Monthly Archives: October 2009

What I learned about swine flu

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Ever since Monday I’ve been meaning to share some things I learned about swine flu at Rotary on Monday. Dr. Stephen L. Shelton from Palmetto Health spoke from a wealth of expertise on the H1N1 virus. (Over at the hospital they call him Boss Hog.)

Some of it was highly technical, such as the diagram of the virus that he used to explain why it’s called H1N1. I’m afraid that sort of went in one ear and out the other. Other parts were sort of obvious, such as a list of typical flu symptoms, or what to do if you get it (drink fluids, avoid contact with others, stay home for 24 hours after fever is gone).

More useful were some of the slides in his presentation, such as the one I photographed above about how to tell when your child needs to go to the emergency room rather than simply be treated at home.

Beyond that, the following points really stood out in my mind:

  • You probably know the signs of flu (fever, cough, body aches, sore throat, runny or stuffed nose, headache, chills, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting), but how do you know you’ve really got it, as opposed to a cold or some such? By the rapid onset of the symptoms. If one hour you’re fine and an hour later it’s like you’ve been hit by a truck, it’s the flu.
  • And if it’s the flu, and you’re getting it now, the odds are 99 to 1 that it’s swine flu, because the regular seasonal variety hasn’t arrived yet.
  • Most swine flu victims are children so far — and they started getting it when school started.
  • Because there is so little immunity in the population, if you are exposed to swine flu, you will almost certainly get sick. This is not true of the more common seasonal flu bugs.
  • Interestingly, the one subset of the population that has some immunity to H1N1 is folks over 55. So for a change, older people are actually the lowest-priority group needing to get the swine flu shots when they arrive (and Dr. Shelton swore this was not a “death panel” plot to get rid of old folks). The highest priority? Pregnant women. Having that baby crowding the diaphragm really makes them vulnerable to a lower-lung infection.
  • However, old folks should still, as usual, get the regular, garden-variety flu shot, if they haven’t already. It helps boost immunity for the other kind.

Anyway, those are the points that made an impression on me.

By the way, for a video version of Dr. Shelton’s presentation, follow this link.

Henry McMaster’s video on the Water War with N.C.

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You know, it occurs to me: How am I going to get people, especially political types, to buy ads on my blog (once I start offering ads on my blog) when I go ahead and put there promotional material on the blog for free? The video above being a case in point.

Well, I don’t know. But I’ll keep sharing stuff like this whenever I have something to say about it.

And what I have to say about this is: It’s a huge improvement over his initial campaign video, but still leaves much to be desired.

It’s an improvement because it isn’t a naked play on partisan resentment. In the earlier video, he blamed unemployment in South Carolina, absurdly, on Barack Obama. In this one, by contrast, his villain is those greedy North Carolinians upstream, which is more credible.

And the tone is laudable because it’s calmly and dispassionately explanatory. That’s nice for a change.

But one thing it fails to do is explain to voters why this has a bearing upon their choice for governor. It doesn’t clearly say that I, Henry McMaster, have taken a particular stand on this issue and my opponents have not, or in any other way related the Water War to the subject at hand, which is nominating a gubernatorial candidate.

You may say I can’t have both calm explanation and overt appeal for votes, but I think I can. If you’re going to take a minute to ‘splain something, ‘splain what I can do about it. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard.

Your thoughts?

Submitted for your approval… my apologies for the weird message

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Folks, if you just received an e-mail from me, within the last hour, that seems to have come straight from the Twilight Zone, it’s not just my usual weirdness.

I just discovered that I had about 65 outgoing messages from the last few weeks that never went out. They were stuck in my Outbox in Microsoft Outlook.

Some of them will seem pretty weird to be getting now, but I didn’t have a way to weed through them — it was send them all out, or none.

So sorry about that.

By the way, one reason I’m explaining here is that some of the recipients — KP, Doug Ross, Kathryn and Lee — are blog regulars. Anyway, now you know what happened. Or about as much as I know, anyway…

Women are just nicer than we are

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Yesterday at Rotary, I noticed a stark example of something that we all know, but don’t often see demonstrated this clearly. The speaker at the podium was recognizing a member — Crawford Clarkson — for having belonged to the club for 63 years. We were all duly impressed, and offered applause, even a standing ovation, because we all like Crawford.

But at some point, when Crawford was offering his acknowledgments, or when another speaker was talking about him with him standing there, and the crowd had sat back down, I looked around and noticed something.

All of the women whose faces I could see were smiling. We’re talking maybe six or seven women whose faces were clear to me from where I sat, without craning my neck. It was that sort of smile that makes women the wonderful beings that they are, a sort of Mom smile, the sure sign of a warm heart. They were pleased, on a fundamental level, for Crawford, and the pleasure radiated from them visibly.

Then I made myself look at the men. There are still far more men in Rotary than women, so in a few seconds I checked the faces of maybe a couple of dozen men. All but one was impassive. They might have been pleased, they might not have been pleased; they weren’t going to show it either way. They had stood up and clapped, dammit, so what more did you want from them? What do you expect a guy to do?

Note that I said “All but one.” That one had a slight smile. But for all I know, he was thinking about something else.

I remember hearing something on NPR a few years ago about some women who took a class in which they learned to impersonate men (don’t ask me why). One of the participants interviewed explained that the hardest thing, for her, was to keep herself from smiling. You’ve perhaps noted that most women, if you make eye contact with them, smile (at least, they smile at me; I don’t know about you). Men, perhaps regarding it as a sign of weakness, generally do not. I think there’s something about survival hard-wired into us.

Anyway, I am reminded of a recent case in which I demonstrated what jerks we men can be. Remember when I complained back here that some young woman I’d never heard of had 100 times as many Twitter followers as I did? Well, she certainly told ME off, but in a nice way:

Hi Brad,

Just read your post. Thanks for the mention, or rather, the criticism. I have so many friends because I talk a LOT and I’m always happy for other people’s successes. I hope you find your own comfort zone soon.

Thanks again,

Gerri

Ow. She’s right, of course. Women are just so much readier to be pleased for other people than we are. Guys are always trying to figure out what’s in it for US.

(un)Critical Mass(es)

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Let’s have a little discussion about human nature.

First, take a look at this story from yesterday’s WSJ, which reveals the rating inflation that plagues (or blesses, depending onyour point of view) the Web:

The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average.

One of the Web’s little secrets is that when consumers write online reviews, they tend to leave positive ratings: The average grade for things online is about 4.3 stars out of five…

Did that surprise you? It did me, a bit. But then I got to thinking about the one place where I’ve done a lot of rating — Netflix, where over the years (in a vain attempt to teach the site to predict my preferences) I’ve rated more than 2,000 movies. And since I love movies, and do a certain amount of selection before watching them, I knew I had given really high ratings more often than really low ones — specifically, I had awarded 5 stars (to such films as “Casablanca,” “The Godfather” and “It’s a Wonderful Life”) 156 times, and 1 star (examples: “Dances With Wolves,” the made-in-Columbia “Death Sentence” and “Dune”) only 24 times.

Still, if you count up all the movies I’ve rated between 1 and 5, you come up with an average rating of only 3.4. And if you factor in the 815 flicks I’ve rated as “Not Interested,” awarding them a 0 score, it drops to 2.0. But that’s misleading, because some of those are good flicks that some time or other I gave that rating just as a way of saying I wasn’t interested in seeing them at that time. But if you count just a fourth of those, it lowers my average to 2.9.

Which is about where you’d expect me to be. I’m a born critic — flaws leap out at me, and I remember them. And my detractors (such as those who think I’m too tough on Mark Sanford) see me as all criticism, as one who never gives my subjects their due. Actually, though, some of my detractors (such as those who were furious that I continued to admire John McCain throughout the 2008 campaign) attack me for the opposite trait — the fact that I can the good outweighing the bad in some people and some things. (You ladies who love Jane Austen may think of me as a health mix of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, only without their wealth.)

Back to human nature: Why would folks be so overwhelmingly positive on the Web (except, of course, here on this blog)? The story in the Journal speculated as follows:

Culture may play a role in the positivism: Ratings in the U.K. average an even higher 4.4, reports Bazaarvoice. But the largest contributor may be human nature. Marketing research firm Keller Fay Group surveys 100 consumers each week to ask them about what products they mentioned to friends in conversation. “There is an urban myth that people are far more likely to express negatives than positives,” says Ed Keller, the company’s chief executive. But on average, he finds that 65% of the word-of-mouth reviews are positive and only 8% are negative.

“It’s like gambling. Most people remember the times they win and don’t realize that in aggregate they’ve lost money,” says Andy Chen, the chief executive of Power Reviews Inc., a reviews software maker that runs Buzzillions…

Aha! I think I understand… at least, I now understand a possible reason why people gamble.

I don’t know about you, but I have not gambled since I was in college. I went through a period when I shot pool (nine ball being my game) and played a few hands of poker. But the last time I played pool for money and the last time I gambled with cards are etched unforgettably on my mind because of the spectacular ways in which I lost. My opponent at the pool table had had a shocking run in which he had pocketed the nine ball on the break several times in a row. After hours in which no one had had a hand nearly as good, I risked all (even writing a check to another player to get cash to stay in the game) on a full house — only to lose to a full house that was one card better (queens as opposed to jacks).

I’ve never understood, since then, why people would gamble. But this tendency to remember the anomalous wins more clearly than the losses would explain it.

But is that truly human nature?

Frankly, I find myself doubting the very premise of the story. As a newspaperman of 35 years experience, I am so accustomed to hearing from the people who are AGAINST something, or who didn’t like something in the paper, that such universal satisfaction seems unlikely to me. Take letters to the editor. One of my favorite examples were the letters we got for a week or so after U.S. troops first went into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001: They were overwhelmingly against U.S. military action. I knew they were not representative of South Carolina, not by a long shot, but they were the people who were taking the trouble to write. And that seems to me to be the norm.

Yet this story is saying otherwise. What do you think is true, and why do you think it’s the case?

See you at the Walk for Life (I hope)

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We don’t have a formal team or anything (yet), but my wife and I will be at the Palmetto Health Foundation’s First Ladies’ Walk For Life at 9 a.m. Saturday morning — just over 12 hours from now.

Please come join us. I can’t think of a better cause, and it looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day. As some of you know, my wife is a cancer survivor, and we’ve been blessed with eight wonderful years, so we look forward to this event as a chance to help others overcome this horrific disease.

And maybe it’s not to late to pull together an impromptu blog team. If you’re on Twitter, send me a Tweet when you get there to let me know where you are and we’ll see if we can march together.

See you there, I hope…

Does Sanford still think he has anything to lose politically?

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This really got my attention in an otherwise boring turn-of-the-screw story over the Sanford ethics case:

Sanford asked the court to intervene Wednesday, arguing that if the State Ethics Commission releases the report, it could be used against him politically or undermine the governor’s ability to defend himself. Sanford’s attorneys will have until noon Tuesday to respond to the Ethics Commission arguments.

The boldface emphasis is mine. I would love to see the original press release or court filing or whatever that led to that paraphrase, “used against him politically.”

Surely the governor doesn’t actually believe that he has anything to lose politically. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t he say, in writing, not long ago, that his political career was over? I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time because it seemed like a painful case of stating the obvious.

This guy was toast before he dug the hole deeper with his unsuccessful attempt to block the stimulus funds. Already, the leadership of his own party had stopped listening to him, and the stimulus battle just made it less likely that they’d ever start again. All the Argentina madness happened on top of that. Those of us who were all too familiar with this guy and his irrelevance knew far before that explosion that there was no way he would ever have had a chance at national office, once the national media paid any attention to his record whatsoever. And of course there wasn’t anything left for him in South Carolina.

So how on Earth could he be hurt politically by disclosure of the preliminary ethics report, or, for that matter, by anything else? How could you possibly hurt a political career that is SO over, and then some?

But maybe he didn’t say that. Maybe The State got it wrong. I’d love to see what he DID say, so if any of y’all know, please direct me to it. A brief search on my part yielded nothing…

Please forgive my e-mail troubles

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Yesterday, I realized that all those folks who have told me in recent days that they never got my e-mails actually never got my e-mails. So I apologize for thinking y’all were technically incompetent or something when it was me all along.

In fact, I’m such a klutz that I haven’t figured out what’s wrong yet, and I’ve got 65 outgoing e-mails just hanging there in limbo in my Outbox in Outlook. Some of them were pretty important messages, too, like the resume I sent out Monday right after talking to someone about an exciting job opportunity. I had sent it out immediately to display my high interest, only to realize last night that it never went out. Like I need this on top of everything else.

I’ve got someone trying to talk me through a solution, and I hope to arrive at one soon. But then I’ll have a new worry — if they all suddenly go out, some of them are really going to confuse people because of subsequent conversations with those people that have rendered the original message superfluous. They’re going to think I’m nuts — Why is he sending me this now?

All I can do right now is post this generic apology to everyone with whom I correspond. Once the e-mail’s back up, I’ll try to follow up with specific explanations to all the affected people. Dang. What a headache. Maybe I should just stick to playing solitaire on computers; I at least understand that…

Valerie B. is back in town (all too briefly, though)

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This morning I had the good fortune to run into Valerie Bauerlein, formerly of The State and now with The Wall Street Journal. She was having breakfast with Tim Rogers at the Cap City Club, working on a story that she hopes will make the “A-hed” position on page one — that’s the feature that is always such at good read at the center of the bottom of the page. (Fortunately for her, she wasn’t here to do yet another Sanford story.)

Valerie works in the Journal’s Atlanta bureau. While she spends close to half her time on regional general-assignment news reporting, her specific beat these days is the soft drink industry.

After Tim left, Valerie stopped off at my table and we had a chance to catch up. Her biggest news is that she’s expecting her second baby in November, so she has that glow about her — but then, Valerie always had that glow about her. She’s one of the nicest, most pleasant, kindest, most considerate people I ever worked with, to the extent that you wonder how she ended up in the trade. Not that news people are universally unpleasant or anything; it’s just that she was SO nice. And very good at her job, to boot.

Anyway, it was great to see her, and greater to see her doing so well. I thought I’d pass it on for those of you who remember her.

Henry’s got some ‘splainin’ to do

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I tend to yawn at debates over technical violations of ethics rules. Perhaps that will shock you, since journalists tend to be the ones who get the MOST worked up about such.

Consider it yet another one of the little ways that I have always tended to be a contrarian. Here’s my thinking on the matter: Ethics rules usually have little or nothing to do with right or wrong. They’re almost always about the appearance of right or wrong — and usually pretty narrow-gauge rights and wrongs at that. For instance, ethics laws really fret over the appearance of a conflict of interest. I worry about it when it actually leads to (or rather points to; the cause and effect relationship can be fuzzy) a public figure doing something wrong.

For instance — I remember a lot of folks getting really concerned about David Beasley accepting plane rides from folks associated with the Barnwell nuclear waste dump, from whom he had also received campaign contributions. People went on and on about these plane rides, like they mattered. (Folks who get worked up about ethics laws have a particular obsession with plane rides, as we’ve seen recently.)

Me, I was more concerned about the fact that Gov. Beasley had thrown careful interstate negotiations out the window in a reckless bid to overturn years and years of bipartisan effort to get some state other than South Carolina to be the region’s nuclear toilet for awhile. Mind you, he had already done this before all the hoo-hah about the plane rides. I kept trying to explain to anyone who would listen that the plane rides were only significant in that they might point to a cozy relationship with the dump people, which could portend that the governor might do something in the interest of the dump people rather than the interest of the people of South Carolina. But folks, he had already done the worst thing he could have done along those lines. This worrisome indicator (the disclosure of the plane rides) was superfluous and after the fact, and it interested me not in the slightest. It was a matter of straining at gnats.

It struck me as particularly dumb that Democrats were making a huge deal over the plane rides, and to my mind never made enough of the trashing of our nuclear waste policy (if Jim Hodges had run on that instead of the state lottery, he still would have won).

Actually, I could have just given you this short explanation: I care more about the substance than I do the appearance.

Anyway, having the attitude I do about these things, I didn’t make much initially of the story about Henry McMaster’s contributions from lawyers working for the state. But as it happens, The Wall Street Journal did pay attention, and made quite a deal of it:

More interesting than the suit’s dubious merits are Lilly’s recent court filings about the AG’s ties to trial lawyers. Mr. McMaster in 2006 chose three private lawyers—John S. Simmons, John Belton White, Jr., and F. Kenneth Bailey, Jr.—to prosecute Lilly on behalf of the state. The no-bid contingency contract—which Mr. McMaster refused to produce to Lilly for nearly a year—gives the private lawyers a sliding-scale cut of any judgment or settlement, a jackpot potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.

About a month after filing the case in 2007, according to the Lilly documents, Mr. Simmons’s law firm had turned around to contribute the maximum amount allowable ($3,500) under state law to Mr. McMaster’s re-election. Mr. White’s law firm contributed the same amount on the same day, and Mr. White later added a personal maximum donation. All told, the law firms, their lawyers and spouses have contributed more than $60,000 to Mr. McMaster since 2006. The AG can transfer this money to his gubernatorial account.

This sweetheart deal is rife with conflict of interest, and Lilly’s filing also lays out the legal and constitutional problems. Consider due process. Both the U.S. and South Carolina constitutions make clear that the state and its lawyers must be guided by justice and the public interest, not monetary gain. South Carolinians would be outraged if Mr. McMaster won a personal financial cut of any case he won as Attorney General. How is it better that his lawyers get it instead?

And as uninterested as I tend to be in such things, they managed to get my interest in the way they described why it was a bad thing. (It used to be Cindi Scoppe’s job, as the one journalist who knew the most and cared the most about state ethics law, to persuade me when an ethics case was actually worth caring about, and she was good at it. Now I don’t have her around to persuade me, so the WSJ did the persuading this time.)

I’m still not clear that Henry violated any ethics rules in taking this money. But as I say, that’s the kind of thing that bores me. (By the way, the reason most journalists get so worked up over whether an ethics rule — which is usually about appearances, not substance — was technically broken is that news people don’t get to make a judgment call and say, This guy did a bad thing. They can only report whether it technically violated a rule. So they go ape over whether a technical line was crossed, and their eyes are closed to policy actions that are monumentally bad, because with those they have to present just as many views saying it wasn’t bad as saying it was. Are you following me? It’s one of the reasons I put news behind me and moved to editorial in 1994.) What interests me is that the Journal piece makes a pretty good case that there is a degree of coziness here that is a bad thing.

Set aside that the Journal‘s motive is likely the fact that they want to stick up for Big Pharma. Bottom line, this is another embarrassing black eye for South Carolina. Not as bad as Sanford’s Argentina travesty or Joe Wilson’s ongoing foolishness, but the GOPs most promising gubernatorial candidate didn’t need this headache. Henry’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.

A point about our history

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Santee offered a nice, quick review of S.C. history back on this post:

Santee says:

South Carolina always has been an interesting place. The Lords Proprietors decided we were too much of a pain in the neck to keep, for good reasons; they dumped us back on the English government. The colonial government was run by a handful of families for their own benefit. They were charming people — large planters and slave traders, pretenders to English aristocracy, living up to and beyond their considerable means by taking advantage of everyone else in sight regardless of race, creed or color. The back country didn’t get into the Revolution until late because they knew the government in Charleston was worse for them than the one in London. Eventually a similar handful of families pushed secession, to hang on to their slaves. After Reconstruction we were unique among southern states in not electing new younger politicians with a vision for the future. SC brought back those old men longing for their lost rice and cotton plantations. The state’s leaders (especially Pitchfork Ben) thought it wise to create a state government that could not fully function other than through a good old boy network, just in case an African-American might be elected Governor. They might not be sure to control who was elected, but they were sure to control the old boy network. The consequences of this history are still with us in mistrust of government, in mistrust of others, in lack of shared purpose, and in general government malfunction. Personally, I’m tired of it, but I see no end in sight.

But I had to quibble on one point, and since I went to the trouble of typing it, I thought I’d offer it here in a separate post:

Brad Warthen says:

Nice review of our history, Santee, but I will offer one amendment. We tend to blame our current form of government on Pitchfork Ben, on account of the constitution of 1895 coming along during his watch. He was a terror, and makes a convenient villain. My journalistic forebears started The State to fight his machine, and one of the newspaper’s founders was shot down by a Tillman (who got away with it).

My own ancestors despised what he represented, even though he lived next door to my great-grandparents in Kensington, Md., when he was in the Senate. (My great-grandfather was an attorney from SC who had gone to Washington to represent the Treasury and later was one of the men who started the General Accounting Office.) I wrote a column once referring to my grandmother’s memory of having sat on Tillman’s lap as a little girl, which appalled her parents, although she didn’t understand why at the time.Anyway, as neat as it is to blame it all on him, the form of government enshrined in the 1895 constitution merely reproduced what we had had since the time of the Lords Proprietors. John Locke devised a system for Lord Anthony Ashley-Cooper that placed diffused power in the hands of the landed, slaveholding gentry. This was maintained through colonial times to make sure the King’s governor had no real power, and the system continued up through 1865.
Keeping power scattered through the Legislature and away from the governor elected by all the people has always been the South Carolina way. This once served our oligarchy fairly well; it doesn’t serve any of us well any more.