Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Month: September 2007
Not Helping
Posted on September 17, 2007 in California Watch Mental Illness
Proposition 63, the mental health millionaires’ tax, generated millions of dollars for sufferers of mental illness. With its emphasis on special programs, however:
Some cash-strapped counties have slashed traditional funding for mental health services, and the state has made cuts too. In almost every corner of California, which has an estimated 1 million people with serious mental illness or emotional disturbance, core mental health budgets are stagnant at best while demand for services balloons.
Although mental health advocates in the state are thrilled about a guaranteed funding source that isn’t subject to budgetary whims, they worry that innovative programs created with the new money are being layered on top of a disintegrating mental health system that Proposition 63 does nothing to correct.
And the new law forbids counties from using Proposition 63 money to backfill — to pay for programs that existed prior to its passage. That provision was written to protect the new money, to keep counties from making cuts elsewhere that would undermine the promise of the new program. But it has also added to the sense among some healthcare administrators that their hands are tied.
“Proposition 63 was a huge policy mistake,” said Jeff Smith, executive director of the Contra Costa Regional Medical Center, which cares for scores of poor, uninsured residents. “It took a good amount of money and dedicated it to new services at the same time that old services have been just ravaged. Instead of solving a problem, it just covered it over — with a nice, fluffy frosting.”
Here in Orange County, hopes that Proposition 63 would enable the implementation of Laura’s Law have not materialized as realities. With millions being cut by AHnold for other treatment programs (which is illegal, incidentally) and shortfalls in traditional mental illness, mental health clients may find that Proposition 63 changes nothing or makes things worse.
Here’s a story about how rural areas are not reaping the benefits of Proposition 63.
Insulin Resistance
Posted on September 17, 2007 in Psychotropics Sugar and Fat
Those of you who are diabetic know the drill: you select a finger for torture, then press a sterile lancet against it to make it bleed. Just the tiniest spot, a wound that will heal itself quickly. But you must not waste the crimson drop that wells up. No, you must carefully balance it so that it does not fall on the rug or the tabletop or the waiting tongue of your cat (lest it become anthropophagic). By inducing [[capillary action]], you suck this ruby into the miniscule slot of a strip that is part microchip and part cardboard tongue depressor and allow the electronic wonder that you have plugged it into to throw out a LED display of zeroes or bars until it arrives at the Number, your blood sugar.
For the past several weeks, yoked by my dependence on [[Risperdal]], I have struggled mightilly with the Number. Ideally it should be under 130 and no higher than 160. Since my adventure in the ER two weeks ago, I have argued it down first to 200, then 160. The other morning, I had it at 141. And just a few minutes ago, after downing many cups of water, it was 124.
To celebrate, I drank some more water and promised myself a big normal breakfast in the morning. For now, I have overcome my drug-induced [[insulin resistance]].
Home Security
Posted on September 16, 2007 in Security
Saying Bruce Schneier speaks words of wisdom is like saying that Meryl Streep gave a fine performance in her latest film. It’s a given:
We have sold the average computer user a bill of goods. In our race for an ever-increasing market, we have convinced every person that he needs a computer. We have provided application after application — IM, peer-to-peer file sharing, eBay, Facebook — to make computers both useful and enjoyable to the home user. At the same time, we’ve made them so hard to maintain that only a trained sysadmin can do it.
And then we wonder why home users have such problems with their buggy systems, why they can’t seem to do even the simplest administrative tasks, and why their computers aren’t secure. They’re not secure because home users don’t know how to secure them.
At work, I have an entire IT department I can call on if I have a problem. They filter my net connection so that I don’t see spam, and most attacks are blocked before they even get to my computer. They tell me which updates to install on my system and when. And they’re available to help me recover if something untoward does happen to my system. Home users have none of this support. They’re on their own.
This problem isn’t simply going to go away as computers get smarter and users get savvier. The next generation of computers will be vulnerable to all sorts of different attacks, and the next generation of attack tools will fool users in all sorts of different ways. The security arms race isn’t going away any time soon, but it will be fought with ever more complex weapons.
This isn’t simply an academic problem; it’s a public health problem. In the hyper-connected world of the Internet, everyone’s security depends in part on everyone else’s. As long as there are insecure computers out there, hackers will use them to eavesdrop on network traffic, send spam, and attack other computers. We are all more secure if all those home computers attached to the Internet via DSL or cable modems are protected against attack. The only question is: what’s the best way to get there?
I wonder about those who say “educate the users.” Have they tried? Have they ever met an actual user? It’s unrealistic to expect home users to be responsible for their own security. They don’t have the expertise, and they’re not going to learn. And it’s not just user actions we need to worry about; these computers are insecure right out of the box.
An Atheist Who I Can Stomach
Posted on September 16, 2007 in Spirituality and Being
Check out Friendly Atheist. Hemant not only provides information about the humanist community, but he also invites members of various religions to answer questions on his blog.
A Thick, but Narrow Fog
Posted on September 16, 2007 in Travels - So Cal
The sun shone down on us as we took our seat on the terrace of The Greeter along [[Pacific_Coast_Highway_(United_States)|Pacific Coast Highway]] in Laguna Beach. Volleyballs boinged, children sang, and cars hissed as they stopped, then growled as they started up again. As I stared out to a [[cormorant]] roost on a moundish rock beyond the end of the beach, a black pigeon did a walk along the wall and then onto our table. It slipped and flapped its wings. “Hey hey!” I cried out. The bird found its wings before it found its feet and flew back to the wall.
I took note of some low clouds off the coast, marking that after sundown they would be piling themselves in the crescent-shaped mouth of Laguna Creek. I misestimated the time. By the middle of my meal of mixed seafood on a skewer, the fog tumbled onto the beach. Waders and volleyball players put on their sweats, gathered their things, and walked towards their cars. Just before the check arrived, the low clouds looked like white cornrows passing transparently over the fleeing picnickers.
We paid our check and rushed off with the rest of them. A quarter of a mile up the canyon, as we passed the [[Pageant of the Masters]] grounds, the air cleared with no sign of becoming occluded. A couple of miles beyond that we passed through a grove of bay laurels and I dreamed of marinara sauce.
Worst Auditions for Greece’s Super Idol
Posted on September 16, 2007 in Strange Video
If you have ever seen the Worst Auditions for American Idol, then you haven’t seen everything. When it is in a foreign language (mostly) and it is still bad….
Number three looks like he could have been pulled off a southern gas station pump.
Well, Larry was All Right
Posted on September 15, 2007 in Celebrity Scoundrels
UPDATE: Mug Shot
Somebody should have told OJ’s mother to mind whose company he was keeping!
For the young and the foreign: [[O.J. Simpson]], [[J. Edgar Hoover]], and [[Larry Csonka]]. From the National Archives. O.J. said someone stole this photo from his deceased mother.
New Use for Prozac
Posted on September 15, 2007 in Psychotropics Scoundrels
An Indiana woman gave it to her twelve year old as a sedative.
Atheism and Belief
Posted on September 14, 2007 in Agnosticism
I caught an atheist blogger who tried to define atheism as being an absence of belief — about anything. If you don’t believe, I said to him, you don’t have a mind. Right now there are ideas in your head about the nature of the world that are wrong because our current science has not understood them properly. These ideas will be overturned by more information. You ~believe~ that these are true. Your mind is not fully cognaisant of the nature of the universe with or without a “Higher Power” or “Intelligence” or god. Nor will it ever be. It is natural to fill in the holes as best we can. (OK, I added a little to it.)
Give me a break!
Let’s just see how many atheists attempt to turn this into a “there is/isn’t a God debate”. Thank the Universe that I am an agnostic! I know that knowledge will change as it refines itself.
Is He Hoping that Mark Furman Is the Detective?
Posted on September 14, 2007 in Celebrity Scoundrels
Just what happened in Las Vegas?
It all started, Southern California auctioneer Thomas Riccio said, when he received a phone call about a month ago “from someone insinuating they had personal items that once belonged to O.J. Simpson” and was interested in selling them. He said he was suspicious about how the sellers had obtained the items, which he described as footballs from record-breaking games, awards and personal photos.
He said the sellers claimed to have the suit Simpson wore the day he was acquitted in the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson Brown, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
Riccio said he set up a meeting for 7 p.m. Thursday in a ground-floor room in an economy-rate annex of the Palace Station, a nondescript facility about a quarter-mile west of the city’s famous Strip. “Simpson was supposed to show up, identify the items and tell the men to either give the stuff back or he would call the police,” Riccio said.
But the plan quickly fell apart when Simpson showed up with an entourage of about seven “intimidating looking guys” — at least one of whom had a gun, Riccio said. “O.J. got really emotional, and things got kind of nutty,” Riccio said.
“We tried to peacefully reacquire these personal items, not for their monetary value, but for their family value. O.J. wanted to be able to pass these things down to his kids,” Riccio said. The auctioneer said that Simpson told him the items had been stolen from his house on Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood (a Los Angeles city district) by a former agent who claimed the onetime football star owed him money.
“It got kind of nasty,” Riccio said. “They (Simpson and his companions) took the stuff, and they left. What can I say? Things went haywire. I’m not sure if O.J. knew what was going to happen or not.”
Was there a bloody cufflink that he wanted back?
Friday Xenartha Blogging – Baby Anteater Dining
Posted on September 14, 2007 in Xenartha
It’s time for baby anteaters. This one is looking for food.
Keep those anteater videos and photos, etc., coming in, folks.
