Measuring Happiness Across the Globe - David Loftus

This week’s news included the results of the latest Gallup Poll of global well-being. As widely reported, the study that supposedly measures how happy various countries are put Denmark on top, and Sweden and Canada just behind. The U.S. came in at a sobering 12th place, behind such possibly surprising contenders as Australia (4th), Finland (5th), Venezuela (6th), and Israel (7th).

Now, I have nothing against the notion that the average person in Denmark or even Venezuela is happier than the average American. I only question the survey here as an exercise in critical thinking -- a devil’s advocate response, as it were. As with any poll, the relevant question to ask is: By what criteria did the pollsters measure what they were looking for? I wondered whether average income, state of the local economy, aspects of the education system, or the activity of the entertainment industries in these various nations factored in.

It turns out this is just self-reporting by a mass of individuals across 124 countries. People from Ireland to Burkina Faso, 1,000 in each nation, were asked in person or by telephone to rate their own lives today, and what they expected it to be five years from now, on a scale of 1 to 10. If they decided they had at least a 7 today and an 8 in the future, the survey termed them “thriving”; lower numbers could be “struggling” or “suffering.”

That’s all. The best discussion of the results I’ve run across was by Miami Herald columnist Frida Ghitis. She noted that while wealth, democratic government, warm and sunny weather, religion, and peace and security all tend to correlate with happiness among individuals, these variables often appear to work at cross-purposes on a national level. For instance, many Latin American countries (not very wealthy, and often sporting high rates of crime) rated high in satisfaction. So, too, did the United Arab Emirates and Qatar (highly undemocratic, but very wealthy and inclined to shower their largesse on their tiny populations). China is surging out of poverty but only 12 percent surveyed qualified as “thriving.” (Less surprisingly, restless Egypt and Libya reported 12 percent and 14 percent, respectively.)

For the record, here are the top and bottom 10s:

Countries where the most citizens reported to be “thriving”

1. Denmark (72%)

2. Sweden (69%)

3. Canada (69%)

4. Australia (65%)

5. Finland (64%)

6. Venezuela (64%)

7. Israel (63%)

8. New Zealand (63%)

9. Netherlands (62%)

10. Ireland (62%)

[ 12.  U.S.A.  (59%) ]

Bottom 10: Countries where the fewest citizens reported to be “thriving”

Chad (1%)
Central African Republic (2%)
Haiti (2%)
Burkina Faso (2%)
Cambodia (3%)
Niger (3%)
Tajikistan (3%)
Tanzania (4%)
Mali (4%)
Comoros (4%)

If you want to see the entire Gallup Poll list, go here.


What it comes down to is self-perception, and how each individual, each collection of people, assesses what makes them happy. Americans take their peace, security, and democracy for granted, and tend to obsess about the wealth they haven’t yet gotten, or the things they feel they’ve lost, such as community, or investment value.

I suspect much of what influences these self-perceptions across the planet relates to the general messages that viewers in each country pick up from their news media and entertainment. Go almost anywhere else in the world, and you’ll encounter dozens, hundreds, thousands of people who want to come to the U.S., because they see wealth, health, beauty, and clean streets and homes in the movies and television programs we export to them. When we watch the very same programs here, we focus on the crimes, violence, duplicity, and fear in the shows (and in the news stories).

Religion, sunlight, music, and other things may inspire South Americans to overlook their poverty and crime. What surprises me is that so many Central and West African countries saw themselves at the bottom: Chad (the worst), Central African Republic (2nd worst), Burkina Faso (4th), Mali (9th). I’ve been to Mali, and though it is indeed one of the poorest nations in the world, the people seemed very full of life and happy. Maybe television and movies have shown them a lot more of what the rest of the world has, and they lack.

If there were some objective way to measure general happiness from country to country, I’m sure the results would look very different from this (or any other) year’s Gallup Poll. Maybe the U.S. would rate much higher, maybe it would lower. But I can guarantee you that how we view ourselves (or how any other nation’s people see their own situation) is far from an accurate, truthful, or objective assessment.

Invasion of the Wee Beasties (with help from inconsiderate carriers): a few thoughts about germs - David Loftus

The past week’s news of a germs study which suggests we get exposed to bacteria and viruses from places we might not have thought of -- like ATMs and TV remote controls -- shows that technology has brought us closer together in unhealthy ways while maintaining our innocence of the fact. (I’ve provided a lot of links below, but I wasn’t able to find this particular news story on a Web search of either the local newspaper’s site or Google News. But I know I read it in my local daily in the last few days.)

We have all witnessed the ease with which strangers can turn abusive and obscene on the Internet -- in public comments and on discussion lists -- because they can’t see their audience and their “listeners” can’t frown on them in person or pummel them physically. Now, a recent study indicates that fecal matter, E. coli, and other nasty critters hang out in considerable numbers on ATM buttons, remotes, and other locations and implements -- another gift from unseen strangers. News stories in recent years have found similar mother lodes of germs on the handles of grocery carts and inside musical instruments.

Most of it goes back to hand washing: too many people simply don’t do it regularly, or at all. I’ve seen this myself. Every time I go to a public men’s room, I observe that roughly a third to a half of the other males don’t wash their hands at all, and some engage only in the curious non-disinfecting exercise of dipping their hands under running water for a moment without using any soap … as if hand washing were a public ritual that does no good at all but people feel they have to at least pay it lip service, so to speak. I commented on this on my Facebook page in late December and got a relative firestorm of 23 comments in a day and a half. (One friend who did not comment asked me in person later, half-seriously, not to write about such things, it had so unnerved her.)

I was like everyone else when I was younger. I didn’t wash my hands at all, because I didn’t regard my private parts as particularly dirty, or I did my bathroom business without touching them. But it’s not really so much about twiddly bits and creases on one’s person; it’s that you pass through a physical space where hundreds of other people have tarried, some of whom carry disease and touch the seats, fixtures, and handles with their germy fingers. Plus, microscopic bits of human waste are floating in the air, ready to attach themselves to you: if you can smell ’em, they’re there.

After too many winters of catching whatever cold or ’flu virus everyone else has, and too many occasions on which I and/or my wife got sick after taking an air flight because we spent hours in a metal tube with hundreds of other folks -- some of whom inevitably carried germs, I’ve become more sensitive about other people’s contagiousness. Since I don’t drive, in the isolated and familiar environment of a private vehicle, every day I hear strangers coughing, sneezing, and sniffling on buses, light-rail trains, and streetcars … and I know some of them are coughing into their hands and then grabbing poles, seat backs, and hanging straps. It’s not a pleasant thought. More and more, I keep my gloves on or lean against a wall -- even balance without any support while the train rolls -- so I don’t have to touch any surfaces on mass transit.

Have I sufficiently depressed and demoralized you yet? Some further thoughts: The “five-second rule” of dropped food is no good. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is growing. (Maybe the human race could still be wiped out by a plague instead of nuclear war or global warming.) And hands-free faucets may spread more germs than taps you turn on and off with your hands!

On the other hand, we don’t build up germ resistance in our systems without regular exposure to wee beasties. And as much as 90 percent of the cells in our bodies are in fact bacteria, good as well as bad. So there is such a thing as being too careful. (Not to mention paranoid.)

Cannibalism or Homosexuality? Whattaya Asking Me For? - David Loftus

Several nights ago I found myself in a conversation of the sort one usually has at a bar in college or in one’s twenties. I’m not that young anymore and most of the time I only go to bars with my wife, so I don’t often run into this sort of thing these days. But a little bar-hopping comes with my work: as an actor, it’s useful to schmooze and network in order to find out what projects are developing in town, and to remind people I’m active and available. And there tend to be a lot more actors and filmmakers in their 20s and 30s at these events than in my age group.

A guy I know slightly pulled a friend and me over from our conversation to ask us a question his circle had been discussing: Would you sooner experiment with homosexuality or cannibalism? My friend—a young woman—unhesitatingly responded homosexuality. The questioner turned to the rest and said, you see? I gather he was arguing either that females are more open to bisexual experiences or they’re more squeamish about the notion of eating human flesh, while (young, hetero) males tend to be more nervous about homosexual contact … to an extent that they’re more likely to consider eating human flesh as an alternative.

I told them I was not particularly bothered by either. For political or eco-ethical reasons I’ve pretty much given up eating meat aside from fish and shellfish, but in the past I’ve eaten beef tongue and heart, rabbit, steak tartare, LOTS of raw oysters, gazelle meat, and other exotic flesh. So long as no laws had been broken in the procurement and preparation, I wouldn’t necessarily balk at eating cat, dog, or human. (On the other hand, human dignity and civil rights are essential parts of the equation: When one of those “Bodies” exhibitions came to town, featuring actual human figures preserved by rubberization processes after donation by the Chinese government, which could not satisfactorily verify their provenance—prior permission given? deceased with no family? executed prisoners?—I deliberately chose not to attend … despite, and even because of, intense curiosity.)

As for homosexual contact, I can remember the notion bothering me a lot more—in a sense, it was unimaginable—when I was younger, but much of that concern faded steadily away after I was 30 and 40 … ironically, during the period it became less likely ever to happen because I’m happily married. In any case, I found the premise of “experimentation” rather stupid. Either I’d feel like doing it, or I wouldn’t.

The discussion brought back to me a couple of notices I’d read in the Hollywood press over the years. I should say up front that I’m recalling these from memory and I can’t verify their accuracy absolutely; they’re small enough that they might not even be recorded anywhere on the Internet, but the names and the basic scenarios have stayed in my memory.

I remember reading that Will Smith was reported as having considered a script which called for him to kiss another man. Worried about what to do, he had gone to Denzel Washington for advice and Washington, as I recall, told Smith in no uncertain terms to turn down the role—it could adversely affect his image. I felt ashamed of both of them, as actors and as men: afraid to step on a bridge that Michael York had easily crossed back in 1972 with “Cabaret.”

In contrast, an interviewer once asked Jeremy Irons if he had ever had sex with a man. His response went something like: regrettably, no, he had never had that opportunity. That struck me as a classy way to deal with such parlor-game subjects.

Fools Rush In: the Accelerating Libya Crisis - David Loftus

Five weeks ago, I wrote in this space that the U.S. should stay on the sidelines as the crisis in Libya unfolded. President Obama has gone in anyway with missiles blazing, but I don’t see any reason to change my advice.

It can be very satisfying to watch an armed conflict from the far side of the globe and feel one has helped to even the odds if not boost the underdog to victory with massive firepower. It’s a little like seeing a slice of an ongoing Xbox game every night on the evening news. We’re safe and comfy in our homes, nobody’s brother or father or son is being sent off to die (we’ve seen how well that’s worked in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, so Obama has assured he won’t be doing that this time), and so far, we haven’t had to look at any gruesome photos of dead ragheads.

I haven’t seen any polls of the American public’s attitude toward our involvement in Libya, but I’m guessing it’s mostly indifferent to apathetic. The average American probably doesn’t know enough about Libya to have a strong opinion. I suspect the basic response would be “yah, Gadhafi looks like a real nutcase and a meanie, so it’s probably good that we’re shutting him down.” (It’s been interesting to watch the Obama-hating commentators respond to this latest crisis: Bill O’Reilly is all for sending in troops with guns blazing to save lives, while Glenn Beck is urging caution and wondering whether it’s a good idea to meddle in Libya, and Rush Limbaugh is decrying our knee –jerk dash to protect Europe’s oil—apparently to make sure they don’t run the risk of actually approving something the President has done.)

The problem (for the average American) is: We’re NOT shutting Gadhafi down. Just as the first President Bush did in the 1991 Persian Gulf War with regard to Saddam Hussein, we’ve joined in airstrikes to stop oppression but will not remove the oppressor from power. In this particular, Obama’s chosen the correct course, and most of our international partners (especially the five who abstained from voting for the UN resolution that approved the no-fly zone—Russia, China, Germany, India, and Brazil) don’t wish to set a precedent for invading a foreign country for the express purpose of toppling its government, however illegitimate or oppressive. Ultimately, that’s a justification for meddling in any nation’s affairs and even terrorism.

But going in at all was a mistake on our part, I would contend—for two reasons. First, it sets us up once again as traffic cop to the world, and if anything goes wrong (and trust me: most likely it will), we will be blamed as a bully, especially by the Arab and Muslim nations who have so far remained quiet, and in one or two cases actually supported action against Gadhafi. (The Arab League approved of the no-fly zone, and news reports say the tiny Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar has contributed planes to enforce it as well as recognized the rebels as “the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people”—something not even Obama is willing to do. If we had hung back, perhaps more Arab and Muslim nations would have rushed in to assist the French who were so eager to get in there. They would have their own reasons, probably having to do with oil—who has it, and to whom it will get sold.)

The second and bigger reason is that if the rebel forces prevail, we probably don’t know who would rule in Gadhafi’s stead or how. The CIA has candidates and theories, I suppose, but in the past Gadhafi was one of our allies, as were the Mujahideen, some of whom would later become the Taliban, in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The U.S. sold military weapons to both—armaments they later used to oppress and kill their own people. As for “armed humanitarian missions,” consider the CIA’s and U.S. military’s (and therefore our, as in all Americans’) past record:

·      Nearly 60 years later, Korea remains a divided nation, after a war that killed 33,000 Americans and roughly a million Koreans, with a succession of tyrants starving and bankrupting their citizens to the north of the 36^th parallel. It is as if we, as Britain, had intervened in the American Civil War, such that the South fought Lincoln to a standstill, and thereby earned separate nation status, with slavery and capital punishment, well into the 20^th century.

·      Vietnam is now our peaceful trading partner, after nearly 60,000 Americans and 1.5 million Vietnamese were killed in battle 40-50 years ago

·      In Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans and locals continue to die violently every day, with no stable native government in sight for either nation

·      On a much less vivid level, one could trace economic and sociological fallout from all these wars back home: boom fortunes for a few (contractors and weapons manufacturers), recessions and depressions for the rest of us, a legacy among veterans of divorce, spousal abuse, random violence committed by sufferers of PTSD, etc.

We haven’t saved anyone. Our muscle hasn’t created new, benevolent, democratic governments for any people anywhere in the world where they weren’t already prepared to take power and rule themselves without help. Armed assistance and incursions only prolongs death and violence, and perhaps even magnifies it over time; it clearly doesn’t end it.

So why do we keep doing it? In this case, the answer is probably oil. To keep proving Obama wrong, even Limbaugh is willing to admit that.

The Campfire in Your Hand: Keeping Warm with Your Mobile - David Loftus

Come on, now. Be honest.

How many times have you stared at your palm today? How many hours—total—have you been poking tiny buttons on a hand-held? How many hours have you spent this year on your mobile phone, informing other persons of meaningless information—where you’re walking or driving at that moment, what shows you’ve been watching—as opposed to work-related, life-threatening, or heart-to-heart sharing?

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” wrote the Canadian philosopher and futurist Marshall McLuhan. With an irony McLuhan might have appreciated, I’m quoting him without ever having read any of his books. I heard the “tools” quote on a record album that transformed his most famous work, the 1967 bestseller The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, into an aural experience. It wasn’t even the LP itself I heard, but a reel-to-reel tape recording of the disk my Dad had copied from a friend’s record.

If you think you’ve never heard of McLuhan, recall a scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen is waiting to get into a movie theater and some pompous jerk is holding forth in line behind him. The man is talking about McLuhan’s theories, and eventually Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, gets irritated he pulls McLuhan himself onto the screen so the media critic and communication theorist can say to the blowhard, “You know nothing of my work.” This apparently was a frequent comment by McLuhan about and to people who criticized his writings. Now he can add me to the list, posthumously.

But back to that toy in your hand. Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys, iPod Touches, or whatever you’re carrying have become an integral part of our working world, and like most tools, they invaded our lives and took over well before we assessed the role they play in shaping us. For some, they entered as necessary tools for work—I know many corporations and law firms issued them to then-indifferent employees—but I suspect most people were sucked in by the toy and entertainment aspect: being able to surf the ’net anywhere or anytime, having access to video games without being plugged in at home or having to lug around a laptop.

Anyone can cite the obvious absurdities of other peoples’ (mis-)use of them: the person texting at the wheel while waiting for the red light to change; the couple walking or sitting together but both texting or talking on their cell phones (to other folks, presumably); the kid texting, playing a video game, or maybe even watching a movie on his hand-held while sitting at a live play or concert. My state, Oregon, made it illegal to talk on a cellular phone while driving, but when I leave my apartment, I can easily see roughly a third of the drivers on Portland’s streets yakking to their hand-held. I can also witness their illegal turns, and signal-less lane changes and cornering.

I don’t claim to know any more about Zen than about McLuhan, but it strikes me that our over-dependence on hand-held mobiles may be a symptom of, or at least lead to, a diminution of mindfulness, one of the prime goals of a Zen life. In other words, the more you look at your iPod Touch/BlackBerry/Whozis, the less you put yourself in the present moment … the less aware you are likely to be of what’s coming at you on the sidewalk, the trail, and the road (whether it’s an oncoming car, a greenback, a moment of great beauty, a mountain lion, or an idea of your own).

That’s obvious, you might say: it’s an escape, or at least a distraction. That’s why so many states have banned their use at the wheel. But what sort of escape? Perhaps an escape from more than just the boring, inconsequential, impersonal world around you. Ultimately, it’s an escape from yourself—who you are, right now, at this moment in time and space, in favor of seeing and feeling something another person or company wanted you to see and feel, whether it’s to hear your voice instead of their own thoughts, or to remove another dollar from your pocketbook (or more likely, raise the digits on your next credit card statement or electronic billing).

And may I suggest that perhaps we are so constantly trying to escape ourselves through such toys and distractions because, at bottom, we are mortal? We are dying. And any time we suppress the clatter and flash of cell phone calls, texts, video clips, mobile phone photos . . . sooner or later we’ll recognize that sobering fact. We mustn’t see that. So we clap the hand-held to our ear and stare at it hour by hour, like a mesmerizing campfire in our palm, warming us against the surrounding darkness.

Carrying Concealed Logic - David Loftus

This week the Judiciary Committee of the Oregon House approved a bill to remove the list of concealed weapons permits from the public record. On Thursday it passed the House, 42-18. A similar bill has been put before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I feel I’m missing something here, but I nearly always have that reaction when trying to understand where gun fanatics are coming from. They take a fairly simple proposition—gun ownership gives one the ability to protect one’s own freedom and liberty—and then defend it to the most illogical extremes. In this case, why would anybody who has a concealed weapon permit want to keep it a secret?

It seems to me that if you’re a proud gun owner, you would have no reason to hide it. In fact, if you’re looking for security by licensing your right to carry a concealed weapon in public, your personal security would only increase the more people had reason to believe you might be armed. Possession of a gun permit doesn’t mean you always have a gun on you; you might obtain a permit and choose never to carry a weapon. But the general knowledge that you could have one on your person would make everyone else less apt to mess with you, I should have thought.

Apparently, House Bill 2787 was pushed by the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association, partly in the wake of a controversy in southern Oregon several years back when a female teacher was rumored to have obtained a permit for a concealed weapon so that she might carry a gun to school to protect herself from an estranged husband. The local newspaper requested the list of local permits, the sheriff’s office fought release of the list, saying “disclosure would unreasonably invade the personal privacy of concealed handgun licensees,” and between 2007 and 2009 several levels of state courts ruled the information was not exempt from public disclosure laws.

Kevin Starrett, director of the Oregon Firearms Educational Foundation, which helped fund the court fight against the release of the information, said, “The public records law was intended for public entities and government, not the activities of private citizens. We’re disappointed that the courts and the legislature can’t see the difference.” Now, apparently various interests are trying to shut down that option through the state legislature.

Mr. Starrett doesn’t seem to grasp that the issuance of concealed gun permits is in fact a government function, one that at least tries to ensure that dangerous individuals such as convicted felons with violent pasts don’t get to carry guns around legally—just as the government issues driver’s licenses to people who have demonstrated that they have the training and ability not to endanger the lives of fellow citizens with an automobile . . . and takes those licenses away when they fail to do so.

I try to make sense of this, and the only thing I can think of (besides the notion that some gun owners might possibly be ashamed of having other people know they own a gun) is the fear that perhaps if a list of gun owners were published, their homes might be burgled by criminals who wanted to steal the firearms. But this doesn’t make much sense.

First, the newspaper which sought the list in the southern Oregon case has said it had no intention of publishing it. They just wanted to find out whether this particular teacher might have obtained a permit so that she potentially could be breaking a school district policy that prohibited guns on school grounds. Since the sheriff’s office wouldn’t tell them just that, the newspaper had to go to court to obtain the entire list. Second, if criminals are not deterred by the knowledge that there might be a gun in a house, then the whole IRA-Second Amendment notion of personal security and individual freedom maintained by a firearm gets a little shaky, doesn’t it?

Personally, I don’t know why this country hasn’t banned handguns altogether. When I was police reporter in southern Oregon myself, I had to report the news of a little 4-year-old boy getting blown away by his brother when they found and played with an adult’s handgun in their home. More than 40,000 Americans die every year from gun violence, much of it involving simple accidents as well as passionate outbursts of trigger-happy violence between family members and couples.

Statistics reliably show that far from protecting the home, a gun is more likely to harm one of the residents in a mishap or get stolen by a burglar. How many of those 6 people who died and 13 that were injured in Tucson two months ago would be all right today if Jared Lee Loughner had sought to assassinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords armed with a knife and gotten tackled by bystanders with just that instead of a 9mm Glock pistol? How many thousands of innocent victims of accidents and family fights would still be around if they could only punch or stab one another when they flew off the handle?

Aftershocks from Sendai: thoughts on a world disaster - David Loftus

It is the fourth day following the stunning natural disaster off the coast of Japan, and the aftershocks—by which I mean the social and economic implications for us, no matter where in the world we live, and the details of the original ’quake and tsunami—roll on.

Since I don’t normally watch television, I might not have known about the event until Friday morning’s newspaper, were it not for Internet social networks. Within a half hour after the tsunami began to steamroller through the communities of Japan’s east coast, I saw the buzz among my Facebook friends and turned on the television Thursday night to catch the live feed. By 10:15 local Pacific time, all the local stations had interrupted normal programming to follow the growing disaster.

I got up the next morning to watch continuing coverage, particularly since I had grown up on the Oregon coast and now live only an hour’s drive from it. Since then I have bounced between Facebook and the television during my free time to keep up with the situation. My Facebook friends pinpoint the best video clips and still photography, where I go whenever local news shows drearily dwell on domestic disturbances and local scams, and (ALWAYS) spends too long on the weather.

The first couple days, like the live coverage of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11/01, the lens was mostly too big to allow you to see individual people, to feel their plight, and that made it kind of unreal. The videos of brown and black ooze driving toy houses, boats, and trucks reminded all of us of just another CGI-driven Hollywood thriller. Occasionally you glimpsed a car racing ahead of the dirty flow, like a rat or cockroach scuttling along a kitchen floor when the ceiling light goes on. Not until Sunday night did we begin to see and hear the stories of heartbreak and miniature triumphs—such as the woman describing how she lost her handhold on her daughter, and the 60-year-old man rescued from a rooftop ten miles out to sea. My wife shuddered to think about all the animals whose awful fates we have not yet begun to learn.

Also like other breaking disasters, local news offered the pathetically hilarious entertainment of reporters tripping over their tongues and committing factual errors because the story didn’t unfold like a typical news event, at a pace they could mentally process. They also walked that tightrope of being reassuringly hopeful while simultaneously pricking our fears so we didn’t stop watching altogether: as Friday morning’s surges approached the West Coast of the U.S., anchors and reporters in Portland repeatedly showed us long footage of calm empty beaches, and assured us this was the best thing we could hope for, but adding ominously: “this could change at any time.” Thank goodness the marinas of Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, and Brookings, Oregon cooperated in giving some good video to keep the thrill junkies happy.

Again, like 9/11, but in a different way, the 2011 disaster will likely raise our level of insecurity and might change how we see and do things in the future. Friday, gas prices fell briefly because Japan is the world’s third-largest importer of oil, but in combination with the incipient civil war on the other side of the globe (in Libya), before the weekend was over they were climbing again.

There will be lots of discussion of earthquake and tsunami preparedness, and most of us will say “boy, I ought to put together a disaster pack” . . . and most of us will do nothing. Or we will put a kit partly together, then raid it within the coming year and fail to keep it maintained.

A Japanese-American businessman who had just returned to Portland from Tokyo a few days before the earthquake said on last night’s news that he was proud there hasn’t been a single report of looting in Japan. Although there’s probably been a little of that, too small to make the news radar, things may be different when the West Coast gets hit with its subduction quake and tsunami, I’m afraid. Japanese citizens are used to thinking communally, to following orders, and cooperating with each other, not to mention having been more experienced with and prepared for earthquakes in the first place.

The Japanese also own no handguns and very few rifles, because General Douglas MacArthur banned individual gun ownership during the post-World War II Occupation. The few gun crimes that occur in Japan today, amounting to about 200 a year, mostly involve illegal possession, not the commission of a violent crime. Kansas City, Houston, even Peoria probably suffer more gun crimes and fatalities than the entire nation of Japan. Lucky for the Japanese we Americans were willing to impose government controls with which we have been unwilling to bless ourselves.

The upshot? No matter how intense or light the actual seismic event, survival of our eventual natural disaster will probably be far more unpleasant than it is turning out in Japan. Those of us who prepared with disaster kits may find ourselves looking down the gun barrels of those who didn’t bother and now think we should “share.” Rather than heroic saves and heartwarming cooperation, looting, bullying, and outright murder may be what the rest of us get to hear about on the news, the next time.

While Islam Sorts Out Some Kooks, U.S. Should Stay in Neutral Corner - David Loftus

Every vacation feels a little like one has stepped out of the world altogether, but the timing of our Hawaiian cruise in early February seemed especially out of time. I was somewhat aware of the developing situation in Egypt, because I went to the onboard gym to fight weight gain from the sumptuous meals and saw a little BBC coverage from Cairo on the TV monitors mounted above the elliptical machines and treadmills. Before our vacation ended, not only had Mubarak stepped down, but protests were gearing up in Algeria and Yemen, and Syria had loosened constraints on Facebook in order to calm the masses.

This week, the military forces of one of the longest-ruling world leaders in history, Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi of Libya, began firing on their own fellow citizens, killing hundreds. Diplomats and some soldiers, sickened by the violence, resigned from the government. Two Libyan warplanes deserted across the Mediterranean to the island nation of Malta, rather than obey orders to bomb their own countrymen. In Yemen and Bahrain, protests against rulers continue as well.

Oddly enough, I accidentally read a book before vacation that predicted this confusion among Islamic nations. I picked Endless War by Ralph Peters off the new bookshelf at my local library in the mistaken belief that it was anti-Iraq and Afghanistan war. Actually, the author is a retired Army officer who writes columns for magazines I never read, such as Armchair General and Armed Forces Journal, and worked for Fox News as a strategic analyst. But I found him a decent writer, a thoughtful analyst, and an interesting war historian. I actually agreed with him at times . . . or he agrees with me. He wrote, “It’s fundamentally wrong to let contractors go head-hunting among our troops in wartime.” He wrote, “The Bush administration’s mismanagement of its wars did not set defense thinking back a mere three decades to the post-Vietnam era, but a full century….” He wrote, “As for the mad belief that the Saudis are our friends, it endures only because the Saudis have spent so much money on both sides of the aisle in Washington. …The Saudis are our enemies.” And most of these essays date back two to four years.

But to return to the current turmoil, toward the end of the book, in a piece titled “Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars” that originally ran in the Spring 2009 issue of The Journal of National Security Affairs, Peters wrote: “Behind all its entertaining bravado, Islam is fighting for its life, for validation. Islam, in other words, is on the ropes…. Those who once cowered at Islam’s greatness now rule the world. The roughly one-fifth of humanity that makes up the Muslim world lacks a single world-class university of its own. The resultant rage is immeasurable; jealousy may be the greatest unacknowledged strategic factor in the world today.”

Why am I quoting this? Because—and here is where I step beyond what Mr. Peters might endorse—as ugly as it may get in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria, and even Egypt and Syria, this is what needed to happen, and without the United States’ involvement. The people had to rise up and demand power, to demand a change in their leaders, by themselves or they’d never have the will to come up with something to replace them. And maybe that’s what should have happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have spent more than $775 billion on the Iraq War and $380 billion in Afghanistan. Nearly 4,500 American military personnel have been killed and 33,000 wounded in Iraq, and almost 1,500 have died in Afghanistan. The sketchy documented deaths of the people we’re “saving” over there amount to roughly 100,000 Iraqis and 17,000 Afghanis.


The money we’ve spent has gone a long way toward crippling our own economy as well as the rest of the world’s, and most Americans have lost all interest in the wars, if not forgotten them altogether, like a TV series that started off with high ratings and has lost all its juice and market share but keeps on running, unwatched. And for what? Maybe it would have been better if we had stayed out of it until the people—or irritated Muslim neighbors—had taken care of the problem. If we hadn't provided a target to hate, but simply minded our own business and engaged in trade where possible, sooner or later Muslim nations would have turned on each other, or themselves. Without costing us half so much as these stupid occupations have cost, and continue to cost us, in lives and dollars.

Pesky Souvenirs - David Loftus

Is it possible to fly in a plane anymore without getting sick? Three nights ago, I got home from a two-week vacation and sure enough, just like clockwork, this morning I started to sneeze and sniffle. I’m coming down with a cold . . . the way I have almost every other time I’ve left for or returned from a vacation.

Since I’m not a business traveler, the only time I fly is for a vacation. In recent years, the largest portions of our time away have been spent on ocean liners. My wife lobbied for one a few years ago, and we found it was a most relaxing and civilized way to travel. You get to the ship, unpack, and then don’t have to pack and unpack again -- bouncing from one hotel to the next -- for the rest of the trip. Other folks make and serve your meals, and there’s plenty of food and no need to worry about driving, catching a taxi, or otherwise getting to and from the restaurant. (Drink up!) You go to sleep, and every morning you wake up someplace new. If you cross time zones, it happens at a leisurely enough pace that you don’t suffer jet lag.

Unfortunately, to get to where you can catch your ocean liner, you often have to fly. And that’s when you’re reminded how unpleasant air travel has become: cramped, no decent meals (when there are any, instead of a crummy packet of pretzels or nuts), getting charged extra for everything from an extra piece of luggage to a pillow or headphones. The only thing you get for free is germs. Airplanes are fabulous incubators for every wee beastie that other passengers bring on and cough out. During our trip to Estonia, my wife caught a cold that crawled up into her ear on the way home and required antibiotics. (“Looks like stewed tomatoes in there!” her doctor commented while examining her auditory canal.) One or both of us contracted colds on subsequent flights to or from Washington D.C., Greece, and London.

Over time, I grew increasingly suspicious of the whole situation. I became more and more like Howard Hughes: washing my hands frequently, taking a small bottle of disinfectant on the plane with me, avoiding the airplane restrooms if I possibly could. For a transatlantic flight, I packed surgical gloves and mask, but was too embarrassed to actually take them out and use them in front of other passengers. I don't blame other fliers for bringing germs aboard with them; I wouldn't want to sacrifice the cost of a plane ticket these days out of consideration for others, just because I had a cold or light case of the 'flu. But there you go.

It’s gotten so dependably bad that if an airline actually advertised that it disinfected its planes between each flight, I imagine potential passengers would fight to get on those jets. But the expenditure of labor and time would probably not be cost effective for the carriers, I’m afraid. Their bottom line holds steady only if their schedules allow just enough time to unload and reload passengers and baggage while fueling up and getting right back into the air. In the end, we’re all just cargo -- humans, luggage, and lots and lots of germs.

Thoughts at 50 (Blood Donations) - David Loftus

This morning I made a blood donation at a local American Red Cross drive – my 50th pint, more or less. I started donating blood in either late high school or early college, let’s say age 17 or 18. I made a steady series of donations in my 20s, and again in my early 40s when my employer hosted blood drives in-house and I could not only donate regularly but participate in publicizing the drive on the organization’s Web site and in the local newspaper. There were breaks in between, however, when donating became too inconvenient. Also, for a period of three years I was not allowed to give blood because I had traveled in West Africa and taken anti-malarial medicine.

Some aspects of the experience have changed over the years, and some remain the same. In the 70s and 80s, one could easily be in and out of the donation site or Red Cross collection center in less than 30 or 40 minutes. That time commitment has doubled. The actual donation, when the needle is in my arm and the blood flowing into the bag, takes no longer than it used to (seven minutes, 19 seconds by the clock this morning), but the initial processing has expanded. Intake involves long and often repeated questioning—some of it on a computer laptop, some by a Red Cross volunteer or nurse in person—about my identity, place of residence, travel and infectious history (Been to Africa? Spent a total of 5 years in Europe since 1980? Gotten a tattoo, or ear or body piercing? Sexual contact with an IV drug user, man, or prostitute?) that were not issues in the past, in a process that alone consumes a good 20 minutes. Once, you could fill in a sheet in less than five.

The iron test is also different: now a blood smear on a slide goes into an electronic device called a HemoCue Donor Hb Checker, which turns out a reading in seconds (a solid 16.3, in my case, since I’d taken care to eat several handfuls of raisins the night before—I was rejected for low iron once in the mid-80s and wish to avoid a repeat of that experience). I told the nurse I missed the old test where together we would watch a globule of my dark red blood get dropped into a test tube of dark blue liquid and sink to the bottom to prove the iron levels in my blood are sufficiently high. She said a surprising number of donors have told her the same thing. I guess there was a sort of lottery-like anticipation to the old process, and an excitement at seeing the graphic result of a positive test.

What hasn’t changed so far are my vitals: temperature of 98.2, 64 pulse, blood pressure of 112/62. I don’t exercise, but not owning a car, I do a lot of walking, and I suspect my low blood pressure (which obscures a pesky, somewhat elevated cholesterol count) is at least partly a vestigial remnant of my long-ago distance running career.

I used to think that no matter what else I did, for whatever misguided or self-centered reasons, I could at least assure myself that making a blood donation was doing some good in the world. I’m not so certain of that now: there’s a chance that some of those 50 pints were all but wasted in a futile emergency room attempt to revive an obese heart disease patient or a terminal alcoholic or cancer victim. But like prayer, meditation, or feeding the homeless, the act of donating remains a good thing for me to do. It affirms my membership in the community of the human race and, amid the many blessings of my life, a duty and responsibility to care for the less fortunate.

An American Tragedy Plays Out in Arizona - Jeff Weiss

 As I type this, forensics experts are searching the crime scene that up until today had been an ordinary Safeway store in Tucson, Arizona.  It is now the scene of a gruesome massacre in which (at least) one gunman opened fire at a "Congress on Your Corner" event that was meant to bring the constituents of Arizona's 8th Congressional district closer to their representative, Gabrielle Giffords.  It should have been a friendly, hand-shaking event, but it turned into a bloodbath.  The accused gunman, reported by news agencies to be Jared Lee Loughner, has been described by acquaintances as a "pot smoking loner."  Loughner recently posted a series of bizarre YouTube videos that consisted of  typed rants about mind control and the lack of intelligence of the 8th district.  He eerily refers to himself in the past tense in his YouTube account profile, perhaps a hint of what he had planned to do, and did not expect to survive. 

Is Loughner a madman; someone who is so mentally twisted that he indiscriminately sought out a large crowd - any large crowd - to take the brunt of his violent rage? Or did he carefully select the location where Representative Giffords' event was behind held because of his political beliefs? An Arizona sheriff referred to the state as a "mecca for hatred and bigotry" during a televised press conference about the massacre earlier this evening.  In the past year, Arizona has been the subject of much controversy when Governor Jan Brewer signed the most aggressive immigration law in the nation, one that inspired an incredible amount of shock and horror.  Not long after that, perennial Tea Party spokesperson Sarah Palin published a list of "targeted" Democrats she wanted defeated in the midterm election.  The graphic that went along with the list displayed the cross-hairs of a  gun over those congressional districts.  One of those mentioned by name on that list was Gabrielle Giffords, who suggested this type of action could incite violence. Gabrielle Giffords would go on to win the election on November 2nd.  Two months and six days later she lies in a hospital bed, fighting for her life after a bullet went through her brain - the result of being shot in the head at point blank range.

A total of eighteen people were shot today at the Safeway in Tucson.  Six have been confirmed to have been killed.  Five of them lost their lives at the scene, including federal judge John Roll, as well as Gabe Zimmerman, Rep. Giffords' Director of Community Outreach, who organized today's event. A nine year old girl died later this afternoon at a local hospital.  She had recently been elected to her school's student council and was invited to attend the event by a neighbor who thought she would find it interesting to meet a Congresswoman.

Tonight as a forensic team sifts through the crime scene in Tucson, the parents of that nine year old girl are trying to understand why their child was taken so soon.  Somewhere else, the parents of an accused shooter are trying to comprehend how he got where he is now, and so many others are attempting to make sense of why their lives were changed forever by an unspeakable act of violence this morning.  The obvious hope on this night is for the survival of those injured today, but my additional hope is that even if this proves to be a completely random act that has nothing to do with politics, this will serve as a wake-up call as to just how ugly the political battleground has become, and it will herald a change.

Sturm und Dollars: thoughts for the New Year - David Loftus

What do I hope for 2011? I’d like to see people—all of us—work on our anger.

There’s been far too much yelling, cheap ridicule, and abuse in recent years—much of it in the media, on the floor of Congress, and on the campaign trail; but I fear such well-publicized misbehavior both reflects and encourages similarly casual disrespect toward others in the schools, on the streets, and in the home.

If we could all take a step back, not just today or this week, but every day, throughout the year, and acknowledge how much we are blessed in this country, no matter who we are; how small so many of the things that obsess us truly are in the great scheme of things; and how little anger helps us to find and build solutions to whatever ails us . . . that would be a great thing. Anger is a terrific motivator, of course; it can get us off our duff and focus our energy wonderfully. But to maintain a steady diet of rage, day in and day out, in a never-ending search for enemies and scapegoats and supposed incompetents, is a waste of time and energy. Because ultimately, we are responsible for our own anger: how often we allow our friends (such as those talk show hosts) as well as our reputed enemies to whip it up, how long we hold onto it, and where we direct it.

Chill, folks. We’re still all in this together. The longer we pretend that’s not the case, that it’s all that fellow’s fault over there, the longer we’ll avoid finding a working solution for everybody— not to mention keep driving up our blood pressure and shortening our own life.

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It’s not clear whether the hope I expressed a year ago for 2010 (see below) was realized to any extent. Certainly, the dash of cold water the economy gave most of the country was a strong corrective to some citizens’ drunken spending habits. But it’s hard to tell at this point whether things have actually improved. On the one hand, AOL’s Money & Finance site, www.dailyfinance.com, reported in early December that in October, credit card debt had fallen $5.6 billion, but consumer debt (due to student loans, auto loans, and personal loans) was up to $2.339 trillion. The Cincinnati Business Courier had equally mixed news on Thursday: total credit card debt has been falling for two years, but defaults have peaked and applications for new credit card accounts (2.8 million in September alone) have also risen.

We’re coming off a week of celebratory stories by retailers who say holiday shoppers beat last year’s dreary receipts by a long shot, despite the blizzard that hit the East Coast last week. Online sales reached almost $31 billion ($1 billion total on Cyber Monday alone!), a 13 percent rise over 2009. Total consumer spending during the holiday retail season, Nov. 5 to Dec. 24, hit $584.3 billion this year.

I have only two questions about that: How many of those purchases were made with plastic whose holders had no current funds with which to repay them? And how much of that money is heading straight to new absentee owners of American businesses in the People’s Republic of China?