it. and give Dr. Sherry Fink a Pulitzer. Or better yet: put her on the new MedPAC advisory committee. This is what journalism should be:

“Father John F. Tuohey, regional director of the Providence Center for Health Care Ethics in Portland, Ore., said that there are dangers whenever rules are set that would deny or remove certain groups of patients from access to lifesaving resources. The implication was that if people outside the medical community don’t know what the rules are or feel excluded from the process of making them or don’t understand why some people receive essential care and some don’t, their confidence in the people who care for them risks being eroded. ‘As bad as disasters are,” he said, “even worse is survivors who don’t trust each other.’ “

these are the ones I listen to religiously… which makes up for the paucity of religious sociology/theology podcasts out there.

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Gail Collins is the voice of it. She makes a point in her column today that lawmakers supportive of health (care, insurance, drainage) reform only wish they could throw back at the crazies: how can you be worried about something audacious as a “death panel” when you have zero confidence in congress’ ability to pass a law that crosses even one special interest group in their constituency?

Last week’s “This American Life,” exploring the trial of Hemant Lekhani, a septuagenarian “terrorist” who was strung along by a U.S. informant into buying a (fake, and provided by the State Department) stinger missile, stirred up feelings that I last experienced when several young men were arrested in may for a similar “terrorist plot.” Before I completely expend my air quote quota, here are those thoughts:

1) entrapment has a very clear definition. as does torture. and terror. these definitions are not blurred by emotions—they are blurred by the exploitation of emotions for political gain.

2) we are not safer because these men are in jail. if anything, they have demonstrated to enemies of america the importance of a. not getting caught, and b. using unconventional tactics. these cases make future FBI/CIA investigations more difficult.

3) if you claim that, “after 9/11, we had to take drastic measures [read: ignore civil liberties, the geneva conventions, etc] to maintain the safety of the american public,”  any and all political gains you chalked up during that period should also be ignored… b/c, you know, it wasn’t about you… it was about saving our “country,” right?  That means you, Chris Christie—public prosecutor in the Lakhani trial and current gubernatorial candidate for Jersey.

4) criminal justice / jail reform needs to happen. soon. or stuff like this will continue.

i’m ridiculously excited about the eggers/spike jonze-written “Where the Wild Things Are.” Now mr. heartbreaking work of staggering genius has thrown these two paper-airplane-light stories into the thermals of goodness already rising from the reviews of his new non-fiction book, Zeitoun. summer reading is not over.

Articulating my thoughts about india is a stream-of-consciousness affair. None of the following is meant to be coherent in any way.

India has committed in principle to the country’s (world’s?) largest solar endeavour, setting the goal of increasing solar capacity from 3 megawatts to 20 gigawatts by 2020. Most of the blogosphere has pointed to the upcoming copenhagen climate talks to interpret this as a giant slammer (please get this elementary school reference) to the wimpy pogs (ie, the US cap n’ trade bill) the west has laid out in the place of emissions bargaining chips.

Regardless of the global realpolitik maneuvering here, the utter hugeness of this plan reminds me of the utopia/dystopia (depending on your gender) of RS Hossein’s “Sultana’s Dream,” in which women not only run india on solar and water energy, but use it to subdue armies of men. the deeper message of the story is that men irrevocably mess things up when any sort of power—electrical or political—is involved.

Which, in turn, makes me think about Secretary of State Clinton’s visit to the subcontinent, wherein the (mostly male) government pretty much dismissed Hillary’s calls to get their emissions standards under control. Their (completely fair) argument goes like this: how did the west develop? massive, polluting industry. and we (india) can’t? A recent princeton study looked at this problem and suggested that we should structure carbon taxes and caps around individual high-emitters, not whole countries. At a certain level, these uber-emitters are doing more damage to their country than good. It’s a broad framework,  but it should be the center of the copenhagen talks.

If that fails, we can always just hand things over to the Sultanas of the world… after all, Clinton’s speeches over the last month and a half have served as an amazingly effective palliative to the screeches from the (male, white) Right in our own country. If you’ve paid any attention… God knows the media hasn’t.

the u.s. has a higher percentage of torture supporters than china:

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…is something outside of the dialectics (religion/secularism, east/west, nationalism/global-market-ism(?), culture/scripture) through which both iranians’ and the west’s images of the country have overlaid photos, videos, and headlines from this “troubled” country. i use “troubled” not in its usual, disdaining and clinical sense—iran is “troubled” in the same way a pebbled agitates a pond, each bending ripple revealing the imperfections, the differences hiding beneath and along the shore of the formerly homogenous, glass-like water.

iranians love poetry, roy mottahedeh writes in his excellent historical analysis of the ‘78-79 revolution (and prescient descriptor of the underlying causes of this year’s events in iran), the mantle of the prophet. this makes sense: the poet’s work is to both create something undeniably personal and affecting… and to hide the evidence that they, themselves, created it. the revolution of ‘79 (and ‘09) are powerful moments precisely because, to many of their actors and viewers, the passion and emotions they recognize within themselves are both new and familiar; they are powerful historical moments because they neither fit perfectly into, nor can be discarded as chance anomalies from, the trace of iran’s written and psychological past.

mottahedeh’s work ends with a discussion between a deeply religious mullah and a university professor. this is iran: [The Mullah says,] “I defend the reasonableness of the law for the world in which the Koran was revealed. but i recognize the variety of human situations, and i want not just a principle that suspends the law when necessary for the general good—I have that already—I want a principle that allows us to seek the spirit and intention of the la and to apply it accordingly. this principle should be something that doesn’t destroy the Koran by allowing people to read into it whatever they want, as some of our young people do. It should be a principle that preserves the substance as well as the name of religion and also preserves everything good that centuries of careful study of the law have given to us. I haven’t found it.”

iran’s identity is “the strive”—that stretch for what was once thought unachievable. we should not castigate, but encourage iranians in this yearning to constantly question and reinvent their identity and history. their leader, and his ambitions, do not represent those of its “troubled,” but enlightened people. khamenei’s actions (and the global community’s inaction) are just troubling.

“i shot a man in reno / just to watch him die”:

on climate change: while views differ on a spectrum from “it’s just god hugging us closer” to “it’s just an excuse for big government to regulate patriotic coal companies, causing millions of americans to lose their [unsafe, low paying, intellectually suffocating, and outdated] jobs,” the republican base agrees on one thing: science doesn’t prove anything. they’re right… sort of: scientists only test hypotheses—but they can reject really stupid ideas. from the guardian:

Pictures that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months. The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice – a record loss – were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

on obama’s place of birth: i’ll let jon stewart take this one. but i think the larger question at stake here is whether the republican party is willing to embrace the (debunked) history of our country as something shaped by a homogeneously white, christian(ist), and male population—as texas textbooks might be claiming in the near future. the question is, should we care if obama was born in kenya (which he wasn’t), or if he’s truly “black,” or muslim—should that matter? in a word, no. the nature and timing of birth, be it of an individual or country, is at its core an accident. identity is something we form through sharing (not demonizing) the experiences and emotions of others.

on health care reform: NO. (that’s productive, guys)

on what it means to be a leader: “it would be apathetic to just hunker down and go with the flow. nah, only dead fish go with the flow.” – the GOP’s 2012 frontrunner, pictured above.

so congrats, party o’ cheney, you’ve got 25% of the country secured—and you only had to give up your integrity and embrace incoherence.