General

I’m finally credentialed. In the same batch of mail that contained Tapas’ AKC pedigree certificate was my University of Washington diploma for a BA in Sociology. (The "With Distinction" refers to the honors program.) Yes, after a mere sixteen years, I finally have a four-year college degree. For all of you friends of mine that have graduate degrees, be forewarned: I’m catching up.

I'm just back from my bike tour in the California wine country, and have heard that Al Gore will be speaking at KeyArena on October 23rd. Please get the word out. Tickets go on sale through Ticketmaster this coming Monday (September 18th). He'll be giving a live version of his Keynote presentation, which the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" was based on.

As China is a regular topic for discussion among my friends, I thought that the following quote from the Grolier series of books, Lands and People, would be decidedly interesting:

Western experts are inclined to believe, even allowing for communist exaggeration, that China’s yearly rate of growth reached 8 or 9 per cent during 1952-57. The rate may be even higher today. Should this tremendous expansion continue the Chinese Communists may begin to threaten American and Russian industrial supremacy by 1970 or 1980. (1961:248-9)

I picked this series of books up many years ago at a secondhand bookstore. It is a complete, seven book set, in mint condition, offering a glimpse of what the world was like close to the middle of the twentieth century. There’s no Afghan war to report. There’s no war in Vietnam. What has held true is China’s economic growth, averaging about three times the annual US economic growth during the same period.

If you haven’t already done so, I recommend that you hop on over to Radio Open Source and listen to the April 18th, 2006 podcast, China vs. India – The Next 100 Years. We will surely speak of China again.

By the way, tasseography is the art of reading tea leaves. It's possibly an apt metaphor of our musings on China.

I've been working through the process of moving my individual health insurance to a group plan provided through the business (since we now have a handful of employees to cover). How is it possible that we (meaning the people in this country) have allowed health care to get so completely out of control?

I'm not going to make the oft heard complaint that health insurance is too expensive -- we already know that. What shocked me during the process was the labyrinth of options. They unnecessarily drown you in them. The company’s Web site and their glossy marketing literature were all but worthless. When I finally reached somebody by phone, they actually told me that it would put them out of a job if the Web site or marketing literature provided the information I was requesting. I did not take this "joke" in the way it was obviously intended, nor do I believe that this was the first time said joke was made.

The above image is just one of three, similar brochures purporting to explain the different programs available to the business. Each program had eight separate plans to choose from. You do the math.

Isn’t this exactly the sort of "service" most anti-government pundits like to claim would be the outcome if we moved to single payer or socialized medicine? Poor service. High costs. Disenfranchised segments of the population. It seems to me that this is what we have today.

Podcasts being all the rage, my dear friend Torea was recently interviewed in Part I of The Finer Points Aviation Community's "Women In Aviation" podcast (#21). The interview reminded me of an National Public Radio show, All Things Considered, about the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), circa WWII. Although the impetus for training women pilots during WWII was tragic (i.e., the War), the acute sexism which limited the aviation opportunities for women was even more so. Sexism -- like racisim -- still persists in this country, but Torea has never let that slow her down.

During the last Confab (Thursday, February 23rd, 2006), I committed to having my personal blog online before the next show (Thursday, March 9th, 2006). Won’t all the other Confab guests be shocked -- I actually made the self-imposed deadline with time to spare. In all honesty, I thought that I could get away without running a blog. I’d just leapfrog blogging and go straight to podcasting. As it turns out that isn’t necessarily the best plan of action. Although the podcasting is going quite well, I don't think you can do one without the other. So here I am.