Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Weekend Escape to Badin Lake
Leave a reply
Monthly Archives: May 2010
Doctor vs. Big Pharma and Government: Burzynski at a/perture
Cancer is insidious and I'd venture a guess that almost every person in America has been touched by the disease. Whether it's a family member, a co-worker or a friend we know someone who has had cancer and we've seen first hand how it decimates them and their loved ones. That's why watching Burzynski, the movie will likely infuriate you.
The movie is a documentary about a doctor and chemist named, you guessed it, Burzynski who discovered a revolutionary treatment for cancer more than 30 years ago. Thanks to battles with myriad government and private entities his treatment has had difficulty getting approved for advanced clinical trials, and has only been available to a limited number of patients as a result. That's all I'm going to say about the actual content of the movie for fear of spoiling it, but I will say that while I found the movie to be obviously slanted towards supporting Dr. Burzynski, it also provides compelling and objective evidence in support of its stance. I also found it refreshingly absent of the kind of stunts that Michael Moore has made popular with his movies, and instead relies on public documents, interviews and public hearings to make its case.
All that's not to say that the movie is boring or slow. To the contrary the pacing seems just right, there's very little redundancy in the evidence presented and yet it still seems thorough. As a result Burzynski is compelling, the story infuriating and it's a movie I highly recommend seeing.
Burzynski, the movie is appearing this weekend (May 29-30) through next week at a/perture cinema (across from Mellow Mushroom on Fourth Street in downtown Winston-Salem) was written, directed and produced by Eric Merola. You can find show times on a/perture's website.
A Pox on the Poor
This won't surprise anyone: According to a recent study poor people spend more on lotteries than anyone else.
A recent study found that poor folks – households earning under $13,000 per year – spend about nine percent of all their income on lottery tickets, reported Consumerist.com…
In all, an estimated 20 percent of Americans are frequent players, shelling out about $60 billion a year.
The study claimed that the relatively low cost of lottery tickets – the so-called "peanuts effect" – helps explain the popularity of state lotteries.
The study also stated that poor people play because they believe a lottery ticket is their best, fairest shot at riches.
I will readily concede that it's unfortunate that the people who can least afford it play the lottery in a fruitless attempt to gain riches, but I still get irked when people call it a "tax on the poor." Taxes aren't optional (in theory at least), and lotteries are most definitely optional. Personally I think a better term for lotteries is a "pox on the poor."
Another Reason to Stay Out of Politics
There are a gazillion reasons to stay out of politics, but one that never occurred to me until I read this post at YES! Weekly is that when you're stumping you'll likely have to deal with people in various stages of undress. It's bad enough dealing with this at the pool, where you're at least expecting it, but I don't think I could handle it as part of what's the equivalent of a job interview. Ick.
What Percentage of Personal Income Comes From Private Pay?
If you had to guess what percentage of Americans' personal income would you say comes from wages paid by private employers? 75%? 60%? 50%? The answer, my friends, is 41.9%. That's a record low, and to me it's an amazing number. From the USA Today article:
Key shifts in income this year:
• Private wages. A record-low 41.9% of the nation's personal income came from private wages and salaries in the first quarter, down from 44.6% when the recession began in December 2007.
•Government benefits. Individuals got 17.9% of their income from government programs in the first quarter, up from 14.2% when the recession started. Programs for the elderly, the poor and the unemployed all grew in cost and importance. An additional 9.8% of personal income was paid as wages to government employees.
Okay, I have a question that I'm hoping someone smarter than me and with more time to do research can answer: If about 42% of personal income comes from pay and about 28% comes from government programs/wages, then where does the other 30% come from? I can think of medical benefits and interest on investments, but my little pea brain can't come up with anything else.
American Idiot, er, Idol
Our forefathers are surely spinning in their graves. As bad as things are with the economy, the Oilf of Mexico and the myriad other problems in this country, I fear that the greatest harbinger of doom for our society is that there are literally millions of living rooms in America in which a terrible TV talent show evokes responses identical to this (warning: language that is adult and NSFW):
Battle of the Bandz
Until a week ago I was blissfully unaware that these cheap doohickies called Silly Bandz even existed. Then some friends with younger kids came over to the house and I innocently asked why each of the kids had approximately 673 rubber bands on their arms, and that's how I was exposed to the latest fad to hit America's shores. Sadly, my teenage daughter's now into these new crack-like collectibles, and that's why I think the banning of these insidious trinkets in schools isn't enough. I think we need to have a War on Bandz, and if not a full blown war spearheaded by the DEA, then at least a Battle of the Bandz headed by the Family Research Council. This kind of thing is right up their alley.
On June 4 You’ll Find Me On Stratford Road
Next Friday you'll find me, and probably hundreds of others, at a certain white building with a "Hot" sign in front of it. Why? Because they're giving out a free doughnut to every customer in honor of National Doughnut Day.
Want to Force Me and Kenny Beck to Shave Our Heads?
Anyone who's been watching WXII this week knows that they're making a serious push to raise food for Second Harvest so that kids won't go hungry this summer. One of their morning show members, Kenny Beck, has been doing goofy stuff like the chicken dance in exchange for financial donations. I asked him via Twitter what it would take to get him to shave his head and he said $1,000. When I indicated I might be serious he said he was too, and we agreed to a low setting on the clippers (not bald, but pretty short).
This dovetails nicely with the food drive that my office is doing for Second Harvest and I thought that if Mr. Beck has the guts to do it, then so should I. So here's the deal:
- If you want to donate to Second Harvest please contact me via email at jon.lowder AT gmail.com and coordinate the donation with me. Once we amass $1,000 I'll arrange to get it to Kenny and we'll get his head shaved.
- Once we pass the $1,000 mark for donations I'll start adding to the tally for TAA's food drive. If you tell me you're donating in hopes of getting me to shave my head then once we reach another $1,000 I'll get my head shaved too (most likely a high and tight like the Marines). I'll post pictures on this blog, my Facebook profile, Twitter, and anywhere else. It won't be pretty, but it's for a good cause. BONUS FEATURE: The largest single donor actually gets to do the hair cutting on me (can't offer that up for Kenny).
So that's it. If you want to see Kenny Beck and me get our heads shaved then email me at jon.lowder AT gmail.com, or call me at (336) 899-0238 to arrange donations. You can also simply mail a check made out to Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina and write "Make Kenny and Jon Shave Their Heads" in the memo field and mail it to me at:
Triad Apartment Association/Attn. Jon Lowder
3407 West Wendover Ave., Suite E
Greensboro, NC 27407
Of course you can mail it directly to the Food Bank, but if you want it to be counted towards our impending baldness you need to send it to me so I can keep track of our progress.
Also, I've also set up my very first Facebook group for the cause. If you visit it you can see one of the worst pictures ever taken of me Photoshop'd to show me bald. Like I said, it's gonna be ugly.
Economy Explained With a Fable
FT.com columnist Martin Wolf explains the current international economic environment with a play on Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper:
Everybody in the west knows the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. The grasshopper is lazy and sings away the summer, while the ant piles up stores for the winter. When the cold weather comes, the grasshopper begs the ant for food. The ant refuses and the grasshopper starves. The moral of this story? Idleness brings want…
As it happens, in the wider world, there are other ant nests. Asia, in particular, is full of them. There is a rich nest, rather like Germany, called Japan. There is also a huge, but poorer, nest called China. These also want to become rich by selling goods to grasshoppers at low prices and building up claims on grasshopper colonies. The Chinese nest even fixes the foreign price of its currency at a level that guarantees the extreme cheapness of its goods. Fortunately, for the Asians, or so it seems, there happens to be a very big and exceptionally industrious grasshopper colony, called America. Indeed, the only way you would know it is a grasshopper colony is that its motto is: “In shopping we trust”. Asian nests develop a relationship with America similar to Germany’s with its neighbours. Asian ants build up piles of grasshopper debt and feel rich…
Yet there is a difference. When the crash comes to America and households stop borrowing and spending and the fiscal deficit explodes, the government does not say to itself: “This is dangerous; we must cut back spending.” Instead, it says: “We must spend even more, to keep the economy humming.” So the fiscal deficit becomes enormous.
This makes the Asians nervous. So the leader of China’s nest tells America: “We, your creditors, insist you stop borrowing, just as European grasshoppers are now doing.” The leader of the American colony laughs: “We did not ask you to lend us this money. In fact, we told you it was a folly. We are going to make sure American grasshoppers have jobs. If you do not want to lend us money, raise the price of your currency. Then we will make what we used to buy and you will no longer have to lend to us.” So America teaches creditors a lesson from a dead sage: “If you owe your bank $100, you have a problem; but if you owe $100m, it does.”
Befuddled 